Faculty News

Creating Change Agents

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Ja’Nina Walker, Assistant Professor of Psychology, reflects on the Check Your Privilege campaign and the steps we need to take to continue raising awareness.

Check your privilege
Check your privilege campaign

Privilege: a special right, advantage or immunity granted or available only to a particular person or group of people (New Oxford Dictionary, n.d.)

Colorblind racial ideology: proposes that the most effective means of ending discrimination is through equalitarianism (without regard to race, culture or ethnicity) often accompanied with an avoidance of conversations about race (Neville, Awad, Brooks, Flores, & Bluemel, 2013).

During the 2014-2015 academic school year, a campaign was launched for the University of San Francisco community. The goal of the campaign was to bring awareness to various social privileges that impact students, faculty, and staff on and off campus. The Check Your Privilege Campaign received local and international attention with many universities replicating the campaign on their various campuses. While the response to the campaign was vast, from extreme support to utter disdain, the relevance of the campaign on this campus cannot go understated.

Understanding Colorblind Racial Ideology

Many individuals in the United States believe that colorblind racial ideology (i.e., I don’t see color, I just see people) is beneficial to race relations. However, research has continued to show that not acknowledging race, and the associated structural inequalities, negatively impacts intergroup relations (Holoien & Shelton, 2012; Plaut, Thomas, & Goren, 2008; Richeson & Nussbaum, 2004). When one does not consider the ways in which people of color are viewed in the world, they are ignoring a key component of that person’s lived experience. While colorblind racial ideology only accounts for racial and ethnic differences, one can propose that tenets of colorblind racial ideology may move beyond race and into other social categories. If one avoids conversations around race, they may also fail to acknowledge structural inequalities around sex, gender, religion, class, sexual orientation, or differently abled bodies.

Understanding Privilege

Although we seek to produce change agents at USF, many students graduate with very little knowledge of the ways in which various social privileges impact the experiences of others. For example, in the United States, Christian holidays are recognized as Federal Holidays, while Jewish and Muslim holidays are not; women make less than men on the workforce; Black men and women are more likely to be arrested and sentenced to prison (or killed) for lesser crimes than their White counterparts (Alexander, 2012; Bonilla-Silva, 2014); and transgender women are being murdered at a heinous rate. To fully understand the impact and reach of privilege one must remember:

  • We all have some form of privilege that will increase or decrease depending on our social setting.
  • We can facilitate within ourselves, and others, deep critical understandings of how our individual privilege(s) perpetuate structural privileges and inequalities.
  • We can use our privilege to advocate for others who are less privileged, in a certain situation, than ourselves.

In order to uphold our Jesuit mission, we must critically examine the ways in which we are accurately infusing conversations around power, privilege, and difference into our curriculums and co-curricular activities so that the USF community can change the world from here.

Creating Change Agents

To put things into perspective, a pre-post study was conducted in tandem with the university wide Check Your Privilege Campaign to test the feasibility of a social marketing campaign. Prior to the campaign, students were fairly knowledgeable about various social privileges, and on average reported relatively low colorblind racial ideology. However, these constructs significantly impacted student interest in social justice activities. Students who reported higher colorblind racial ideology were less likely to report interest in social justice activities. Students who were more knowledgeable about heterosexual privilege were more likely to report positive outcome expectations from engagement in social justice activities (Walker et al., under review).

We also examined across discipline knowledge of social privilege, the perpetuation of colorblind racial ideology, and interest in social justice. We found that on average, students in the schools of Management and Nursing and Health Professions were the least aware of individual and structural privileges and social inequalities (particularly racial and class privileges) when compared to Arts/Humanities, Social Science, and Science majors. Additionally, management students were the least aware of male privilege and Christian privilege. Science majors, in addition to management students, were the least aware of heterosexual privilege. With regard to colorblind racial ideology, management students reported the highest levels. Lastly, Management, Science, and Nursing majors were the least likely to report interest in social justice activities when compared to Arts/Humanities and Social Science majors (Poole & Walker, under review).

Our Jesuit Mission

These findings should serve as a call to the USF community to consider the ways in which we instill within our students the ability to think critically about the world in which they live. Given that students who uphold colorblind racial ideology are substantially less likely to show interest in, and positive outcome expectations from, engagement in social justice activities, we must teach them the fallacy in such messaging. Saying that one does not see race, sex, gender, class, religion, sexual orientation, or ability status not only limits one’s ability to see the humanity in others, such thinking is in stark contrast to our value of cura personalis. We must reflect on our similarities and acknowledge our differences to uphold our Jesuit mission.

As a University community we can take action steps toward ensuring that our community maintains our core values:

  1. Provide mandatory diversity training for faculty and staff. If we want to ensure that our students are knowledgeable about diversity, and leave USF with a social justice framework, we must ensure that faculty and staff are well-informed about such topics. Providing optional trainings are not enough. What we know is that the individuals who have the largest learning curve in regard to diversity and multiculturalism, are less likely to attend optional trainings. Developing an interactive course on diversity (i.e., fallacy of colorblind racial ideology, microaggressions, implicit bias, tokenism in the classroom) similar to Think About It, or having faculty who extensively study issues around diversity conduct department specific trainings, would greatly benefit our community.
  2. Conversations around power and privilege must be infused within the curriculum. We must critically examine the ways in which conversations around privilege and power are conducted within and outside of classrooms. It is not enough to require students to take only one or two cultural diversity courses during their four years of study. If we want to produce men and women for and with others we must be diligent, especially within the schools of Management and Nursing, to ensure that all of our students are gaining an education that is inline with the University’s goals and expectations.
  3. Provide trainings, through the Center for Teaching Excellence, on how to conduct difficult dialogues around privilege and power. The CTE is an amazing resource for faculty and can use its platform to equip faculty with the skills needed to engage students in conversations around power and privilege. The CTE could offer Teaching Retreats, Summer Bookclubs, and Teaching Cafés on teaching and discussing power and privilege. The CTE and administration could even collaborate to produce a mandatory training for all new(ish) faculty on how to navigate infusing such discussions into their classrooms.
  4. Develop an Ombuds Office. One of the biggest barriers to effective conversations around privilege and power is accountability. Often times students experience egregious acts of racism, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia by faculty and staff. However, they do not know who they can talk to about their concerns without negative repercussions. Developing an ombuds office, where a non-bias party provides confidential, impartial and informal conflict resolution, and problem-solving services for offensive or unethical behavior, would greatly improve responsibility and accountability for all parties involved.
  5. Reinstate and Expand the Multicultural Recruitment and Retention Office. Although the Strategic Enrollment Management office seeks to ensure effective recruitment of all students, the dismantling of MRR has already shifted the culture and climate at USF around race and ethnicity. In an era where Affirmative Action is on the chopping block, yet students of color are not accurately represented on university campuses, we must not forget the need for such an important office with trained staff who use multiculturalism as their lens. For the past 20+ years MRR has successfully recruited and retained students of color who thrive at USF. Disassembling MRR has sent a message to the USF community that multicultural issues are no longer needed. Removing MRR is synonymous to colorblind racial ideology as its dismantling implies that the needs of students of color are no longer a priority. It is very important to have one office that specializes in the recruitment of students of color so that accountability is centralized as opposed to being dispersed among multiple Strategic Enrollment Management staff.

It is the responsibility of administration, faculty and staff to ensure that the USF community upholds our Jesuit mission. We must all be knowledgeable about the ways in which social privileges often perpetuate colorblind racial ideology. If we want our students to change the world from here, we must first reflect on our own knowledge, and then instill in them the skills to think critically about the world around them. We must ensure that the core values that rule our institution are at the center of each department, each course, each advertisement, each conversation, each meeting, and that equity is at the forefront of all of our minds.

References

Alexander, M. (2012). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: New Press.

Bonilla-Silva, E. (2014). Racism without Racists: Color-blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Holoien, D. S. & Shelton, J. N. (2012). You deplete men: The cognitive costs of colorblindness on ethnic minorities. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 48, 562-565. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2011.09.010

Kellaway, M. & Brydum, S. (2015). These Are the U.S. Trans Women Killed in 2015. Retrieved from http://www.advocate.com/transgender/2015/07/27/these-are-trans-women-killed-so-far-us-2015

National Equal Pay Task Force. (2013). Fifty Years After the Equal Pay Act. Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/equalpay/equal_pay_task_force_progress_report_june_2013_new.pdf

Neville, H. A., Awad, G. H., Brooks, J. E., Flores, M. P., & Bluemel, J. (2013). Color-blind racial ideology: Theory, training, and measurement implications in psychology. American Psychologist, 68, 455-466.

Plaut, V. C., Thomas, K. M., & Goren, M. J. (2008). Is multiculturalism or colorblindness better for minorities? Psychological Science, 20, 444-446. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02318.x

Poole, S. M. & Walker, J. J. (under review). Are marketing students less culturally competent? Evidence from a survey of undergraduate students.

Richeson, J. A., & Nussbaum, R. J. (2004). The impact of multiculturalism versus color-blindness on racial bias. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 40, 417-423. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2003.09.002

Thompson, D. (2013). How America’s Top Colleges Reflect (and Massively Distort) the Country’s Racial Evolution. Retrieved from http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/01/how-americas-top-colleges-reflect-and-massively-distort-the-countrys-racial-evolution/267415/

Walker, J. J., Poole, S. M., Murray, S., Williams, S. L., Banks, C. J., Stallings, J. A, Balgobin, K.R., & Moore, D. P. (under review). Colorblind racial ideology and privilege awareness in relation to social justice among college students.

Nostalgia, Lahore, and the Ghost of Aurangzeb

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Taymiya R. Zaman, Associate Professor of History, explores conflicting pasts and her process in writing about Aurangzeb through the personal memoir of one man, Bhimsen Saxena.
Portrait of Aurangzeb
Portrait of Aurangzeb. Artist Unknown. Reprinted with permission from Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

How do historians address troubling pasts? Recently, because of public pressure, “Aurangzeb Road” in India was renamed “Dr. A. P. J Abdul Kalam Road.” This is because Aurangzeb (d. 1707) is seen by many as a fanatical Mughal king who persecuted Hindus, and whose strict adherence to Islam was to the detriment of all non-Muslim communities. A number of historians opposed the renaming, because historical evidence does not support this image of Aurangzeb and because we are attuned to the ethical dilemmas that arise when a figure from the past is tried and found guilty based on standards of the present. A guilty verdict supports the erasure of history quite literally, as was the case with the destruction of the sixteenth century Babri Mosque in India in 1992 on the grounds that Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, who commissioned the building of the mosque, was also a Muslim invader.

My recent article, “Nostalgia, Lahore, and the Ghost of Aurangzeb” addresses the conflicting pasts that play a role in shaping political discourse in present-day India and Pakistan. The article traces how the image of Aurangzeb as a fanatical Muslim was created by 19th century British colonial historiography, and how the ghost of Aurangzeb surfaces in Lahore, Pakistan in response to pain caused by the political upheaval of the present. While some blame Aurangzeb for the sectarian violence that rages in Pakistan, others uphold him as a hero who stood up for Islam during a time when the political power of Muslims in India was starting to fade. Despite being at odds with one another politically, these two positions rely on an image of Aurangzeb created by the historiography of the colonial period rather than by Mughal sources.

Instead of drawing upon multiple primary sources to reconstruct Aurangzeb (which has already been done by others in deft and interesting ways), I choose to resurrect Aurangzeb through the personal memoir of one man, Bhimsen Saxena, who was a Hindu soldier whose family had served the Mughals for generations. My goal in using Bhimsen’s memoir is to create, in modern subjects, empathy for a historical actor whose ability to hold ambivalence towards the king provides an intervention into heated present-day debates that are framed around binaries of good and evil. Bhimsen is at times furious with Aurangzeb, who he sees as a terrible administrator, and at times filled with reverence towards the king, because in his eyes, even a flawed king is a sacred being who can perform miracles and whose presence is necessary for the protection of the land. Aurangzeb is both the hero and villain of Bhimsen’s world, but he is not—as is the case today—hero to some and a villain to others, where the former see his ascetic adherence to Islam as desirable and the latter as abhorrent.

Finally, this article argues that the figure of the king—sacred to multiple religious communities— was central to mediating religious sentiment in pre-colonial India. In the absence of a king, this sentiment attaches itself to sites of injury, such as monuments or the names of roads, which are perceived as evidence of the threat one community poses to another. But even kings such as Aurangzeb, who had their critics in their own times, constituted the beating heart of a world sustained by the sacred symbol of kingship, in which communal violence of the kind that exists in modern South Asia was absent. Viewing a king through the eyes of one of his subjects opens both historians and their audiences to the imaginative possibilities of the past; we cannot erase national boundaries, but we can rebuild an older order of being within ourselves to help us make peace with pasts that trouble us.

Research for Scholarly Impact and Policy Impact

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John Trasviña, Dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law, writes about his experience with research in policymaking and the importance of scholarly impact and policy impact.
John Trasvina
John Trasviña, Dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law

 

I came to the University of San Francisco (USF) School of Law committed to training the next generation of leaders and lawyers following many years of public service and advocacy, especially in the areas of immigrant rights and civil rights. My previous work allowed me to see first hand how public policy and advocacy were greatly informed by research, which then influenced many of the policies, laws, and public actions I helped to implement as Assistant Secretary of the Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund (MALDEF), and Special Counsel for Immigration Related Unfair Employment Practices at the U.S. Department of Justice.

In the Academy, our work in the classroom is incomplete without preparing our graduates to achieve their professional goals and serve our communities in myriad ways.  In recent years, we have added clinical and experiential educational opportunities to the core of what we offer at the USF School of Law. Today, our global externships in China, Mexico, Vietnam, and across Europe are larger than ever and foster an understanding that globalization can help promote justice and the protection of human rights, while building legal skills for contemporary issues.

But our responsibilities to communities and to the profession do not end there. Faculty research and engagement are fundamentally intertwined and have the potential to deeply influence social change through both their scholarly impact and their policy impact.

Recently, the USF School of Law faculty was recognized as being in the top third in the nation in terms of scholarly impact.  In “Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties in 2015: Updating the Leiter Score Ranking for the Top Third,” a group from the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minnesota ranked all accredited law schools based upon the number of times other law faculty and scholars cited articles written by each law school’s faculty.   Not surprisingly to me, our faculty ranked in the top third nationwide, 64th out of over 200 accredited law schools.  The study reviewed the scholarship of ten outstanding professors at each law school and documented the number of times their law reviews or other scholarly articles were cited in other law reviews and publications.

This scholarly impact is certainly an important indicator of how our professors’ expertise and stature are recognized by other scholars in their fields.  However, another measure is policy impact, how our faculty research is actually used by people outside of the academy—judges, appellate attorneys, policymakers, advocates, and media opinion makers—to advance particular aims.  In my previous work in the U.S. Senate, law professors and other scholars would send me their research papers and articles describing various missteps by Congress or the Administration on a bill, law, or regulation. My typical reaction would be that it was important research to understand but I was receiving it after any possible action could have been taken. It made me wonder why I could not get access to this work in the midst of the battle or controversy when that research could have been deployed for maximum effect. This frustrating realization about the limits of scholarship in the academy leads to my main point. Beyond scholarly impact, our faculty members engage in meaningful policy impact.

When the Connecticut Supreme Court narrowly struck down that state’s death penalty in the summer of 2015, at least one justice cited an amicus brief prepared by USF School of Law Professor Connie de la Vega.  And when California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law the California Electronic Privacy Act (Cal-ECPA) in October 2015, a bi-partisan victory for civil libertarians and service providers with support from the law enforcement community, our own Professor Susan Freiwald provided much of the academic backing as an issue expert for the bill’s authors.  She also testified before committee hearings in Sacramento, organized several academics across the country to get engaged, and together they prepared and submitted a scholarly analysis and support letter to Governor Brown.

Our faculty members in all fields can assist local, state, and federal policy makers as well as advocates by conducting research, offering expertise, conducting surveys and promoting public dialogue.  Our outstanding Center for Research, Artistic and Scholarly Excellence (CRASE), led by Professors Christine Yeh and Saera Khan, can guide professors in all fields who seek to widen the impact of their important research and scholarship.  At the School of Law, we benefit from and support the CRASE and its initiatives and encourage all interested USF colleagues to participate.

How to come up with an interesting and meaningful blog post or public scholarship.

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Rick Ayers, Assistant Professor in Teacher Education at the University of San Francisco and Huffington Post blogger, walks through his process for writing a blog post with a bunch of tacked on advice, ideas, and encouragements.

A walk through my writing process and a bunch of tacked on advice, ideas, and encouragements.

Knowledge is socially constructed. So are blog posts. To write a piece of public advocacy is not accomplished by you sitting staring at the screen.  It is the result of ongoing engagement – with colleagues, with the public, with your classes.  Often a blog post is strung together from wide-ranging conversations you have had, including some insights you have gotten and others you picked up from others.

I remember the debates about the Vietnam War when I was a freshman at the University of Michigan.  I knew I was against the war but was not adept at all the arguments.  When some students raised a protest against military recruiting on campus, hundreds of people gathered in front of the army table.  I would argue with someone until I got stuck on a point.  Then I would wander around and listen to other debates, searching for someone who could answer the point that stumped me.  Then I would return to the fray.  It was a roiling mass of people, made up of dozens of smaller discussions.  And it was a powerful education in debate and how to engage and persuade.

Unfortunately, academics often see ourselves as isolated, toiling away in offices and libraries.  But engaged scholarship calls on us to be engaged in the debates in the world, to always be alert to issues that are impacting communities and to arguments that need to be heard.  You will never craft the best argument while just in that cubicle.  You have to be testing it out, as during the Vietnam debates, to hone your point and help make it understandable. Kevin Kumashiro often talks about our responsibility to be “framing” the debates, looking at the fundamental assumptions that drive a policy and how to challenge them. I reject the idea that knowledge is “created” at the university level.  Knowledge is in practice, in the community.  Our contribution is to understand struggles on the ground and how to represent and advance those struggles.

How to get started:   Start with a moment.  Not a constructed story for an article but actually something that happened that got you thinking.  If you pay attention to your interactions, these will come up as the genesis of pieces.  For me this might be a classroom interaction, a demonstration or event in the community, or even driving and listening to NPR.  Even if you don’t start your blog post with this story, you write it down.

This also suggests that you should use the first person pronoun and point of view.  Well, not always.  But quite often you should.  At least I think you should in order to find your voice and to move into a more relaxed, genuine way of writing.  When I first started writing for Huffington Post, an editor gave me the advice to “write like you are sending an email to a friend.”  That is a great idea.  I try to do that but in fact my pieces end up being a bit more formal than an email – they really are small essays.  But at least thinking of an email moves one off the “stuck” place of staring at the screen.  And it pushes the style to a more mass audience, not an academic one.

To start:  An interaction, discomfort.  Describe the picture.

So below is an example of an incident I experience that troubled me, as I began to wonder if this is something I should pursue and write about:

Committee meeting, representatives from different constituencies.

“The problem is,” I ventured, “there is very little you can tell from a standardized test of students and then to tie evaluation of that teacher to performance of those students becomes even less valid and finally trying to compare professional development graduates to other teachers is just a fool’s errand.”  That was my intervention in the discussion, a big dissention blurted out.

It was a meeting of a collaboration group for an innovative summer professional development teaching project – I was a visiting professor in a medium-sized California city, Charley was from the professional development non-profit and Greg was from the school district.  We were discussing evaluation data to send to the granting agencies and Charles had suggested that we collect “Better Balance” test scores from our graduates and compare to other teachers.  I was immediately doubtful – not only that this measure would distort and narrow the teaching practices of our graduates, but that it would provide support and validation for the advocates of value added evaluation across the state.

Greg, the district guy, showed no interest in my comment.  He did not even raise himself to disagree or debate me.  He simply declared, “The superintendent wants these numbers (on the test) and we are collecting them so they can be used as data.”  The look in his eyes, the subtext of his dismissal, was essentially, “What is this pinhead talking about?  It’s irrelevant.”

Charles actually agreed with me.  He is a progressive educator who knows the debates and the game.  Why, then, had he made this proposal?  It was, of course, the pressure of the grant.  Both foundation and federal grants for the professional development program required “quantitative” data to determine if our graduates were effective.

Now I realized that this article might put Charles, Greg, me in a difficult situation.  While I had fictional names for the main characters, I decided to go back and fictionalize the place and the program.  Still probably a weak disguise but the best I could do.

Extending the idea:

So there was an idea, a conflict.  How did I regard it?  What was behind it?  And, even now, I had to think: if I were to write it up, what is the audience, who needs to hear about this, why would I write it up?  I began to think about people working in these different spaces, the non-profits, the universities, the school districts, and the built-in tension between their missions.  They could use a discussion and clarification – and this article could contribute to that.  More broadly, what does this situation tell us about problems in education policy and the corporate “reform” agenda?

So this is the period of reflection, open-ended exploration of the issue.  For some people that means writing a mind map, a web, or simply notes.  It is also a time to talk to others about the problem, the issue.

In the course of writing this piece, I talked to a lot of colleagues about this issue –  Sepehr, Lance, Monisha, Uma, Lillian.  I wasn’t always asking for input, I was just trying to explain the point, see how it would take, how to best articulate it.

The first thing I was thinking about was the problem for non-profits, the problem people in these positions have because they have to fulfill requirements of the grant in order to get the next phase of the grant paid.  I thought about other institutions I know who face tensions and challenges to their mission because of the demands of the grants.  I have seen this is places like Youth Speaks and Youth Radio.  They start with a radical, outside-the-box project and they are wildly popular with youth who flock to them, turning their backs on formal schooling.  Then the non-profit finds itself trying to sustain a staff and a budget and go for grants. And the grants insist that they take these youth and turn them back towards the schools, that they show “progress” in matriculation, grades, etc.  I have been in discussions with people in these non-profits and have also discussed the problem from the other side, as my brother was on the board of the Woods Fund in Chicago and they struggled with how to make their grant structures more honest.  I reflected on how difficult it is to be in a grant-driven non-profit. That was the context within which I recognized the different positionality of Charles, for instance, from me.  So I wrote:

The challenge for Charles was that he was ruled by the terms of the grant.  And for the grant he had to bring data – proof of success.  Some data could be qualitative (reports from teachers, supervisors, principals, students) but some had to be quantitative.  People who live by grants find themselves spending a lot of time worrying about the reporting, the data.  And often the terms of grants practically compel the recipients to be fraudulent, to make things up.  Because most grants require that you define problem and then declare that when you get so many thousands of dollars you will provide a solution of the problem.  But too often the problems are deep, structural, and difficult to move the needle on. Open-ended grants might allow projects that are exploratory or generative for participants.  But generally grants are for some kind of linear “improvement.” 

While in education research studies, “value added” teacher evaluation (basically evaluating teacher effectiveness by tracking improvements in the test scores of their students) has been demonstrated to be invalid, Charles felt compelled to put that idea in the assessment package.  

Rereading and editing:

I went back and read the draft a few times.  I noticed that I said “discussed” and “problem” a few times in the same sentence so I did some clean-up, drawing in new words.

Sometimes I just had to rewrite for clarity.  I had written:

Open-ended grants might allow projects that are exploratory or generative for participants.  But generally grants are for some kind of linear “improvement.” 

But the problem was that this sentence butted in too abruptly after the last one.  Is a grant being “open-ended” in contrast to the grants I’m discussing in the paragraph? Yes it is but I have to make that more clear.  Thus:

If you manage to get an open-ended grant, this might allow projects that are exploratory or generative for participants.  But generally grants in education demand some kind of linear “improvement.” 

There are a lot of thoughts packed in these 2 sentences but I also don’t want the blog to get over-long.  Are these sentences simple enough to allow me to go on? But do they carry the thought I’m trying to communicate?

Halfway through it was important to stop and ask a question to myself.  What is this piece about?  It’s not just about my discomfort at raising the objection to value added assessment.  It’s about how our different approaches to data-gathering arose not from the facts but from our different positions, who we reported to.  I’m taking the long way around to try to defend the university as an organization crucial to open inquiry and real progress.  So I had to explain more about grant-driven, foundation-funded educational projects.

And I had found myself in this meeting wondering about my privilege, the flip side of the discomfort felt by scholars of color when they intervene in such a situation.  For them, the subjective pressure, communicated through raised eyebrows and lowered gazes, tells them that they are not academically worthy, they are being emotional.  For me, in the white privileged side, the internal question reads more like:  who am I to raise this methodological objection? Who is this privileged academic to make the pathway for our student teachers, and the access to grant money, difficult for his abstract concerns?

Indeed, in my high school teaching and in teacher education, I am always mindful of my responsibility to support marginalized students through the gatekeepers even as I argue and debate that the gatekeepers are invalid.  To not do the former would be to sacrifice students in front of me who are doing well to my radical vision; to not do the latter is to sacrifice the futures of the vast majority of my students in the project of courting success for the lucky few.  So I was also seeking a tone that was not arrogant, not preachy; rather it was to simply point out the material structures that underlay the discussion.

At this point I started reflecting on a talk I heard some years ago by Arundhati Roy about the negative impact of NGO’s on radical social movements.  Also I was thinking back on a section we had on the Freedom Schools in Mississippi in 1964 that demonstrated what independent activism looked like.  I was not sure if I was wandering too far afield from my main point; but it seemed to be the best way to jump to a broader analysis of the problem.  I signaled the transition to this reflection with a one-sentence paragraph.

How does the world of non-profits, the social justice enterprise funded by grants, affect our work?

Some years ago, Indian novelist and activist Arundhati Roy made a scathing critique of the role of Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in containing social movements even as they “professionalize” activism.  Her point was that many activists who in the past would have gone into radical, non-sanctioned, community-based liberation organizations were now being brought into NGOs – where they could make a decent salary and where their every move was framed by grant reporting – long proposals, narrow goals, and constrained possibilities.  It was the kind of “repressive tolerance” of sponsored dissent that Marcuse had warned against.

Writing an outline halfway through:

And there was still a jumble of things I wanted to say.  So I made a rough bullet-point outline as to where I thought this was going, so I could just elaborate and explain each of the points:

  • Arundhati Roy – C Cobb
  • Foundations so big. Federal government now competitive grants.
  • Two points:  1)  they are big because of tax issue;  2)  they are authoritarian.
  • Universities.  Regarded as out of touch.  Foundations as source of money → Opposite of tenure or union protection

I also came across this article that demonstrates federal support for privatization, which, much like federal dollars for segregated housing after World War II, has long term impacts.

Generally in this writing I make no footnotes and no references to another author.  For example I wrote a piece a few weeks ago about the police.  I asserted that the police are the only people in society who are allowed by the state to use “legitimate violence.”  This phrase is something that Walter Benjamin coined in the 30’s in discussion of the state and repression.  I could have put a footnote.  Or I could have said, “what Walter Benjamin called ‘legitimate violence.’”  But really, why?  If anyone asked me more about this, I could point them to Benjamin.  Otherwise I could just claim and use the phrase because, well because it is a great way to put it.  That is a way of owning an idea and asserting one’s authority with the idea.  Academics often find themselves footnoting and referencing others throughout their prose.  Try writing with no references – just to feel how liberating it is.

And after making an outline of how I would end it, I sometimes would just throw down random sentences, notes to self, as to how I planned to argue the point.  For example:

Under grant you are cowering
When I raise a criticism of testing or value added, I feel like an egghead, out of touch with reality.  Reality is the grant. 

Problem of foundations have money because capitalists keep all profits
Taxes should have taken some of these resources – created by social labor – for democratic determination of where to go.

Foundations run things.

So I wrote:

Nonprofit organizations inside the US occupy the same space.  People who want to improve conditions for oppressed students, who want to challenge inequities, are not leading demonstrations in Jackson, Mississippi, or in Oakland, California.  Instead they are working for improvement within foundation and government-funded nonprofits.  The revolution may not be televised but apparently it will be funded.

It makes me think back to the Mississippi Freedom Schools that started as an adjunct to the voter education organizing there in 1964.  Charlie Cobb wrote up a proposal for the freedom school project.  Where today under a foundation grant it would be a 25-page (or a 200 page!) document with extensive claims about the situation they were facing and the exact outcomes they planned to achieve, Cobb’s proposal was two pages long and defined exactly the purpose of the schools.  It is a document that launched one of the most dynamic educational initiatives in the US and today is still studied as a classic artifact of movement history.

Certainly funding is a good thing.  Initiatives for change should be funded and organizing campaigns need resources.  But the question of who is doing the funding and what their underlying goals are – this is the rub.  Too often, the fundamental world view and values of the funders are written into the kinds of problems they will entertain and kinds of measurements they demand to determine success.  In this way, funding takes a social change project off track.

And foundations, private funding, have become such a huge part of the educational landscape that we accept without question that so many projects should be sustained by these kinds of grants.  Indeed the federal government, whose responsibility is to raise money through taxes and disperse it to communities for their education projects, now mimics the private sector – only giving out most funds through competitive grants.  Indeed, the largest of the grants we were discussing about the professional development program was a federal competitive grant.

One problem we have is that we tend to get caught up on our present reality, normalize it as if that’s the way it has to be. Living in the grant-driven world, channeling our social justice activism through non-profits, makes us begin to think this is just the way things are.  In this way, the hegemonic mind-set of neo-liberal market-driven systems colonizes our minds.  And how did it come to be this way? 

Trying to wrap it up:

This discussion about foundations making education policy takes me back to a point Mike Klonsky in Chicago made to me many years ago.  It is something that has stuck with me.  And I have said it often while speaking or teaching.  It is this:  The reason foundations are over rich and able to set policy is simply that they are not being taxed enough.  Those resources the1% hoard are produced by social labor and in general tax policies are there to collect some of those resources to use for broader social purposes – building roads, supporting schools and health care, etc.  This method suggests that there will be at least a somewhat democratic process in decisions about the disposition of those resources.

So I wrote:

One of the main culprits in this shameful development is the changing tax structure.  Starting after World War II but accelerating ridiculously in Reagan era, the taxing of the wealthy has changed enormously.  Where excess wealth created by society was once gathered through taxes and then distributed through at least somewhat democratic decision-making processes, now it goes almost exclusively into the pockets of the one per cent.  How does the Broad Foundation, the Gates Foundation, the Walton Foundation have all these billions of dollars?  It is because they have not been taxed enough.  Resources that should be distributed through public projects are now in the pockets of individuals.

It follows then that the structure of grants and their reporting responsibility is a much more authoritarian way to make decisions than the democratic process of a community deciding how to prioritize education projects through a locally elected board.  The grant does not ask your opinion.  The grant says:  do this, do that.  It establishes instrumental goals, goals directed towards narrow, concrete outcomes that can be quantified.  And we see evidence every day that the federal government is completely bought into the privatization project, restructuring education like top-down corporations.

Looking back on the piece so far,  I reflected that it is an important issues and one I could try to reframe the discussion on.  But the title was boring.  I had called it, “Foundations and the Dumbing Down of Activism,” and, while that said something of what I wanted, the very first word “foundations” was going to put people to sleep.  I’m thinking now of calling it “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded.”  That does not explain much of what will be in the piece but it will grab attention.

Now the piece was driving towards the end.  I had jotted down some other notes at the bottom of the page about the university and open inquiry:

But actually academic world is what it should be – freer.  Under grants they must bow down.  Actually you want the deeper read.  Grantees don’t go deep.  Backward planning. 

Why universities with inquiry built the greatest educational system in the world.

When I raise a criticism of testing or value added, I feel like an egghead, out of touch with reality.  Reality is the grant.  But actually academic world is what it should be – freer.  Under grants they must bow down.  Actually you want the deeper read.  Grantees don’t go deep.  Backward planning.  Why universities with inquiry built the greatest educational system in the world.

This would not be at all how I would write the ending but it contains, in raw form, thoughts I wanted to communicate.  I hesitated to claim that US universities were the “greatest education system in the world” but I wanted to defend university freedoms.  I need to think about that a little more.  Also, there is a contradiction between the position that Arundhati Roy was extoling for activists – outsider, volunteer, community based guerrillas – and the position of university professor as somehow a better place to be than a non-profit.   Many community organizers I knew in the 60’s left universities precisely because they were too constrained.  But I don’t think I can go into all that.  I’ll probably just leave this contradiction unaddressed.

So I wrote:

So the awkward moment when I raised objection to value added measurement truly reflected the different positionality of the three people in the room.  When I raised the criticism of testing measures, I seemed like an abstract-thinking egghead, out of touch with reality.  But such framing accepts the grant and its demands as reality, something not to be questioned.  And it reminded me why universities are important. 

Yes, universities that grant tenure, that allow freedom of inquiry, that protect professors to say aloud what they see.  Universities now are under attack.  According to the critics from the business world, universities have not enough clear outcomes, not enough measures of success.  But the very open nature of university-based research and inquiry is what made the US educational system the most powerful engine for knowledge and understanding, the envy of the rest of the world.  The narrowing of the university, the constraining of the inquiries of faculty through grant-driven projects, disallows us from pursuing the truth.  Someone has to be in the room to declare the emperor’s new clothes to be a fraud.  I felt fortunate to have the protection of my position in the university.  But more and more, that is a voice that is silenced by the power of the foundations and now the federal government, who control the budgets.

Writing style:

I have made a number of comments along the way about writing style:  write it like an email, think of a mass audience, use first person, leave out references.  I would only add that you can find much of this kind of writing all over the place.  Check out social media.  Read Truthout, Jezebel, and Salon.  Follow polemics, about issues large and small.  Read New York Times for ideas.  Always read Valerie Strauss column in the Washington Post.

I’m not even sure that I like this so much.  It is fascinating to me but would anyone want to read it?  Am I reaching for too many points?  At this point, I would show the draft around to some of my friends and co-conspirator writers.  Get feedback and edits.  Then submit.

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