like dogs
first beam of light
tickles the eye lids
tail wags, body stretches
‘my people are still here!’
very, very soon
can’t you feel it coming
there will be
my daily bread and a chance to run and pee…outside
awesome
another day begins

This may not qualify as a poem, but as I watched Annie wake up this morning, same as every morning, all ready to go and optimistic it occured to me that I was watching perfection.  She has mastered her dogginess.

Recently, a group of friends sat and discussed poetyr with a poet.  It was eye opening.  I saw that all the 'poems' I have written, likely including this one today, hardly qualify.  For good reason.  It felt like she was talking to me, but of course she was just explaining her area of expertise, saying 'show me, don't tell me.  Paint me a picture, do not tell me what I am supposed to see in that picture.' 

This is a rough paraphrase, but it pretty much said the kind of things I put to into words and call a poem are nearly always of the 'tell me' variety.  More like prayers really.  Usually me telling myself to be more like my dog, for instance.  This is a skill it would be cool to have. 

To be able to paint a picture with words, and only a few words at that, with enough courage and confidence, humility and groundedness to refrain from the simple (and boring and patronizing and selfish and non-interactive) telling of my story as if it were a silo and to instead tell my story in a way designed to connect with the stories of others.

Difficult Dialogues and Teaching Moments

In the January 20, 2014 issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education Dan Berret does a pretty good job of laying out the importance of, and challenges within, encouraging and facilitating ‘difficult dialogues’ on campus.

He notes that face2face conversations about controversial and complex issues “can provide great educational value if guided skillfully.”  The educational value includes learning to listen actively to (usually multiple) opposing views or unfamiliar perspectives, learning the value of considering and re-considering these and our own views, perspectives and values in a larger context that includes the best available data.

These skills are important because these are the skills we expect citizens to use when we deliberate over policy alternatives and competing candidacies.

Difficult dialogues, done well, provide us with opportunities to “wrestle with messy problems that have no clearly defined answer, a skill that will help [us all] as voters when [we] evaluate policy tradeoffs. It is also a skill that many employers say they value.”  Most important political, social, cultural, even economic questions that make it onto our public policy agenda are complex and lack a single, clear-cut, data-driven solution.  They require us to balance competing demands and values, in contexts where resources are limited. 

This type of problem solving—the heart and soul of democratic politics—requires nuance and subtlety, data and experience, listening and finding common ground for moving forward even while we likely still disagree.  Lacking one uncontroversial solution, these are the types of questions that a zero-tolerance culture will almost certainly answer badly, but with great confidence.  These are questions where the solutions depend on achieving agreement, agreements that are usually tentative, partial, and provisional.  Achieving agreements in these areas nearly always requires us to be uncomfortable, to accept uncertainty, to be willing to collaborate with other who bring complimentary skills and perspectives to the conversation.

This type of learning is one reason we value discussion-based teaching.  Doing it well requires professors to be comfortable being uncomfortable, because they will not always know the right answer ahead of time.  Doing it well requires us to be ready to be honest in these dialogues when we are confused or when a question or comment has caused us to re-think or re-consider.  If we are so unschooled in political conversations that we cannot help a room puzzle through the difference between politics and partisanship, it is time to be honest:  we are the student in this situation, so simply choosing to avoid charged conversations, because they are charged, is like refusing to do our homework.

Instead, be present.  Help students puzzle through the questions by doing it with them with a shared goal of enhancing everyone’s understanding of the questions and controversies.  Ask questions when you do not know, instead of changing the topic to something you are comfortable being the expert on to demonstrate that you are interested in the questions and concerns expressed by the people in the room with you.

The Chronicle piece concludes with suggestions:

Establish Ground Rules.  This is important because ground rules help us when conflicts escalate and because the process of achieving agreement on ground rules is way that a group can ‘be the change they want to see in the world.’

Emphasize Storytelling.  This is contrasted with ‘making sweeping generalizations,’ in order to focus on each participant sharing what they think honestly, the questions they have, the areas they are confused or optimistic. 

Frame the Discussion.  This focuses on knowing the issue itself and that is both important and misleading, because a skilled scholar should also be able to facilitate a productive conversation on a topic outside his expertise…since all of us are experts in only a very narrow slice of reality and largely ignorant about just about everything else.  So, knowing the issue is important.  Knowing how to listen and be present and interested in what is being said, how to engage in the uncomfortable struggle of real world intellectual inquiry is even more important…and more likely to bring with it the humility required to contribute toward achieving agreements by appreciating competing perspectives and finding common ground. 

I would add one more:

Prepare to Myth Bust.  Any controversial topic will invite participants to think (and argue) in terms of what they see as new and exciting insights, but what even a modest amount of research reveals to be competing sets of talking points that saturate communication channels.  This is where a familiarity with the best available data helps a lot, along with an ability to ask questions that reframe from positions to interests and encourage participants to tell their stories, listen, and engage with the data and each other’s stories.

Two sources for more information in the story:

CivicLearning and Democracy

SustainedDialogue Campus Network

The Fox News Effect:  Misinformed by Design
Excellent summary in Salon of available studies showing Fox News viewers are more misinformed, and the more Fox News they watch the more misinformed they become.

Seeing Conflicts Play Out on Multiple Levels
We engaged with a short video text recently in class where the author of the text argues that when we want to more effectively respond to what we see as a racist comment or action it is important to avoid falling into the familiar trap of framing our response as a claim about ‘who you are,’ that is, calling the offender a racist. 

Instead, we are more likely to be able to hold that person accountable if we frame our response around the ‘what you said or did’ conversation.  Check out the video (below) for more, but one core reason is that when we allow an offender to reframe the conflict as a ‘who you are’ conversation it makes it too easy for them to dodge the issue entirely and escape accountability.

In the short article below from today’s Akron Beacon Journal you can see exactly this dynamic.  Pasted below is the full text of the ABJ article with my comments in italics. 

We can draw several lessons from thinking about the competing stories in this conflict.

First, the lessons we cannot draw:  we cannot conclude which disputant is right and who is wrong in this particular conflict on the basis of this news story. 

Second, we can conclude that the analytical tools discussed above appear helpful in decoding what might be deeper conflicts, hidden in plain sight, behind or beneath the presenting conflict here. 

Third, we cannot conclude much about these deeper conflicts,  however, on the basis of this news story.  We cannot conclude that either disputant did not did not have a hidden agenda, only that thinking along these lines is likely a good way to remain alert to understanding conflict management and politics.  We also cannot conclude anything about the nature of potentially deeper conflicts here, the positions either disputant might hold on deeper conflicts, or how we might normatively evaluate those positions.

Fourth, local politics is a rich source of data we can use to see politics and conflict management more clearly, because it is less scripted and less insulated and less able to insulate actors from face2face public scrutiny.  Anyway, take a look at this article.

The controversy surrounding a scuffle between Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic and Councilman Russel Neal Jr. is continuing, with the mayor taking the unusual step of writing a letter to the community Friday with his account of what happened.

Here we see the mayor seeking either to ‘expand the scope of the conflict,’ by writing a letter designed to publicize it to draw the attention of additional audiences he expects will not turn their (our) attention to this conflict…that is, be mobilized…and impact the outcome in his favor.  Or to reverse a publicization process started with a facebook post. 

We cannot know what is the mayor’s heart, but we should be attentive to the political dynamics revealed here about our struggle to publicize some conflicts (amplify these and put them on the agenda) and privatize other conflicts (mute these, keep them off the agenda).

We can see (below) that the mayor’s letter is also a response to an anonymous effort to expand the scope, when a random facebook user put a post about this conflict on the FB page of a local community group. 

Since we all know that there are countless posting like this daily, this one might have struck a nerve (we cannot know for sure—but a good question to ask).  Did the FB post mobilize some new audiences (or create fear in the mayor’s office that it might mobilize some) such that it sparked an official response (since such responses are extremely rare—an official response to a random, now deleted, FB post)?

Plusquellic said he decided to write the letter, available on Ohio.com, because of suggestions by some in the community that the shoving match between him and Neal following a Dec. 16 council meeting was racially motivated.

Plusquellic was particularly upset about a post on the Facebook page of a local community group, Stand Up Ohio-Akron. The post, which later was removed, was made by someone else to the group’s page.

Here we see that the FB post is likely only one source of ‘suggestions by the community’ that the incident might be about race, but the mayor’s efforts to expand the scope and reframe the conflict want us to focus only on this one source from FB. 

This is a good question to ask:  is the FB post an outlier (as the mayor suggests) or is it one voice speaking for many?  We cannot know based on this one news story, but understanding this conflict requires is to ask (and find out).

It featured a photograph of Plusquellic and the words: “He be like, ‘Russ, why would I give them a job?’ ” which appears to be a reference to the push for the city to hire more minorities. At the bottom, in red letters, the post said, “I don’t even like n-----!”

“Because of the efforts of some unscrupulous people in our community who have tried to take political advantage by not telling the truth and who have tried to make this a racial issue, I need to set the record straight,” Plusquellic wrote in his two-page letter. “You deserve to know the truth.”

Neal, however, said Friday that Plusquellic’s letter, which gives a lengthy description of what the mayor says happened in the confrontation, is erroneous. He said the mayor wrote the letter to “promote his agenda.”

“This right here is slander,” Neal said after reading a copy of the letter provided to him by the newspaper. “This is a lie.”

Here we see that in terms of the narrow, presenting, conflict the mayor’s account in this unusual public letter appears to be inconsistent with the account from the other disputant.  We know that this is not uncommon and likely involves two competing perspectives on the same incident.

Think for a minute.  If a mayor chooses to take the unusual step of writing a public letter like this, would he not also choose to frame that letter in a way that would be likely to secure agreement from the other disputant…if the goal was to de-escalate this conflict?

We can imagine a letter that says “The council member and I are both passionate public servants and it is entirely common for people like us to sometimes disagree.  In the heat of one such disagreement our shared passion for doing the right thing for Akron voters got the best of us.  I am sorry for my part in creating this misunderstanding and look forward to working collaboratively with the council member in the future to improve the lives of everyone in Akron, black and white, male and female, rich and poor.”

But this is not the type of letter we see…is it possible that the mayor might be seeing this conflict as an opportunity, using this presenting conflict to advance an agenda, that is, to win in a struggle over a deeper conflict?  Is it possible that, while the mayor is posturing to appear to want to de-escalate this conflict, he actually wants to keep it going for some reason?

Keep in mind, asking these questions in no way requires us to suggest this is about corruption or slander; we want to learn to see this is a time-tested political strategy…to use conflicts….

…to take what non-elites see as a problem (the presenting conflict) and use it to play for a rule change, pressure opponents, mobilize supporters, or re-align public opinion in a way that will help one disputant win a larger fight over, for instance (as suggested in this story—but we cannot know if this is accurate or not based only on this story), pressuring council members into supporting the mayor’s policy agenda.

Blaming each other

Plusquellic’s account of the scuffle in the letter mirrors the account he gave the Beacon Journal after the incident. He and Neal then and now blame the other for the first shove.

Council President Garry Moneypenny, who witnessed the episode, said he wasn’t sure who shoved whom first. Neither man was injured nor filed a police report.

The incident prompted a group of African-American ministers and community leaders to attend the Jan. 13 council meeting and urge Plusquellic and council members to control their tempers.

Important people, all of whom know both disputants well, do not lightly abandon a relaxing evening at home to show up as a group to a city council meeting.  While we cannot know what this means we now know to ask:  does the mobilization of this larger audience (expanding the scope of the conflict from the disputants, to the council, to now this larger audience) benefit either disputant?  How might we expect the addition of this new audience to impact the outcome of the conflict?

Plusquellic, who has been with the city for 40 years, said in his letter that he has never before had a physical confrontation with a council member and has gotten along with “70 of 79” of the council members with whom he has served.

Is this really relevant? Are we persuaded by someone charged with robbery when they tell us that they have not robbed anyone before?  Since it does not appear to be directly relevant, we need to ask:  why introduce this into the story?  How might this contribute to reframing the conflict…and who might benefit if this framing comes to dominate our conversations?

“I’m almost 65 and have had two back operations, four knee surgeries, one elbow surgery, one leg surgery, and a double bypass heart surgery,” he wrote. “The idea that I would initiate a physical confrontation with a council person is absurd and, in this case, fabricated by persons trying to make political gains by falsely adding racial remarks.”

Here we see the mayor attempting to place the incident in a context…because contexts give meaning to actions.  He is suggesting a context that would lead a non-attentive reader to think ‘it is just common sense that the mayor would not start the fight.’ 

An attentive reader, however, also knows that this mayor has a long history of being a bully with a temper problem…which suggests that the mayor’s version of the context is designed to redirect our attention. 

This does not mean one disputant is right and the other wrong.  But once we learn to see the struggle over narrowing or expanding, framing and reframing, conflicts we become able to ask better questions.

Plusquellic concluded his letter by saying he has agreed to meet with Neal, but Neal has not responded.

“He has the chance to do the right thing, stop encouraging the politicalization of this and (different than some others in the community) speak the truth before others mislead our citizens,” the mayor wrote.

Neal said he told WAKR (AM-1590) host Ray Horner on his Dec. 19 show that he wanted to meet with the mayor.

“If this happened the way the mayor said, I would be charged with assault,” Neal said on the show. “I know, and the mayor knows, what happened. He and I have to have the opportunity to speak one on one.”

Asked if he thought the incident had anything to do with race, Neal said Friday: “I don’t know what it has to do with. I don’t know what his hang-ups are.

“All I’m trying to do is do my job,” Neal said. “I’m sorry he feels it has to go this way.”

Here we see the other disputant is not (yet, not here) advancing an alternative account as much as expressing confusion over what he sees as the mayor going public…publicizing…with what he sees as an inaccurate account (and ‘with an agenda’ suggests the other disputant believes that this account is not randomly or accidentally inaccurate but inaccurate by design). 

We cannot, on the basis of this story alone, determine the veracity of either account.  But we can learn to ask questions designed to get us that information.

Reactions mixed

Here we see one outcome of a struggle over scope and salience when we do not see that struggle in the more complex way outlined here: confusion.  And we can see here that sometimes elites benefit from confusion among average voters.  We cannot know which of the two disputants (or both) benefit from confusion, but we do want to be attentive to this strategic dimension to political conflict.

We will recall from our video text (below) that once the accused is able to wrap himself in the ‘who you are’ conversation what follows is a lot of confusion—that helps the accused escape accountability.  (Remember the part about the Bermuda triangle that ends with ‘we blame hip hop’ and move on like nothing happened?)

The assertion that the incident between Plusquellic and Neal had to do with race was fueled by the Facebook post on the Stand Up Ohio-Akron page.

Stand Up Ohio-Akron took down the post at the request of several prominent Akron leaders, including Planning Director Marco Sommerville, the former longtime president of the Akron City Council. He spoke with a member of Stand Up for Ohio-Akron at the same council meeting in which black pastors and community leaders urged Plusquellic and council members to try to get along.

“I didn’t think it was funny,” Sommerville said of the post. “I thought it was wrong.”

Stand Up Ohio is a statewide, community-based group pushing for such reforms as making the hiring policies for felons more lenient.

Damareo Cooper of Stand Up Ohio-Akron said he thinks the reaction to the Facebook post has been “kind of extreme.” He said he thought it was “hilarious” and viewed it as a local political meme. He said his group took down the post after seeing the reaction to it.

“I think somebody put it up there being funny,” he said.

Cooper, whose group supports increased job opportunities for minorities, thinks Akron needs to have a conversation about race, but not based on one Facebook post.

Moneypenny said race had nothing to do with the shoving incident between Plusquellic and Neal. He said Neal and a few other African-American council members have talked about how the “culture of council needs to change,” but this had to do with an allegiance (or lack of one) to Plusquellic among council members.

“If any of council feel there’s a race issue, they surely have not brought it to my attention,” he said.

Sommerville, who is black, said Plusquellic has been supportive of providing opportunities for African-Americans during his career, including by having them in his Cabinet, choosing a black fire chief and a black police chief, and pushing for more minority hires in the safety forces.

“He has talked the talk and walked the walk,” Sommerville said. “No way is the mayor a racist.”

Here we see an ally of the mayor grasping onto the dodge-ability provided by framing this as a ‘who he is’ conversation…just as our text lead us to would expect.

The original FB post, using mock dialogue, suggested that the mayor was doing something—opposing job creation for blacks.  It did, however, also open the door to the accused using the ‘who he is’ conversation to weasel out of accountability by also saying he does not like blacks.

We do not have enough information to conclude if the mayor is dodging accountability or not, but we can see multiple ways that using the concepts and ideas in our text we become able to ask new and deeper and more analytical questions, which empower us to see presenting and meta (deeper) conflicts and the common strategies driving elite use of conflicts…often (as DFW says) hidden in plain sight.

Attacks on the Liberal Arts Inconsistent with Data

AAC&U just completed an analysis of data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and, like we have seen in analysis of other data sets, the data is inconsistent with the often-repeated claim that Humanities and Social Science graduates cannot find jobs or earn less than students who choose a professional degree. 

While measuring the value of an education by income earned captures only a fraction of the value of a liberal arts degree, this is the measure that is most often used by those who consistently claim liberal arts degrees are without value.  So, using their own metric what does the data show?

Humanities and Social Science majors start at salaries slightly below those with professional degrees (and slightly higher than those with math and natural science degrees), but over the course of their entire careers Humanities and Social Science majors not only catch up, but surpass, salaries of those who earned a professional degree. 

The data, as always, is complex.  But those interested in advancing empirically unfounded claims about the low value of a liberal arts degree will respond here that 40% of those with Humanities and Social Science earned a graduate degree.  This is accurate, and suggests we should encourage those majors to consider carefully graduate school options, but 30% of the comparison group (those who earned professional degrees) also earned a graduate degree. 

The forces aligned against the liberal arts will also point out that engineers, science and math majors earn significantly more over their careers than either professional or liberal arts degree earning students.  This is also accurate, but engineers account for 9% of working college graduates—we should encourage our students who can succeed in these fields to do so, but these fields are a much smaller segment of the job market.

And this is only comparing the value of various degree based on income, which is not the metric best suited to capturing the full value of any degree, much less a liberal arts degree.  Since we know that many liberal arts majors choose to occupy fields that provide important services but are low paying (teaching, counseling, social work).

Today’s Akron Beacon Journal includes a very interesting look back at local history.  Staff writer, Mark Price, reminds us that not very long ago—during the lifetimes of our parents and grandparents—there was a raging debate about whether or not allowing women to continue to teach in our public schools after they got married did harm to our families and classrooms. 

I admit that these glimpses back at local history appearing in the ABJ periodically are among the top reasons I still subscribe to the paper (along with sports coverage, the editorial page, and local coverage).  This one, however, interests me as a snapshot of turn-of-the-century life in the place that I live and as a reminder:  often the conflicts we argue about so passionately…when we look back on them from the future…turn out to be silly distractions, not worth the energy and passion. 

And that makes me wonder: which of the conflicts we are fighting about in 2014 will emerge as mere quaint illustrations of how backward or silly or misinformed or prejudiced we are today?  This article about Akron at the turn of the century might help us get a better grip on this set of questions.  Here is the full text, with the link to the ABJ version at the bottom and my comment inserted in italics. 

A woman’s place was in the home — unless she became a teacher. A teacher’s place was in the school — unless she became a wife.

Female educators walked a narrow path through Akron Public Schools in the early 20th century. They were expected to devote their lives to other people’s children, but heaven forbid if they wanted kids of their own.

Women put their jobs at risk if they got married.

Here the author starts his analysis by, correctly in my view, zeroing in on the most pressing human cost, the players in this story most harmed by this drama of social control:  women.  Women as a group, because they are women, sometimes with other women participating in the harm-doing.  It is important to see and be able to stand in the shoes of the players, on all sides of conflict and sometimes making explicit that there is on particular group singled-out for scrutiny here, or personalizing our description of players in a conflict, can help us do that.

At the dawn of the century, it was generally understood that female teachers would resign their posts upon holy matrimony. They left their classrooms to become homemakers and start families. Other schoolmarms stayed behind, remained single and retained their posts.

Here the author uses language likely common at the time to bring us back to that time, so we might understand the concerns and interests of all sides as they would have understood these themselves at the time.  This is important.  Even though you will see that I have a rather unambiguous read of the ‘right thing to do’ in this case, it is critically important—today—that we engage with those who see the world differently, understand their concerns as they articulate them (not as summarized by those who agree with us).

Every summer, the school district lost dozens of educators to marriage. Submitting their resignations were newlywed teachers with such names as Pearl, Gertrude, Esther, Gladys, Cora, Evelyn, Lydia, Flora, Ethel and Lillian.

During teaching shortages, such as when Akron’s population swelled from a breezy 69,067 in 1910 to a torrid 208,435 in 1920, the unwritten rules were relaxed. Some married teachers stayed in school. Then troubles began.

Again, these names sounds like names our grandparents had and then the author reminds us that larger macro-economic changes are often catalyze changes that upset political or cultural power structures, expectations or norms…sparking interest and passion in a conflict that makes that conflict a candidate to be put on the agenda by local elites trying to mobilize constituencies to support this or that larger reform (or opposition to reform).

Critics accused married teachers of ignoring wifely duties, being too busy for pupils and stealing the work of single women. No one complained about married men, though, because they were considered the breadwinners. The job paid at least $1,200 a year (about $14,000 today).

A series of superintendents and school board members grappled with “the marriage problem” for decades.

Here the author notes the very, very low salary, the fact that similarly situated men were not similarly singled-out, and that the conflict came to have a name, suggesting it was widely discussed (perhaps helping to frame discussion of other conflicts of the day like women entering the labor force, voting, or seeking a remedy for domestic abuse).

In 1919, the Akron Board of Education voted to prohibit the rehiring of married teachers because of their “divided interest” between home and school. When teachers and parents objected, the board softened its measure to allow the retention of married instructors whose husbands were unable to support them.

Does this argument make sense to you today?  Is there a divided interest?  If not, how does an argument like this come to be accepted, perhaps even taken as ‘common sense’ by many?  Is there any overlap between elites who are advertising concerns about a divided interest and their own economic or political or cultural power (and threats to that power)?

A year later, the board reversed itself, voting unanimously that the district’s policy would be to show no discrimination between married and single women.

“For the Akron Board of Education to adopt the principle that the place of the married woman is in the home and that she should be allowed to teach only when her economic situation makes it necessary would put us on record as way behind the times,” said board member Sara M. Read, the wife of Akron Postmaster A. Ross Read. “The point of the whole matter is whether or not those who are fitted for service shall be allowed to serve.”

As it turned out, the policy was “way ahead of the times,” too, because the board flipped, flopped and flapped several times during the Roaring ’20s. The buzzword was “efficiency.” Which teachers — married or single — would be more efficient?

Here we see that, in the 1920’s this debate was framed (by some at least) as a conflict between out-of-date ideas about the limited capacities of women and efficiency.  What we do not hear here is a conflict between subordination and liberty.  I wonder why?

In a January 1924 review, Akron Superintendent Carroll R. Reed found that married women took fewer days off than single women.

“The difference in their attendance records is very slight, but what difference there is shows in favor of the married women,” he said.

In a series of letters to the Beacon Journal, a Barberton woman identified only as “Mrs. E” condemned married teachers for failing to fulfill “the purposes of matrimony.”

“In their mad desire for the inordinate things of the world, combined with shiftlessness, they hire servants to run the place they call home, and openly defy the laws of nature in refusing to rear a family,” she wrote. “Where does so much delinquency and depravity among school children originate?”

A teacher who refused to raise children of her own “naturally cannot love and forebear and tenderly administer to the children placed in her charge,” Mrs. E insisted.

Does this argument make sense to you today?  Is a woman who chooses to have her own family and to work (as a teacher, in this case) failing to fulfill the purposes of marriage?  Is she ‘mad with desire, shiftless, and defying the laws of nature?’  Is this woman—and the class of women like her choosing to join the workforce—the cause of juvenile delinquency and childhood depravity?  Are the women in our classroom, who are more likely than not planning to both have families and careers, a threat to our children?  Are the men with similar aspirations also a threat?

Another letter writer, known only as “Interested,” countered that the district had an obligation to hire the best teachers regardless of their marital status.

“In all other professions, efficiency is the standard, not state of celibacy,” the writer noted. “Persons engaging a trained nurse never ask is she married; rather is she a good nurse?”

Others wondered if “flapper teachers” might engage in questionable practices such as — gasp — auto riding and dancing. If they spent too much time dating, they might neglect their schoolwork.

In August 1924, the board voted to nullify the contracts of any women teachers who got married. Introducing the measure was member Joseph B. Hanan, an assistant office manager at B.F. Goodrich and exalted cyclops of the Summit County Ku Klux Klan.

Here, as a reader, I want to know more (and may consult the library or a colleague in the History Department).  But based only on what the author provided, the story makes me wonder if those who have seriously analyzed the KKK have observed that this Christian group was motivated largely by their own fear of change? 

Usually the KKK is discussed today as an anti-black group, which is accurate.  We know it was also anti-Jewish and anti-immigrant.  This story suggests, at a time when the KKK was extremely powerful in Akron, it was also afraid of other changes we now take for granted as good things:  women as full participants in society.

Before anyone seeks solace in that fact that this is not the case today…imagine what it would have been like to grow up in 1925 and aspire to teach or heal or preach or be an entrepreneur?  And remember that today women still make 70 cents on the dollar compared with men doing the same work.

The contract was voided 30 days after a wedding. Furthermore, the board resolved that “as a general policy,” it regarded “with disfavor the employment of married women whose husbands are living and able to work.”

The ruling did not apply to the 200 teachers married before the rule was adopted. In 1925, however, the board announced it would reduce that group by 20 percent, too.

“Something should be done to start eliminating the married women now on the staff and to let them know we favor single girls,” said board member Catherine Garrett, the wife of Akron stockbroker Charles W. Garrett.

In 1927, the board proposed saving $50,000 a year by replacing all married teachers with single women and placing them on a list of substitutes earning $5 a day.

Like today, we see elites in 1927 combining the need to address a budgetary problem (almost certainly caused more by their own mis-management than by women seeking to teach) with cultural pressures to ‘enforce’ norms against women seeking to teach by trying to build on the ‘common sense’ status of these norms among some (many?) elites, voters, and parents.  Or, as the next paragraph suggests—norms held by a decreasing number of teachers and parents.

School board member J. Grant Hyde couldn’t take it. “Forget all this talk about married women and hire and pay all teachers on their merits,” he told his colleagues. Teachers and parents in the audience erupted in applause.

The board suspended the marriage ban again.

Superintendent Thomas W. Gosling did add another wrinkle in 1928, though.

“I am very careful about employing divorced teachers and do not like to retain them after they have obtained a divorce,” he said.

This turn suggests that the conflict is less about protecting women or families and more about using access to employment opportunities to punish legal (and often necessary for the safety of women and children) behavior by woman (but not men) that threaten existing power balances.

The board briefly reconsidered “the marriage problem” in 1930, but tossed it away like a hot potato.

“I know that some unmarried teachers have their minds more on a date for the evening than on their teaching,” board member Ed Conner said. “And some married women I know would do good work teaching even if they had five husbands.”

In 1938, the district had 1,600 teachers, including 400 married women. In an effort to open up jobs for single teachers, Superintendent Ralph H. Waterhouse proposed one-year voluntary furloughs for married teachers.

The Akron Federation of Teachers called it “school wrecking.” Waterhouse scuttled the plan after receiving only a dozen volunteers.

In 1941, the board tried one last time to ban the hiring of married women as new teachers. That plan fell apart after the United States entered World War II.

Following the war, the baby boom began. By the mid-1950s, more than 49,000 pupils were enrolled in Akron Public Schools and the district had to hire hundreds of additional teachers.

“The marriage problem” no longer was a problem.

It was the answer.

Here we see macro forces again driving change.  And we see that we choose the biases (sometimes captured as common sense or conventional wisdom) that become the topic of passionate debates, at least in part, on the basis of how well these help us address the questions we consider important at any given time. 

Once school age population exploded the question changed from how to keep married women out of the workplace to how to meet the exploding need for qualified teachers…and that transformed the marriage problem from a problem to a solution. 

This illustrates another insight about politics and conflict management through this case.  The ‘marriage problem’ was not a problem for elites in Akron in the 1920s.  It was an opportunity. 

Copy editor Mark J. Price is author of The Rest Is History: True Tales From Akron’s Vibrant Past, a book from the University of Akron Press. He can be reached at 330-996-3850 or mjprice@thebeaconjournal.com.  Find this article here.

Learn to Engage

Blogger Allan Johnson provides thoughtful guidance on the importance of engaging.

Engaging with others—particularly those who see the world differently than we do.

Engaging with the controversies and conflicts of our age.

Living in ways that reflect our daily struggle to engage with questions we may never answer…such that our lives are our response to these questions.

Questions about power and privilege, justice and subordination, suffering and intolerance….  As he put it,

“We must become the question, with the living of our lives the response.”

Engaging, thoughtfully and seriously, is the way to find answers, together, in our everyday living. 

The calls to ‘love our neighbors as ourselves,’ and ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive others’ are calls to engage…with love.

 

 

Reading Our Beacon Journal

An article in today’s Akron Beacon Journal highlights the multi-layered structure of conflicts (political struggle).  You can read the entire article at the link.  Here is a selection of text with my comments in italics.

Steve Neeley did not want to get involved in Utica shale drilling.

He had invested heavily in building a country estate on 9½ acres off Pontius Road in the southwest corner of Portage County. He was concerned about hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and wanted nothing to do with it.

The 57-year-old Neeley was repeatedly approached by Chesapeake Exploration LLC, part of Chesapeake Energy Corp., to lease his land. The company offered a signing bonus of $1,200 per acre plus 12½ percent royalty of natural gas and liquids from the well. He repeatedly refused.

Then, in late 2011, Neeley and 23 neighbors who also had rejected the company’s lease offers were forced to take part in Utica shale drilling under a little-known and seldom-used provision of Ohio law called “unitization.”

With approval from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Chesapeake was allowed to include 24 unwilling landowners in the large drilling unit — an area of land under which the company can extract resources — even though the owners had not signed leases granting rights to the minerals below……

The article then provides more detail, including statements from the key disputants in this conflict.  And continues, using a sub-heading to accurately describe this as a ‘conflict of rights.’  This is an important category of conflicts in a rule of law system.  The rule of law marks the boundary between barbarism and civilization (in part) by creating individual rights (property rights being the most important). 

These rights—as seen in this story—are a way to try to define concretely what we mean by abstract concepts like ‘limited government’ (or individual rights) but we continue to constantly negotiate and renegotiate the location and meaning of these boundaries (as we must in a rule of law system) and that is one of the core foundation conflicts BEHIND what initially appears to be a simply conflict between a landowner and a drilling company. 

This is an important aspect of conflict management (and politics as conflict management) to understand:  presenting conflicts (the tips of the iceberg conflicts that are what we initially focus on as being what is important) are often ‘decided’ on the basis of who has already ‘won’ deeper, more fundamental conflicts about process or principle, jurisdiction or standing, including meta-conflicts:  that is, arguments over what the argument ought to be about…

Conflict of rights

Critics say the law effectively allows government to take something of value from private property owners and give it to for-profit companies.

But the ODNR and the industry say unitization is needed to prevent a minority of landowners from blocking their neighbors’ right to develop mineral rights…….

And after providing more detail, the story later reveals yet another layer to this conflict, another deeper (usually hidden) aspect to this conflict…

Chesapeake’s request is “reasonably necessary” — the key state standard — to boost access and increase production from the tract, ODNR wrote. Approval will allow “a greater ultimate recovery of [product] and is protective of correlative rights,” the agency wrote.

Appeal rejected……

Here we see that the presenting, tip of the iceberg, conflict (the one that ordinary folks initially consider to be the actual conflict) is a disagreement within negotiations for drilling rights on private property. 

Behind this, however, is a deeper conflict over how to regulate property (and balance regulatory rights/powers with property rights/limited government), in this case on whether ‘unitization’ is a legal way to do this or not, and beneath that over the state standard of ‘reasonably necessary.’ 

This legal test is sometimes called minimum or moderate scrutiny, and is yet another layer of conflict over how actively courts should intervene in conflicts like these.  Should courts rigorously scrutinize  the substance of a law (more likely to strike down laws) or only scrutinize to ensure that the law was passed with the proper procedures (far less likely to strike down this, or any, law)?

This meta-conflict over legal standards permeates nearly all aspects of the law and grew out of property cases from the founding of the republic and then out of equal protection jurisprudence as well. 

The farmers in this story…can be thought of as one-shotters (ie, not routine participants in the court system) only interested in seeing that their decision not to sign a lease is respected. 

But they have not been in this (courtroom) game for decades, playing for rule changes (playing for rule changes is a strategic option only available to those who are not one-shotters, but are repeat-players in the court system) to develop a body of precedent designed to support legislation like ‘unitization,’ that will (in this case) erase the farmer’s property rights. 

Emotional Correctness
Another TED Talk worth listening to...only six minutes...I recommend you check it out.

"Our challenge is to find the compassion for others that we want them to have for us.  That is emotional correctness."
 
'Political persuasion does not begin with ideas and facts or data.  It begins with being emotionally correct.  We cannot get anyone to agree with us if we can't get them to listen.'  Instead of spending time on the treadmill talking past each other, we need to learn to 'talk through our disagreements,' by putting ourselves in our opponent's shoes to see if we might be able to (as Getting to Yes puts it) invent (new) options for mutual gain.

A recent Allan Johnson blog also takes on the notion of political correctness, from a different perspective.  He argues that the term itself, like other terms once used to challenge power and privilege, has been hijacked for political purposes, reframing a once ‘powerful tool in the struggle over social justice’ so that is appears as merely another ‘petty imposition on freedom of speech.’

“The goal of such attacks was to separate behavior and speech from their political consequences, so that objections to everyday acts that enforce privilege and oppression would be seen as nothing more than a trivial protest over etiquette and hurt feelings.

…The hijacking of political correctness has helped remove the reality of privilege and oppression from public conversation and replaced it with a running battle of competing complaints about offensive acts on the one hand and the policing of personal behavior on the other.

And now ‘feminism.’ Not to mention ‘socialism’ or any other alternative to unbridled capitalism. And ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’ are not far behind as corporations and the wealthy show the rest of us what raw power can do.

What is at stake in this struggle is not only words, but the ideas we live by. And to see how it matters, this selective destruction of words and the ideas they name, we need only look at where we’ve come and where we are going. This is how it is done.”

Thanks to my good friend Kathy for connecting me with both of these texts!