A Hopefully Realistic Take on the Future of Democracy

This week in North Philly Notes, David Campbell, author of Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, writes about the cultures of the bureaucratic and communal worlds.

It’s a little intimidating to have your book published on the same day that Taylor Swift’s new album drops. Even if everyone reading this blog rushes out to buy my book, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes, it will be hard to keep up in the sales competition!

But Taylor and I share something in common. We both use small, everyday stories to tell a larger story worth hearing. While the particular stories can stand on their own, it is their accumulation that packs a narrative punch.

My stories were gathered over three decades and draw on over 2,000 interviews with local bureaucrats, nonprofit directors, and other community leaders. I use their highly particular accounts of daily hassles to tell a larger story about democratic governance—what it requires, why it is so routinely difficult, but also why it often works better than we might expect. In this story, the bureaucrats we have been taught are narrow-minded rule followers often turn out to be the creative agents rescuing policy from implementation roadblocks. They don’t always succeed, but their efforts are worthy of our attention.

Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is a hopefully realistic book that counters the current pessimism about the future of democracy. Much of that pessimism stems from our division into two warring tribes. But instead of a left-right distinction let us imagine that the names of the two tribes are bureaucracy and community.

The culture of the bureaucratic world is captured in terms like standardization, specialization, formality, and uniform treatment. Its language is primarily metric—things exist to be counted, measured, and controlled.

The culture of the communal world is captured in terms like craftsmanship, social networks, local knowledge, and informal agreements. In this world communication is infused with stories. Nuance and discretion are always necessary because we are dealing with individual human beings and unique local circumstances.

Now imagine that these two worlds routinely meet and often collide, often in grants designed on high and implemented locally. Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is about the governance spaces where these collisions happen and the people who work in those spaces. These “heroes” live with a foot in both the bureaucratic world and the communal world and the burden of their work is to reconcile those worlds, however difficult that reconciliation may be. This burdened work is the secret sauce without which public policy will fail, not matter how well-intended or well-funded.

The protagonists in my story—government and foundation funders, on the one hand, and participants in networks of benevolent community care, on the other—share the common goal of improving the health and well-being of children, families, and communities. They are partners in a quest to produce tangible results, driven by their own civic motivations and increasingly by accountability demands imposed by others. The funders have the resources and some types of expertise that the community partners need. Network participants have local knowledge without which the funders’ initiatives cannot be adapted successfully to place and personal circumstance. If they could find a way to bring their capacities together, we could reasonably expect better policy and programmatic outcomes and with them a badly needed uptick in public trust in government.

By paying attention to the way the hidden heroes reconcile these two worlds—their way of embracing contraries—we can learn profound lessons that inform our politics, policy processes, and democratic culture. We learn how to become conversant in two distinct languages of public life and how to balance the alternative forms of knowledge on which bureaucracy and community networks rely. We learn to emphasize crossover roles: experts as community members; community members as experts. We learn to put more stake in learning from experience and less on pre-set strategies. We learn how to treat rules as starting points for negotiation. We learn to evaluate short-term programs not in isolation but in light of the dynamics of the community networks in which they are embedded and long-term trajectories of community change. These are the sorts of strategies and approaches needed to navigate difference democratically.  

The hidden heroes know that the voice of the people has no efficacy if there are not resources and staffing and expertise to turn that voice into programs and policies that work. They also know that the policy wonks and bureaucratic experts will always be wielding blunt instruments, such that the work of fitting policy to people and place will always be critical to achieving the results we want.

And here’s the good news: we already have a huge cadre of mid-level bureaucrats and nonprofit directors who have extraordinary experience in finding a way to marry the best of bureaucracy with the best of community voice. Hopefully, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes will play a role in introducing their collective wisdom to a broader audience of academics, students, and practitioners. 

Unorthodox Captures Many Truths of Leaving Hasidic Communities

This week in North Philly Notes, we repost Degrees of Separation author Schneur Zalman Newfield’s recent article from The Society Pages that considers the Netflix series, Unorthodox, about exiting ultra-Orthodox communities, the subject of his new book.

Like many who left ultra-Orthodox communities in which they were raised, I eagerly awaited the release of the Netflix miniseries Unorthodox, loosely based on Deborah Feldman’s first memoir by the same title that chronicles her journey out of her Hasidic community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and her efforts to join the broader secular society. I was curious to see in what ways the narrative of the miniseries would reflect the experiences of the 74 ex-Hasidic men and women I interviewed for my PhD dissertation and forthcoming book, Degrees of Separation: Identity Formation While Leaving Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. Hasidic communities adhere strictly to Orthodox Jewish law, members tend to marry young and have large families, and generally shun non-Jewish culture and outsiders.

The miniseries revolves around the attempt of Esty Shapiro—brilliantly portrayed by Shira Haas—to leave her socially and culturally isolated Williamsburg community and start a new life in Berlin, Germany. The miniseries is deeply compelling and captures many truths about the lives of the people I interviewed as well as many others who make the complex journey out of ultra-Orthodoxy.

The miniseries highlights Esty’s traumatic experiences inside her Hasidic marriage. Although Esty rejects the term “escaped” to describe her journey and protests that her community was not “a prison,” she did suffer a lot. As Esty reflects at one point about her life in Brooklyn to her new friends in Berlin, “God expected too much from me.” She is perplexed when informed just before her wedding of the basic mechanics of sex and the complex details of the “family purity” laws that require her to chart when she is menstruating and to abstain from sex during those times and for a week afterwards. Esty cries through the sheering off of all her lush hair the morning after her wedding and is terrified and alienated when she visits the ritual bath (mikvah) and immerses herself in order to make herself “pure” and available to have sex with her husband. She also suffers extreme physical pain when having sex with her husband and after months of trying, they are only able to engage fully in intercourse a single time. The physical pain is only heightened and given an added sting by her nosy and insensitive mother-in-law’s intrusions into her sex life aimed at securing her another grandchild. Ultimately, her mother-in-law encourages her son to divorce Esty because it is believed she will never be able to get pregnant.

I will focus on three themes of the exit process from religion that are significant in my own research and are all dramatized in Unorthodox: the dire warnings from community members to potential exiters; the maintenance of religious beliefs and practices by exiters even after they exit; and the hybrid technique of integrating aspects of an exiters’ past into their present and future.

While still in Williamsburg, Esty secretly took piano lessons for several years from a non-Jewish woman who rented an apartment from her grandfather. Before Esty leaves Brooklyn, the music teacher gives her student a small compass to help her find her way once she exits her community. Indeed, it is an extremely difficult task for exiters to create a new life for themselves once all the rules, norms, expectations that they grew up with are discarded. These communities tell those contemplating or suspected of contemplating leaving that it is impossible to do so, that all who leave are crazy and end up with ruined and dysfunctional lives. It is clearly a lie, but for those inside the community lacking information about the outside world and those who make it out, this can be a very compelling argument to stay.

One of the most powerful scenes occurs shortly after Esty clandestinely travels from Brooklyn to Berlin and finds herself on a beach, surrounded by scantily clad carefree swimmers splashing around and enjoying their time in the sun. Esty is still wearing her Hasidic garb, including her conservative long skirt, thick opaque brown tights, and wig (sheitel). We feel Esty’s internal struggle, her desire to be “normal” and join in the fun, while being simultaneously horrified that people could expose so much of their bodies to total strangers. She has internalized the teachings of her community that stipulate that the body, especially a woman’s body, must always be covered up in order to protect its sanctity and the purity of those around her. Esty wavers for a moment, but then gathers her courage. She takes off her opaque tights and walks into the lake fully clothed. As she enters the shallow waters, she pulls off her wig and releases it. It floats away. This emersion is a sort of reverse mikvah, a ritual cleansing of her former life and a symbolic rebirth into her new secular identity.

Esty’s internal struggle mirrors what many of my interviewees grapple with once they leave their community but still hold onto numerous religious practices and beliefs from their old community, such as an aversion to eating pork—which is strictly forbidden by Jewish law—and the persistence of belief in God, and conservative views of gender and race. These practices and beliefs can prove difficult, if not impossible, to jettison.

One of the best techniques that Hasidic exiters have found for integrating into the broader secular society is taking a hybrid approach to their life. That is, to find a way to incorporate elements of their past into their present and future. This approach is powerfully exemplified in the final scene of the miniseries when Esty auditions for entrance to a prestigious Berlin music institute. Esty first sings a short piece from Schubert entitled “An die Musik,” and does a competent job. Then she is asked to sing another song and chooses a Hasidic one with Hebrew words that was chanted at her wedding. She sways (shuckles) just as Hasidic Jews typically do when lost in a melody.  Her rendition is soul stirring. The viewer is mesmerized by Esty’s blending of classic European and Hasidic music. In that moment she has decided not to ghettoize her past but to allow it to blend into her present and future. In my book I call this “embracing a hybrid identity.” It’s not a brief transitional phase, but a long term strategy for pursuing a life that is deeply different from the life one was raised and trained in. Examples of hybridity include schuckling, like Esty in Unorthodox, while engaging in secular activities such as studying American law, or occasionally taking the time to study a passage of Talmud while pursuing a doctorate in French literature.

The main weakness of the miniseries is its inclusion of a spy-like theme that distracts from its beauty and authenticity. This theme begins in the opening scene of the miniseries with Esty surreptitiously collecting hidden items from around her bedroom—a wad of cash from inside a foam wig holder—in preparation of her departure. The covert ops continue with a scene where Esty is taken by an aunt to a kosher supermarket so that her prospective mother-in-law can furtively inspect her, like a piece of meat at a butcher shop, to see if she passes muster. This entire scene makes no sense. The mother-in-law doesn’t know her from around the small and close-knit neighborhood?  She can’t ask a friend? The espionage intensifies when the Rebbe, the spiritual leader of the Hasidic community, orders Esty’s sheepish husband Yanky, accompanied by his cousin Moshe, a thuggish character and former renegade himself, to travel to Berlin to track down and bring back Esty. Moshe even receives the obligatory box with a pistol when he checks into his Berlin hotel. Who does he get the gun from and what exactly is he supposed to do with it once he meets up with Esty?

This espionage subplot seems truly absurd. It makes Hasidic Jews and those who leave their community seem entirely foreign to the viewers who are finally coming to know this “exotic” community through shows like this one and to see them for the normal human beings they are, albeit living a wildly different lifestyle.

Sociologically speaking, exiting from strict religious communities is an example of the broader phenomenon of personal transformation and resocialization, similar to the processes people experience after a divorce and when immigrating to a new country. Leaving a religion is traumatic and complex, but not unrelated to other kinds of social experiences. It is helpful to think of religious exiters in relation to other forms of exiting. This helps humanize religious exiters and helps us realize that the process of resocialization is a more common one than we might otherwise imagine. People from all walks of life may need to engage in resocialization at some point or another.

Ironically, the actress who plays Esty, Shira Haas, starred in the international hit show on Netflix Shtisel, which was a huge success because it made the ultra-Orthodox appear normal, or more accurately, as troubled and complex as everyone else. They have distinct religious dress, beliefs, and rituals, but they too have romantic problems, marital disharmony, financial woes, struggles to find a career, and disappointments from their children.

Notwithstanding the distraction from the spy element, Unorthodox is a powerful series that celebrates the human capacity for personal transformation. It affirms that birth is not destiny, and gives voice to a group of survivors that are often marginalized in mainstream culture.

Schneur Zalman Newfield is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Sciences, Human Services, and Criminal Justice at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Visit him online at zalmannewfield.com.

Changing Climate, Changing Communities

This week in North Philly Notes, Braden Leap, author of Gone Goose, writes about how the population of Sumner, MO, the Wild Goose Capital of the World, responded to climate change and the lack of geese.

Communities being disrupted by disasters related to climate change have become a semi-regular fixture on the nightly news. One night, a reporter walks through the scorched remains of a neighborhood following a deadly forest fire. The next, they’re boating down the flooded main street of a small town following another major hurricane. But how do communities respond to climate related disruptions that range from catastrophic fires and floods, to warmer winters, to the shifting geographic ranges of an array of plants and animals? This is an especially urgent question because climate related transformations are taking place across the U.S. and around the world, and they aren’t likely to stop any time soon.

Climate catastrophe gets a lot of attention, and rightly so, but if we hope to sustain communities as they are disrupted by climate change, we need to know far more about how people work together—or why they don’t—to effectively respond when their lives are disrupted by shifting climatological conditions. Accordingly, in my recently published book, Gone Goose: The Remaking of an American Town in the Age of Climate Change, I consider how members of a rural Missouri town were reconfiguring their community in response to climate change. Although Sumner, Missouri claims the title of Wild Goose Capital of the World, the nearly 200,000 Canada geese that used to migrate there no longer come to Sumner because of a combination of land use changes and shifting climatological conditions. For a town whose culture and economy were intimately tied to geese and goose hunting, this has been a dramatic transformation.

While we often hear stories of small Midwestern towns fading away, that’s not exactly what was happening in Sumner. The population may have been dwindling, but after talking and working with residents for nearly two years, I found that community members were effectively rearranging the social and ecological complexities comprising their town to respond to the lack of geese. Men were dramatically transforming the landscape to make it more amenable to duck hunting. Women reorganized the town’s annual festival to cater to families instead of goose hunters. Both were working with staff at the National Wildlife Refuge adjacent to the community to make it suitable for public uses other than goose hunting. In all three instances, they were strategically leveraging the social and ecological complexities of Sumner to rearrange and sustain their ties to the people and places they valued.

Although Sumner is undoubtedly unique, I argue it provides some important lessons for other communities disrupted by climate change. Most notably, it is sometimes possible for communities to be sustained and even improved. For this to happen, people must effectively utilize and rearrange the social and ecological beings and things comprising their communities. This is a somewhat hopeful lesson, but one that must be tempered by the realities of communities and climate change. Not all places will have the social and ecological inputs to adapt. The effects of climate change can also be so catastrophic that it can be impossible to adjust. Communities being inundated with saltwater because of rising sea levels provide a clear example. The environments in which our communities are entangled will continue to present both opportunities and challenges over the coming decades and centuries, but it seems clear that in some cases there can be more to climate change than catastrophe.

 

University-Community Partnerships for the Public Good: A Democratic Imperative

This week in North Philly Notes, Ira Harkavy, John Puckett, Matthew Hartley, Rita A. Hodges, Francis E. Johnston, and Joann Weeks, the co-authors of Knowledge for Social Change, discuss the importance and mutual benefits of local partnerships involving the university and the community. 

Martin Luther King used the phrase “fierce urgency of now” and called for immediate “vigorous and positive action” to end segregation and the unequal treatment of African-Americans. Given the severe dysfunction of the American political system—as well as many political systems throughout the world—vigorous and positive action is also required  at this time. In particular, universities have an increased and increasing responsibility to contribute to the advancement of knowledge and improvement of the human condition.

Colleges and universities, as former Harvard University President Derek Bok and others have emphasized, have become the central societal institutions in the modern world. The path to power and success for the vast majority of leaders in science, health care, business, law—indeed, in nearly every area of American life—passes through colleges and universities. They have become the primary engines of growth for an increasingly knowledge-based global economy. Colleges and universities have also come to play a key role in their local environments as anchor institutions. They possess enormous resources (especially human resources), develop and transmit new knowledge, educate for careers and advancement, function as centers of artistic and cultural creativity, and have a powerful influence on the norms, values, and practices of the pre-K–12 schooling system. They are catalysts and hubs for local and regional economies as employers, real estate developers, clients for area vendors, and incubators for business and technology.

In the past several decades, enlightened self-interest has prompted many colleges and universities to respond to external pressures from government, foundations, and public opinion by partnering in local community economic development efforts to help solve pressing problems including poverty, crime, violence, and physical deterioration. These partnerships also manifest a renewed commitment to the historic civic and democratic purposes of higher education.

In Knowledge for Social Change, we focus on significant contributions to learning made by Francis Bacon, Benjamin Franklin, Seth Low, Jane Addams, William Rainey Harper, and John Dewey—as well as our own work at Penn’s Netter Center for Community Partnerships—to help create and sustain democratically engaged colleges and universities for the public good. We particularly highlight our model of university-assisted community schools to effect a thoroughgoing change of research universities that will contribute to more-democratic schools, communities, and societies.

We argue, however, that universities, including our own, have not fulfilled their promise.

What strategic step might help engage Penn, as well as other universities, to embrace that democratic vision actively as well as rhetorically? In one of his most important propositions, John Dewey stated, “Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community.” Democracy, he emphasized, has to be built on face-to-face interactions in which human beings work together cooperatively to solve the ongoing problems of life. We are updating Dewey and advocating the following proposition: Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the engaged neighborly college or university and its local community partners. Neighborliness, we contend, is the primary indicator that an institution is working for the public good.

The benefits of a local community focus for college and university civic engagement programs are manifold. Ongoing, continuous interaction is facilitated through work in an easily accessible location. Relationships of trust, so essential for effective partnerships and effective learning, are also built through day-to-day work on problems and issues of mutual concern. In addition, the local community provides a convenient setting in which service learning courses, community-based research courses, and related courses in different disciplines can work together on a complex problem to produce substantive results. Work in a university’s local community, since it facilitates interaction across schools and disciplines, can also create interdisciplinary learning opportunities. Finally, the local community is a real-world learning site in which community members and academics can pragmatically determine whether the work is making a real difference and whether both the neighborhood and the institution are better as a result of common efforts.

For Dewey, knowledge and learning are most effectively advanced when human beings work collaboratively to solve specific, significant real-world problems in “a forked road situation, a situation that is ambiguous, that presents a dilemma, which poses alternatives.” Focusing on universal problems—for example, poverty, poor schooling, and inadequate healthcare—that are manifested locally is, in our judgment, the best way to apply Dewey’s brilliant proposition. A focus on local engagement is an extraordinarily promising strategy for realizing institutional mission and purpose.

“Only connect!” The powerful, evocative epigraph to E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End captures the essence of our argument—namely, that the necessary revolutionary transformation of research universities is most likely to occur in the crucible of significant, serious, sustained engagement with local public schools and their communities.

Knowledge for Social Change concludes by calling on democratic-minded academics to create and sustain a global movement dedicated to radically transforming research universities to realize Bacon’s goal of advancing knowledge for “the relief of man’s estate”—that is, the continuous improvement of humanity—as well as Dewey’s utopian vision of an organic “Great Community” composed of truly participatory, democratic, collaborative, and interdependent societies.

Temple University Press’ Fall 2017 Catalog

This week in North Philly Notes, we showcase the books from Temple University Press’s Fall 2017 Catalog.

	“A Road to Peace and Freedom” The International Workers Order and the Struggle for Economic Justice and Civil Rights, 1930–1954 Zecker, Robert M. The history of the International Workers Order’s struggle to enact a social-democratic, racially egalitarian vision for America 430 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1516-5 cloth 978-1-4399-1515-8
	Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century A Reader of Radical Undercurrents Edited by Asimakopoulos, John and Richard Gilman-Opalsky A broad, nonsectarian collection of anti-capitalist thinking, featuring landmark contributions both classic and contemporary 390 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1358-1 cloth 978-1-4399-1357-4
	Against the Deportation Terror Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century Buff, Rachel Ida Reveals the formerly little-known history of multiracial immigrant rights organizing in the United States 382 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1534-9 cloth 978-1-4399-1533-2
	Believing in Cleveland Managing Decline in “The Best Location in the Nation” Souther, J. Mark Do reforms that decentralize the state actually empower women? 210 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1397-0 cloth 978-1-4399-1396-3
	Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate The Story of the Negro League Star and Hall of Fame Catcher Westcott, Rich Forewords by Monte Irvin and Ray Mackey III The first biography of arguably the greatest catcher in the Negro Leagues 160 pp • 5.375×8.5 • Fall 2017 cloth 978-1-4399-1551-6
	Communities and Crime An Enduring American Challenge Wilcox, Pamela, Francis T. Cullen, and Ben Feldmey A systematic exploration of how criminology has accounted for the role of community over the past century 282 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-59213-974-3 cloth 978-1-59213-973-6
	The Cost of Being a Girl Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap Besen-Cassino, Yasemin Traces the origins of the gender wage gap to part-time teenage work, which sets up a dynamic that persists into adulthood 238 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1349-9 cloth 978-1-4399-1348-2
	Exploiting the Wilderness An Analysis of Wildlife Crime Warchol, Greg L. A contemporary criminological analysis of the African and Asian illegal trade in wildlife 208 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1367-3 cloth 978-1-4399-1366-6
	From Slave Ship to Supermax Mass Incarceration, Prisoner Abuse, and the New Neo-Slave Novel Alexander, Patrick Elliot The first interdisciplinary study of mass incarceration to intersect the fields of literary studies, critical prison studies, and human rights 266 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1415-1 cloth 978-1-4399-1414-4
	Latino Mayors Political Change in the Postindustrial City Edited by Orr, Marion and Domingo Morel With a Foreword by Luis Ricardo Fraga The first book to examine the rise of Latino mayors in the United States 312 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper paper 978-1-4399-1543-1 cloth 978-1-4399-1542-4
	Love A Philadelphia Affair Kephart, Beth From the best-selling author of Flow comes a love letter to the Philadelphia region, its places, and its people New in Paperback! 176 pp • 5.5×8.5 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1316-1 cloth 978-1-4399-1315-4
	On the Stump Campaign Oratory and Democracy in the United States, Britain, and Australia Scalmer, Sean The story of how the “stump speech” was created, diffused, and helped to shape the modern democracies of the Anglo-American world 236 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1504-2 cloth 978-1-4399-1503-5
	Phil Jasner “On the Case” His Best Writing on the Sixers, the Dream Team, and Beyond Edited by Jasner, Andy Three decades of reporting by famed Philadelphia Hall of Fame sportswriter Phil Jasner 264 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 cloth 978-1-4399-1494-6
	Philadelphia Finding the Hidden City Elliott, Joseph E. B., Nathaniel Popkin, and Peter Woodall Revealing the physical and cultural intricacies of Philadelphia, from the intimate to the monumental 200 pp • 7.875×10.5 • Fall 2017 cloth 978-1-4399-1300-0
	Rulers and Capital in Historical Perspective State Formation and Financial Development in India and the United States Chatterjee, Abhishek Explains the concomitant and interconnected emergence of “public” finance and “private” banking systems in the context of state formation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 188 pp • 5.5×8.25 • Fall 2017 cloth 978-1-4399-1500-4
	Selling Transracial Adoption Families, Markets, and the Color Line Raleigh, Elizabeth Examines cross-race adoptions from the perspectives of adoption providers, showing how racial hierarchies and the supply and demand for children shape the process 274 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1478-6 cloth 978-1-4399-1477-9
	Suffering and Sunset World War I in the Art and Life of Horace Pippin Bernier, Celeste-Marie A majestic biography of the pioneering African American artist New in Paperback! 552 pp • 6.125×9.25 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1274-4 cloth 978-1-4399-1273-7
	Tasting Freedom Octavius Catto and the Battle for Equality in Civil War America Biddle, Daniel R. and Murray Dubin Celebrating the life and times of the extraordinary Octavius Catto, and the first civil rights movement in America New in Paperback! 632 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-59213-466-3 cloth 978-1-59213-465-6
	Toward a Pragmatist Sociology John Dewey and the Legacy of C. Wright Mills Dunn, Robert G. An original study that mines the work of John Dewey and C. Wright Mills to animate a more relevant and critical sociology 198 pp • 5.5×8.25 • Fall 2017 cloth 978-1-4399-1459-5
	We Decide! Theories and Cases in Participatory Democracy Menser, Michael Argues that democratic theory and practice needs to shift its focus from elections and representation to sharing power and property in government and the economy 360 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1418-2 cloth 978-1-4399-1417-5
	Why Veterans Run Military Service in American Presidential Elections, 1789–2016 Teigen, Jeremy M. Why more than half of American presidential candidates have been military veterans—and why it matters 320 pp • 6×9 • Fall 2017 paper 978-1-4399-1436-6 cloth 978-1-4399-1435-9
Click here to download the catalog (pdf).

Celebrating University Press Week

This week in North Philly Notes, we celebrate University Press Week!

The theme of University Press Week 2016 is Community: from the community of a discipline to a regional home and culture, from the shared discourse of a campus to a bookstore’s community of readers.

The Association of American University Presses community uses the #ReadUP hashtag to highlight on social media the best of what our members are publishing all year long. It beautifully captures what we celebrate when we celebrate University Press Week: the scholarship, writing, and deep knowledge that is shared with the world through our books and publications. Follow #UPWeek for more news and info about the 2016 celebration!

Check out these videos featuring members of the Temple University Press staff talking about what working at a University Press means to them:

Sara Cohen, Editor

Gary Kramer, Publicist

Mary Rose Muccie, Director

Temple University Press is having a Back-to-School SALE!

Deepening our thinking about higher education civic engagement

This week in North Philly Notes, Randy Stoecker, author of Liberating Service Learning and the Rest of Higher Education Civic Engagement provides his observations about the self-defeating nature of higher education civic engagement.

For thirty years I’ve been trying to be a “useful” academic—not just to my students but to my world.  And so, for that entire time I have been trying to practice forms of higher education civic engagement such as community-based research and service learning. But it has never felt as satisfying as it should. The models that dominate the practice seem too weighted for the benefit of higher education stakeholders and not nearly focused enough on the real world.  Most important, the models have not seemed thoughtful—carefully designed and theorized.

In my quest for a more meaningful philosophy and practice of higher education civic engagement I recently attended an international conference devoted to the topic. My hope was that, by getting out of the country I might find deeper thinking, stronger strategies, and more critical reflection on what it means to build knowledge power with real people struggling against oppression, exploitation, and exclusion in real places. Because, in the U.S., such engagement is still an outlier to the self-satisfied higher education establishment where the idea of relevance is mostly irrelevant. Insulated from the issues of the day that press down upon the people, and comfortable in their sense of job security, most academics could care less about engaging with the “community.” So, for those of us who do, it’s an unrelenting uphill struggle for recognition and respect inside the walls of the ivory tower. But even amongst those civic engagement promoters on the margin, and perhaps because they so much feel like they are on the margin, there is far too much self-congratulatory rhetoric covering up the lack of impact from higher education civic engagement, and especially from service learning. Far from being some kind of revolutionary force in either the academy or the “community” that promoters portray, our practices in the name of higher education civic engagement mostly expose us as willing partners in a political economic system designed to transfer wealth from the many to the few. Our engagement work is far more likely to be charity work than change work. We help people get low-pay and low-dignity jobs rather than changing the structure of the economy. We integrate children who come from marginalized cultures into the existing school system rather than changing the school system to be inclusive of diverse cultures.  We clean up the trash along the stream rather than shutting down the upstream corporate polluter.

Beginning with my experience in 2006 working with students and community organizations researching the real story of service learning in the community, that produced the book The Unheard Voices, I became increasingly convinced that I needed to articulate not just what bothered me about higher education civic engagement, but also what would be better. Eventually the book Liberating Service Learning took form. The book is my attempt to show both how higher education civic engagement has become unwittingly complicit in maintaining oppression, exploitation, and exclusion; and how we can change our practice by deepening our thinking about the practice and its social context. I wrote the book to try and get from my gut-level discomfort with current practice to a thoughtful critique, and then to an alternative set of theoretical and philosophical principles on which I could build a more progressive practice. And, as a personal project, it certainly succeeded. Writing the book clarified a lot for me, and gave me a more satisfying vision and a more consistent strategy.  The first simple insight I got is that mainstream, or what I call “institutionalized service learning,” practice has its priorities reversed. Institutionalized service learning starts by focusing on student learning, then on “service,” then on “community” and only then on any kind of social change. In completely reversing that prioritization to start with change, then community, then “service” and finally learning I found a new foundation for what I was trying to do. But I also found that those conceptual containers were filled with bad thinking, so I also needed new theoretical foundations for all four concepts. The result is a model that understands change as embedded in structural conflict, community as a goal rather than a starting point, service as bottom-up power organizing rather than top-down charity, and learning as constituency-focused rather than student-focused.

The book has also helped me see what we are up against. Higher education administration, I am learning, is working hard to enforce the system of institutionalized service learning that maintains the status quo. Before the international conference I was at a job interview—one of those administrative bloat positions that had three modifiers, like “assistant associate blah blah blah to the blah blah blah.” But because it also had “engagement” in the title I thought there might be some potential. No luck. The most important interview questions seemed to be how I would handle laying people off from budget cuts and how I would promote higher education engagement with one of the powerful business lobbies that, by the way, engaged in a business I find morally distasteful. There was clearly no interest in thinking deeply about the philosophical and theoretical issues of civic engagement that we should be discussing in institutions supposedly devoted to the advancement of knowledge.

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. Higher education administration is already so corporatized that it is easy to understand the unreflectiveness of those who occupy its boxes on the org chart. But as I returned from the latest conference I also saw more clearly, from a global perspective, just how far away we all are from a practice that can create a better world where the many, rather than the few, control wealth and power. For there the talk was about promoting yet another new label for the same old and unreflective practice, treating profit-taking businesses and oppressive institutions as if they were deserving “communities” in and of themselves, and focusing on the technicalities of “partnership” rather than the critical realities of oppression, exploitation, and exclusion.

There are a few closeted higher education civic engagement practitioners out there, however, who’ve already read through Liberating Service Learning. They have disclosed to me their own loneliness in attempting a practice that goes against the grain of the current systems both inside and outside of the academy, along with their pain and occasional victories.  And it has been heartwarming and reassuring to hear their voices. May Liberating Service Learning help us raise our own voices.

What happens when the protests end?

In this blog entry, Harold McDougall, author of Black Baltimore, looks at growing civic infrastructure from family and neighborhood connections to show the “powers that be” that little people matter

Recent events in Baltimore are a reminder of the need to build “civic infrastructure” in inner-city communities like Sandtown, the neighborhood in which Freddie Gray lived, a neighborhood I studied closely when writing Black Baltimore, more than twenty years ago.

Sandtown then was home to many community-based, self-help efforts that provided examples of what participatory democracy, on a small scale, should look like. News reports from Sandtown in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death show they are still there—Rev. A.C. Vaughn’s Sharon Baptist Church, the New Song Community school, the Sandtown-Winchester Improvement Association, ”helicopter” parents and grandparents, trying to guide their kids through the maze.

I celebrated the indigenous social capital of these small-scale efforts in the book, calling them “base communities” because they reminded me of the Christian study circles organized by liberation theologists in Latin America. Groups of no more than twenty, seminar-size, where people could connect, reason together, figure things out and take action.

Friends and colleagues challenged my idea, arguing that while intimate and powerful, these small groups were not scaled to solve the problems they could see. Employment? Education? Police misconduct? Environmental damage? How could a group of twenty people respond to such large-scale issues?

So I went back to the drawing board, trying to figure out how to take base communities to a scale large enough so they could impact the issues people in neighborhoods like Sandtown face without sacrificing the intimacy and trust that made them so powerful, so important, so precious.

It was quite an undertaking, assisted by serendipity and caring people as much as by scholarship and hard study. It’s taken a long time.

The process started at a National Civic League annual meeting I attended, where former U.S. Senator Bill Bradley gave a speech comparing American society to a three-legged stool. There is a government leg, a business leg, and a community leg, he said. Bradley got the audience’s attention by declaring that the government and business legs are very long while the community leg is very short, making the stool—and the society—unstable.

How can community be lengthened, strengthened, so that it can balance business and government? Episodic flare-ups, through demonstrations, protests and other forms of mobilization, are not enough. Once grievances have been addressed, or the protesters silenced or co-opted, activity tends to subside. Civil society needs an ongoing civic infrastructure if it is to impact government beyond periodic elections, and business beyond individual consumer choice.

But how to build that infrastructure, how to knit those base communities together?

Then I met Don Anderson, a lawyer and social activist who was also an African-American descendant of Thomas Jefferson. He had come across some of his ancestor’s writing on “Citizen’s Assemblies.” The assemblies were to be sized to a Congressional district, and would select their Member through a series of caucuses. The Assembly’s most intriguing aspect, however, was its structure, and its potential to do a lot more than elect a Member of Congress.

The building block of Jefferson’s assembly was a neighborhood council of seven families, comprised of one representative from each family. Each council in turn selects its own representative, and these seven people meet as a “conference” representing seven councils (49 families). Finally, each conference sends a representative to an assembly representing all the conferences in the congressional district. The assembly conveys information—and instructions—from the constituent base to the member of Congress. (The model’s democracy was apparently a bit too direct for the Founding Fathers, and it never left the drawing board.)

This was what I was looking for.

Today, Sandtown numbers approximately 9,000 people. A Sandtown Citizen’s Assembly could aggregate families directly, and empower the people of the neighborhood. Such an Assembly could hold local government more closely accountable—schools, the police, elected officials—not from the distance of the voting booth but up close and personal. The Assembly could also perform some functions parallel to government, such as community mediation. (I called this the “politics of parallelism” in Black Baltimore)

The Sandtown Citizen’s Assembly could also check businesses and banks engaging in exploitative or high-handed practices. Past examples include the boycotts and selective buying campaigns of the civil rights movement, and labor’s boycotts and public shaming campaigns. Co-ops such as those Gar Alperovitz has described [http://democracycollaborative.org/] could round out the Assembly portfolio, creating “social” businesses, micro-enterprises, and other “off-the-grid” sources of income.

Protests emerging from the hassles people in neighborhoods like Sandtown face every day have erupted all across the country.  These protests are, at bottom, about a political and economic system that just doesn’t care about little people until, like Lilliputians, they get organized.