>>Jay, thank you! This a fascinating article.
I read it. It troubled me. I ended up just now writing about why it
troubled me, as a way to clarify my own thinking. This emerged a
pretty long response.
I am going to paste it in here and send it to the list. I'm not sure
how much of what I wrote is new, in terms of my emerging and already
posted commentary and critiques of the SL field. And my tone is much
less reflective than some of my other posts. But here goes:
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[deletia]<<
In my opinion, Michelle Golden’s very helpful warning about misuse of the term “movement halfway houses” (MHHs) is surely not “quibbling over academic terms,” but indeed a corrective reminder to those of us who might miss the subtle but significant differences in the ways we think our academic institutions work and the actual operation of MHHs.
If we consider Highlander Folk School’s demise—labeled “subversive” by the state of Tennessee in 1959, then raided and padlocked—we are provided with a glaring example of tension arising from the only partial integration of MHHs in society that Aldon Morris refers to and Michelle highlights. I’m not aware of a university that has been treated as Highlander was in 1959, although we do have many examples of federal and National Guard troops occupying campuses for various reasons in the latter 20th century (Kent State in the 60s comes immediately to my mind). Governmental occupation of a campus to the best of my knowledge is usually done to control student groups/movements that do not receive sanction of the university itself.
Consideration of this difference would seem to support Michelle’s warning to us. Universities are perhaps too rooted and implanted within the machinery of larger society to represent the same force for social justice—although they are a charitable force. Lateral networks with community associations and vertical ties to government and corporate resources may limit the movement universities might make to be in higher tension with those bodies.
I’m not trying to suggest that universities do not differentiate themselves from the “outside.” I think the popular reference to college life as a “bubble” and service-learning as a means of “breaking out of the bubble” indicate a sort of tension with the outside other than that along the lines of social justice. Twenty years of involvement with college life has led me to see universities as cities within cities (or towns within towns, or towns close to towns, and in some cases virtual towns, etc.—if you catch my drift). Structurally they seem close to what in neighborhood research we refer to as “gated communities.” At the expense of mixing metaphors, I’ll argue that Michelle’s “gateway” reference is significant at this point: the university’s primary purpose is to help generations sustain meritocracy.
But the idea of social justice presumes a tensive relationship to larger society and not simply because organizations like Highlander are less integrated with the broader societal machinery. Social justice also requires a larger ideological or moral framework, a higher vision that demands struggle and sacrifice very different than the goals of a comfortable and prosperous life offered by society and the university (Here I would refer all to Christopher Lasch’s views in “The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics”). Highlander and the black churches that collaborated with it provided not just less “embedded” organizational frameworks, but also a cognitive structure and hope that does not necessarily fit the terms of conventional lifestyle enhancement. A commitment to social justice requires a belief that choices do not simply augment or diminish an upwardly mobile lifestyle. It often maintains that life has serious consequences beyond a lifesyle of enhanced benefits and risk avoidance (see Lasch’s discussion “Optimism or Hope,” pp. 79-81 in "TTAOH").
Let me suggest here that college life remains implanted within the current system (I would add within the current political, social, and cultural system to Michelle’s “economic system”) insofar as students, faculty, and administrators buy into this society’s idea of progress at the expense of social justice. I am not meaning to suggest that social movements within universities do not experience tension with the “outside.” I am hypothesizing that such social movements more popularly experience tension with the “outside” over competing views of what makes for an enhanced lifestyle than what makes for social justice. Student demonstrations/rioting at Ohio State and Michigan State over alcohol availability/consumption might be a case in point.
On the other hand, service-learning movements within universities may or may not be in tension with larger society regarding lifestyle issues. I would hypothesize, however, that insofar as they are committed to some idea of social justice, then they would find themselves in higher tension with American ideas of the good life, popular student culture frameworks, and with the university’s sense of mission. I think the university will do all that it can to root any student commitments into its sense of mission. The university is probably going to treat strong commitments to social justice again as “lifestyle choices” that are made by those who consume university culture. It is also likely to represent a student’s commitments to social justice as a developmentally significant stage on the way to greater personal authenticity and care, which paradoxically runs the risk of trivializing such commitments. In these ways universities may remain themselves committed to a diversity of opinions that do not exclude social justice, at least until a vision of social justice directly threatens to undermine the larger economic and socio-political goals of progress and prosperity seen as common goods by the university community.
All in all, the possibility of strong commitments to social justice by those involved in service-learning is real as long as those adherents remain aware of the structural and ideological costs of those commitments. To endure, those commitments are going to require sacrifice and struggle similar to that that those in MHHs are willing to embrace. While universities may not have the capacity to be MHHs, social movements within universities certainly may approximate something like MHHs relative to more dominant cultures, while counting the costs of no popularity and no easy go of it.
I hope my comments have assisted in the critically reflective dialogue that those of us involved with service-learning should be doing. Thank you, Michelle, for calling us to greater critical reflection on these issues. You definitely got my wheels turning.
Best wishes,
Michael Byrd
Nashville, TN