Mobilizing the Crusaders

The website Inside Higher Ed is doing its part to get all the troops in line for the civic engagement movement in American Higher Education.  The website has set up an audio conference on "Restoring Civic Education" with one of the academic advocates who prepared the report "A Crucible Moment" on the urging of the Department of Education. For a mere $199 ($149 if you register early), you can phone in for a 30 minute presentation and a 30 minute question and answer session.  You can learn how to integrate civic education into all aspects of education, presumably leaving no tiny bit of learning outside of the social and political program.

Seriously, though, I advise everyone to save the money and devote an hour instead to thinking about the problems with this proposed assault on intellectual diversity and independence. The civic educators begin with a fairly reasonable point: today's students are deplorably ignorant of history and government. Instead of arguing that we should teach them more about history and government, though, they urge "...colleges to teach students how to work together on public problems (at the national and local levels)."  So, we aren't supposed to be satisfied with teaching them mathematics, literature, or the social sciences. We're supposed to be training them to become communitarian cadres.

Made of Paper: Gibbon, Toynbee, and Spengler

In my early twenties, I developed a strange fondness for multi-volume, philosophically inclined historical works. The best of these was Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I was captivated by Gibbon's literary style, the elaborate irony of his balanced clauses, that seemed the perfect expression of his cool analyses.  Gibbon did not originate the idea of decline, nor was he the first to ask why the Roman Empire declined and disappeared. He was arguably thinking about his own time as he looked back to antiquity, and this adds an extra irony to the great book, since Britain was then not in decline, but at the beginning of its ascent to empire. Or maybe this just made Gibbon more prophetic.

More recent historians of antiquity have tended to reject the idea of a "decline," emphasizing instead a gradual transition to a post-Roman world. Still, the drastic decline in political order and literacy following the end of Roman Mediterranean rule does seem to indicate a diminishing of social organization. Gibbon accounted for this, in part, by arguing that the very success of the Romans introduced stresses that ultimately caused the organization to come apart. We might regard him as the true originator of the "imperial overreach" idea that Paul Kennedy revived a couple of decades ago. Rome stretched itself to the point where it could not effectively control its vast territories, in the process becoming vulnerable to attacks from tribal groups that learned its techniques of warfare and to incompletely Romanized immigrant settlers. These same tendencies may still exist for political powers today, although we can legitimately ask whether the power of political organization is today much greater as a result of our far superior technologies of communication and transportation.

Gibbon was critical of religion by the time he wrote the great work, and he attributed to Christianity a "softening" of the martial character of the Romans. In one of those phrases of balanced irony, though, Gibbon also attributed to Christianity the civilizing of the barbarian invaders and settlers: "If the decline of the Roman Empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors." This may raise the question (not asked by Gibbon) of whether that same religion much later contributed to the partial displacement of conquest by economic exchange as a means of establishing political order. The ideas of culture, political coordination, and external and internal enemies continue to shape our thinking about power today and even when modern historians and political thinkers disagree with Gibbon, they still enter into a conversation with him.

About the same time that I read Gibbon for the first time, I read Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History. That made a big impression on me then, although I have more recently gone back to Toynbee and found his logic shaky. The idea that civilizations arise from a challenge to which they respond comes uncomfortably close to a tautology. We know that a civilization has faced just the right magnitude of challenge from its response. In addition, Toynbee's claims that all civilizations tend to produce a universal church and to be threatened by an internal proletariat and an external proletariat may have been procrustean attempts to impose a classical Mediterranean model on all other highly developed societies. Still, Toynbee is probably worth reading because he raises the question of whether one can find repeating patterns in history and he looks for these patterns so widely.

Toynbee led me to Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West. It is difficult to criticize Spengler's historical logic because he essentially dispenses with the logic of causation. Spengler operated out of a kind of mystical insight, leading Ernst Cassirer to describe his work as an "astrology of history" and Spengler as a "diviner."  The prophetic German historian saw civilizations as flourishing and dying like plants. Spengler still has his fans: I recall reading somewhere that Henry Kissinger gave Richard Nixon a copy of The Decline of the West (I do not know if Nixon ever read it). One of Spengler's genuine insights, I think, was the recognition that each society has a distinctive style and that this style guides its arts, it scientific perspectives, its social interactions, and its political ideologies.

The Naming

They woke in a wood of leaf overlapped by leaf.

Eyes unfocused, they saw all things and none

in wakefulness not yet distinct from sleep.

Their uncombed hair twisted in rays of sun

wrapped about their heads in crazy wreaths

of light and dark completely interwoven.

Their feet touched earth, the same dirt on their feet

that covered earth. They were a man and woman

still intimate, like plants, with the soil beneath.

As quiet as the grass, the two were dumb,

wordless when they heard the rustling leaves.

The beasts, by wing and foot and fin, had come.

The cats twitched tails, the serpents hung from trees,

and frogs squatted among the loosening buds

of lotus flowers, all waiting patiently.

The names began to drop off one by one,

one word fell out to pair with every beast,

until a parallel world of words was done.

With words they knew to tell each life from each,

and since the eyes are pupils to the tongue,

they began to see as syllables would teach.

They saw each line take on new definition,

as if cut from its background in relief.

For named, this was a form of liberation.

For namers, though, the names brought limitation.

They knew their world and from this they knew grief.

By names their lives were bounded and made brief.

The Hidden Costs of Recruiting Abroad

As reported in today’s New York Times, a number of U.S. universities are trying to make up their budget shortfalls by recruiting tuition-paying foreign students, especially from China. At public institutions, the foreign students pay the more expensive out-of-state tuition, usually without the discounts often available to American out-of-state students.  From a budgetary perspective, this makes sense. Higher education is something that we produce that is in demand in China and other countries, and the money the pupils from abroad spend on schooling in this country can help offset our trade deficit, in addition to bringing dollars into individual institutions.

Appealing to international scholars may also become more of a survival strategy for American higher education.  For the past few years, applications to colleges and universities in this country have been increasing due to the “baby boom echo.”  In the 1970s, when people born between the end of World War II and the early sixties were mostly in their teens and twenties, it looked like the nation faced a drastic demographic drop because the baby boomers weren’t producing many children of their own. From about the middle of the 1980s through the 1990s, though, members of the baby boom generation apparently became aware that they were not immortal and that their biological clocks were reaching the time of post-fertility, and they belatedly produced a little boomlet of their own.  The echo will soon fade into the historical distance though, and finding students from around the world may be a way that colleges can fill the spots left by diminishing numbers of young Americans. 

While foreign enrollments may serve the needs of institutions, though, the trend of international recruiting may not be such a good thing for many American students. As I have discussed previously, one of the reasons the costs of higher education have risen so sharply in recent years is that rising enrollments and government subsidization have largely removed constraints on expenses. Having more high paying students from other parts of the world is like having rich people suddenly decide a neighborhood is fashionable, pushing rents and housing prices up. An institution that can find foreign students willing to pay top dollar will have even fewer incentives to bring down costs.

In addition, there are only a finite number of seats in any institution and seats that go to some people cannot go to others. While more spots may become available in the future because of the likely demographic decline, for the present admitting foreign students necessarily means not admitting some U.S. students. Under the practices at most schools today, some categories of students already have structural advantages in admissions. While higher education is under legal direction to avoid openly using quotas, effort to bring in underrepresented minorities, mainly African Americans and Latinos, automatically disadvantage individuals who are not members of underrepresented categories. While the disadvantage unavoidably falls on all those not in the preferred groups, it falls heaviest on Asian Americans, who are overrepresented as a result of high average levels of achievement.

Native born Americans who are not members of preferred groups, then, find themselves caught in a pincer. Some spots go to high-paying foreigners and the native born who belong to putatively disadvantaged groups have the best access to the remaining spots. The competition for the shrinking educational space among other Americans, especially Asian Americans, becomes much more intense.

Within universities, the foreign students and the Americans from underrepresented categories go in two different directions. As a controversial study at Duke University recently indicated, the underrepresented tend to move out of the STEM fields. These, however, seem to be exactly the areas of study that draw many foreign students. It is reasonable to suggest that the admissions pincer may ultimately push American universities toward contributing to an imbalance in training between American-born and native students. While some of the latter may remain in this country, other s will take the skills acquired in this country home with them.

Mass Movements and the "Arab Spring"

As uprisings broke out in the Arab world, Western commentators labeled the events the “Arab Spring” and enthused about the imminent spread of democracy across North Africa and the Middle East. When protests later began in Russia, many saw these occurrences as the Russian version of the great democratizing trend. I’m not in favor of dictatorships by any means, but I’ve found it hard to be optimistic about the immediate future of these changing national societies.

My hesitation to cheer these mass movements is precisely that they have been mass movements, each a different sort of manifestation of what Ortega y Gasset termed “the revolt of the masses.” Large crowds of people, composed of frustrated individuals or opposing groups united only by their opposition to a regime, rampaging through the streets do not provide a stable foundation for a workable democratic order.

Recent events have only deepened my skepticism.  In Port Said, Egypt, a riot by fans at a soccer match resulted in the deaths of over 70 people and in nearly 250 injuries. The rioting ultras, or fanatical soccer fans, had earlier made up part of the “democratic mass movement” that led to the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. Now, those same ultras, together with supporters, are fighting with the nation’s security forces and attacking the headquarters of the Interior Ministry. The ultras and their sympathizers blame the authorities for not having prevented the violence perpetrated by ultras.  If the military government cracks down on the protesters, it will probably provoke even more violent protests. If it accedes to their demands, it hands over power not to a representative elected government, but to a mob.

A functioning democracy is not a matter of mass movements. As I see it, too much passionate “engagement” is bad for civil society.  A polity works best when it grows out of the everyday interactions of citizens going about their own business in voluntary systems of associations, with minimal coercion from authorities and without large-scale, intense social movements. Something approaching this state of affairs may eventually come to pass in the many troubled parts of the world. But only after a very difficult period of transition that will probably last a long time.

Bowling and the Disadvantages of Social Capital

Political scientist Robert Putnam is best known of his "Bowling Alone" argument. In a widely publicized article in the Journal of Democracy  in 1995, Putnam argued that networks of social engagement were in sharp decline in the United States. While Americans continue to bowl for amusement, membership in bowling leagues declined by as much as 40 percent from 1980 to 1993. This was, for Putnam, symptomatic of a larger withdrawal from the public sphere, since he maintained that town meeting attendance, membership in civic and fraternal organizations, voter turnout, and membership in PTAs also went down.  In the 2000 book Bowling Alone, Putnam developed and defended this thesis in greater detail.

Putnam used the term “social capital” to describe levels of social engagement. His social capital argument was in the tradition of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, which maintained that widespread membership in churches, clubs, and other forms of voluntary associations provided an essential basis to American democracy.  However, Putnam and many of those who have used his argument have missed another part of Tocqueville's generally favorable view of American democracy. While Tocqueville saw voluntary associations and cooperative participation as critical to the civic order of the new nation, he also saw these as pressures for conformity.

In my own work on Vietnamese American students, I used a version of the social capital perspective to account for why many of these students did so well in our schools. Drawing on interviews, surveys, and fieldwork, I found that the academic performance of students could be attributed to tight networks of interpersonal relations among children, parents, and neighbors within Vietnamese communities. These networks provided control and direction. They also, however, limited independence and personal freedom. Everything comes at a cost, and the benefit was probably worth the cost in the lives of these young people, but I would be willing to state as a general truth the equation high social capital equals high social control.

Social control by communities is not necessarily a bad thing. More social control within families and neighborhoods is exactly what our crime-ridden inner cities need. But it does have its disadvantages. I was thinking about these as I read the article "Are there Hidden Virtues to Bowling Alone?" in the online magazine The American.  Peter A. Coclanis suggests in this article that the decline in bowling leagues was linked to surging bowling scores. Freedom from community enabled Americans to focus on improving their games, rather than on maintaining and deepening relationships with fellow bowlers.

Surrounded as I am by unabashed communitarians, I read this article with interest. I agree that we need communities, as long as these are voluntarily formed (as in Tocqueville's book) and not imposed by social architects. But we should remember that communitarianism and individual excellence don't fit well together.

Strange Incentives in Federal Employment

Jordan Weissman has an interesting article in this month's Atlantic Magazine. Drawing on a new Congressional Budget Office study, Weissman notes that federal employees in general do slightly better than those in the private sector in wages and much better in benefits. The standard response to this type of finding is that the federal workers do better because they are more highly qualified.  But Weissman's evidence indicates that the least educated federal employees do best, relative to private sector workers with similar characteristics.

Federal workers with high school or less and with some college do better in both wages and benefits than other equivalent workers.  In other words, the federal government rewards people who don't have much formal education.  But it also penalizes people with high levels of education. Those with professional degrees or doctorates had about 18% less in overall compensation. If you had a college degree, your salary was about the same as in the private sector, but your benefits were much better. The government may be competing with better benefits for its average office workers, then, but it offers few incentives for those most likely to be in highly specialized kinds of work.

At best, this kind of pay structure seems like it is specifically designed to produce mediocrity.  But I think the real question is with the high rewards at the lower end. Because those with educations below the bachelors level do generally pay taxes, it would seem that federal jobs don't just redistribute income from high earners in private employment. They also apparently subsidize the least educated public workers at the expense of the private sector peers.