#177: Restoring Power and Agency to the Public for Civic Studies and Renewal feat. Dr. Peter Levine, Dr. Harry Boyte

Most Americans would say civics is very important to our democracy. But how often do members of the public ask themselves "What should we do?" 

This dual-guest episode features Dr. Peter Levine of Tufts University and Dr. Harry Boyte of the Institute for Public Life and Work, who are two longtime friends and fellow experts in the fields of civic studies and public work respectively. Hear the ways we can come together to actively renew our civics for a more resilient democratic system of government.

Learn more about Dr. Levine and the Tisch College at Tufts University: https://tischcollege.tufts.edu/

Learn more about Dr. Boyte's Institute for Public Life and Work: https://www.iplw.org/

Take a read of Dr. Boyte's new essay just published in the National Civic Review!

https://www.nationalcivicleague.org/ncr-article/revitalizing-the-american-commonwealth/

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Patriotism. Faith. National unity. Education. Physical responsibility. Stability. The values that define America. Fascinating stories and talks from America-loving patriots dedicated to preserving freedom, opportunity, and justice. Welcome to the Friends and Fellow Citizens Podcast. Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Sherman Tailowski. As always, thank you all so much for joining me in this interview episode. If you're new to this podcast, welcome aboard. Firstly, a big thank you and shout out to our most dedicated Patreon supporters. They are helping to keep this show running. I really appreciate their generosity and they're enjoying bonuses with their listener serve experience. So if you are enjoying our content or like additional benefits, check out our Patreon page in the show notes below. If you haven't already, make sure to hit smash that subscribe button or sign up for our email list at our website, George Washington Institute.org. I will have the guests introduced a bit more in just a bit. And to give you an idea of our guests, we first have Dr. Peter Levine from Tufts University. Peter Levine is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Lincoln Fillen Professor of Citizenship and Public Affairs in Tufts University's Jonathan Titts College of Civic Life. He is a political philosopher and political scientist who specializes on civic life, has helped to develop civic studies as an international intellectual movement. Our second guest is Dr. Harry Boyd. Harry Boyd is a co-founder of the Institute for Public Life and Work and senior scholar of public work philosophy at the Institute and also at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He founded and for 20 years directed and co-directed the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs. But first, I'd like to just bring attention to the fact that we are having two guests on this interview episode. I haven't done one of these in a long time, but I hope this will be a really dynamic new way of bringing together more guests and also having a really lively conversation. So I hope you will enjoy seeing more of these as we go along. And now let's get right into our episode discussing civic studies and renewal in America. Well, everyone, I am very honored to have two distinguished guests onto the podcast, Dr. Harry Boyd and Dr. Peter Levine. Gentlemen, thank you so much for being onto the podcast. I just, as I expressed to you earlier before recording, I really appreciate the time you're taking to share with us about civics. Today's topic is a lot about civic studies and how it relates to civic renewal. So kind of just seeing that dynamic there between these two concepts. And I think both of you have had extensive experiences in these respective fields and really the dynamics of how civics and democracy really interlink here in the United States. And I'd like to start with some introductions. Peter, would you mind uh sharing a bit more about yourself and a little bit about how you got interested in this field of civics and democracy?

SPEAKER_03 3:37

Sure. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for organizing this. Thanks for your time. Um actually I I knew I met Harry when I was um about 19 or 20 years old. Um so uh I mean one answer to your question is I guess I came up as an undergrad in the uh in the 80s, w which was a time of um a lot of interest in things like service community service and university relationships with communities. And um I was sort of in that um not not influential, but I was it was around me. Um and I ended up um connecting to various organizations, including in that in this case the Kettering Foundation, which I'm still involved with going there next week. And uh Harry was a fellow, I think. So I've been um yeah, so it's been a long time I've sort of never quite gotten out of it.

SPEAKER_00 4:27

Well, I'm glad you mentioned the connection between you two, because uh this is quite a quite a great reunion, I think, in terms of discussing these important topics. And Peter, I before I moved on to Harry's introduction, I want to acknowledge that uh Dr. Emma Humphreys mentioned your name in our podcast uh about four years ago. And she said you have to have uh Dr. Peter Levine on. So uh I just want to acknowledge that first. Uh a big shout out to Emma. Uh she is the chief uh education officer at iCivics and just had a fantastic conversation with me about civics. So uh there's that connection there.

SPEAKER_03 5:02

She's she's wise and excellent, and you should have her back. Let's put return the paper. You should have Emma Emma Humphreys back.

SPEAKER_00 5:10

Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Uh Harry, uh like to turn to you. Uh would you mind providing an introduction and a bit about how you got interested in this in this field as well?

SPEAKER_01 5:19

Uh Sherman, I also joined Peter with uh expressing thanks and appreciation for this discussion today and your podcast in general. It's a a good cause. My background, I grew up in the South. I thought I was going to be a spaceman or astrophysicist. But my parents, especially my father's um deepening involvement in the civil rights movement, changed my career path. I worked for dad went on staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in 1963 as the only white guy on the executive committee. That's King's organization. And I was on and off in college, uh a lowly field secretary in SCLC. Um then I drive King to the airport and played ping pong and so forth. But it was a transformative experience. I think the key thing that stayed with me was the sense of what uh King called the uh feeling of some bodiness that people in the movement developed, a sense of dignity and agency and visibility and importance that really was something to see and that I think inspired the country. I'd started, upon King's suggestion, I'd started working in 1966 in a mill village in uh Durham, North Carolina, where I was going to college. Um and did in community organizing. King asked if I could try my hand at organizing for white folks. I did that for seven years. I discovered I was not a terrible organizer, but not as not a great organizer, and I was better at writing about and drawing lessons from citizen effort and community organizing. So I wrote a number of books and uh kept those themes that I saw in the movement of um civic agency or empowerment, um, and also democracy is much bigger than simply an electoral or institutional system, a way of life, a culture. Um and then the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute asked me if I would start a project on democracy in 1987, and I did that, and um wanted to develop theory, but based on real-world experience. So we were we've been involved in many things. I guess the basic thing that's been my concern is that the civic spaces or community commons, to use the language uh been using recently, um have really uh dried up or atrophied, weakened. And how can that be changed? How can be that turned around? Because I don't think people are they people are individuals as citizens, but they they're shaped by their experiences with others and in settings that are lasting and substantial. So those are really central questions for me, continue to be indeed.

SPEAKER_00 8:32

And uh when I think of Dr. King, I think about those words when he emphasized the importance of content of character. And I always keep those words in the heart when he uh presents the dream and the dream that we all share. And I think he uh it's it's it really makes me think about how when MLK Day is uh uh is celebrated, I think that should be a reflection of of not just of him, but the movement that he started and the uh the movement that continues to this day uh regarding civic participation. And and uh I I I can't wait to hear more about your experiences. We we talk a bit about Mr. Civic New. I think that's a great, great story that you you have, Harry. Uh Peter, I'd like to turn to you now for our first topic, which is about civic studies. And you are uh definitely one of the pioneers of this uh this intellectual movement. And uh I'd like to preface with saying that uh civics is something that we we hear a lot about. We hear civics has something to do with with how we we learn in school, we learn about the three branches of government or about the just the fundamentals, but then I think there's something a bit deeper though in terms of its significance. And I'd like to uh have you uh uh present to our audience uh what civic studies is and how it it's unique to uh to the field of civics and and democracy and participation, in particular because uh my understanding is that from your bio, you you conduct you direct the civic studies program at Tufts University outside Boston. So uh this is a great opportunity for you to talk to me more about that as well.

SPEAKER_03 10:07

Sure. Um I mean, brief brief story is that um a bunch about a dozen, or probably less than a dozen, maybe eight or nine people wrote a statement uh calling for civic studies in in uh in I should have looked up the date, maybe maybe 2011. Um no, a little anyway, let's say around 2001. Thank you, thank you. Uh one of whom was Harry, and one of whom was me, and the others uh we could we could tell you who they were. But it's it's a manifesto and it calls for um not not a different not really a different approach directly to civic education, but a different approach to thinking about civic life and democracy. Um and it wasn't aimed really at particularly at curriculum or students, it was aimed at uh it was sort of an intellectual um and cultural shift. Um and um it it's it's a real it's a um as a movement. It's it's not vast, but it's real. We one of the things that um my colleague Carol Sultan and I did when Harry was in support of this um and involved in it, but for uh at least for 10 years, we we ran a summer institute which would draw about 20 people a year um who came from around the world um and mostly mid-career professionals in either civic um engagement or or academics, and we would uh talk for two weeks about some sort of fundamental issues. And those people have gone off and done a lot of things. So you both uh Sherman and Harry know that I was just in Kyiv, uh Ukraine, and what I was doing was offering in summer institute of civic studies, partly at a bomb shelter. Uh, every time the air labs went off, we were in a bomb shelter. Um and that was to about uh 20 Ukrainian society leaders, and this is and next week there's um there's an institute at George Mason and uh no uh James Madison University of Virginia and so it spreads and it has we have a a journal, the good society, which Harrison very involved in. Um and so it's it's real. I mean I think um it's happening while other things are going on. There's a whole bunch of centers being formed, um state universities that are typically called civic thought. Uh and sometimes they're quite fast, actually. And um these are um I've been in a lot of dialogue with them. Um they're coming from a little bit different place, but there's there's definitely some overlap, and then there's civic education as uh which is robust and and and growing. So um yeah, so I I could I could say more about desperately enough at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 12:31

And Harry, what would you add to uh what Peter talked about, and particularly regarding the this this growth here in terms of the centers and uh set schools of civic thought and whatnot?

SPEAKER_01 12:44

Well, I feel like I've spent my life uh trying to develop a conceptual vocabulary around the experiences I had as a very young man. Um and uh I was involved in the in the movement in something called the Citizenship Education Program of the Movement, which um supported 900 local um civic citizenship schools in informal, not formal schools, although they had a history in thousands of black schools and uh during Jim Crow, called the Rosenwald schools. Um a very strong focus on agency, empowerment, and that was understood as you know, beginning with people's everyday lives, including literacy and numeracy, and um how do you find out what's happening in your local community and how do you deal with the local mayor and so forth. Um but we're also really about people coming together to solve local problems and build uh what could be called commons or community goods in communities. That's a major theme of the civic studies field. Um just a note, this is longer than um we can explore today, but uh, in my view, there are really two strands of democracy and democratic theory. One is the Republican uh theory that is the popular government comes from the most explicitly from the uh British experience uh overthrowing a king and creating a commonwealth, um and was an important strand of the revolution. But there's a pre a pre-modern strand that is usually uh uh eclipsed or slighted, which is diverse people in communities working together to solve problems and build common goods, um, fisheries and irrigation systems and common lands and buildings, and um, and that was also the pre-revolutionary experience of settler communities in the U.S. People built communities, and which is echoed in the uh language of the Constitution's preamble, we the people create government. Well, people had created governments all across New England. Um so that's an important, and as I said, usually forgotten dimension of the democratic uh dispensation. Um and that continued in the citizenship school movement and the movement freedom movement. Um I think in the in the black experience, the the uh experience of second class at most, uh citizenship or marginality and slavery and really raw oppression meant that the that the um the kind of community focused collective work tradition uh was sustained in a way it was not in mainstream society. So it's a reservoir of insight and history and culture and theory um that we really need to pay much more attention to in the kind of intellectual and academic conversation. Anyway, so I did community organizing, I uh became convinced that the civic world was innovating and experimenting and developing important new insights. Um wrote about that in in different books. Um I think that throughout the theme of um the commonwealth was really important, not only in the US, and this makes a difference, a distinction, distinctive quality to American democracy. It was not only popular government, but it was creating the local commons. And we had a commonwealth that had vibrancy because it was full of local comments that people created. Sometimes they called it that, but and they often did, but they often called it other things. Um settlement houses and local study groups and community uh festivals and libraries and public schools and so forth. Anyway, that's a background. Um I think it's a it's a profound and extraordinarily important tradition for the world today. It feeds into civic studies, especially the idea that uh citizens are co-creators of communities at different scales, including uh democratic societies. And in and in doing that, being co-creators, people develop a sense of dignity and importance and agency.

SPEAKER_00 17:29

Harry, I'm glad that you brought up those theoretical strands and the uh the reservoir, as you mentioned, the kind of almost like the infrastructure behind civic studies. And this is a good segue to my next question to Peter. Uh Peter, obviously you are a uh political philosopher, and I think it's fascinating. Philosophy was my uh first major that I thought of doing in college, and ultimately I probably combined that with political science. And you can't have political science without philosophy.

SPEAKER_03 17:56

And good, I agree.

SPEAKER_00 17:57

And I'd like to uh talk a bit more about the civic life and and teaching of civic studies. So, from your uh philosophy background, what are the most important pillars of civic life that you think should guide our understanding and teaching of civic studies?

SPEAKER_03 18:17

Um so one thing I just want to build on what Harry said and make a contrast to, I mean, I'm I'm addressing your question, Sherman, but in a little indirect way. Um so what Harry I agree 100%, a thousand percent with what Harry said. It's it's interesting contrast to what we might normally think of as civics, because um what we normally would think of as civics is understanding the the rules and systems of the national government. That that's true in the United States and it's true in other places, and sometimes the origins of them. So um, you know, so you're supposed to learn the three branches of government and so on. And I think um Harry should speak for himself. I think we both agree that the national government is a a venue of civic life. It's one of many. Um and um it fits it f it and it's it's got interesting characteristics. It's kind of problematic because it's so big, but we can still try to do things that are civic at that level. But um it's not so it changes the emphasis, it is very different in a civic studies program. Civics a different way of putting it is I think the question for civics most typically is what kind of government do we have, what kind of people are we, what should the government do? And the question for civic studies is as I always say, what should we do? Um and that gets me to the other part of my answer to your question, Sherman, which is the should is to be taken seriously. So what should we do? So it's a moral or ethical or people would say normative question. Um and the difference between your two disciplines, philosophy and political science, is that sometimes political science and social science in general um marginalizes the should question. That's that's a matter of opinion. People just have different opinions. We can study their opinions, but we don't know what the truth is. Um real people, when they're actually faced with a problem, even if they tell you that they're moral relativists and they don't think there isn't a right answer, they give up that very quickly when they start actually figuring out what what to do because they take very seriously the should. And they really they really do almost everybody. Um and so um civic studies puts together the should and the and the practical in one because that's what people need to do as human beings um in groups. And um that means in the in the um academy it needs to bring it needs to be interesting to learn a particular way, it needs to combine. The other the other what so I think one deficit is that and there are many deficits all around us, but one deficit is that the social sciences don't pay enough questions attention to the should and don't take it seriously. But then the people who are purely should, which is to say philosophers and theologians, often are not nearly um involved enough in trying to figure out what works and who's doing what and so on. It's getting that part is getting better since my day, since I was trained as a philosopher. It's getting considerably better. But um anyway, so we try to put it together.

SPEAKER_00 20:55

I agree with what you say there about the should part. I do think that when we try and uh think that we can always just uh have a scientific view of things, but not really include the the the civic element really of social sciences and of political science or of other fields. I think it it it definitely can be a bit of a problem in terms of that civic renewal element and to uh promote that studies element to try and engage with students and to build, I think build more bridges between these disciplines. Uh a lot of times uh they these are quite can be quite siloed uh for a number of reasons. But I'm glad you bring up the good part. And so Harry, kind of a bit based on what uh Peter was uh discussing there about uh this about civic studies, and this I want to relate this to your public work framework because uh I think uh you kind of discussed this a little bit before, but I'd like to ask if you can elaborate a bit more on uh what what specifically the public work framework is, uh, and how how does this framework shape civic studies as we understand it as an intellectual brand. Of civic participation and understanding.

SPEAKER_01 22:04

Well, again, it's uh in in my reading, it's an ancient concept. It's not a not a contemporary or modern concept. It comes out of really cultures around the world where people work together to create common goods and solve common problems and then sustain them over time. So one of the central themes in the civic studies is the idea of the commons. Uh Eleanor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Prize in 2009, right after we founded the Civic Studies field, um then uh, you know, focused on the governance of the commons. How is it that people set rules and um incentive structures and um penalties for eroding the commons? Um and I would say the public work adds emphasis on how are the commons created and sustained. They're not simply governed, they are actual creations. Um what it does, it does several things. Um there's a dimension that is simply communities kind of learning the civic muscle or uh collaborative capacities to work together across differences on common things. That's an old American tradition. Um Lawrence Creeman, who was a historian of American education, points out that common schools were created by communities that were uh very different and often quite at odds, but they realized they needed a school. So there's a kind of practical and political, and not in a partisan sense, but in the older sense of politics, political motivation for co-creation. But in the uh black experience, the Rosenwald schools were 5,300 schools and thousands of libraries, black communities created under the most difficult circumstances. So it's a story of political acumen and skill and um vision and actually anticipating the nonviolence of the movement. Um but the um but as people created things, um they also developed a sense of their significance, their value, and developed a kind of moral vocabulary around that. So um we did uh a colleague of mine, uh Nan Carey, and I did a book called Building America, the Democratic Promise of Public Work. And for that book, we interviewed a number of uh veterans of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s. Now that was an enormous citizenship school. Uh there were three million people, um, or more than three million, almost all men, although a few women in in the early days it was integrated, and then the southern segregationists prohibited that. Um but we were struck both by the kind of practical skills people learned. They learned how to work together across differences, hillbillies and rural kids and urban kids and ethnic groups, and um and they developed a real work ethic um that stayed with them. But the other thing they developed, it's was again this um version of what happened in the civil rights movement in with nonviolence. They developed a sense of somebody that what they were doing was of enormous importance to the nation. They hadn't gone into it, they they were all on almost all on relief, so they were poor kids. Um, but they told us again and again, as we built a forest or built a park or planted trees or dealt with soil conservation, and we developed a sense of we were creating a national treasure. It's another word for Commonwealth. Um, and they that would stay with them as a kind of high point of their lives, their whole lives. They would bring their relatives back and they'd create alumni associations in every state in the Union. So I think public work has that sense of work that makes a difference in the life of communities and society. The other thing they do is draw attention to work itself as a site of civic life and democratic possibility. Um, and that is somewhat at odds with the conventional political theory, which even the great participatory democratic theorists tend to think of work as over there, like Hannah Rentz say public life and public action as something different. So looking and interrogating work also draws attention to the cultures and practices of institutions. Again, schools and libraries and local governments and local businesses and all sorts of institutions that need to be on the civic map. And at best, they could be called what we call commons. Um, and that that enlarges the landscape of what counts as civic and what needs attention and needs uh nurturance and needs uh reconstruction.

SPEAKER_00 27:10

Indeed. And uh and it seems like this is uh something that is so valuable, but also that uh with with any initiative that has that value but also that uh that need for uh for civic society, obviously there's quite a few challenges too. And a lot of people probably always wonder as to why things can't get done faster in society, whether it be for economic uh prosperity or national security or whatnot. I mean, think of the types of issues that people expect from a society. They they they always want something instantaneous. But with just like with anything, even with civics, it takes a lot of time and it takes a lot to overcome the challenges. So, Harry, if I could stick with you for just a bit in terms of uh what's what's a big challenge that you uh and your team and others uh have encountered in terms of implementing uh the public work approach in educational institutions?

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Um well, uh one key dimension um of the problem, in my view, is the way professionals are trained. Uh and this wasn't this was an old insight of Max Weber, the sociologist, but uh to look at uh the means and basically neglect the ends of activity. Uh called it instrumental rationality. Um he also called it the iron knight of polar darkness. Um is quite vivid. And he thought it was inevitable. He didn't think you could do anything about it. Um but uh and this is the loss of of the older civic dimensions of professional practice. Um but it used to be that professionals, whether they were teachers or doctors or artisans of different kinds, not only formal credential professionals, um saw their work as is really connected to the well-being of communities. So they had a kind of multidisciplinary transdisciplinary quality to what they were doing. And they didn't see themselves narrowly as specialists in general, some did, but um, we've really lots said in in education and higher education, the formation of professionals. So, for one example, um when I last time I scanned, which was about a decade ago, it may have changed, but um no teacher college in the country taught how do you deal with parents. How do you work with communities? How do you how do you listen to people? How do you understand that parents actually have an enormous amount to contribute? The great schools, in my experience, like Deborah Meyer's uh uh Central Park East in in uh Harlem, where 98% of the kids graduated, she said the foundation was that teachers had to unlearn what they learned in teacher college. That the most important thing was the pedagogy, having kids learn knowledge. And the most important thing is actually building relationships with not only in the school and with kids and with other teachers, but also with communities and parents. So um that's an enormous problem, and it afflicts basically every profession. Um, we've lost the civic. As one person in our work with the Clinton White House Domestic Policy Council said, um, we got interviews with one guy. He said, we've lost a civil and civil service. We don't think of ourselves as citizens anymore. We think of ourselves as delivering services to citizens, or maybe regulating citizens, reprimanding citizens. But um that's a that's an enormous challenge because it points to the need for cultural change across the whole uh landscape.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

And Peter, same question to you. And I imagine that within Harry's response, he talked a little about relationships and about the professionalization element and how those might be obstacles. Uh what what uh what's one obstacle that you've encountered yourself, whether at Tufts or other institutions that you think uh are notable to have to overcome to uh to achieve civics and to achieve civic studies?

SPEAKER_03 31:20

Yeah, so I agree with uh again with Harry, of course he's had a huge influence on me, um, about the about the basically the attitudinal shifts that we need to value different things, including including a relationship with the communities and um more respect for democratic uh communities. And also we talked earlier about some disciplinary silos, the splitting between the social sciences and the and the normative questions. I mean, I just can't help also saying there are people and organization movements that are uh trying to correct democracy. I mean I I come back from Ukraine, I was there the day before yesterday. Um they I Ukrainians have a democracy, it's very imperfect, but they have one because they they fought and sacrificed for it, they had two mass nonviolent um uh revolutions since two since 2000, right? Um and they uh suffered and died for that, and it's a it's a six it's a reasonable success, and it's sitting right next to Russia, which is a fellow Republic of the Soviet Union, which doesn't have that, and Putin knows that this is a a rebuke to him and a threat to him, and that's why they were sending um uh lot 479 drones at us on on last Thursday. Um and um my university has many flaws and um the kinds of things that Harry puts his finger on. But you know, when our student Romez Osturk was getting uh g getting up in the in the morning to go to break fast for Ramadan, but she had written anodyne and perfectly reasonable, rather good um op-ed in our college newspaper about the process, and ICE agents grabbed her and put her in a truck and took her as quickly as possible to Vermont so they could get out of the reach of Massachusetts um judge and then held her in a jail in a cell for cell built of 14 women, holding twenty-four women for several months, saying and the government in the United States saying specifically that she's there because she's a threat to national security is a Fulbright scholar whose job whose whose whose whose visa is so that she can come and contribute to our conversation. I just can't let pass the fact that there are people trying to destroy this.

SPEAKER_01 33:29

Yeah, I I agree with that strongly. Um I think uh one of the, you know, there's always was a balance of tension between wealth and commonwealth in the US uh politically. Commonwealth has a different tradition, by the way, than a state-centered democracy. It was more populist and community-grounded. Um But we really see as we've seen the loss of centers of community life and power, um, like the old school with community roots or the Humphrey Drugstore. Humphrey's I was at the Humphrey Institute. Um Humphrey's father had a drugstore in a little town in South Dakota, Doland, and he was a druggist, and he made that drugstore the civic center of the town. It was a vibrant center. Um Humphrey said he learned everything he knew for about politics from his center. And that was about building the community. Um we have a uh, I think the kind of uh Pope Francis was really very insightful about this, the kind of interplay between a kind of market mentality, everything has a price and everything should be measured by dollars and cents, and a technocratic expert mentality, called it the technocratic paradigm. But as we've seen that develop, we've also seen a rising culture of greed and celebrity uh and avarice. Um I mean, it's getting getting it's gotten worse. Um Ben Rhodes in the New York Times the other day said greed is is kind of a badge of honor in this this administration. Um and there's a loss of a sense of commonality. Um and I think it means also a scarcity consciousness. So and and a hyper focus on efficiency, even the doge was this everything has to be more and more efficient. Well, things are not efficient if they're democratic. They're that's one value, but you look at how to balance that with the purposes and the involvement of people and the co-creation process, and the hyper focus on efficiency is really destructive. And I think it also feeds the kind of technologies of um information replacing human beings.

SPEAKER_03 35:45

But there's also a question of resistance. So I mean, I mean, I'm also talking to you from Cambridge, Massachusetts. I don't have an affiliation with Harvard, but it's right here and it's it's huge and it's in the global um attention. And it's not my favorite institution in many ways, and most of the people I know and love who work there don't love it either. It's very problematic, but you know, it's being there's an attempt here to destroy it because it's a source of alternative authority. It's uh it's not exactly a commons, but it's not completely not a commons either. It's it's thousands of people who um are in different ways working together to create knowledge and um and that's a that's a threat. Um so there's a struggle.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

Absolutely. And uh I I'm glad both of you brought up the higher education institutions because obviously we we still need that talent we still have from the from within our borders, but also across the world as well. And I think civics really does span that far. And of course, Peter, your your store, your experience in Ukraine. I can't imagine what it was like to um to go to that part of the world and to but also but to do so to to better understand, better to uh to of course help uh help those who are looking for looking for uh for uh partners to strengthen um civic democracy and whatnot. So I I hope you you'll continue to share your story to uh not just onto this progress, but on to other platforms as well. Because I think people do need to hear uh hear that. And I think as Harry explained about the the this this idea we we are we are losing that kind of commonality, I think that's also something that resonated with me and that uh it seems like we are uh almost instead of a instead of a strong collective, we are a collective individuals, it seems like, that uh might not be focusing on on what unites us um instead of instead of just focusing on what divides us. And Peter, I'd like to uh build on the higher education uh part if you if you don't mind. I like to focus more on the um the improvements element. So uh we talked a little bit about higher education, and I think you're absolutely right that would there are so many areas of improvement. However, we need to ensure we don't lose the reputation and the and the great uh resources of our higher education institutions. So, how can improvements to higher education policy and curricula uh based on your experiences uh improve the quality of our civic studies in higher education?

SPEAKER_03 38:17

Yeah, I I'd like to uh actually acknowledge and and kind of celebrate this the civic thought institutes that are getting spun up there. You know, uh the a lot of they're coming in mostly um red states and as a result of legislative mandates, um, and I think at least some of the votes in the legislature are trying to get more conservatives in the campus. And I'm not um a conservative, but I think there's some value to that because there is um an intellectual homogeneity in universities. But besides that, they are not actually creating a center for conservative thought for the conservative outposts. They're creating centers for civic thought. And I know the I've had the um I've enjoyed the opportunity to meet most of the directors because they've been gathering and um they they in behind closed doors would definitely say they're not trying to create conservative things. In fact, they get offended if you indicate that you thought that's what they were doing. They are trying to create civic um centers, and um I see a lot of a lot of promise in that. And these things are big. I think they have eighty tenure lines at some of these institutions. They're making they're dropping just huge amounts of money. And so that's going on. Um I mean um that's going on and other good things are going on. Um the some of the intellectually interesting questions that arise here are um about what should be what should be if you're gonna have a center for civic thought, and part of your motivation is to push it back against a a liberal orthodoxy, um, what should you actually focus on? A number of the centers are very focused on the American tradition. And um they have a very they're very open to my they invite me to come and debate that, um, because they know that uh what I'm gonna say is that it shouldn't be specifically American, that that that civic life is both local, national, and and international in different configurations, and um that the nation state is just a piece of it. So they I welcome that they invite me to do that, but often their curricula are almost entirely American. And then often interestingly to me, because I do have a background of political philosophy, they they highlight political philosophy to a tremendous extent. Um uh and I actually wonder uh whether that's all that we should be calling a civic. Um I'm not sure that civics is just getting the political philosophy right. So um there's all kinds of more pragmatic questions. So there for instance, uh Harry's earlier testimony, they're not gonna teach uh organizing strategies and techniques in a in any of these centers right now. But I I think um and and frankly though that would be often coded as something that they would do in the lefty part of the campus, and then this is supposed to be a counter to that. But um I don't know, I think we can I'm I'm very impressed by the intellectual openness. Actually, my their involvement of me is a little bit of a test case because I I they know perfectly well who I am. I mean, I I told one person who I could I guess I won't say his name because it was a private conversation, but nothing secret about it. And he said I he invited me to something and I said, You do know that I use Black Lives Matter as my main positive case in my recent book, because he's a definitely a movement conservative. And he said, Yeah, yeah, I like your book. I think creating these kinds of uh projects and institutes and centers is great. In this case, we have the resources which I've never seen in my whole life because they're coming from conservative-oriented legislatures, and I think we should work with that.

SPEAKER_00 41:27

Excellent. And uh Harry, I like to before we move on to a civic renewal, I'd like to uh ask you a bit more about other institutions. And of course, this is combined in one question, but I do think that higher education, of course, cannot thrive without other institutions that partner with it. And again, recognizing that dynamic relationship is quite important. So, from your experience, how and and to what extent can a public work uh theoretical organizing framework revitalize these what's called um service delivery cultures of a lot of these local institutions, so including nonprofits, faith communities, small businesses, schools, and colleges, how can how can that approach really encompass all those different stakeholders?

SPEAKER_01 42:12

Yeah, that's that's those are that's an important question. Let me just made a addendum to Peter, which I I agree with Peter's comments. I think this is an ironic feature of the landscape that um conservative critiques are producing a lot of interesting ferment, including a kind of call for for what's viewpoint diversity or plurality in thinking. Um I also think uh in higher education, um there's there's a really important frontier of of uh kind of regrowing the civic dimensions of disciplines. And Peter has been an important voice in the in the civic studies and talking about the way we divide up knowledge production and learning, um scientific or normative, empirical fields and normative fields of value and humanities, and then practice fields of humanities is really kind of screwy because any person in the world has to learn how to integrate those ways of knowing. Um, I think uh I think there we we need creative ways of thinking about the public dimensions of culture of higher education, also every institution. And you can't really do that without the focus on work. Um one of the things we did that was most ambitious and it had partial success, and then it was arrested partly because of the hierarchy, the rankings, uh uh meritocratic rankings of higher education. But in in the late 90s, uh the foundation Kellogg asked our Center for Democracy and Citizenship to make an assessment of whether the land grant tradition, which had a very strong commitment to communities of Across the state could be revitalized. And the chair of the political science department, Ed Fokelman, and I did several dozen interviews with senior faculty and across the university. We found that in every case, people thought that the norms had privileged detachment or enforced detachment from the life of the of the society and the state. There was a lot of anguish about that. But one of the most promising things we did, and I can think of how we could have done it better, we worked with our provost Robert Brunix in 2000 to create a task force that was across the university that was charged with actually regrowing the citizen dimensions of every field. It wasn't simply humanities or whatever, science. It was how do we strengthen the civic dimensions of professional practice across the university? And we had very lively and vigorous discussions. I think if we'd used the organizing method of uh what are called house meetings, where you have small groups thinking about why they went into a field and what were the public dimensions of that and how could that be revitalized, that would have created even more momentum. Although it's also very hard to change higher education in one uh university like the University of Minnesota. But I think uh I think giving thought to how we can make more public and conscious and begin with where people are in their own lives and their own work and their own fields, that's really important. Um, I would say in every setting we've sought to create a kind of a renew or revitalize the civic culture, whether a school or a congregation or a local business, um, and we do have some good examples of all of those. Um, college, college of St. Catherine we work closely with, it all began with people thinking about um what is the purpose of our work, what is the larger meaning, what is the commonwealth of our work, um, having various kinds of discussions of that, and then thinking about changing incentive structures and systems so that those can be reinforced. And shifting from a kind of privatization process to a making more public is really key. And that's that's true. That's true in a local nonprofit as well as in a university. Of course, the how you do it is differs a lot.

SPEAKER_00 46:28

I'm glad you brought up the renewal part because it's of course it segue in it segues perfect into our our next topic. And and Harry, I'm glad you talked about those those dimensions too. I think of being able to you know to see and participate in civics in these different dimensions and seeing things from different angles, I think it makes a lot of sense. I think it really put the puts in perspective on the dynamic forces that that really tie all these together. Uh Peter, I'd like to ask you about the civic renewal because for of course I'm sure if you ask anybody else, do we be do we keep doing the same thing uh or do we wrap up civics? I'm pretty sure a lot of people would say we would want to bring back civics. And uh but I think a lot of people will be asking, well, how do we renew civics? What does it mean to have civic renewal? So can you talk a little bit about why you think civic renew renewal is such an important part of America, particularly in this day and age of 2025 and beyond?

SPEAKER_03 47:28

Yeah, I mean it's a it's a good topic for conversation, not only right here among ourselves, but also, for example, with Sudis and others, because it does c cause you to have to think about your assessment of change over time. I mean, um, you know, uh I was um influenced by, but not solely influenced by Robert Putnam, because I uh it hit when I was young and and it was an important part of my development, Robert Putnam's argument in bowling alone that our civil society had had declined. And I I can defend that argument, um, but I don't want to just only say that because our civil society has improved in many ways as well. And it's just changed too. And we don't want to just go back. I mean, right now I'm involved in a project to try to um in some ways um reacquaint people with some of the nuts and bolts skills that the civil rights leaders who thought Harry, and who Harry was one, knew. Um uh just quickly, I mean, you know, the night after Rosa Barthes arrested, they meet 50 people in in Montgomery. And one of the things they do, 50 black people, um, and one of the things they do is they immediately create a new organization with it's with bylaws and officers. And you can you can just Google the bylaws of the Montgomery Improvement Association and they're online and freedom and it's they did that because they knew how to do it. So that was uh it sounds like a digression. What I'm trying to say is I do want people to know that stuff and that they did know it better in 1955 than know it now. I think we can demonstrate they knew it better then because they were all those 50 people were in different groups, were either pastors of Protestant churches which had governing, self-governing, or they were um union leaders or they were professors, and they they knew this. So I do want to go back in some ways. On the other hand, we don't want to just go back. I mean, I'm riffing in a way that I didn't expect to, but I would point out that they immediately created a elected a president, vice president, secretary, and treasurer because that's what you knew how to do. And they immediately made Rosa Parks the secretary because she was the woman. And the secretary has to do the scum work. So we we're not gonna just go back, and renewal doesn't mean good old days. Um it means renewal. Um in some ways, even if things were great, you would want to renew because it's a living organism, and you wouldn't want to renew in a civic way. I sometimes wonder whether the the term civic renewal has been important to my life because I was one of my early jobs as deputy director of a commission on civic renewal. I I think I've written books with the title Civic Renewal in in them, but um I sometimes wonder about it as a term because I want I don't want to promote nostalgia without some critical thinking about that. A lot of my friends in the civics, the K-12 civics world, which I've worked in for 30 years, want to always want to insist that the problem that we have to work on civics because it's in decline. And I'm not at all convinced that it's in decline. I mean, one of the things they'll do is they'll say the test scores are down. And I just want to say, I just as a fact, they're not down. They're just not down. I mean, there was a statistically significant decline in one year, but otherwise they're incredibly flat. So what's interesting to me is the diagnosis, the the rhetorical framework that says in order to get people to care about something, we have to show that it's worse than it was before. And I I actually just don't think that K-12 civic education is worse than it was before. But it doesn't mean we shouldn't do something about it.

SPEAKER_01 50:34

And also our world is changing, so we couldn't we can't be complacent because the civic education that we offered in 1960 can't be the one that we offer today, so we have to change the one of the important dimensions again of the black experience, and I think it has to do with the fact that its very marginality also produced some great insights. Um one thing that really is a pet peeve of mine is to see the kind of academic frame that tends to see the black experience as one of victimization. Now it has been full of oppression, like Ukraine, um, and efforts to break the spirit and terrible things, but but that's also prompted tremendous creativity in both in practical terms, institution terms, and philosophical terms. And one of the real resources in black education and in higher education, um historically by colleges, is the concept of pedagogical, what's called pedagogical personalism, which is sees that every every child has enormous talent and creativity and various kinds of excellences, not far more than simply taking tests, um, and potential, and not only individual potential, but potential to contribute to the commons. And education should be about cultivating and unleashing and unlocking that potential. Um that uh also means respect for people's talent and appetite for ideas. And our colleague Trig Trodvight worked on with Peter uh a few years ago is the idea of third-way civics, which is basically shifting the agency of a class, a course, or educational experience of any kind, it can be adapted from the professor who imparts the knowledge to the learner who is seen as an agent of their own learning, needing tutoring and mentoring. It's not off by themselves. Um, but in the uh course called Third Way Civics, Peter and and Trig wrote a piece for Inside Higher Education on this. Um the point of third-way civics is not to impart knowledge of what is civics, but to actually acquaint students with primary sources reflecting a whole range of different viewpoints about controversies in American history, from the revolution to the modern civil rights movement, even higher education controversies today. And uh and students wrestle with the diverse voices. Now that turns out to be um resonant with both conservative colleges, its original foundation was a a Christian college in in uh Florida, Southeastern University, came out of a conference who we helped to organize um to R1s, uh like Stanford and University of St. Thomas and on and on. Um but I think the point is that having students learn to think themselves and to talk to others and to even present to others what they've learned, um, and with the with the teacher being more of a coach and a mentor and a facilitator than an instructor is a really creative um civic, civic in vitalization process. It's not really renewal, it's vitalization, and um has a lot of different possibilities for spreading and adaptation. But it but the foundational principle is that every person has great talent and it's usually buried and locked away and not very visible. And how does that get unlocked and developed?

SPEAKER_00 54:34

I think what you said, Harry, really connects very well with what Peter talked about regarding how perhaps some of the metrics we're using, like test scores, are not uh a very good indicator. It might be they're only as good as as they're they're meant to be, I guess. But uh I I think do think it's important that that creativity element I think is so important because I can't tell you for how many times I felt like I could I would want to create something of my own rather than being just given what is being taught in the world before. So I appreciate what you both contributed there. Uh Harry, I'd like to now turn to a uh a more personal side of your experience. And uh this is obviously what regarding uh you and your father's experience working for the uh SDLC. What can you share about your or you and your father's experience working for the SDLC uh as well as other civil rights experiences um that feed into your approach to democratic renewal in the United States?

SPEAKER_01 55:39

Well, it was it was a powerful, very powerful life-shaping experience to be firsthand at the emergence of the movement. It was also something that can't be romanticized or idealized. My father was manager of the Atlanta Red Cross in the 1950s, desegregated the Red Cross, Southern working class Scotch Scottish guy, um Scottish American guy. Um but he he had come through the war to differ with the racial views of his relatives. So when he became active first in desegregation of the Red Cross and then keeping schools open in Georgia in the late 1950s, our family disowned us, our working class family disowned us. Um it was not easy, and um I don't think he handled the conflicts well, but uh but he uh before he worked for SCLC, he worked for the American Friend Service Committee and placing kids in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where they had closed the schools rather than desegregated. Um placing them up north and mostly black, but a few white poor whites who didn't have schools. Um he was almost killed one night by the American Nazi Party, left in a ditch, bleeding to death, and a black guy who amazing network of knowledge in the black community, but anyway, they had heard what had happened, so they pulled him out. And King came in the spring of that year, 63. That was 62, but 63 told him he had heard what had happened and wanted to know if he wanted to work for SCLC. But we had to stay together. We all were suffering in the movement, and we all faced tremendous obstacles. So I think that saved my father's life, basically. I mean, I had a personal experience that it's probably worth sharing. I was hitchhiking around the country, wondering whether I should go to college at Harvard or Duke or go to sea and be a seafaring poet. Um and I called up uh my family, which had moved back to Atlanta at that point. Dad was working for the Southern Person Leadership Conference, and he said, uh, get back here, we're gonna have a march to get the attention of the nation. So I found somebody to hitchhike back with, and we went night, day a day and night, got there, got to Washington before the march, the night before the march. Uh and I put my sleeping bag on dad's hotel floor and heard King practice I have a dream in the room next more next door. Booming voice, I have a dream. Just trying it out because the SELC executive committee had thought he shouldn't use that phrase. So the speech was inspiring and also importantly embodied the strategic thinking of Bayard Rustin, who was a great strategist and organizer of the march. And he he saw the march as not a protest, very explicitly. It was basically a conversation with Middle America, because his calculation was that a third of the country was for the movement, a third was pretty diehard opposed, which should have been my relatives. Um, and then the the 40% was up for grabs. And so there had to be, there couldn't be a polarizing effort, had to really engage people. So thinking about King's speech as a way to engage, you know, everyday Americans for whom the movement was not their cause was brilliant and also strategic. But I would also say that the thing is that impressed me as a kid who had just turned 18 was the demeanor of the marchers. There was this kind of calm and determination and dignity. Now the March program notes um called for that, but it also was prepared by the citizenship schools and Rosenwald schools and early decades of organizing and development. Um the political theorist Margaret Canavan, a British theorist doing a riff on Hannah Rent made a distinction between mobs and publics. And I had a living experience of a public. In fact, the march basically the program notes made that point. In a neighborhood dispute, there may be stunts and rough words, but when a whole people speaks to its government, the quality of the action and the dialogue needs to reflect the worth of the people and the responsibility of the government. That was a public speaking to a government. And I think it it the depths of those kind of formative civic learning experiences that fed the march are as important as the speech itself. So that shaped me, in fact, it made me decide immediately I better stay in the country and stay involved in the movement. And so I went to college that fall and created a Congress of Racial Equality chapter.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:39

What an amazing experience. Uh Harry, I can't imagine being there in Washington for that historic march. I mean, I I imagine that there were so many people there who will never never forget that experience just by being there and uh to see such a great orator and someone who gave a vision. I'd like to now turn back to Peter uh on uh the civic renewal. And I like, if I may, I'd like to kind of combine two questions in one, if you don't mind. How does active citizenship make a difference with regards to civic renewal? And more specifically, I'd like to ask if you could talk a bit more about Tufts and talk a little more about that institution and how uh your institution has uh has contributed to to the civic renewal and any opportunities that uh you you hope to to expect as as time goes on.

SPEAKER_03 1:01:33

Sure. I mean, there's a huge body of literature on the effects of uh on why not the effects of on why it was good to have active citizenship. And I think the the the big categories are the effects on solving problems and making the world better, and then the uh effects on um uh something that's a little closer to intrinsic, the effects on people's um sense of somebody nice. Harry, was that the phrase you're using? Or uh and um their their relations to each other to other people. Um and uh I mean I think in both cases there's there's lots of evidence. You there's a sort when you're talking about whether civic active citizenship improves the world, you want one kind of evidence, which is sort of outcomes. And um Harry mentioned Eleanor Ostrom, who was one of the authors of the civic studies um framework, and she did win a Nobel Prize for a whole body of research that showed people are better at solving problems like how to distribute water or how to um save a forest if they if they're active. Um she has seven design principles for making things work. Basically, they're quite profound, and one of them is participation. Um I I would actually promote it. I think on her list it's just five out of number five out of seven, but I I actually think a better interpretation of our own thought is that it's it's a super ordinate kind of thing. And then the the the question of um making us feel well, changing who we are. So that that I'm trying to say that it it we we we should be active citizens not just because it makes uh helps us to solve problems, but also because it changes who we are. And that's a little harder to turn into statistics, but it's uh very, very profound. And you saw that one Harry saw that, and we read about it on the mall in 1963. Um one one thing I could say is Tisch College was founded before I was at Tufts, it's the Tisch College of Civic Life. It was founded before I was at Tufts in about 2001. At that point it was um maybe this is interesting broadly, it was founded to promote mainly um sort of service and community involvement. At a time when I think generally people thought the American political and economic systems were triumphant and very secure, right? So we had a democracy, we need to teach kids about it, um, but we were always gonna have a democracy, and we had a uh certain kind of market system, and that was working well. And um, but the problems were relatively subtle that people weren't as involved as they should be, and that institutions like Tufts, which is a private, um highly, as they say, highly rejective or highly selected um institution, wasn't involved enough in its own community. So a lot of the emphasis was on our physical geographical communities, which are within the Boston area, but there are specific places, Medford, Massachusetts, Somerville, Massachusetts. And so that was the framework. And I I I believe it was valuable, but I think that times have changed. Um so as the years went by, we um became more interested in national, first of all, national and international issues, not just local, but also and that's a change of values in some ways. Um it's a debatable change, because I mean we may have lost some ties to our local community, but also um more interested in trans in transforming systems rather than teaching kids to help them better. Um and so um and and practically speaking, one of the things about it is there's about um eighty people or so who work at Tish College, about sixty of them do basically applied research. So it's really not a service center. It's mostly a uh kind of applied action-oriented research center with various streams of research around young people's civic engagement in America or around state policy in Massachusetts, or we have several centers.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:03

Well said, and uh I'm I'm I'm glad that there's uh that that kind of institution uh of a number of great institutions in the Boston area. I'm glad that uh that Titch is uh such an integral part of not just community but also of the nation too. Peter, I'd like to stick with you uh because I'd like to give an opportunity to talk a bit more about your just an overview of your books and your written work, because I'm sure people will be interested in in reading more about uh your political philosophy work, but also of the the kinds of uh literature and of research that you've done on civic studies. So uh what can you just share briefly to our audience about what to expect from from the works that you produced?

SPEAKER_03 1:05:45

Well, I can I think the only thing I can think of saying is the most recent book is called What Should We Do A Theory of Civic Life. Part of it is just an argument that that that question, what should we do, really should be taken seriously. That that's actually the defining question is if you want to ask what's an active citizen of somebody. Who asked that question, although they should also then do something when they when they've asked when they've asked it. It's the question, what should we do? And and the qu and the question, um, the argument is the question gets lost a lot. One of the reasons it gets lost is because it gets turned into it slips away and gets replaced with what should happen or what should be done. The we is lost. And it's hard to keep the focus on the we because many of the things we've talked about in this conversation. Um, you know, that book is not very original. It's uh it's a kind of a long lit review and it's drawing on literatures, including Harry's work and public work and other Harry's other work.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:33

Very well said. Very uh much needed book, I think, nowadays. Uh to ask you that question, which should what should we do? I'll make sure to include the appropriate links down in the show notes below as well for people to check out. Uh Harry, I'd like to turn to you. I'd like to ask if you can talk a bit more about the the Humphrey School uh and a little bit about Augsburg College as well, and uh, and then kind of tie in with anything that you like to share regarding your written work as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:00

I'm now uh working with help co-founded of something called the Institute for Public Life and Work. I'm an emeritus at the Humphrey and at Augsburg. Um but the the organization that we're working with mostly now is called Braver Angels. And I would argue Braver Angels is distinctive because it it said citizens have to be responsible for rebuilding the civic comments that is a sense of shared commonality and story. Uh nobody was gonna fix it, government, no politician is gonna fix that. Really, citizens have to do it. And the first uh few years uh was very partly through the work of our colleague uh Bill Doherty, um, developed ways for people to understand um other people's uh experiences, stories, their own stereotypes, how to not hate other people for their views of uh taking on what's called effective polarization. And now we're in a transition of leadership and we also have a what's called a civic renewal support team, although there's a there's it could be also citizen-led solutions team is two different terms. But it's actually how do we bring in a kind of public work action dimension and how do we think about not only stories, how do we rekindle the sense of civic initiative and civic entrepreneurialism of the best in the American democratic experience, but also build sites, what we would call commons, where that can be nurtured and supported and sustained and be launching pads of all kinds. So it could be a local library, it could be a community center, it could be an arts program, it could be a sports program, it could be a grounded educational experience. Um so Braver Angels is something I'd like to uh draw people's attention to. I think the best uh journal I mean, I'm a big fan of our journal, Civic, The Good Society. I think the the most important thought-leading journal in terms of audience and connections is something called the National Civic Review. And I have it had a piece last year that said we need to recover the sense that citizens are the foundation and citizens have disappeared from political discourse. But this year it's also that we need to recover a sense of a commonwealth built on many commons, not simply an abstraction, but actually concretely embodied in all sorts of spaces where people can come together, get to know each other, build things together, solve problems together, and revitalize the life of civic life of communities.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:47

Absolutely. And I've I'm glad you both really outlined some of this so much of the work that your respective institutions have done. Um and Harry, I'll be sure to include the link to that uh that article that you sent me about uh revitalizing the American Commonwealth, because I think that's a great piece to uh to compliment uh for people to read after they listen to the podcast. So I appreciate you you bringing this up because I think whether it's standing up for uh public lands, which I live in Nevada and 85% of our state is federal land, so I think I can I can certainly relate to that as a as a bad end. Uh but all but it's really uh uh about again going back to that sort of renewal about how it doesn't have to be going back to the past entirely. It's about creating new opportunities and and really looking forward to the future in that respect. I'm so glad we've had this conversation. And I have one last question, which is a bit of a tradition on our podcast. Of course, this podcast is called Friends of Fellow Citizens, which is named after the first four words of George Washington's farewell address. And I always ask my guests to reflect on some of these values that Washington espoused in his farewell address. And I also want to uh give you an opportunity to give any closed remarks as well. So I'll combine these two uh questions into one. So, Harry, if I if I may, I'll start with you in terms of uh what sort of values, whether it be patriotism or civility or national unity and others, what sort of values do you think really relate to our conversation today and to your work? And then just any closing remarks that you may have for our audience.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:26

He recognized he was not a savior. He shouldn't be a king. He couldn't fix the country's problems, he had to hand it over to his friends and fellow citizens. Um that's an extraordinarily important dimension of character that we urgently need in the public domain these days. Um we also need character itself, a sense of integrity and purpose and discipline and a check on avarice. Um we need um a sense that there's a world far beyond ourselves that in my faith-based approach is sacred, um, but is enormously important to pay attention to. Um so those are those are values I think that are at the heart of civic learning, um, as well as efficacy and capacity to take action and work together, the things Peter was talking about. Um and I think uh We also need uh, you know, the final sixth principle of nonviolence um that King outlined with help from Bayard Rustin in his stride toward freedom um is refusing fatalism. Uh recognizing that there is always possibility, and that actually times of significant danger are also times of opportunity. So I think we should have that uh sense of possibility, even in diff difficult times, and that we can make we can make the future that we decide to make with others.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:02

Amen.

SPEAKER_03 1:13:02

Uh Peter, yeah, you will have the last word, and uh I I kind of wish Harry had had the last word because that was very well stated, and I uh I was also gonna say uh his humility and his uh of course the the monumental decision to uh step down uh involuntarily, actually twice, once is uh after winning the revolution, the second time after winning the election. Um and and and and the and uh what Harry said then about uh resisting fatalism is extremely important. Uh so much of what it takes to be a good person and citizen is to think that uh future is up to us, not not for ordained, and it's very hard to feel that way. Um I I'll I'll I don't know if this is a great way to end, but I'll I'll uplift patriotism. It doesn't the word patriotism, it doesn't um necessarily come naturally to me because of I I don't know, sort of philosophical, ideological, whatever ideas I have, you know, cosmopolitan and they're polycentric and we're part of we're all part of one big world, everything. But actually patriotism is very important. Um I mean, again, not to dwell too much, but I have do have this experience. I've just got back from from Ukraine. I think I went to Ukraine first of all, Ukrainians are patriotic, but also I think I went to Ukraine for patriotism. I went to Ukraine partly because I'm utterly appalled by my country's betrayal of Ukraine. But actually why does that matter to me? It matters because I love my country. Um and I went to be an American there and to tell people partly to I I offered a course, but I partly to tell people we we haven't given up on you. And um I then can come back and tell Americans that. And um I went because I love Americans. And I so I'm um I feel in part that um so some some old-fashioned words come to my mind. I feel that our our honor is diminished by our treatment. And I feel that our honor as a country affects me. Um and I I wouldn't feel that way if I didn't love my country. So I so I think the word I I don't remember whether Washington uses the word patriotism in the farewell speech, but he certainly was a patriot. Nobody doubts about that. And I would say patriotism, yes, patriotism.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:09

I second that. I second that. Uh patriotism is different than nationalism, I would just add. Patriotism is a love of country, and the movement that shaped me was very patriotic in the citizenship handbook. We had a page on We Love America and we're gonna change it. We're gonna pour the power of love into the raging seas of rage and hatred.

SPEAKER_00 1:15:34

So fitting given that patriotism comes for patria, fatherland, of course, the father of our country. So I think I I think you're both right in that, about recognizing Washington's importance in art history. Well, uh, Dr. Peter Levine and Dr. Harry Boyd, thank you both so much for for coming onto the podcast. I learned a lot from the discussion as as today's moderator and host, and I really appreciate just all the work that you and your respective teams as well, your institutions do, because uh there's so much more that needs to be done. But the to hear that there's all this promise and that there's all this work that's that's being done to serve others uh for our civics, I think is really heartening. So uh thank you both so much for for coming out of the podcast today.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:21

Well, thank you. Thank you for having us.

SPEAKER_00 1:16:23

Thank you all so much for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed it. Make sure to check out the links down in the show notes below. Have a great rest of your day and rest of your week. And remember, a day in America is always better. We are with our friends and fellows.