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1869, Ep. 173 with David Busch, author of Disciplining Democracy: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

1869, Ep. 173 with David Busch, author of Disciplining Democracy

Cornell University Press31min

Jonathan Hall

00:10

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with David Busch, author of the new book, Disciplining Democracy: How the Modern American University Transformed Student Activism. For over a decade, David Busch has worked as an educator and program administrator in both academic and public settings. He now teaches at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio, where he directs a summer humanities program. We spoke to David about why the conventional wisdom that universities are hotbeds of political transformation is, in fact, wrong, why universities actually discourage political activism in favor of volunteering and service learning and some promising new models for promoting engaged citizenship that could better serve students universities and our democracy as well.

Jonathan Hall

01:06

Hello, David, welcome to the podcast.

David Busch

01:09

Hello. Thanks for having me. It's our pleasure. It's our pleasure. I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Disciplining Democracy: How the Modern American University Transformed Student Activism. We're excited to be publishing the book. It's out now. Tell us the backstory to this book. How did it come? To be sure, sure. So when I think about this backstory, I think about three different threats. So the first is my undergraduate coursework and focus. And it was an undergrad, you know, it's kind of writing, I guess you call it my my senior thesis on what was really kind of that kind of existential rhetoric of students in the 1960s I had been working with a cultural historian. So, like most of my work was really focusing on, like, film, popular novels as kind of my primary sources. And if I'm honest, when I'm like thinking back on it now, the work really more captured my own kind of youthful existential angst. And so I think there was kind of interplay between kind of myself and some of the historical actors. But nonetheless, I had been kind of intrigued by, you know, these kind of mass student politics and movements of the 1960s

David Busch

02:21

so that's kind of one kind of element backstory. The second one was after I graduated with very little job opportunities. As you know, bachelor in history and psychology, I joined the AmeriCorps, which is the kind of domestic version of national service. And so I did national service, and ranging from kind of community development work with some of the kind of urban gardening in Pittsburgh and Boston, as well as just kind of tutoring and teaching.

David Busch

02:53

And so I did this work, and I were thinking at the time, it's like, Man, I like, learned a lot, like, I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about this kind of idea of civic responsibility,

David Busch

03:41

really was just about continuing that kind of cultural history of existentialism in the 60s. But I'll be honest, this is like, you know, if we have graduate students listening, I mean, this is where good mentorship fits in. I remember my first advisor, who, you know, I'm still friends with today, who clearly saw something my backstory day didn't at the time, and one of the first meetings we had, he just asked us questions like, Have you heard of this? Like service learning? Is this like teaching approach and practice that's common in higher ed? And I was like, No, I have no idea what it is. And I walked down to that meeting, went to the library, began looking at some secondary sources, and like it was in that moment that this research proposal takes shape and often became the book that it is today. So the backstory really was kind of this, like convergence of my academic interest and then some of my own kind of experience with doing national service work. Nice, nice. I like that. I like that. And you mentioned, you know, which is one of which is the core of the book, the whole idea of service learning. We'll get to that in a second. That I wanted to kind of look at the big picture, which is how we look at the the American University itself. And the conventional wisdom is that that the American University the model of the university, that it is a source of political transformation.

Jonathan Hall

05:00

And we think of the protests of against the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement that colleges and universities were a part of this, this is something that the left celebrates and the right kind of demonizes that this is it radicalizes the youth.

Jonathan Hall

05:14

And your research found that this is actually, in many cases, just a myth, and in fact that the American university functions to actually limit radical politics, rather than the reverse. And you argue that the American University, at its core, is actually a much more conservative institution than we generally believe it to be. Tell us more about this. Sure. I mean, this is a great question, and I think it like sometimes when I kind of pitch this book as a whole, I often kind of frame it as a history of a particular political tradition of the modern university. And I think this question kind of speaks to that in different ways. So it's like a really great question. And I also just think, you know, this idea of, like, this myth, right associated with the university as this kind of source of political transformation and radicalism is one that, like, you know, I myself was kind of like, you know, I drank the Kool Aid for lack of better words around that myth as well, and, and so that's, I think, what was my initial kind of motivation with this project around, especially around some of the Students in 1960s

David Busch

06:21

but I also want to be careful here when I'm kind of thinking this through, is that when I use the word conservative, I don't mean it in this kind of partisan sense of the word, right? And so whether by conservative, mean the kind of cultural sensibilities of the institution, and so these are like the habits and practices and commitment to tradition that is still very common in the higher ed landscape, even as we've seen, it's kind of more general evolution. And so the way to think about this goes to that title, disciplining democracy. And so as I kind of chart out in kind of the initial framing of the story is that when we think about the verb to discipline and the noun discipline is they both evoke a set of ideas central to the university, disciplining the mind notes the kind of training of mental functions, and discipline provides that kind of demarcated space for one to really engage with a particular branch of knowledge. And so both the verb and noun are conservative in form. They value and seek to kind of transmit it, kind of inherited forms of intellectual traditions across time. And like, I need to be clear for myself. I mean, like, when you're trained as a graduate student, going through your graduate programming, this is what you're doing. You're kind of being trained within that particular discipline. And there are certain kind of boundaries within that exploration. So what I argue in my book is that the idea of disciplines and disciplining are not necessarily inherently static. They are evolving,

David Busch

07:53

but albeit conservatively. And so the thing I just want to point to, and there's a long, longer discussion within the book itself is that when emerge at mid century, was our particular discipline and culture that, on one hand, kind of maintained this kind of longer history and emphasis around kind of service to the nation, right? So when you think about just the history of the university and the college in this country, I mean, the kind of design and formation was always in service to the country in various different forms. And of course, that kind of social compact changes over time. And the one that I think really becomes the other part of this kind of discipline and culture that becomes important about this book is this kind of triumph of this kind of technocratic, value neutralist model of disciplining. There's really been some great work. There's Ethan Shrum who wrote, you know, instrumental University, also with Cornell. But then there's also work by Julie Rubin around the kind of marginalization of morality that kind of speak to the different ways in which the idea of kind of moral concern gets kind of expunged around kind of disciplinary engagement and knowledge production. And so one of the things I kind of really look at is like, actually, this kind of marginalization of morality within a discipline and culture of the university was actually one of the key motivating issues for young activists and some of the faculty supporters they tell so again, I just want to kind of chart that out a little bit because, again, I think it helps provide a different framework that gets beyond that kind of partisan rancor and partisan myths around the university. And really just tries to kind of show like there is this embedded institutional culture that in some ways might be its kind of positive form, that it is actually kind of a bit slow engagement, but that that kind of slowness its nature also sets boundaries when you try to think about moving some kind of a participatory politics into this culture as well.

Jonathan Hall

09:56

Interesting, interesting, yeah, I hear what you're saying. Saying, you know the you the terms you said, like value neutral or the marginalization of morality. Let's just keep things even keel. Don't rock the boat. But what prompted you to, one of the reasons that prompted you to do this research, is that you started asking yourself, What happened to all these mass student protests of the 60s, those certainly weren't value neutral or morality was not put on the sidelines. Those were driven by morality. Why are we in this war? Why? Why aren't we? Why aren't there civil rights for everyone in this country, things like this? This morality was first and foremost in the students minds. And so you did this research, you looked at seven universities, and you found that the mass student protests and politics of the 60s were reconstituted over the years into what we were talking now is the service learning program and community service volunteerism. Tell us more about how, tell us more about this evolution. How did that happen, from these hot, fiery protest to now just go out and volunteer and everything's gonna be okay? Yeah?

David Busch

11:06

I mean, it's good question. So one, you know, I want to go at this in a couple different ways, but one again, is to keep that kind of discipline and culture in mind. So again, you're thinking about a culture that has kind of boundaries, particular ways of thinking about kind of knowledge engagement, and then of culture around kind of value neutralism. And so one way to think about is to think about how that culture kind of functions as a filter, right? And so you have this kind of unrest, this movement among students in which they're demanding the kind of university to be morally concerned about the engagement the war and lack of concern when it came to civil rights. The book itself goes all the way up into the 1980s and concerns issues around South Africa and the divestment movement, but the institution is always going to say, well, we can't take political positions because that goes against this kind of culture and ethos of value neutrality. But one thing I like to really be careful in this book is that I think many of the university leaders and the presidents that are involved in these different case studies do see the kind of value of what the students are demanding and the kind of experiences that are articulating through these movements. So they kind of turn to them in a way in which they say, Well, how can we embrace these elements of like, the value of engaging with your community, the kind of participation and kind of whether it's local issues or even national or international issues, in a way that is valuable to the kind of civic growth of the students while still maintaining right, that kind of distinction between, well, we can't, like, take these political positions right, and so it is to that kind of convergence is where you then see these programs develop again. There the way that, like, I would encourage kind of your audience to kind of look at this as like, if you go on any college or university website today, you will find some program and a really, probably fancy page devoted to the civic engagement volunteer programs. And oftentimes, what you might see in their kind of short histories is that they kind of emerge out of these, you know, the 2000s but again, the book, or as the book shows, is that these programs go much, much deeper. And again, it's through those thick, that kind of conversions. And again, what you'll see mostly, and I would be careful here, because I do think there are some, some amazing programs out there, but for the most part, these programs, as you suggesting already, John, is like they really are designed for students to you know, if you're someone that's interested in doing some tutoring, volunteer at the Community Food Bank, it's a way of students kind of coordinating an effort with maybe a fraternity, a sorority or some other Club to kind of do that work. You also see, like, you know, there's that kind of very common approach with alternative spring breaks where you're trying to get students to not go to Miami, but actually go do some some kind of volunteer service, right? And so these programs are kind of the hubs for this. And like, again, I'm always careful in how I frame this out. Because other thing I just want to say is that, as a teacher who runs, you know, a humanities program is I actually think these kind of engagements are really important, right? Like, I think there is value within it. But again, this still goes back to the larger story I'm trying to tell how it is revelatory of this larger political tradition. And so when you read these efforts through the longer history of of the University Institute of protest, they have kind of two important effects, kind of especially for what I think about how students understand their roles within a democracy. So one. One hand. You know, the programs themselves enable, I think, university leaders, again, of different stripes, to employ a rhetorical strategy that anytime a campus protest or movement emerges, they frame the student activist as, quote, unquote, kind of disrupting classes or occupying a canvas screen in a negative light, as compared to those who are doing kind of, quote, unquote, the good volunteer work incentives. And again, you see this happen over and over again in all my case studies, Michigan State's a very good example. When it was President Wharton who kind of framed like, Okay, we have these anti Vietnam War protests. You see how disruptive they are, as compared to our volunteer center of our students engaged in this particular way. And so those type of strategies over time continue to play out. So that's why that frame it as this kind of recycling of a logic that often kind of de legitimizes student activists and in particular tactics, but then also, more broadly, it kind of limits the terrain of what we even mean by engaged citizenship for students. And then the second thing is, and this is what I think I'm more kind of interested in as as kind of a kind of area of further exploration is always these programs have kind of fragmented community service and political activism. So when you look at the roots of these programs, for instance, one of the kind of key organizations of the 60s, but in particular, even the programs themselves, was the student non violent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. I'm sure many people are familiar with organization. This is kind of often the student wing of the civil rights movement and did really important work in Mississippi and Alabama. But one things that I would argue was one of their political strengths was the ways they combined community service right like they were doing food drives and book drives for communities within the kind of back roads of Mississippi, but with efforts around political power and organizing, and so here's actually the combination of the two that is where, like the young students organization, I think, grew as actually engaged citizens, but also thinking about just the general impact of the work of that organization in The South, the institutional programs that emerge kind of from these efforts. Oftentimes they maintain similar appeals to something like justice, but again, they're largely still just focused on community service and volunteerism. And again, I think there are some logistical concerns around it, but it's really, again, I'm just going to point back to this. It goes back to that kind of culture of disciplining that discourage and limits any forms of actions that are deemed, quote, unquote political and that might run against this kind of culture of value neutrality. So I think like the result is this students today, when I think especially kind of its effect on how we think about democracy more broadly is that students move through their education in college or university thinking and graduating with this view that engaged citizenship, largely This means volunteering during community service, or in some cases, maybe attending a city council meeting, which again, all very important, I think, to a functioning democracy, but, but it's a very kind of narrow definition. And I think some ways these programs have kind of narrowed that larger terrain for how we think about engaged citizenship.

Jonathan Hall

18:31

Interesting, interesting. Yeah, it's fascinating to see this fragmentation, as you say, splitting the community service from the activism. It seems like the community service is, it doesn't necessarily have to support the status quo, but it's, it's, it's easy for people to swallow, versus, as you were saying, the students are protesting that they're disruptor they're disruptors, and they're disrupting things, and they're, they're troublemakers, but we need troublemakers. Certainly so. With all that in mind, in addition to what you were saying in the in the second question, as far as universities, at their core conservative, they're slow to move. What are some other models that that you can envision, or even if there are any case studies that you're like, here's a school that's doing it correctly, or here's a way to go forward. What are some other models that you think would be better than what we currently are seeing right now?

David Busch

19:29

Yeah, I mean, again, isn't that great question? I'll be honest, this is probably the harder of the questions, but important one, you know, it's one of those, as you see, when you get to the conclusion of the book where it is like, you know, as a historian, we're really good at kind of tracking this longer narrative, but then it's okay, but so what? So let me be clear, you know, I kind of, I'm thinking this through as well, with some kind of contemporary practitioners, kind of in this field. But, you know, I think there. Have been kind of important developments, especially more recently, I think that actually speaks pretty effectively to the history that that I kind of write in the book, especially around kind of civic engagement and service learning, one end of it in particular, though I still find it to be a bit marginal in practice, but I think least it's there's a spread of it across the university, which is a movement towards kind of, although it's framed as kind of participatory research, which helps bring students research and researchers and community activists together in ways that are kind of a bit more equitable, and kind of speak to these earlier models. I of course, don't have it in front of me, but there's really this great book or quote that I pull in from a former SNCC activist that kind of critiques, you know, kind of prevailing forms of volunteerism in higher ed in, you know, the the 90s, of the ways in which, like, you know, like today, what you'll see, like, Martin Luther King day comes around, and so this is when the University says, Okay, go out and do volunteer service. Um. And you know what this former activist was kind of pointing out, is that, like when we think about the legacy of King, it was never about simply charity to the other right. It was actually more about, how do you work with someone else to create new conditions to live in? And so I think the participatory model of research, I think is kind of in that tradition where we're trying to move away between a hierarchy between the kind of researcher and the student and the community on the receiving end, in which they're kind of collaborative in that way.

David Busch

21:35

But I also want to kind of go out in kind of two other ways this question. One thing that really is a common thread in the book, is that this culture around disciplining is often reflected within the kind of administrative process of the university. And so one way to kind of think about this is that one of the things that really emerges, and I think someone could write a whole separate book on this, is all the different rules for when and where you can hold a campus protest. And again, these are rules that really develop out of the 1960s so just about today. So a student today, if they are like, Listen, I have a organization, we want to raise an issue around this. And again, this could be across the political spectrum. They have to go through all these levels of approval to have a particular space and time for a protest, and you know you're gonna have a certain day, and there's only a certain space that's voted to it. And so this process inherently just mitigates any disruptive potential, right? Because it part of the value often, of protests in particular, is how it ends up being kind of organic and surprising, and oftentimes pulls people in ways, in surprising ways. But if you structure it and limit it in certain ways, it loses that potential. I also think, has these weird unintended consequences too. It was last year, you know, with especially, again, when we're thinking about protests in the news, and campus protests in particular at Columbia. And what happened is that you had organizational groups. They were like, I wanted to have a protest around, you know, what would be the kind of anti war, pro Palestinian position. And then, of course, you had groups that were on the quote, unquote, other side of it. And so what happened at Columbia is they both, they both went through the administrative processes. And what happened is that one part of the campus green was devoted to the kind of anti war, pro Palestinian position, and other one was not, and was that kind of pro Israel standpoint. And so then it creates these conditions where then there's actually no productive discourse happening. And it actually creates these both real but also metaphorical walls that I think is reflective, then, of the kind of failure of the university for providing a space for genuine, kind of public deliberation. And so I think it's on that kind of last point, you know, especially the kind of public deliberation piece of it. You know, there's this kind of recent movement around kind of programs oftentimes coming through these civic engagement centers around kind of civil dialog. And like, how do you get students to kind of engage with these issues across differences? And again, I think the spirit of them come from the right place, and especially thinking about what happened at Columbia. But I also think, you know, like, there's a model for this one that actually was quite successful from the 1960s though limited in kind of time and space, which was the teaching model. And you know, this was a model in which, you know, it brought administrators together, faculty together, students together, residents from the local community together, in which the university was used at a space where it says, Okay, here's this political issue, and this political issue is divisive around the Vietnam War. Let us debate this issue in an honest way. Let us think. About ways in which we can engage students and faculty around it. You know, like the Vietnam moratorium, this kind of movement of organizing in DC comes out of the teach in movement, so it allows students to move ideas into action. But it also had teeth, to a certain extent, right? I think the issues right now with the kind of civil dialog movement. It's like, I don't think it's enough to just say, well, let's bring people from different backgrounds going to have a dialog. And then they all walk out of the room and, like, the institutional policy or concerns don't actually have, you know, much change surrounding it, right? And what the teacher was trying to do is like, Okay, if we deliberate around this, we then want right, the university actually then to take a position right, whether it's through financial means or just even the statement of positionality, but as long as it's rooted in a process of deliberation, I think that's been some of the critiques is that presidents would take these positions right, representing the University, but it wouldn't be part of a lot like a bigger community process going on in university. Now, of course, the caveat to all this, John, because we were just chatting about this in our kind of current context, you know, such an effort with like, the teach in like requires, on one hand, an amount of institutional autonomy that just seems almost inconceivable in our current context, especially thinking about what's going on between the universities and administration. But the other other way to think about this, and this is actually something that has become even more of interest to me recently, is that it also requires a shift away from the disciplining cultures and silos that are just so common right within the university is like, what was value about the teaching is that you would be bringing right a scholar from engineering to be in conversation with the scholar from the social sciences, to be in conversation with the activist in the local community in a way that, like forces one to rethink some of these boundaries of our knowledge cultures. And I think that's one of the actually, the even harder areas is like how to actually transform those, those cultures that, again, as we started, tend to have a very kind of conservative tendency. And I just want to end with this last point, you know, and it, I'm actually kind of working through a piece to see if it actually kind of works out in terms of kind of a clear argument around this. But I start this book out, and I don't think this would surprise listeners so much is that I allude to, you know, Tom Hayden students for democratic society, and the Port Huron statement, probably because it kind of rhetorically captures this, this larger vision of, kind of turning towards the university as a source of social change, right? And that's kind of that progressive vision that really has lived on so much of political discourse since the 1960s if I keep on thinking about this piece, where I go, well maybe Tom Hayden was wrong, right? And so one of the things I kind of focus on, or I've been thinking more about recently is that many of the historical actors and books, not a lot, but there's this kind of minority of thinkers who maintain that, like, maybe the university at its best is this intellectual third space for like, reflection and providing context for their activism. But you know, the actual, real work of kind of engaged citizenship, social activism, those are things that just are always going to happen outside of institution, right? That efforts to kind of try to create programs with the institution will always mitigate them, right? And so this is where, again, there's this kind of, partly this history of kind of SNCC, but also to certain extent, SDS creating, what were these alternative institutions, right? So students could still be at once engaged from the intellectual side in the university, but then when they wanted it to participate from a political standpoint, they had these alternative institutions that were the kind of resource for it. And so, like, one way I might end this, there's this activist from San Francisco State, Michael vozic, in the 1960s and I think he captures kind of my own kind of thinking of how I kind of navigate some of the lessons of this book. And he was in this conversation with some activists at San Francisco State, about thinking about, Well, should we a program, kind of in the institution that supports the work of activism, or, as some argued, like, you know, we need to keep it separate, right? Because it will ultimately kind of mitigate the type of work we want to do. And Michael said this, he just goes, you know, the real difficulty, and I'm quoting him here, is, trying to work inside and outside at the same time, the really radical experiment is trying to be in both places. And so like, for listeners that are intrigued with this book and thinking about lessons, is like, what is that kind of really radical experiment today that is kind of in both places? That. Hold its value. So I'll end with that.

Jonathan Hall

30:05

Those are some great ideas. I like that a lot of having some alternative institutions to mitigate against the conservative nature of the university, but we can also

Jonathan Hall

30:17

throw away what the university has to offer. So this whole idea of having a foot in both worlds sounds like a reasonable idea. And so I would encourage anyone that's interested in this conversation to grab a copy of David's new book, Disciplining Democracy: How the Modern American University Transformed Student Activism. It was great talking to you, David.

Jonathan Hall

30:39

You too. Thanks John. Really appreciate the conversation. Opportunity to talk more about the book that was David Bush, author of the new book, Disciplining Democracy: How the Modern American University Transformed Student Activism. Use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off his new book at our website. Cornellpress.cornell.edu.

Jonathan Hall

31:03

Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast.

Jonathan Hall

31:08

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