Vote – Roth on Wesleyan

Although the conditions for stimulating civic engagement have changed, the importance of making informed choices in determining the country’s political leadership has rarely been clearer. We won’t be knocking on doors in the immediate future, but there are many other ways to get involved. Wesleyan continues to support #E2020, and we need the energy of students, faculty and staff to make this work! I recently wrote about this subject for Inside Higher Education.

In recent days, I was looking for a break from reading about COVID-19, and what did I stumble upon? Articles about the disappointing turnout of young voters in the Democratic primaries thus far. In the United States, ever since 18-year-olds got the vote in 1972, people between 18 and 29 have voted in smaller numbers than other age groups.

Part of the reason for this, apparently, is that it takes time to adjust to any public activity. Voting is a habit that develops from being part of a community, and it takes a while to get it going, especially when you are just entering adulthood and pulling together an independent life.

Reading about voting, like reading about anything these days, brought me back to ideas of contagion, isolation and interaction. Maybe the failure to vote is like the widely reported failure of younger people to self-isolate; they don’t feel they belong to the community that’s at risk. We are now asking for immediate feelings of communal connection when we ask people to stay away from one another. These preventive measures are encouraged to protect some of the most vulnerable: the aging, people with underlying and chronic health issues, the economically disadvantaged. But have we encouraged connectivity of young people with these groups?

The term being used for these measures is “social isolation.” A grim term indeed, but, as Nicholas Christakis has said, we should really be speaking of “physical isolation.” After all, we can remain safely isolated from one another physically while staying socially connected. Via our ubiquitous technological networks, we can have a virtuous social and political contagion even as we avoid malignant physical contagion by keeping six feet apart.

And maybe it’s virtuous contagion that we need to stimulate participation in the vital 2020 elections. Given the current administration’s penchant for voter suppression and the very real problem we would face if people had to come out to vote during an epidemic, one can easily imagine attempts to use the fear of contamination to make it more difficult to cast ballots. This would especially be the case in urban areas where voting happens in crowded places.

The best way to attack cynicism, apathy or voter suppression is through authentic civic engagement between elections. One of the great things about this kind of engagement is that it is contagious. As we replicate efforts to bring people into the political process, we create habits of engagement and participation. Concern for the public sphere — like a virus — can spread. Usually this happens through face-to-face interaction, but now we must turn to virtual tools — notorious in recent years for being deployed to misinform or stir hatred — to strengthen networks for democracy.

At Wesleyan University, we’ve begun a project called Engage 2020 that aims to bring more students into the public sphere to increase their civic preparedness and broaden their liberal learning. The next eight months offer a crucial opportunity for civic participation and liberal education through engagement with the public sphere. With the launch of the E2020 initiative, we provided a number of pathways for student skill and leadership development via direct participation in civic life. On a nonpartisan basis, we offered mini-internships linked with classes, funded student work to increase voter participation and awarded small grants to students to travel to areas where political races were of particular concern.

Of course, circumstances have now changed. We no longer want to encourage travel or to contribute — directly or indirectly — to the kinds of rallies characteristic of political campaigns. Still, there are other ways for colleges and universities to encourage meaningful civic engagement — and to make that engagement contagious.

We can support our students (through internships or virtual fieldwork classes for credit) in helping other people find out how they can register to vote or in working on campaigns, all from home — plugging into virtual networks that allow “knocking on doors” from computer to computer, from phone to phone. Working with organizations like Campus Compact or Civic Nation, MyFaithVotes or Let America Vote, the Chamber of Commerce or the League of Women Voters, students can connect with large numbers of people through networks that don’t require travel, or even hand shaking!

Although some of the commentary on the difficulty of Senator Bernie Sanders’s campaign focuses on the failure to increase turnout among 20-somethings, it’s important to note that many thousands of college students across the country are already stepping up to their political responsibility. In our E2020 initiative, we’ve invited several other colleges and universities with strong civic engagement programs to join us in embracing the educational value of political participation. More than 75 quickly signed up — from large community colleges to small liberal arts colleges, from HBCUs and Christian colleges to large, secular research universities. They recognize that civic engagement is good for students, for their institutions and for the country.

This is an anxious time, a time when we have to stay away from our neighbors, our fellow citizens, in order to protect ourselves and the greater good. In circumstances like these, some social networks break down, and we see their disintegration in examples of hoarding, price gouging and general selfishness masquerading as independence. But we also see other social networks coming alive as neighbors look out for one another — providing food, medicine, even communal serenading.

This is also a crucial time for American democracy, an inflection point that will determine the direction of the country and of the world’s environment for many years to come. Colleges and universities have a duty to pay attention to the physical health of their constituents while also attending to the civic health of the nation. By promoting a virtuous contagion of thoughtful, networked civic engagement, our institutions can prove once again that we can respond to dire challenges and make a potent contribution to the public good.

Tomorrow is Election Day, and there is a polling place right on the Wesleyan campus. You can find out more about voting in Middletown through our Jewett Center for Community Partnerships here.

As vital as voting is, I argue in an essay in Inside Higher Education that colleges and universities should do more in this time of peril for freedom of inquiry and expression. I reproduce the piece here.

In a year when inducements to political violence have become normalized at the highest level, colleges and universities must do more than just encourage our students to vote. Free expression, free inquiry and fact-based discussion are essential to higher education, and we must protect them. Diversity and inclusion are core commitments, and so we must oppose those people who cultivate hatred against immigrants or trade in racist stereotypes. And when government officials go beyond obfuscation to outright lying, we must stand up and object. If we don’t, we become complicit in the calamitous corruption infecting our society, and it may not be long before the higher education we offer is no longer worthy of the name.

There may be no more obvious attack on freedom of expression and inquiry than the Trump administration’s regular demonization of the press. Can it be that we have gotten used to campaign rallies at which reporters are described as “disgusting” and the news media is labeled an enemy of the people? Can we abide a president who tells the media to “clean up its act” when it is the target of terrorism? If one objects to this crude stoking of animosity, defenders of the regime will accuse one of “pearl clutching,” as if defending the dignity of journalists were akin to protecting snobbish privileges. When authorities in Saudi Arabia devised their heinous plot to torture and murder a critic of the regime, did they assume their friends in the White House would understand their desire to punish a writer for The Washington Post? Is objecting to Jamal Khashoggi’s murder pearl clutching?

Education is degraded when freedom of inquiry and expression are undermined. We must not be lured, however, into confronting the poisonous partisan dogmatism coming from Washington with similar dogmatism of our own. If we do so, we will merely be preaching to our own choirs. We must instead promote the importance of intellectual diversity in higher education, and we must beware of confusing the critical thinking we value with the ready-made ideological positions held by the majority of professors and students. Colleges and universities must remain open to a variety of intellectual and cultural traditions if they are to speak meaningfully about freedom of inquiry.

We must also not let the administration and its supporters make a mockery of American aspirations toward diversity, equity and inclusion in our institutions and in the larger society. We at colleges and universities have an obligation to preserve those aspirations, for they are essential to the learning environments that we aim to create. The current demonization of immigrants, for example, is meant to instill a sense of fear and insecurity among folks who have lived in this country for many years as productive members of society. Many of our higher education institutions offer support to our undocumented colleagues and friends, and we have pledged not to voluntarily cooperate with federal authorities seeking to intimidate or deport them.

It is true enough that politicians from various points on the political spectrum have long pontificated, stretched the truth, pumped themselves up and distorted inconvenient facts. But over the last two years, we have seen a callous disregard for truth become an ordinary part of public life. Educators must push back on this trend, but not just by digging into our own ideological commitments. People of goodwill, of course, can disagree about issues concerning freedom, the role of the military, the importance of markets and the responsibilities of the state to protect law and order and to help the most vulnerable members of society. No political tradition has a monopoly on the truth. In fact, that’s why intellectual diversity and freedom of inquiry are so vital: we need that diversity and freedom to see the errors of our own ways and to discover more equitable and effective ways of facing the issues before us.

But we must also recognize that our public discourse has entered a new arena of willful misrepresentation. The dismissal of the dangers of human-induced climate change is the most egregious example of the repudiation of science for the sake of political expediency. President Trump routinely denies having said things that he has been recorded saying, and his mantra of complete denial when confronted with the facts is spreading to other politicians. From issues of sexual misconduct to votes against requiring insurance companies to protect those with pre-existing conditions, politicians have learned from this president that lying (loudly and repeatedly) works when the truth is inconvenient. Surely, educational institutions have as a core part of their mandate to expose falsehoods, to gain agreement on the facts of a matter and to leverage those facts for better public policy.

In the summer of 2016, I wrote in these pages to urge those involved in higher education to join forces “to stop the Trumpian calamity.” I spoke out on electoral politics at that time with great reluctance because I do not think it appropriate for university presidents publicly to back one candidate or another. But over the last few years, from Hungary to Brazil, from Italy to the United States, we have seen the intensification of authoritarian, populist political forces around the world. They all demonize a group of outsiders, and they all substitute appeals to myth and violence for inquiry and discussion.

We in higher education must not treat this intensification as a normal dimension of our public life. This political movement is antithetical to learning; it is anathema to research and teaching and to any possibilities for democracy. Our mission in higher education requires us to oppose it. This is not a call for partisan, political indoctrination. It is a call to preserve intellectual diversity and freedom of inquiry by standing up to the poisonous pollution of our public life.

Promoting the ‘Virtuous Contagion’ of Civic Engagement

Voting is Good but Colleges Must Do More