Thoughts About American Tribalism

I have just returned this past weekend from the annual conference of the International Studies Association. For scholars like me who study international politics in a systematic way, this is the largest gathering every year - a way to see people we interact the rest of the year only in writing, to meet new faces and get exposed to new ideas. It is a collective expression of a scientific community trying to figure out the world - often raucously and discordantly, although there are some things that the community agrees strongly on.

This year's conference got me thinking about tribalism, in part because:

• I tend to think about tribes a lot anyway (search this blog for the "tribalism" label to see a lot of my past stuff)

• The community of ISA scholars constitutes, in many ways, a tribe of its own, with various sub-tribes embedded therein

• The national (United States) conversation about immigration is really a conversation about who is "us" and who is "them" and how "us" should treat "them" (with the answer to the latter question, far too often, being "badly")

• I am reading Jonathan Haidt's work The Righteous Mind, which has an extensive discussion of how "groupish" humans are and why

• There is an underlying tribalism within the United States that worries me greatly, and which I think almost no one is dealing with very well (or at all) right now

This last point is what concerns me most. The specific issues we're arguing about at the national level - immigration, the role of the press, foreign policy, tax policy, and many more - are all suffused with a tribal divide. To put it plainly: there is no longer any room in our national conversation for Americans, only for tribes within America that each regard the other as an existential threat.

I see this mostly from the Left side of the divide, because that's where most of my social contacts have their home. There is plenty of opposition to Trump (reasonably so - every President faces opposition) and other individuals in his administration. This opposition seems reasonable, even obvious, to those who share it. It also seems treasonous to the most committed folks on the Right.

I suspect that there is a similar dynamic on the Right, though I don't see as much of it myself (again, most of my friends are on the Left). Polling data suggests that there is a committed core of folks who view Trump's actions so far as positive, who were excited by his electoral win and his inauguration, and who view the opposition to Trump's appointments and pronouncements with deep suspicion if not outright hatred. The Left, in turn, wonders if these same people are going to take over everything and destroy our democracy.

These groups of people seem to inhabit very different worlds - not only in social circles, but in the very reality they see. One side sees a massively dysfunctional government careening back and forth between evil and unprecedented incompetence. The other sees a hero battling valiantly against the forces he campaigned against. Even basic facts have become a matter of partisan identity. And everywhere, people are convinced that if Their Side doesn't win, it will spell the end of our civilization as we know it.

To say that this is bad is a massive understatement. To borrow from Abraham Lincoln, a house divided against itself cannot stand. Unlike in 1858, we can't even sort ourselves into states on different sides of a contiguous line - we are more like Yugoslavia in 1990, intermixed in geography but inhabiting separate nations. I recognize that neither of these historical analogies ends particularly well for the people involved.

Last night President Trump gave a speech to Congress that was widely hailed, at least in the mainstream, as being very different from his first month of governing. And in truth he did call for bipartisan cooperation in Congress - though cooperation in service to his agenda and his ideas. In this, he did what every other President before him has done. He did not address the real divide among us, a divide he has done much to increase.

A part of my participation in last week's ISA conference involved chairing a discussion of a recent book, Nationalist Passions, written by my friend Stuart Kaufman. Stuart looked at a number of different societies with significantly diverse ethnic and identity groups - some that had gone down the road of violent conflict, some which had suffered through dysfunctional politics, and some which had managed to operate with normal political systems despite significant differences across their populations.

Stuart's advice for today's divide in America? Surprisingly (given the decidedly liberal bent in the room), he said that we should acknowledge diversity but we should celebrate what we have in common. We need to stop emphasizing our differences, and instead hold highest that which binds us together.

This is what our entire national conversation seems incapable of doing, on both the Left and the Right. Nothing that President Trump has said, even last night when he was being "reasonable", has suggested that he has any vision for what binds Americans together or what we might have in common. Nor have any national politicians, either on the Left or the Right, made this kind of claim. Everyone is backed into their corner playing defense and lashing out at the other side.

This is a question largely separate from the very real debates we are having over particular issues: immigration policy, terrorism and national defense, education, health care. All of those, bombastic rhetoric aside, are routine arguments we have perennially. They are things about which we should be expected to disagree.

Part of the reason why these debates feel different from previous iterations is the lack of a "center" - not centrist positions (those do exist, though these days they are rare), but a central touchpoint which we all agree exists and which connects us all to each other. In my view, we have reached the point where there isn't one. We are no longer "one nation", under God or otherwise. We are not one out of many. Pluribus has overtaken unum.

My work, and that of many much smarter scholars, on identity-driven conflicts suggests that there is no easy road back from here. Some of our work suggests that there may not be a road back at all. Violence and attacks have so far been limited mostly to threats and vandalism against minority groups that have been subjected to such things before (recently in particular, Jews but also foreigners). The more violence there is, and the more separated the sides become, the harder and harder it will be for any kind of reunification. What happens when somebody gets attacked for being a Hillary supporter? (Oh, wait - that has already happened...)

At this point, we cannot look to our leaders - neither Republicans nor Democrats, not Trump nor Pelosi nor Ryan nor Schumer - to provide us a way out. The President and members of Congress all have more immediate agendas for shaping legislation and influencing policy. Each will call for "Unity!" when it serves their purposes, and they will sow division when that works better. The health of the US body politic as a whole is too big, too distant, too easily put off into the future to make it onto their radar screens.

Unfortunately, as I have pointed out before, we have a tendency to expect our Presidents to solve all of our problems. Almost always, they can't - think of the hopes placed on Obama to bring racial healing (and who better positioned to do it?) President Trump has done his best to pour gasoline on our fires of division, so there is no hope there.

The problem, I think, is not just that we expect our Presidents to do things they can't. It's that we don't believe that we can do anything ourselves. But this is one problem that only ordinary Americans will be able to solve. Community leaders can help, if they are people who care more about bringing us together as a people than about getting their way. Look for these people where you live. If you don't find one, become one.

How do we do this? Talk to each other. Not argue on the internet, not get into Twitter fights. Talk with real people, about our real lives - our whole lives. Listen. A lot. Find the common ground, and celebrate it when you do. Decide that our relationships with one another are more important than winning this or that point.

This doesn't mean you can't call your Congressman, or join in a march, or write letters to the editor, or vote for your favorite candidate. All of those things, and many more, are good things to do. It does mean that as we do them, we should try to take care not to contribute any more to our widening divisions. We can be honest in our views, but we shouldn't be snarky. We can be open about how we see the world without disrespecting those who see it differently. How we do things is, as I have argued so many times before, ultimately far more important than what we do, because the How has a much greater impact over time than the What.

Tonight I join with millions of fellow Christians around the world in the celebration of Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent. Lent has historically been a season of penitence, of introspection, and of discipline in preparation for renewal. Whatever our faiths, our theologies, and our beliefs, it seems like now is a good time for these things.

Gaslighting on Terrorism and Immigration

This weekend has seen a mass of confusion, protest, anger, and dismay at a hastily-constructed executive order that brought an immediate halt to certain kinds of immigration and travel, and an indefinite halt to others (specifically, refugees from Syria). People marched, court orders were issued (and apparently ignored), statements were made, contradicted, and clarified. Things are still far from certain as of the start of the week.

Lost in the shuffle of all of these important issues is an underlying reality: we as a nation have been effectively "gaslighted" on terrorism and immigration. The Trump forces have told the lie that we are unsafe and vulnerable to attack by terrorists traveling from overseas so often that we all now take it for granted - even Democratic Senators otherwise opposed to the executive order.

As a security studies scholar, let me put this in clear terms: there is not a shred of evidence that the United States is any more vulnerable to terrorist attacks from abroad than it ever has been, and plenty to suggest that we are safer than at any point in our history. There is also no way of defending the assertion that Islamic terrorism represents an existential threat to the United States, or that it even ought to be on the list of top US national security priorities. We are afraid of terrorism only because we've been told we should be.

The easiest way to see the truth, of course, is to look at the statistics. Violence of any kind - never mind terrorist violence - doesn't even make the top 15 list of causes of death in the US, and has been in long-term secular decline (as have death rates in general). Any given American's odds of being killed or injured by a terrorist are almost infinitesimally small, and the odds of a terrorist attack of any kind happening on US soil on any given day - or even in any given month - are likewise extremely small. The list of things you are more likely to encounter than a terrorist is vast.

The few high-profile cases we've had in recent years (San Bernadino and, if you really want to stretch, Orlando) were committed by US citizens. The only recent case that might conceivably have been stopped by the rules recently put in place was a knife-wielding Somali at Ohio State, which while regrettable and tragic didn't lead to any loss of life (other than the attacker's) and which represented only the tiniest of dangers even to the people of Columbus, OH. Dylann Roof did more damage in South Carolina that this student did in Columbus.

The fact is that, of things that threaten Americans' lives and way of life, terrorism just doesn't make the list. It is, in reality, just not that important. Are we 100% free of terrorist risk? Of course not - and we never will be. There is no set of rules, no border restrictions, no "extreme vetting" procedures that will ever eliminate that risk. And at this point, the risk is so low that any efforts to improve procedures - however well-considered and well-implemented - will only lower the risk level by an almost immeasurably small amount. When you're that close to zero, it's hard to get closer.

Why, then, are so many Americans concerned about terrorism? Why are even Senate Democrats unwilling to question the underlying logic of Trump's executive order, which amounts to "desperate times call for desperate measures"? Because we have all been gaslit on this. The lie has been repeated so many times that it has become the truth.

This is not a problem that goes away with one administration, however disliked or incompetent. This is now baked into the system, the result of 15 years of steady drumbeats that long predate Trump and his people. No politician, Democrat or Republican, will challenge the conventional wisdom, and a great many of them will find it useful as cover to do what they want to do, whether it be restricting economic activity or discriminating against certain groups or simply getting reelected on the basis of blind fear. The "War on Terror" is, indeed, the never-ending war, because we have enshrined it on a pedestal in our heads.

I wish I could be less bleak about this, but I don't see a way forward. We have largely lost the capacity for hope in our politics, especially as concerns "national security" issues. 25 years ago we dreamed of a world in which we felt secure. Since then we have allowed our "leaders" to make sure that we will never feel secure again, whatever the real world is doing. As usual, Walt Kelly said it best: we have met the enemy, and He is Us.

Drag Racing the Prius: Government, Business, and the Dangers of Bad Metaphors

I think I'll take my Prius drag racing.

It makes perfect sense, right? After all, a Prius is just like those cars you see tearing down the track at drag races. It has four wheels, each with an inflated rubber tire. It has an engine powered by oil-based fuel. It's got a seat for a driver, with a steering wheel. It's got a transmission system, and a bunch of electrical support stuff. I mean, they're practically the same thing.

Of course, this is crazy. A Prius, despite some superficial similarities, is not a drag racer. Attempting to run mine on a drag strip is likely to fail, and cause a fair amount of damage in the process. A drag racer is built for speed. A Prius (unless you heavily modify it!) is built for gas mileage.

Along similar lines, why do so many people insist on arguing that "government should be run like a business"?

This is a popular metaphor, resurrected recently as a rationale for supporting Donald Trump for President. If the government should be run like a business, who better to run it than a successful businessman who is busy stocking his cabinet with other successful businessmen?

(I will leave aside the question of whether Trump is actually successful or not. For my purposes, whether he's a good businessman or a bad one is irrelevant.)

Businesses and governments do share some things superficially in common. What most people are thinking of when they use this comparison is that both have budgets. Businesses have revenues and expenses, and so do governments. Government at the national level tends to run a fairly serious deficit, which is seen in many conservative quarters as a bad thing. Businesses, or so it is claimed, can't run structural deficits for long or they go out of business. Hence, the argument that governments should be run like businesses.

(It should be noted that lots of other things have budgets, too - churches, households, stray pet shelters, homeowners associations. No one ever says we should run government like a church.)

There are a few other points of similarity - businesses and governments both have rules and authority structures, both are to some degree hierarchical, and both are made up of people who fill particular roles within the larger organization. These are minor matters, a little like saying that a Prius and a drag racer both have spark plugs.

The fact that "business" and "government" both belong to the broader category called "human organization" tells you very little about how to run the latter. The differences between them are far more important than the similarities. And like the comparison between Prius and drag racer, what is most important is the purpose for which each was built.

A business is an organization designed to produce some product or service for the wider world, usually (though not always) at a profit. A business creates what it creates. It is primarily concerned with two groups of people: the owners (who control the business, and in whose interest it presumably operates) and the customers. A business can define its own customer base, to a substantial degree, and doesn't need to concern itself with anybody else in society. Businesses don't even have to be all that concerned about their employees, except as these are necessary to produce the product or service.

Governments look nothing like this. They are not meant to operate at a profit, and those that do are generally regarded as corrupt and illegitimate. Governments do not produce individual goods or services, but provide public goods to a broad group of people known as citizens. Except at the margins, governments have very little ability to define who they serve, and governments that decide to serve only one segment of the population usually find themselves losing legitimacy. Legitimate governments can't pick their "customer base".

We can perhaps lay this confusion at the feet of Calvin Coolidge, who famously said, "the chief business of the American people is business." By this he meant that most individual Americans are chiefly concerned with making a living for themselves. In this, he was at least partially right.

But the chief purpose of the government is not to be a business, but to provide a safe, secure, and fair environment in which everybody can pursue their own individual business. If businesses are like sports teams competing, government is like the referee enforcing the rules of the game.

Ultimately, the purpose of a business is to advance the interests of its owners, usually a small group of people. The purpose of a government is to advance the interests of everybody. A business is partial to itself. A good government is impartial towards all.

In this sense, being a successful businessman makes one little more qualified to run a government than being a successful gymnast, or race car driver, or neurosurgeon. These are all completely different human endeavors requiring different skill sets. They may overlap in some ways (success everywhere requires determined effort and the ability to learn and adapt, for example), but the goals and purposes of each are radically different.

So let's stop talking about how government should be run like a business. I don't want my government run like a business (Verizon customer service, anyone?) I want it run like a government, with the interests of all of its people in mind.

Presidential Races: Who Do I Really Want to Be?

I've written recently about why I hate watching politics in Presidential election years. Now that we've gotten past both major party conventions, I expect things to get worse, not better. Choosing a President every four years brings out the worst in us.

I won't make comparisons to past years, or suggest that this is getting worse over time, because I really don't know. I have a general gut sense that every election cycle is worse than the one before it, but I can't tell if that's really true or not. I don't trust my memory of past elections, because I know I will remember the parts that fit the narrative I want to tell. So I'll leave it to someone else to see if there's a trend line here.

As I've been assiduously avoiding the conventions, I've been trying to figure out what it is about this whole mess that bothers me so much. I think I may have stumbled on an answer. I'll probably come up with a better one in future years, but this is the best I have right now.

Let me start with a basic premise: the experiences we undergo, the things we invite into our lives, the streams of information and conversation we pay attention to, all have a tendency to take us either closer to or further away from our "best selves". I know this concept has been cliched and corporatized, even mocked Stuart Smalley-style, but the basic idea is there. We all have, to borrow Lincoln's phrase, "better angels of our nature". We also have demons. Nearly every culture across human history has some way of expressing this basic truth, whether it's through Yin and Yang, or Paul's struggle against himself ("I do the things I don't want to do"), or the Tao, or the inner Jihad of Mohammed.

So let me begin from this point: the things I do, the choices I make, the conversations I have, should push me towards being a better person rather than a worse one. If I'm lucky, those same conversations and choices will help those around me be better, too - not to become better people (certainly not to be more like me!) but to tend towards better versions of themselves.

What does a better version of me look like? This should not be a surprise. Virtue suggests we should talk less and listen more. We should be more sympathetic towards others, not less. The virtues of justice, patience, kindness, humility - these are not new inventions. In the words of the Colossians, we are to "seek the things that are above." (3:1)

Here I begin to see why this year's Presidential campaign is so difficult for me, and why I am avoiding it as much as possible. And since I'm talking out myself here, I'm going to frame this in the Christian tradition, which is the one I'm most familiar with and the one in which my faith lies.

In their letter to the Colossians, Paul and Timothy lay out what "seeking the things that are above" means:

But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. (3:8-9)

Or this from the Gospel of Luke:

 ‘But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you. (6:27-28)

Does this sound like politics today?

These are not obscure, cherry-picked verses from odd corners of Scripture. They are, as almost all clergy will agree, at the heart of the Christian gospel. To reject these things is to reject Christ.

Both major candidates claim the mantle of Christianity, as do a great many of their followers, supporters, and staff. Yet anger, malice, slander, and abusive language are everywhere. No one wants to do good to those who hate them.

Trump stood in front of microphones the other day and claimed that he wanted to hit speakers who criticized him. How this man can claim to be a Christian I have no idea.

When someone stands in front of a microphone (whatever the color of their skin) and yells "All Lives Matter!", that's not meant as a philosophical statement. It's meant with anger and malice, which is why the crowd roared. It was not delivered in love, but in hate.

Political operatives will say, too bad - this is the way the world works, this is what it takes to win elections. I'm not an expert in political tactics, so I can't say whether that's true or not. What I can say is that, for me at least, the process of experiencing an election makes me a worse person. I would go so far as to say that it has that effect on a lot of people, perhaps on all of us. If that is true, then we are degrading ourselves as a people every four years (to say nothing of what happens in between), and doing so with great gusto and delight. It's not clear that there is any political outcome in the near term worth such degradation.

People will say, "this is necessary," but all that really means is, "I can't imagine it being any other way". Leadership does not have to be divisive, and we don't have to reward the loudest and angriest voices. What would a different kind of conversation look like? I recently came across this interview, which offered interesting insights:

Trump: Tribune of Poor White People

This is from a source and a point of view I wouldn't ordinarily listen to, or even hear of. It's not a perfect piece, but it's a good reminder that the "other" people out there are people who think of themselves as good, who are trying to make it as best they can in the world, and who need to be listened to and taken seriously - especially because they are poor. Most of Jesus' ministry was directed at the poor and the powerless; we should do no less.

This kind of cross-boundary dialogue is not typical. What I see instead are liberal friends insulting conservatives as morons, idiots, and racists, and conservative friends insulting liberals as traitors, liars, and thieves. I see everyone issuing existential threats about what terrible things will happen if "they" win - as if "they" were an alien invasion, not a fellow group of human beings. Elections are not opportunities for discussion or even debate, but simply shouting matches where we remind people on our side of all the great reasons we have to hate the people on the other side. As the subject of the interview linked above puts it, "The November election strikes me as little more than a referendum on whose tribe is bigger".

After the election, though, we all still need to live together. We aren't voting on whether to divide up like Slovakia and the Czech Republic, where we get to go our separate ways. If we want any of the things we claim to want - peace, prosperity, justice, life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness - we have to work together to secure these things. Yet our process of transitioning from one government to the next makes working together impossible. Small wonder that we're not getting what we want.

Conservatives: the answer to the brokenness of politics isn't "defeat all the Liberals".

Liberals: the answer to the brokenness of politics isn't "defeat all the Conservatives".

The only real answer to all conflicts is the hardest road. As Abraham Lincoln reminded us, the best way to destroy an enemy is to make him a friend. Or perhaps we should remember the words of Lao Tzu many centuries earlier:

When two great forces oppose each other,the victory will goto the one that knows how to yield. (Tao Te Ching, Ch. 69)

So there it is: I hate watching politics because the more of it I experience, the worse I become. I strongly suspect that is true of most of us. This is not to say that I can't make distinctions among candidates, or that when the time comes I won't cast my vote. But I can wait until November to do so. In the meantime, if I really want to make the world a better place there are so very many other things to do than pay attention to, much less engage with, the sewer that is our political process.

Brexit and the Fundamental Problem of Human Communities

The Brexit vote which shocked the world this past week has raised a lot of questions, from the local and immediate (who is going to do what in the UK government?) to the global and sweeping (does this represent a global trend towards nationalism?) Even understanding the vote is difficult - there are divisions of geography, economics, age, and class. Those who voted for the UK to leave the EU did so for a host of reasons, some of which may never be fully understood.

One of those reasons was surely a sense of exclusivist nationalism, a "Britain for the British" sort of movement. This part of the Leave campaign was by turns implicitly or explicitly anti-immigration, and both leading up to and after the vote there have been a number of incidents of violence and intimidation across the country directed at people seen as being "foreigners". A friend of mine, an expat American who now lives in the UK, posted this to Facebook the other day:

I thought my heart was broken already, but it shattered a little more today, when another American woman I know was attacked in a Tesco parking lot. She was spat on, and screamed at, and told, "Go home, you filthy immigrant." And there's the attack on the Polish center, and the flyers delivered to schoolchildren saying Polish "vermin" should leave now, and the other reports of violence and abuse hurled at anyone who looks foreign. I thought this was my country too, but I think now maybe I was wrong.

While he doubtless disapproves of spitting on people in parking lots, George Will signaled his approval for this sort of nationalism in a recent column (which you can read here), which he titled "Britain's welcome revival of nationhood". He couches his argument in terms of the political centralization of power and control in Europe, but it's really an argument about identity and community. He rails against "cultural homogenization" and lauds the desire "to live on our land, under our laws, our values and with respect to our identity".

What Will is blithely assuming here, of course, is that we have a common understanding of who is "us" and who is "them". Moreover, he is also assuming (without saying so) that the best way for humans to live is for all of "us" to get together in our community, and all of "them" to go live somewhere else.

This notion of homogenous, exclusive communities is popular with some (though not all) "conservative" thinkers. It's usually rooted in an unexamined base of primordialism - the notion that "nations" have an "essential" character that is deeply historical, often ancient. Britons are British, therefore, because ... well, because they're British. The history behind these groups is usually fantasy and myth, but people like it anyway.

The instinct for gathering communities of like-minded people with whom we are comfortable is an understandable one. Social psychology has long established that this is in the nature of the human-as-social-animal: the desire both to be connected to others and to be distanced from others, which social identity theorists identify as the primary purpose of groups. If I'm in a group, by definition there must be some other people who are NOT in my group - there is an "us" and a "them".

Because of those boundaries between us and them, we have an easy means of making all kinds of difficult decisions quickly and easily. Perhaps the most important of these is trust. Our resources (mental and physical) are limited, and I can't be wary of everything and everyone. Group identity gives me a quick way of understanding who I can trust (and therefore relax around, do business with, etc.) and who I can't trust.

The problem with this is that we rely for our survival and prosperity on ever-widening circles of cooperation. Despite Donald Trump's emotional claims otherwise, the world is not built around "winners" and "losers". The highest achievements of human civilization come when we cooperate with each other, which isn't possible in a zero-sum world. George Will may want to usher us back to the 17th century when we only dealt with each other "as nations", but there's a reason why that model has been eroding - it's not as good as an interconnected world in which nations matter less and cooperation among people matters more.

A lot of the argument around the Brexit has focused on these issues of economics, and reasonably so. The less interaction and cooperation, the more barriers to trade and exchange, the poorer everyone will be. The fact that so many in the UK have been left out of the benefits of being part of a larger community is a failure not of the system of interaction, but of the distribution of wealth. The profits of free enterprise are increasingly hoarded by fewer and fewer - small wonder that the masses would like to shut that system down, since it isn't going to benefit them anyway. That failure has very little to do with the EU and bureaucrats in Brussels, and a great deal with the exercise of power and greed within British (or American) society.

But there is an argument here which goes beyond the economic to the moral and social. Simply put, what kind of society do we want to live in? And what kind of citizen do I want to be within my community? Do I want to only interact with people like me and avoid others as much as possible? How do I think the stranger, the "other", should be treated? Is it OK if I draw the boundary of my identity narrowly and reject everyone outside of those lines?

These aren't "liberal" questions or "conservative" questions - they are fundamentally human questions. The answers have political implications, but the questions are not essentially political, they are moral and social. In my view, I cannot square narrow nationalism with any understanding of the Christian faith, and any attempt to do so would simply be selfishness on my part. The value and worth of every human is the same in the eyes of God. How we negotiate living nearby and interacting
with each other is a matter of details, based on (hopefully) mutual respect for a common humanity.

The only other alternative, despite Will's attempt to deny it, really is isolationism. If you want to be honestly isolationist and not interact at all with people who are different, that's fine - have at it. But if you want to live in modern society, you don't have much of a choice. And being angry at, or afraid of, other people is simply a recipe for violence. That road leads to behavior that we know we don't want. Let us stop following "leaders" who want to take us down that path for their own gain, pretending all the while that it leads somewhere peaceful.

Presidential Bread and Circuses

We are already several months into the process of selecting the next President of the United States, and we've barely started. We've got another nearly ten months of yelling, screaming, and flamboyant nonsense ahead of us before, in November, we finally choose who gets to succeed Barack Obama in the White House. This process will be THE topic of conversation in the United States for the rest of the year.

There's only one problem: none of it matters. We're devoting almost all of our attention to the least important aspect of our national political system.

Put another way, Presidential elections have become the bread and circuses of our time.

This is a contrarian argument, given that we are told every four years that "this is the election that will define our era". Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia had been dead for less than 24 hours when pundits began pontificating about how the court vacancy "dramatically raises the stakes" of the election. Donald Trump, who gets more airtime than the rest of the field combined, has repeatedly claimed that everything is terrible.

I've written recently about how a lot of this fear-mongering is patent nonsense. I mentioned in that post that the Presidency is not nearly as powerful as we think it is - that Presidents have to answer to Congress and to a variety of powerful interests, and that the world often stubbornly does what it wants to do despite their thundering proclamations otherwise.

But this is only part of the issue. The larger issue is one I've made reference to from time to time, and which is contained in this article by Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page. Their bottom line (taken directly from the article itself):

The estimated impact of average citizens’ preferences drops precipitously, to a non-significant, near-zero level [when controlling for the impact of economic elites and interest groups]. Clearly the median citizen or “median voter” at the heart of theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy does not do well when put up against economic elites and organized interest groups. The chief predictions of pure theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy can be decisively rejected. Not only do ordinary citizens not have uniquely substantial power over policy decisions; they have little or no independent influence on policy at all. 

The data to reach this conclusion were compiled by looking at policy outcomes over nearly 1800 different policy issues for slightly more than 20 years (1981-2002). This is not an issue merely with particular issues like gun control, where policy seems to stubbornly cling to a particular line despite popular views otherwise. The conclusion Gilens & Page reach is that, taken as an independent force on policy outcomes, popular opinion matters not at all.

The period of time they studied included both Democratic and Republican Presidents, and Congresses controlled by each party and divided between them. Whether we put Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, or anyone else in the White House next year, this pattern is not going to significantly change.

To be fair, Trump and Sanders in their own way appear to be the only candidates who make even oblique reference to this issue. Sanders promises a "revolution" to overturn the existing system, though it's not clear how he intends to do that. Trump has no apparent plan to change anything other than to replace "losers" with "winners" - though where the spoils of such "winning" would go is anybody's guess.

If the Gilens & Page analysis is correct - and I believe that it is - then arguing about whether Rubio is better than Kasich, or even whether Hillary is better than Cruz, is entirely irrelevant. Yes, Presidents bring certain tendencies with them that can marginally nudge things in one direction or another. But none of this changes the fundamental character of the system. It just doesn't matter.

Look at this another way: changing from George W. Bush to Barack Obama (a pretty wide ideological swing from one President to another) did not significantly alter the general trend towards the accumulation of wealth and power in the hands of the few. If that change didn't matter, why do we expect a different result this time?

I have no doubt that this view might anger a few people. We want to believe that what we see in front of us is meaningful. We want to think that our choice of candidate is consequential - after all, the candidates and the media all tell us that it is. Moreover, we have such a wide range of choices this year that it's easy to find some that we like a lot, some we sort of tolerate, and some we can't stand. There's something satisfying about that.

This is not to say that people shouldn't develop candidate preferences, or that they shouldn't care about who wins the Presidency. It does suggest that they shouldn't care too much, which is to say very much at all, nor should they expect the outcome to have a substantial impact on either their own fortunes or the fortunes of our country. If what we seek is real change that broadly and systemically alters the direction of the country and the welfare of the population as a whole, we need to stop paying attention to blowhards standing behind podiums at debates and start paying attention to ourselves and each other.

Oregon Occupation: What Kind of Politics Do We Want?

Now that the occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge by a band of armed anti-government protesters appears to be mostly over, we can step back and see if there's anything to be learned from the whole mess. The answer may be "not much," insofar as the whole thing was a bit of a farce (and widely treated as such) from the beginning, but I think there are some significant points to consider.

The chief question, one raised every time a group of citizens finds itself opposed to a government policy, is: how is opposition to be legitimately expressed? If I don't like a government policy, what should (or shouldn't) I try to do about it, and what are the limits to my opposition?

To talk of limits to opposition seems almost countercultural in these days of open political-tribal warfare in which politicians and political organizations have done almost everything short of direct violence against each other. Certainly the rhetoric of most politics, whether in campaigns for office or in the constant, ongoing "debates" over this or that policy issue, does not admit to any limits. The mantra is, we are right and they are wrong and we must do whatever it takes to prevail.

This is great for getting masses riled up (and, as the proverb has it, separating fools from their money), but what does it really mean? The Bundys and their followers apparently took this rhetoric seriously. They had a particular view on government policy towards federally-owned lands, and they chose to arm themselves, occupy a (remote) set of federal buildings, and issue demands until they were met.

Setting aside their views on the particular issues of federal land management and ownership, their strategy was both ridiculous and doomed to failure from the start. It was ridiculous in that no government and no society can function if the means of opposition is to take up arms and issue demands. If groups did this every time they didn't like a policy decision, we would quickly become a country of armed camps. It's an absurd way to conduct politics.

No government, of any kind, is going to give in to demands under such circumstances. To do otherwise would set a precedent in which groups would know that if they want to win on their pet issue, they need to arm themselves and find some federal building (or set of employees) to take hostage. The idea of any government - democratic, authoritarian, or anything else - meeting such a demand is extremely difficult to entertain.

What the Bundy boys did was not just misunderstand the law, or the Constitution. They misunderstood politics fundamentally. In any society, there is ultimately a choice to be made about how resources will be allocated and distributed and how rules will be established and maintained. Either there is a process for establishing those rules that involves consultation and assent from some (or all) of the population, or the rules are established and enforced by whoever has the most and biggest guns. Law and violence are the basic choices here. Either we agree on something, or we fight it out.

The Bundys seemed to want to have it both ways. They made an argument based on their interpretation of law, yet they denied our entire system of government designed to set up and maintain laws. They tried to use force (of a sort) to get the government to agree with their interpretation of the law. They broke the law in order to try to change it.

Some sympathizers have taken this logic to equate the Bundy movement with MLK and the civil rights marchers. The equation is of course absurd. MLK understood that when you break the law, you face the consequences. He voluntarily went to jail to prove a point, to shock the conscience of the nation. He didn't break the law and then hide behind a gun, daring the government to arrest him. His strategy was clear: he wanted through action and example to convince a majority of Americans that his cause was right and his preferred laws and policies were good ones. In this he succeeded to a substantial degree.

So changing policy through force and demand is out. No matter what political system you operate under, it doesn't work and it doesn't make any sense. Small wonder the occupiers in Oregon have garnered such widespread scorn.

In our current political climate, however, this does leave the rest of us wondering how politics should be conducted. We have seen a decades-long escalation of rhetoric calling for all-or-nothing solutions. Promises to "take back America". Strategies to create a "permanent majority". These things don't involve guns or shooting, but they do call into question what kind of society we want.

If your approach to politics is predicated on achieving some ideal future in which everybody agrees with you, I have bad news for you: there will always be people who disagree. Sometimes there will be more people who disagree with you than agree with you. Sometimes you will be on the winning side, sometimes on the losing side. If you want to participate in society and in politics, you have to accept that. You also might want to consider that you could work with people of differing views to get things done that you both can agree on.

In the end, we forget a key truth: the process is far more important than any particular outcome. There will always be another issue, another policy, another law that we want or hate. But the way we handle and deal with each other in reaching those outcomes, day after day, is in the end what defines us.

Back from the Brink: Sweet Briar and the Changed Conversation About College Finances

I blogged a while back about the announcement that Sweet Briar College would be closing its doors this summer. At the time that news sent shock waves through higher education. It was the first time in recent memory (ever?) that the Trustees of a respected institution with a good reputation, a beautiful campus, acclaimed programs, and $80 million in endowment still in the bank had decided to shut down for financial reasons. Despite these apparent advantages the Trustees were convinced that closure was inevitable, and they chose to try to wind things down with some order and dignity.

It turns out that Sweet Briar may have a few years left after all. A deal has been reached with the Virginia Attorney General's office to change the leadership of the institution (new president and a largely new Board) and keep the operation going. Alumnae, many of whom were distressed and outraged by the decision to close, have raised some $21 million in pledges to help the college continue to operate. The AG has also agreed to lift restrictions on some $16 million in the college's endowment, allowing that money to be spent for any purpose that will help keep the college running (rather than on whatever specific purposes the original donors had intended).

This is certainly a happy day for those alumnae who have fought to keep the institution open. Sweet Briar still faces massive challenges, not least seriously diminished student and faculty populations (many have already transferred elsewhere). The college has been doing essentially no recruiting during the peak of recruiting season, so the incoming class is likely to be small. Whatever operations start up again in the fall are likely to be a shadow of the former institution, which was not that large to begin with. Nevertheless, the college now has a second chance at life.

The larger issues that led the Trustees to decide to close the institution still remain. The $12.5 million that alumnae have pledged initially is roughly equal to the college's operating deficit last year. It's great that former students are willing to lay out that kind of money, but what about next year? The year after that? One would guess that the $21 million in pledges raised by the organization Saving Sweet Briar represents a substantial proportion - perhaps nearly the entirety - of the giving capacity of the alumnae base. When that is tapped out, what next? The college was already burning off its endowment at 10% per year - that $80 million will disappear pretty quickly even if the state AG agrees to lift all restrictions on it.

The question here isn't whether the college will stay open for next year. The question is, can Sweet Briar build and run a sustainable financial model? Given the competition for students, the challenges of finding families who can and will contribute significant sums to their kids' educations, and the weakened borrowing power of those same families, where is the money going to come from? There isn't a clear answer. But if the new Board and president don't come up with a solution within the next year or two, we'll be having this same conversation in two years' time. If they do, this will be one of the greatest success stories in higher education and could pave the way for a lot of new thinking at institutions across the country.

One thing I do want to applaud the outgoing Trustees for: they have changed the conversation by calling the question. For too long, people both inside and outside higher ed have assumed that "real" colleges and universities - those with good reputations, status, and name recognition - could never really close down. Faculty and administration have always assumed that "we'll find a way" - even when that way involves shell games or unsustainable financial practices, hoping that "it's just for a few years". Now we know that failure is an option.

That knowledge should cause all of us, especially administrators and faculty inside the walls of academe, to take these matters much more seriously. Universities are mission-driven institutions where decisions should never be made "just to make money". But the money constraint is very real, and if we can't find a way to fulfill our missions in a financially sustainable fashion we too will ultimately close our doors. The message to the rest of us in higher education is clear: don't wait until the wolves are at the door. We should all be thinking about sound financial practices and models now. Because if we don't do it now, someone else will surely do it for us later.

Higher Education Myths: The "Golden Age" Fallacy

My good friend Steve Saideman had an excellent post this morning taking on Mark Bauerlein's NYT article "What's the Point of a Professor?" I'm sure that Bauerline's piece will get plenty of response in the higher ed world - it could be described as a form of trolling, or at least the NYT stooping to click-bait to boost their online attention. But I'll go ahead and jump into the fray anyway.

I do so because Bauerline is guilty of one of the most common fallacies in higher education writing: pining for a "golden age" of college, usually back in the 1960s, when things were so much better and wonderful and isn't it a terrible shame how far we've gotten away from that idyllic time? Or, as my friend Steve puts it much more succinctly, "Kids these days!"

Bauerline's argument is that "back in the day" - when Todd Gitlin was a "fiery working-class kid at Harvard" in the 1960s or when he himself was a student at UCLA in the early 1980s - students were much more engaged (especially with faculty), were more interested in the intellectual conversation that faculty serve as mentors and shepherds into, and were more intent on "developing a philosophy of life" than in crass material things like getting a job. It was a wonderful time when you couldn't walk down the hall of the English department without tripping over the legs of students who couldn't wait to engage in deep, meaningful, mentoring conversations with their professors. No doubt when Bauerline chose a career in higher education, he hoped to have a similar experience from the other side of the desk. And now he's not - and he's got surveys to prove it!

There are several problems at work here. One is the narrow view of higher education which many in higher education themselves hold. Three specific institutions are mentioned in the article: Harvard, UCLA, and (if you count the byline) Bauerline's employer, Emory University. These are all brand-name institutions, instantly recognizable across the country. And because most people in higher ed went to elite institutions like this (and yes, UCLA and Emory ARE elite institutions), they tend to think that these experiences represent the whole of higher ed.

The truth, unfortunately, is much more prosaic. Most college students - especially today, much more so than in the 1960s - don't go to these kinds of institutions. Most of them go to comprehensive regional universities near where they live: University of Akron, Wright State (my employer), Wichita State, Bridgewater State, Millersville, Shippensburg, SUNY (there are 64 SUNY campuses, only a small sliver of which are in or near NYC), and so on. Many of them are the first in their entire families to go to college. These students are, in my experience and observation, practical people pursuing practical things. Most of them don't have the background to understand the Golden Age image of the Life of the Mind that Bauerline is talking about. That's not to say that they can't come to appreciate those goals - but that's not where they are.

These students - many of them also post-traditional, not fresh-from-high-school - make up the vast bulk of college students today. So when Bauerline starts comparing surveys of students today to surveys of students in the 1960s, he's comparing apples and orangutans - they're completely different things. A MUCH larger swath of the American population goes to college today than did in the mid-60s, or even in the early 1980s when Bauerline was in school. It's no wonder they answer the questions differently - they're different people.

Then there's the problem of the supposed "culture shift". This is the "kids these days" part of the argument - Bauerline's lament that "back in the day" college students cared more about self-development, but now they just want to get jobs and make money. It's tempting to blame that shift on the kids themselves, which as Steve points out makes us old folks feel good about ourselves. Except that it isn't the kids' fault - its ours.

As a professor and administrator at an institution much closer to the median of higher ed than Emory, I see this on a regular basis. Every state politician - governor or legislator, Republican or Democrat - talks about education (and higher education in particular) in one manner only: Jobs, Jobs, Jobs! Our entire state government - made up completely not of slacker 20-somethings but of grown men and women older than Bauerline or me - views universities through this lens. Jobs and workforce development are the beginning and the end of the conversation. What state dollars we get depend on our ability, as a public university (which, remember, is where most students go), to sing from this hymnal. Is it any wonder that our students have absorbed what their elders spend so much time talking about?

This sometimes leads to another fallacy - the faculty "call to arms", in which professors complain that their university presidents should "push back" against this "crass commercialization" of higher education. Some of them want to mount the barricades and "take back the university" from those who would extinguish the higher purpose in pursuit of mere economic growth.

That's a comforting battle cry when you're a tenured full professor at a stable and elite university. I've known faculty to get extremely worked up demanding that their university presidents take up this standard and "fight back". But that ignores the reality that presidents face every day: they have to keep the lights on and the salaries paid. State dollars, dwindling as they are, are important for doing so. So are tuition dollars, and a full-throated old-school demand for "higher education the way it was Back In The Day" doesn't pull students in. Again, that's not where our students and their families are. And if we insist that they meet us where we want them to be - if we move the starting line back to someplace we think it once was, and then demand they follow - they won't. Call that crass commercialization if you want, but it's reality. Any good teacher knows - you have to meet students where they are, not where you wish they were.

And why is it, anyway, that politicians are so bent on casting higher education as jobs and workforce development? Look to their constituents - only 35% of them, in most areas, have a college degree. In really well-educated places like San Francisco or Boston, that figure can challenge 50%. But that's it. The reality is that 2/3 of the country hasn't gone to college in any meaningful way - and even accounting for differential rates of voting and participation, those folks are still a large part of the electorate. When Bauerline talks about the "moral authority" of faculty as mentors, most people have no idea what he's talking about. And those are the people who vote, pay taxes, and aspire to send their kids to college.

In a way, then, the problems which Bauerline and his Jeremiad brethren complain about are really the result of the enormous success of higher education. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when very few people went to college but the country was consumed with the idea of upward mobility and making things better for the next generation, there began a vast expansion of higher education as a means of bringing more and more people into and upwards within the middle class. That boom resulted in large numbers of new students, massive growth at existing universities, and the creation of new ones. My current employer is a byproduct of that growth - in 1967, Bauerline's benchmark survey year, Wright State didn't even exist. Now it sports 18,000 students and is looking to grow past 20,000.

All that growth inevitably changed the nature of higher ed. As more students arrived who DIDN'T have a multigenerational experience of college, the broader environment of norms, ideas, and expectations shifted. These newcomers brought their own goals, and universities naturally adapted to try to meet those goals. I won't argue that the broader culture hasn't changed, too - we are perhaps more concerned with jobs and careers and economic growth than may have been true in the past. But if that is true - and we need much better evidence for it than Bauerline offers - it's not the fault of our kids, its the fault of us and our parents, the people who really drive society.

None of this is to argue that the Liberal Arts ideal is dead, or that we shouldn't strive for meaningful mentorship as faculty. I'm a product of the liberal arts world myself, and still believe strongly in its benefits both for career-building and for enlightened citizenship. But the ways we instill that in our students - most of whom work, many of whom don't know what college used to look like, and most of whom have life experiences very different from ours - will of necessity be very different.

The story of a bygone "Golden Age" may be comforting to some, but it just isn't true. We haven't lost the opportunity to engage with our students, and students aren't necessarily less engaged than they used to be - they just engage in different ways. Real transformation is still possible in higher education - indeed, it happens all the time. Meaningful relationships and conversations do still go on between faculty and students. Students themselves frequently talk about the real and significant impact which faculty have had on them. These experiences just don't necessarily happen during regular office hours anymore. Better that we figure out how to do more of this in light of today's realities than pine for a past which isn't coming back, if it ever existed at all.

Growing Inequality: Is This the World We Want?

We are just at the beginning of the 2016 (yes, 2016) US presidential campaign. Because of this, I suspect that the quality of public discourse about the most important issues of the day will get steadily worse between now and November of next year.

This is a shame, because there are some significant issues that we're either not addressing, or addressing badly. One that has been much on my mind lately is the wide and growing gap of inequality in the United States. This is not only an inequality between rich and poor, but the gulf that has opened between the very wealthy (the top 1%, in popular parlance) and everybody else. The statistics on this are too numerous to mention, but even a cursory search of economic data will show you this picture no matter how you slice it.

Simply pointing out the existence of this problem (or labelling it a "problem") is enough in some circles to get you labelled a hippie commie liberal. I'm not sure that I understand the knee-jerk response in some conservative circles to deny that the United States has moved much farther towards a highly stratified oligarchy, although I suspect it's because this "inconvenient truth" gores a few sacred cows. Nevertheless, I don't think this is - or should be - a partisan issue.

Early rumors in the presidential campaign are that some Republican candidates are going to make an issue out of this, using it as a cudgel with which to beat up on Obama (even though he's not running again you can always run against the sitting President, much as Obama ran partly against Bush in 2008). And there is some truth to the accusation - certainly inequality at all levels and of all types has increased over the last seven years, and it's not clear that the Obama administration has done much to halt that trend or even paid much attention to it. On the other hand, the same was true of the previous (Republican) administration, so there's not much help there. All in all, I suspect that I will be quoting Dickens a lot this campaign season:

'Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed the Ghost. They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread.
 'Spirit. are they yours.' Scrooge could say no more. 'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down upon them. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye. Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And abide the end.' 

I think our politicians will likely make things a great deal worse in pursuit of their factious purposes in the coming years.

Dickens, being of an earlier century and another country, is safe for both Republicans and Democrats. And the half-truth that Republican politicians are now seizing upon is that the gulf between the rich and powerful and everybody else is owned by both parties, perhaps because both parties are owned by the rich and powerful.

A significant study by Princeton professors briefly raised eyebrows last April in asserting that in the US, political outcomes are not significantly influenced by what the population at large wants but by what the rich and powerful want. In a study that is as clinical as it is chilling, they demonstrate with a significant pile of data that the output of the American political system is largely a function of an economic elite and the interest groups (corporations, business associations, and the like) that they control. The study briefly gained news attention - it might have lasted 48 hours in the news cycle - before being buried in the crush of day-to-day events and forgotten.

Global climate change has faced similar resistance and skepticism, but it has also had its passionate defenders who have pushed back, piling evidence on evidence. The climate change "debate" is now a part of the national conversation and slowly the science is winning out, insofar as those who would deny that climate change exists are being driven ever farther into dark corners as their numbers thin. This does not, of course, have any effect on policy because policy outcomes are determined by something else entirely.

But the observation that the US is becoming an oligarchy, and that our society is becoming both radically unequal and increasingly unjust, has no such passionate defenders. Al Gore will not make an award-winning documentary about it. Hollywood celebrities will not take up the cause. There are no equivalents to Greenpeace, no analogs to the photos of stranded polar bears, that can capture the public's imagination with the reality that they - we - are being slowly but surely isolated from both wealth and power.

Briefly, it seemed at the Occupy Movement might provide a visual center of gravity around which a counter-effort could coalesce. But that Movement was widely mocked, scorned, and at times brutally repressed. Its young participants all went home, many having learned the lesson of a previous age: you can't fight City Hall.

We can argue, of course, about what's causing the gap to grow. Certainly the widespread adoption of the creed of privatization, and the concomitant belief in private goods over public goods, has helped. In my own field of higher education, a study was just released showing that the share of higher education paid for by students and their families has risen from about 30% in 1980 to over 50% in recent years. I've blogged about this before - but this is just one fragment of the much larger iceberg.

That's part of the problem - we tend to view things as small, isolated fragments, separate puzzles rather than pieces of a larger whole. Yet societies and economies are organic things (as F.A. Hayek, a darling in some conservative circles, liked to point out), and in organic systems you cannot neatly separate out one piece from another and deal with them in isolation. Falling state support for higher education is related to the shooting of Michael Brown, and the responses to it, in Ferguson, MO. It's all a part of the same tapestry.

So the question we really need to ask ourselves is, What kind of society do we want to live in? Except for briefly addressing issues of race, President Obama has largely avoided this question. President George W. Bush never went anywhere near it, perhaps because like his father he was never very good at "that vision thing". Bill Clinton liked to govern largely by small to medium-sized policies - the Wonk-in-Chief. You have to go back to Ronald Reagan to find a President willing to use the bully pulpit to articulate a vision, not of what government should do but of what our society should look like. Not everybody agreed with his vision, but at least he tried.

Waiting for our politicians to break their silence and start talking about the big questions that matter is, I expect, simply wasting time. The current status quo is largely to the liking of the powers that seem to control that system - see how quickly the upper echelons on the financial world recovered after the crash that they themselves caused, taking the rest of us with them on the way down but not on the way back up. Perhaps politics, or at least the standard mechanisms we have come to think of as politics, isn't the right venue at all.

So here's a radical wish: that rather than participate in the bitter, petty tribal squabbling that defines the American political landscape over the next 18 months, I hope that Americans can come together to talk about the things that really matter: what kind of society we want to live in, and how we (not the politicians, but us) can get there. I don't think that this is terribly likely - I'm too old to be an optimist anymore. But wouldn't it be a wonderful thing if it did?

Quality and Profit in Higher Education Really ARE Inversely Related

One of the long-held beliefs in some corners of our society is the Free Market Faith: that introducing a profit motive (along with appropriate competition) can make anything better. Those who belong to the Free Market Faith are generally found in certain wings of the Republican party, although not all Republicans share this belief and there are plenty of Libertarians (and probably a few Democrats) who do.

In the realm of higher education, this Faith has been one of the few shreds of protection for the for-profit education sector. If it weren't for Free Market Faith folks, the for-profit college industry would be in even worse shape, seeing as how they offer a worse product at a higher price than one can get from existing universities and community colleges (h/t to Steve Greene for spotting that article for me). But there are still enough state governors and legislators who, as Faithful Adherents, want to give these poor free-market upstarts a chance.

In the realm of traditional higher education - that is, our long-standing universities and colleges that are collectively the envy of the world - there has long been a concern that for-profit means "low quality". This argument bleeds over into debates about online education, which is a separate question entirely. But because for-profits are private entities, we don't often get to look inside their books to see if there really is a trade-off between the quality of education and an institution's ability to make money.

Now, thanks to the Securities & Exchange Commission (and some excellent journalism from the Chronicle), we get to peek into at least one of these creatures' books. Some of the highlights:

In 2012 the Western Association rejected Ashford [for regional accreditation], saying the university had a high turnover of students, a vastly inadequate number of full-time faculty and student-support staff members, and inconsistent quality and rigor in its curriculum. 

Since then, however, the university has hired an accreditation insider as its president, slashed its admissions staff, and put more employees to work in areas meant to ensure students’ academic success. Those changes were enough to satisfy the Western Association, which last year awarded Ashford initial accreditation. 

But on Wednesday, financial data in the SEC filing from Bridgepoint revealed just how much the changes had affected the company’s bottom line. 

Instructional costs and services now account for more than half of the company’s expenses, compared with nearly a third in 2011. 

"In the second half of 2012, the company began to increase its instructional costs and services costs in direct response to … accreditation efforts," Bridgepoint said in its filing.
At the same time, operating profits have fallen from nearly 30 percent to less than 8 percent, Bridgepoint reported. 

And the effort to improve quality has had another price, the company said, in declining enrollments and revenue. The company brought in 20 percent less revenue in 2013, compared with 2012—a decline of nearly $200-million.

For-profits are learning what those of us in real universities have known for a long time: providing a quality education is not a cheap undertaking, and the more you cut corners the more you are likely to be stiffing your students to line your own pocketbook. Yes, universities today can be criticized for spending money on things they don't really need, or for having too many administrators, or for slowly walking away from tenure-track faculty. But for all of the arguments about "bloat" in our public universities, legislators should take a good hard look at the alternative at the other end of the spectrum: low quality, high drop-out rates, lousy outcomes, and massive student debt to pay for it all. These supposedly "lean" for-profits turn out to not be such a good bargain.

Academic Freedom in Perspective

In American higher education we have significant debates about the limits and rights inherent in our notion of "academic freedom". Rooted in the basic principle that scholars should be free to pursue the truth wherever it takes them, and to teach what their discipline requires (rather than bowing to public or, often, political pressure on this or that issue), the idea of academic freedom is fundamental to the American higher education enterprise. Hardly a week goes by when there isn't at least one story in the Chronicle about some professor or another, or some institution or another, debating the boundaries of what's appropriate and what kinds of speech are protected.

As important as those debates are, it's good to keep them in context. For the vast majority of western faculty, nearly all the time, academic freedom isn't much of an issue - even for those who study controversial subjects (evolution, global climate change, politics, etc., etc.) Hundreds of scholars (including me) signed an open letter criticizing the George W. Bush administration over the Iraq war; to the best of my knowledge, none of us suffered so much as a slap on the wrist. Contrast that to the situation in modern Russia (this from today's Insider Higher Ed):

A philosophy professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations was fired after writing an op-ed criticizing Russia’s annexation of Crimea as akin to Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, Reuters reported. The institute, which is affiliated with the foreign ministry, said it had dismissed Andrei Zubov for criticizing Russian foreign policy: "Let the inappropriate and offensive historical analogies and characterizations lay on Zubov's conscience, the leadership of MGIMO view it as impossible for A.B. Zubov to continue working at the institute,” it said in a statement.

Granted, I am no big fan of casual comparisons to Nazi Germany. On the other hand, there are some similarities between Russia's grab of Crimea and the German Anschluss with Austria - they're not the same, but there are some valid comparisons there. Whatever your take on the appropriateness of the analogy, however, it's clear that all this professor did was what American professors do all the time: disagree publicly with his government on one of the more important policy issues of the day. For that he was openly fired, without even a pretext that there is some other reason.

So the next time we are tempted to declare that the sky is falling because some American professor is abusing or being abused over academic freedom issues, remember that it could be FAR worse. And if the Moscow State Institute of International Relations calls with a job offer, you might want to think twice.

Power, Character, and Respect: Machiavelli Is Beside the Point

Although I almost never post anything (other than blog post links) to Facebook, I posted the following to my FB timeline earlier today:

People fear power. People respect character.

Since a good chunk of my FB friends are poli sci geeks like me, I quickly got references to both Machiavelli (who obviously made this observation, more or less, long before I did) and Socrates. But as much as I still spend some of my professional life (including my last blog post) musing about politics, that wasn't really what this is about. Unlike good old Niccolo, I'm not interested in giving governments or government leaders advice on how to successfully run a country - which is good, since they're not listening to me anyway.

The context in which this observation was meant, and for which it is much more interesting, is organizational. Loosely, an organization is an entity with a bunch of folks arranged in some kind of structure (usually hierarchical) which is collectively trying to achieve some mission or set of goals. Within the organization, individuals have their own goals, motives, and incentives, giving rise to the oft-cited "organizational politics". One reason why I have had some measure of success in academic administration is that organizational politics follow many of the same laws and predictable patterns as other politics, so there is a connection between what I study and what I do.

One of the interesting challenges to leaders in organizations is the leader-follower dynamic (or, if you're an academic geek, the principal-agent problem). Leaders, of course, want to lead - meaning they want the people under them in the structure to do what they (the leaders) want. Indeed, much of what people think of as "leadership" boils down to "telling other people what to do and getting them to do it". This is a necessary function of leadership, to be sure - although the latter part (getting people to do what you want) can be tricky.

But many organizational leaders, I suspect, don't want merely to be effective in ordering others around. They also want to be respected and admired, including by the people beneath them in the organization. Part of this is ego, part of it may be a sense of efficacy - if people respect me, they are more likely to do my bidding (true).

And this is where organizations differ from, say, running a country - and why Machiavelli is beside the point in an organizational context. Because an organization, even a fairly large one, is still small enough that the relationships between individuals at different levels matters. I work in a fairly sizable university, with up to 2400 employees - faculty, staff, etc. We all work in a space that's fairly geographically limited, and in an organizational context where, while the senior leadership doesn't see everybody every day, there are opportunities for direct interaction that you don't have even in a town or municipality of similar size. The population of the town I live in is substantially smaller than the staff + student population of my university, yet I have far more interactions with people at the university (up to and including the president) than I do with the mayor or town officials of my town.

So relationships matter organizationally. And this is where leaders can get themselves in trouble. Because the higher up the food chain you are in an organization, the worse the information you get. People hate to tell leaders bad news, and they particularly hate to tell them they're wrong - because the leaders at the top have a lot of organizational power, and people are afraid of that power. So if a leader does something foolish that ticks off a lot of people, they're unlikely to hear about it or to see its effects - until the effects are so big and obvious they can't be ignored.

Unfortunately, being in an environment of mostly positive feedback all the time can cause leaders to confuse being feared with being respected. They may conclude that, since no one is criticizing them, everyone thinks they're doing a great job. This is, of course, a serious delusion that leaders have to go well out of their way to fix - if they even want to, which most of them don't.

I have heard many eloquent arguments about the importance of doing "full 360 degree" reviews of personnel, especially leaders. If you want to know how someone is doing, talk to their supervisor, talk to their peers and others on their level, and talk to the people who work for them and others beneath them in the structure - all with total anonymity and no possibility of knowledge or retribution (as much as can be credibly arranged). The benefits to such an evaluation, in terms of getting at the real truth of the matter, are obvious. I've also never seen an organization - including any of the five colleges and universities for which I've worked - do one, ever. It's hard to find a better idea so widely avoided.

I've thought of all of this recently because of a few events (the details of which I can't write about here) where I've seen people in positions of leadership do things that seem almost calculated to destroy respect. I don't think they ARE calculated - I think they are done out of ignorance. But because the people in question have power, the fear which that power generates mitigates (in the short run) the damage caused by the lack of respect.

In the long run, such people aren't doing themselves any favors. But even that is a probabilistic statement - lots of people who are not respected (and whose characters are highly suspect, if not downright despicable) nevertheless succeed in a professional arena. The fact that their organizations are probably measurably worse off for that success doesn't end up mattering much, because those losses are "opportunity losses" - things that might have been, had the leadership been better, but didn't come to pass. Being invisible, they trouble very few, least of all the leaders busy confusing fear with respect.

There's an open question on the end of all of this - given how prevalent these mistakes are, is it the case that organizational leadership selection processes are biased in favor of those who would lead by the use of fear rather than respect? Or are we simply seeing the distribution otherwise reflected in the general population - that most people, given the choice, would rather control through fear than influence through respect of character? That's a question far too large for a blog post, or even for a lifetime of research. But for myself, I know what sort of leader I would like to be if ever I am given that opportunity - and I continue to add to my stock of negative examples, gathered over a nearly 20 year career.

Government Shutdowns: Why We Need More Process People and Fewer Zealots

There has been a lot of ink spilled in recent days about the government shutdown. Understandably so - while brinksmanship has become a regular feature of US politics, it's rare that the tires actually wander over the edge of the cliff.

Everybody's got their own view, of course, about who's fault this is. Those views depend very much on party ID and political ideology - a certain segment of the Republican party (not all, but some) think that this is great and that they're winning, while all Democrats and some Republicans think this is a terrible idea.

That partisanship, of course, is a big part of the problem. This is where our tendency to focus on outcomes in politics - whether or not Obamacare gets passed, or we intervene in Syria, or gay marriage is legalized, or any of a thousand other issues - becomes a real problem. Because the process of getting to those outcomes is more important than the outcomes themselves - and we seem to have lost sight of that.

Why is process more important than outcome? Because the process of representative democracy is all we have that binds us together. We have a range of opinions about political outcomes (although as many have pointed out, the policy differences are not nearly so extreme as we like to think - take a look at European democracies). Having different opinions is to be expected; the folks who wrote the Constitution certainly understood that. They also understood that the process - the rules of the political game - are the only way to insure that you get reasonable outcomes at an acceptable cost.

It's that last part that eludes us. We sort of understand (sometimes) that democracy produces messy outcomes, and that you're never going to get the perfect policy (if, indeed, there is such a thing). But what we forget is that in getting there, we really only have two choices:

1) We compromise, cut deals, or come up with rules to determine winners and losers that everybody accepts.

2) We start killing each other. Whoever is left alive at the end determines the outcome.

This sounds extreme, but politics tends to lead in one of these two directions. The moment you decide that a particular outcome - defunding Obamacare, legalizing marijuana, driving illegal immigrants out of the country - is so important that you would do anything to achieve it, it's only a matter of time before the guns come out. If the issue is existential (we must win this fight or our way of life will be destroyed) you will break any and every rule to win that fight. That's why Syria and Iraq are such a mess right now - those are, to the people involved, existential conflicts.

The system of government we have - flawed as it is - was designed precisely with this in mind. It was not designed to produce the best policies, or even necessarily good policies. It was designed to produce policies in such a way that nobody dies. We forget that the precipitating event for drafting the Constitution was an armed rebellion on American soil, pitting two different economic interests - farmers and bankers - against each other.

What does this have to do with our current mess? The decision to shut down the US federal government over a single issue (health care legislation) sends a clear signal. Those that have done so are saying clearly: the outcome on this one issue is so important to us that we are willing to do anything to achieve it. We don't care what the cost or collateral damage are - we will stop at nothing to achieve this particularly policy objective.

This has nothing to do with whether you like or don't like the ACA, or whether it is good or bad for the country. To make the claim that this health care law is an existential issue - that literally nothing is more important, and indeed that everything else the US government does put together is not as important - is the cry of the zealot. It is fundamentally anti-democratic, and fundamentally un-American.

Despite the hyperbole, there is something in common that binds this shutdown strategy (and, likely, a fight in two weeks over the debt ceiling, which will be worse) and terrorism. They differ in terms of the tools used, but they share the same fanatical devotion to the cause - to have their way regardless of the rules and regardless of what anybody else thinks. It is the strategy of revolutionaries the world over, from Lenin to Mao to bin Laden to Assad: I will impose my will on you, because I am right and you are wrong.

This zealotry is clearly emanating from one particular political faction, which therefore owns most of the blame for the crisis. But the political party system at large, and the binary identity thinking it has developed in the American public, are hampering a solution. Realists have told us for generations: when identities and alliances harden and there is no more flexibility, the result is war. What we are seeing is the product of a calcified party system that cannot adapt itself, being taken advantage of by a small band of ideologues with at best 20% of the population behind them. Whether the system can find enough flexibility to find a way out of the crisis remains to be seen.