The Struggle Against Positivism

Academics can be public intellectuals, but they can’t pose as "experts."

By Harry C. Boyte

In our youth effort, Public Achievement, for example, more than ten thousand young people from the ages of eight to eighteen have created public projects on issues they care about (the issues have to be legal and nonviolent, and they have to "make a public contribution"). In teams coached by adults and based in schools and community centers in four states and Northern Ireland, the young people address problems such as gun violence, racial conflict, school change, teen pregnancy, and "saving the rain forest." They often choose issues that affect the overall climate of their schools or communities, and they learn skills such as negotiation, public speaking, letter writing, interviewing, and dealing with those in authority.

Public Achievement has made clear the immense untapped public talents and hidden passions of young people. It has also helped generate a concept of the citizen not simply as a voter or a volunteer but as a "co-creator" of the common world and democracy itself. Young people are seen as "citizens today," not just as "citizens in preparation."

Our efforts at the Humphrey Institute are not unique. Campuses and communities across the country have formed partnerships to promote community service, citizenship, and democratic renewal. An important partnership has developed between Trinity College and the city of Hartford, Connecticut; a university-wide citizenship curriculum is in place at Tufts University; and there is new attention to public scholarship at Oregon State University and at the American Association for Higher Education. Since the early 1990s, Campus Compact, an organization of college and university presidents founded to promote community service, has shifted its focus to fostering citizenship and democratic renewal.

These changes are welcome in a time of falling voting levels and wide feelings of civic powerlessness. But they are still just beginnings. If they are to amount to much, faculty members need to take sustained leadership roles. We must do so partly for reasons of self-interest: only through a recovery of our public purposes can we resist the forces pushing us toward reorganization according to the dictates of the market and toward distance education as the basic paradigm on the premise that teaching is, at bottom, simply "instruction."

Yet we face a great obstacle. The stance of the "outside expert," woven into the fabric of our work and sustained by a discredited theory, positivism, weakens us tremendously in political terms. As intellectuals in the Eastern bloc had sounded the death knell of communism by 1989, we need to put an end to an outdated philosophy in which few believe any more, but which holds us all in thrall.

Predecessors

Barriers

At the Humphrey Institute, we engage in "action research" in which community partners are co-builders of knowledge. Our theory-building experiments in Public Achievement and elsewhere have highlighted the promise of civic education, but they have made evident the barriers to this kind of endeavor.

College presidents, such as the distinguished group of more than three hundred who signed the 1999 Presidents’ Fourth of July Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education, have made eloquent calls for civic engagement and education. Yet whatever their philosophies, administrators experience enormous pressures that push them in other directions.

A November 5, 1999, article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Restoring Sanity to an Academic World Gone Mad," by James Carlin, past chair of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, points to these pressures. Carlin’s complaints are what administrators hear all the time: "Faculty members do ever more meaningless research while spending fewer and fewer hours in the classroom during an academic year that we have shortened in recent decades," he writes. Speaking as "a businessman who has learned something about management and controlling costs," Carlin states that "never have I observed anything as unfocused or mismanaged as higher education." Presidents must "take charge," he admonishes. The power of "faculty unions" needs to be broken; tenure must be seen as an idea "whose time has passed"; and classroom hours must increase sharply.

As draconian as Carlin sounds, his proposals pale beside the predictions and prescriptions of some within the ranks of administrators themselves. On March 13 Arthur Levine’s lead op-ed in the New York Times, "The Soul of a New University," sketched a chilling future in which students truly turn into "customers." Levine, president of Columbia Teachers College and once known as a progressive reformer, calls on higher education to wake up or get left behind. Leaders need to recognize the enormous pace of technological change and take action "not only to adapt our institutions but to transform them."

"Why do we need the physical plant called the college?" he asks. Most students of the future will acquire what they need in "on-line instruction, with education at home or in the workplace." He cites as an example the for-profit University of Phoenix, which provides distance education. He quotes a corporate executive who says higher education is "the next health care: a poorly managed nonprofit industry which was overtaken by the profit-making sector."

Levine calls for leaders to recognize "the convergence in knowledge-producing organizations," from television and book publishing to universities, and go all out for distance education and new technology as rapidly as possible. "In the years ahead, every knowledge-producing organization will begin to produce similar kinds of products," he predicts. Unless higher education gets on the bandwagon, it will go the way of the railroad, which lost out to the airlines when it failed to recognize that "it was in the transportation industry," not rail travel. "The reality," he says, is that "colleges and universities are not in the campus business but the education business."

I am not a technophobe. New technologies may have the potential to create in higher education parallels to the more craft-oriented, human-scale environment that Jason Epstein envisions for books in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books: "once more a cottage industry of diverse, creative, autonomous units" in which the ties between writer, editor, and audience will again become close and interactive.

But this transformation is certainly not inevitable. Effecting it will require us to reclaim power over technological change and over the marketplace. Yet a sense of human agency is precisely what is missing from the world view of Levine, and feelings of collective powerlessness, in my experience, afflict many faculty. We live with a fatalism fed by the dominant, if hidden, operating philosophy that structures our lives and work, a silent world view that disempowers us by isolating us just as surely as it turns our students into Levine’s customers.

Dangerous Philosophy

—Shoshana Zuboff, Harvard Magazine, 1988

Shortly after her book, In the Age of the Smart Machine, appeared, Shoshana Zuboff argued in Harvard Magazine that in the world of new technologies, active, informed, thoughtful citizens are indispensable. Higher education must function "to remind students of the classical themes in human experience, create a sense of kinship between present and past, and heighten understandings of the continuities in the human condition," she wrote. More than a decade later, higher education’s role in developing such a citizenry is more crucial than ever.

But certain roadblocks prevent us from carrying out this task. One important barrier is faculty members’ disengagement from public life, a pattern that infuses our practices and culture, and that disempowers us politically and intellectually. Sustaining this disengagement is the philosophy of positivism. Positivism structures our research, our disciplines, our teaching, and our institutions, even though it has long been discredited intellectually. It is a genie that academia let loose long ago, now lurking below the surface and threatening our destruction.

Faculty members undergo an insidious socialization, especially in graduate school. We learn a stance of ironic detachment from our fellow citizens, seeing ourselves outside what Jane Addams, cofounder of the Hull House settlement in Chicago, called "the common lot." We embody such aloofness in different ways. The image of the detached and objective scholar and teacher leads to the expert stance of "fixing problems," "discovering truths," and "dispensing knowledge."

This image has roots in the influence of German universities on American scholars in the late nineteenth century, as the Princeton historian Daniel Rodgers has argued in Atlantic Crossings. Based on the German model of the pursuit of knowledge only for its own sake—without regard for social value or consequences—American graduate students in economics learned an ethos of scientific "objectivity" and a model of policy making in private consultation with political leadership, far removed from public involvement.

The ethos of detachment was further fed by an uncritical celebration of science, and especially by the philosophers of positivism, who argued that science rested on the discovery of permanent, atemporal standards of rationality that could be found and then applied. Scientific method was purported to be pure; its aim was to find abstract, universal truths "out there" that could be brought back to enlighten the masses, like the philosopher king who returns to Plato’s cave.

Its overwhelmingly male practitioners were considered men of objectivity. "The miracles of science seem to be inexhaustible," wrote Walter Lippmann in 1922. "The men of science," he urged, "should have acquired much of the intellectual authority which churchmen once exercised." As Lippmann’s observation illustrated, for many public intellectuals, science was the new religion.

Such views triumphed after World War II in the context of the Cold War and the arms race. Positivism identified the detached, rational observer as the highest judge of truth and the most effective problem solver. Whatever its justifications in the struggle against communism, today the philosophy of detachment feeds a crisis in democracy. People "hate politics," as the journalist E. J. Dionne has put it. They feel that public institutions are outside the citizenry—that they are "they," not "us." In addition, many people sense that technological change is beyond human control.

Problems of Content and Perspective

Our implicit theories of knowledge assume the specific understanding of scientific inquiry that derives from positivism, for a time the dominant philosophy of science. This model delegitimates "ordinary knowledge" and depreciates the capacities, talents, and interests of the nonexpert and the amateur. It is antagonistic to common sense, folk traditions, and craft and practical knowledge mediated through everyday life experience. Of course, "common sense" is not always right, nor "science" always wrong. I argue only that many different kinds of valuable knowledge support public life and that conventional academic approaches slight the nonexpert.

Contemporary philosophers of science have shown that science itself is a process full of trial and error, messiness, ambiguity, and social interaction and cooperation; it is far different from what positivists imagined. Thinkers from a range of fields—from pragmatic philosophy and interpretive social theory to women’s studies and action research—have recently shaped an alternative pragmatic ground for knowledge theory. They argue that sound knowledge of any kind is communally generated and public in nature. Provisional, open-ended, and evolving, it best emerges from real-world problems and needs constant testing through practical action. Apprenticeships and experiential learning are often used to communicate it. (Under this theory of knowledge, the "anecdote," derided in mainstream social science, becomes key, because it is the touchstone for testing theory.)

As Richard Bernstein, a past president of the American Philosophical Association, put it in Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, knowledge of any kind, whether "scientific" or not, is part of the human experience, and made by a continuing community: "A community or a polis is not something that can be made or engineered. . . . [It involves] the coming into being of a type of public life that can strengthen solidarity, public freedom, a willingness to talk and to listen, mutual debate, and a commitment to rational persuasion."

The ideal of the detached scholar may be discredited in theory but it would be a mistake to minimize the challenges of overcoming it in practice. As Steve Elkin, a political theorist at the University of Maryland who edits A PEGS Journal: The Good Society, argues, "Our disciplines absorbed positivism in the 1950s when it was at its peak of influence, and then they stopped thinking about the foundations."

In 1989 Donna Shalala, who was then chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, illustrated the difficulties in the David Dodds Henry Lecture she presented at the University of Illinois. Shalala made an impassioned plea for public service and social justice, for struggles against racism and sexism, and for environmentalism and peace—and she wed these improvements to an unvarnished expert model. She upheld "the ideal of a disinterested technocratic elite" fired by the moral mission of "society’s best and brightest in service to its most needy." The imperative, she said, was "delivering the miracles of social science" to fix society’s social problems, just as doctors "cured juvenile rickets in the past."

The political consequences of such a stance have been played out in Shalala’s career as U.S. secretary of health and human services. Thus she made not a murmur of public dissent when the Clinton administration abolished welfare, with no substantial public work program to take its place. Although she probably disagreed with the policy (as did her special assistant Peter Edelman, who resigned in protest), her self-understanding as a leader of the "disinterested technocratic elite" radically limited her political options.

The positivist perspective is at work in many ways. As Davydd Greenwood, an anthropologist at Cornell University, and his colleague, Morten Levin, have pointed out in An Introduction to Action Research, positivism structures most social science research. It assumes that research agendas are best developed by detached researchers outside public settings, and it puts a premium on mathematical and quantitative approaches, predictive theories, and abstract formulations.

Positivism also shapes contemporary patterns of professional education, credentialing, and continuing education, as theorists and historians of professionalism, such as Donald Schon and Ellen Lagemann, have demonstrated. I would argue that positivism is at work in the purportedly "blind" (and excessively specialized) peer review of journal articles. Positivism, by example at least, also molds the position of sharp critics such as deconstructionists, whose inaccessible language is a measure of their distance from the public.

Isolation

Everywhere the sense of detachment and the stance of "objectivity," which are positivism’s legacy, lead to isolation and competition. As part of a research project for the Kettering Foundation, I interviewed faculty members at research institutions such as the Universities of Minnesota and Michigan and Cornell, Duke, and Brown Universities; I also spoke with professors at liberal arts and community colleges such as Augsburg College and Kansas City Kansas Community College. I heard many stories about lost community and the disappearance of public purpose. Faculty recounted experiences of isolation—and said they never discussed such things with colleagues. Countertrends at colleges like Augsburg seek to create a vital campus culture of public conversation and civic engagement. But the overall movement is toward disengagement. "I talk more to the fifty members of my subdiscipline over the Internet than I ever do to my colleague next door," said one faculty member. He spoke for many. For me, these discussions recalled C. Wright Mills’s argument in The Sociological Imagination that people in "mass society" experience trouble in personal terms disconnected from social structure, and have lost the sense of "genuine publics."

The positivist mind-set is a silent civic disease. In 1993–95, the Center for Democracy and Citizenship coordinated, in association with the White House Domestic Policy Council, the New Citizenship Project to examine the citizen-government divide. We heard again and again some version of positivism from federal employees: "We’ve lost the civil in civil service. We no longer think of ourselves as citizens. Now we’re outside, providing services to citizens."

Positivism structures patterns of evaluation, assessment, and outcome measures, as University of Minnesota theorists Michael Patton and Michael Baizerman have detailed. It sustains patterns of one-way service delivery and the conceptualization of poor and powerless groups as needy "clients," not as competent citizens. It infuses funding patterns for government "interventions" to fix social problems. It shapes the market, the media, health care, and political life. Professionals imagine themselves outside a shared reality with their fellow citizens, who are seen as "customers" or "clients," objects to be manipulated or remediated.

An Alternative Tradition

Despite its omnipresence, the positivist genie can be put back in the bottle. The intellectual foundation for broad opposition to logical positivism—and for a pragmatic, publicly grounded alternative view of knowledge creation and learning—is astonishingly diverse. It includes neopragmatists such as Cornel West, Richard Rorty, and Richard Bernstein, as well as democratic theorists like Sheldon Wolin, Mary Dietz, and Jeff Isaac. It numbers communitarian philosophers such as William Galston, Amitai Etzioni, Stephen Carter, Mary Ann Glendon, and Charles Taylor. It encompasses feminist philosophers like Elizabeth Minnich, theorists of moral development such as Carol Gilligan, scholars of knowledge such as Mary Belenky, and action researchers like Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin. Social theorists of the left and the right, from James Scott and Andrew Polsky to Robert Nisbet, Peter Berger, and William Schambra, have shown the devastating impact on living human communities of positivism wedded to state policies. The very diversity of these public intellectuals in politics, outlook, and discipline suggests the profound challenge that can be mounted to the disengaged academic enterprise.

In my late teens and early twenties, when I worked for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, I gained an intuitive sense of democracy as the great and unfinished work of the people that comes alive only when individuals struggle to make it real. I gained hopefulness. As Dorothy Cotton, director of SCLC’s Citizenship Education Program and my boss in those years, often says, if you had lived through the experience of seeing so many illiterate, powerless, and brutally oppressed people rise up and remake the world, you would never again doubt at least the possibility of democracy. In addition, I learned the usefulness of democratic history. In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King, Jr., ties his fierce denunciations of segregation to a call to remember the richness of American democratic and religious traditions as resources for the struggle. In his words, the freedom movement was "bringing the whole nation back to the great wells of democracy dug deep by the founding fathers."

We have sought for more than a decade to develop and elaborate such themes in the action research projects of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship. The search for democratic history has also led us to uncover an alternative democratic tradition in higher education.

This tradition was well articulated by Jane Addams, who saw education as being about "freeing the powers" of people for public creation and contribution. In her 1902 volume, Democracy and Social Ethics, Addams argued that the educator has a role beyond simply informing the student: "We are gradually requiring of the educator that he shall free the powers of each man and connect him with the rest of life. We are impatient to use the dynamic power residing in the mass of humankind, and demand that the educator free that power."

Gioia Diliberto’s recent biography of Jane Addams, A Useful Woman, makes vivid the context of such craft by describing the "civic community" of Toynbee Hall, in the East End of London, on which Hull House was modeled. Diverse people worked and learned together at Toynbee Hall. Diliberto writes:

The distinctive reform spirit of the Victorian era—an earnest combination of self-improvement and duty toward others . . . a conviction that all people, regardless of class, birth, or wealth, have the capacity and indeed the duty to "evolve" into their best selves . . . was epitomized by Toynbee Hall.

Toynbee Hall teemed with courses, projects, meetings: in one month, classes for writing, math, chemistry, drawing, music, sewing, nursing, hygiene, composition, geography, bookkeeping, citizenship, and evening courses in geology, physiology, botany, chemistry, Hebrew, Latin and Greek, European and English history, and literary subjects from Dante to Shakespeare to Molière.

Addams’s Victorian language of "uplift" can sound condescending. But what is remarkable is her underlying conviction that ordinary people—poor and working class people, without money, of varied backgrounds, with little social status—had wonderful buried talents to contribute to the public conversation. "She was throwing in her ‘lot’ with the rest of the population," writes Diliberto, "struggling with them toward ‘salvation.’" That salvation was just as much in the self-interest of the college-educated settlement workers as it was in that of the poor immigrants.

Hull House created strong partnerships with higher education, pioneering in extension classes and helping to shape the scholarship at leading academic centers such as the University of Chicago. The most important aspect of these efforts was their public, open, diverse quality. This public quality included recognition of the need for political range: "The Settlement recognizes the need of cooperation, both with the radical and the conservative, and . . . cannot limit its friends to any one political party or economic school." Contrasting the Settlement philosophy with cloistered colleges, Addams argued that residents of Hull House "feel that they should promote a culture which will not set its possessor aside in a class with others like himself, but which will . . . connect him with all sorts of people by his ability to understand them as well as by his power to supplement their present surroundings."

This understanding, we have discovered, flourished and expanded in once-vital traditions of public and land-grant education, which espoused a philosophy of reciprocal partnerships and "public work" to build rural democracy. It conveyed much more of a "craft" view of scholarship and teaching than of an "expert" one. The University of Minnesota, said Lotus Coffman in his 1922 inaugural address as president, "breathes the spirit of the social order . . . is constantly engaged in an attempt to understand the meaning of the age . . . inculcates the craft spirit of the profession [and is] dominated by a philosophy of helpfulness" to the commonwealth. This tradition took shape in many private and liberal arts schools as well. Powerful leaders such as Liberty Hyde Bailey, dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell; Mary Mims, a pioneering rural sociologist at Louisiana State University; and the African American anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston helped develop the tradition. As late as 1948, the Presidential Commission on the Future of Higher Education titled its report Education for Democracy.

This theory and practice of civic education and knowledge creation radically deteriorated in the last half of the twentieth century. Today we are captives of an invisible philosophy that few would profess and many would find difficult even to name. To break free will require a sustained, powerful intellectual movement, as well as practical strategies and action for change. We have isolation and powerlessness to lose, and a public world to gain.

Harry Boyte is codirector of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs located at the University of Minnesota, where he also serves on the graduate faculty in the College of Liberal Arts. He is coauthor, with Elizabeth Hollander, of The Wingspread Declaration: Renewing the Civic Mission of the American Research University, and his most recent book, coauthored with Nancy Kari, is Building America: The Democratic Promise of Public Work.

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