local government

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.
-Bob Dylan

Some Cleveland-area businesses, officials, and citizens were frustrated in June when what was believed to be a flash mob disrupted an arts fair in Cleveland Heights. Take a peek:

Officials estimate that nearly 1,000 youth showed up spontaneously. Apparently there were random fights (though little information about these fights is provided in either the video or the Cleveland Plain Dealer's account).

This event, along with other alleged violent flash mobs, spurred Cleveland city council member Zach Reed (pictured, right) to introduce an ordinance criminalizing the use of social media - Facebook, Twitter, etc. - to organize crowds.

Under existing law, any member of a flash mob can be charged with disorderly conduct or other offenses carrying jail if there is a disturbance. Reed's legislation would have added a misdemeanor charge for summoning a crowd through social media. A first offense carried a $100 fine.

Reed said the new measure moved beyond "antiquated legislation" that never imagined social media.

To his credit, Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson vetoed that legislation this week, noting that while he is sympathetic to it's goal, the ordinance was not narrowly tailored enough to pass constitutional muster.

Reading about this on the heels of reading an articulate post by Sam DuPont at NDN - which calls for more examination of how social media can enhance civic engagement and social capital, I'm thinking about this flash mob issue in a few ways.

First, Reed's proposal to specifically criminalize social media-induced flash mobs is ridiculous. The last thing we need is another petty law on the books that we ask police officers to enforce, especially when we already have laws that address the issue. If a large group of people convenes and is hellbent on disrupting an otherwise peaceful event with violence, then the laws should be enforced. Some comments from festival attendees actually suggest that the Cleveland Heights PD efficiently defused the mob.

But instead, Reed - while admirably looking to solve the problem - throws the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. Reed's proposed ordinance is far from being narrowly tailored. An Ohio ACLU official points out that the law could penalize innocent citizens; should two or three friends agree to meet up somewhere to talk, dance, listen to music, or whatever, and several others show up and cause problems, the two or three friends would bear the responsibility under this ordinance. In fact, what Reed proposes would have criminalized the actions of those young people abroad who used social media to gather and rally against their oppressive governments and in support of democracy. Effective government can't simply pass a broad, sweeping law and - voila! - expect results.

I'm not arguing that there isn't a problem to be solved when people congregate with the intention of disrupting a community. However, the question Cleveland and its suburbs should be asking is not "How are these youth organizing," as this legislation does, but "Why?" I wonder if it has something to do with 25 percent of teenagers in this country being unemployed? Perhaps many youth have nowhere left to gather, other than 24 hour Wal-Marts?

What is this subculture resisting? Perhaps it's not the suburban couple or family, but a society and community that seems to have forgotten about them?

I hope Zach Reed reads Sam DuPont's blog post. DuPont doesn't view social media as a menacing threat to society. Instead, he suggests that our communities and young people could benefit from a leveraging of these technological tools to increase social capital.

[I]f this generation is to rebuild American social capital, it needs fora in which to connect, build bonds, and establish the mutual obligations of social relationships. While the primary causes Putnam points to are immense, historical shifts, the secondary causes can be largely boiled down to the resultant decline of membership in general community organizations: churches, Rotary clubs, PTAs, etc. It's hard to imagine most of these organizations making a powerful comeback among the Millennial generation, and we're left with the question of where, exactly, Millennials will come together to build social bonds.

Another cause Putnam identifies as contributing an additional 10% toward the decline in social capital is "suburbanization, commuting, and sprawl." This trend has reoriented American communities away from the neighborhoods, downtown areas, corner bars, and public squares where social capital was once forged, to a landscape dominated by highways and strip malls where the closest thing to a shared public space can be found in the Caverns of Walmart. And so, in addition to the evaporation of civic groups, our shared physical spaces are also disappearing, and the question of where social capital can be created in the 21st century becomes still more confounding.

As you've no doubt guessed by now (Sorry this took so long. Actually, I'm not sorry at all. Brevity is for cowards.), the point I'm driving toward is this: with the decline of community organizations and associations, and the disappearance of shared public spaces, I look to new network technologies to bridge some of those gaps, and help create the shared public spaces of the 21st century.

Perhaps instead of fearing and resisting social media and flash mobs, the local government in Cleveland and its suburbs could make an effort to learn about and embrace these phenomena, while also trying to understand how to improve youth quality of life in the area? Yes, cities like Cleveland and the suburbs have lots going on and many priorities in these tough times, but ignoring youth issues and rejecting their culture is not effective problem-solving, it's sinking like a stone.

The United States Conference of Mayors met in Baltimore last week, and the topic? American cities are under continuous attack from our poor economy.

Providence and Hollywood, Fla., issued layoff notices to police officers this month that will cut jobs in the coming weeks unless the cities get more union concessions. Lansing, Mich., and New York are threatening to close fire stations. Teachers are getting pink slips in Philadelphia, and schools in Montgomery, Ala., are being closed. Libraries are open less. And potholes are staying unfilled longer in cities like Minneapolis.

Local governments shed 28,000 jobs last month, the Department of Labor reported, and have lost 446,000 jobs since employment peaked in September 2008.

Because of rampant foreclosures, many cities don't have the tax base to take care of the issues above. As cities continue to make cuts, the quality of life in the present--and most likely the future--deteriorates. Commitments to education, jobs, public safety, libraries, and basic infrastructure are all receding at a time they should be increasing.

As the Times story indicates, most of the mayors at the meeting targeted the Defense budget, specifically the money being spent in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So when downturn-weary mayors from around the country gathered here on Friday for the annual meeting of the United States Conference of Mayors, they decided to make a statement: they introduced a resolution calling for the speedy end of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and calling on Congress to use the $126 billion a year the wars cost for urgent domestic needs.

The resolution, which will be decided Monday, seems likely to pass. “There are so many better uses for the money,” said Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake of Baltimore. Mayor R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis lamented that cities across the nation were being forced to make “deeply painful cuts to the most core services while the defense budget continued to escape scrutiny.” And Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of Los Angeles said that the idea “that we would build bridges in Baghdad and Kandahar and not Baltimore and Kansas City absolutely boggles the mind.”

At what point do we start to view this as an attack on our generation? And at what point does this begin to spark more visible outrage?

You've read about this movement before here.

And now, it's taken another step forward.

After a failed student campaign a year ago, William and Mary students put together an organization called Students for a Better Williamsburg (SBW), an organization engaging local government in order to provide the best outcomes for students. This effort led to the amendment of a housing ordinance, making it more student friendly and eliminating an issue that divided the town and gown factions in the community for years.

This past spring, a student ran for a Williamsburg city council seat once more. Last Tuesday night, Scott Foster, a graduating senior, dominated the contest.

Foster was elected to the Williamsburg City Council on Tuesday night, becoming the first William & Mary student ever to do so. The 22-year-old said his win was a victory for town and gown relationships.

"Today, the people of Williamsburg demonstrated that our city is truly unified," Foster said Tuesday night. "When I decided to run for City Council, I hoped to receive the student vote. Now, I have been additionally honored and humbled to have received such strong support from across our City."

Foster received 1559 votes in the election, 741 more votes than the next finisher, Planning Commission Chairman Doug Pons, who also earned a seat on the council Tuesday night. Five candidates, including one incumbent, ran for the two open positions. According to Foster's campaign, approximately 67 percent of his votes came from students and the remaining votes came from residents.

Over 1000 William and Mary students voted for their fellow student in the election, ensuring that college students will have a strong voice in the city's government. Between this victory and the aforementioned organization of Students for a Better Williamsburg, William and Mary students have provided students across the country with a model for organizing within the system to produce positive outcomes.

How did Foster do it? Well, in textbook Millennial fashion. Foster used online social networking to spread the news, and then benefited from a student-coordinated voter registration and GOTV effort on William and Mary's campus.

Foster benefited from a coordinated get-out-the-vote campaign by William & Mary students. Earlier this year, student organizations, including the Student Assembly, worked to encourage students to vote in the election through a series of registration efforts. Approximately 300 students registered this year as a result of the drive. More than 2,100 students are registered to vote in the City of Williamsburg and early estimates indicate that roughly 50 percent of registered students voted in Tuesday's election.

On election day, the Student Assembly provided transportation for students between the Sadler Center and the Stryker Building voting location. Sarah Rojas ‘10, outgoing president of the assembly, also sent an e-mail to the College's students, encouraging them to vote in the election.

[...]

Much of Foster's campaign was run by students who utilized a website and social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Foster also spent a good deal of time meeting city residents.

After his upcoming graduation, Foster plans to continue his studies at William and Mary in 2011, attending the William and Mary Law School.

Crossposted at Politics for the Common Good.

Rarely do I intentionally blend my graduate school lessons learned with the material discussed in this blog. I'm starting to realize that's a mistake.

As a graduate student in a Student Affairs in Higher Education program, I endeavor to eventually work on a college campus, encouraging students to mind their civic habits and responsibilities, while simultaneously teaching them about life throughout that journey. In order to fulfill graduation requirements for my masters program, I must work in an office on campus for twelve hours a week; such an experience usually involves creating some form of original work. In working with a leadership institute on campus, I have managed to perform my own bricolage, mixing two seemingly disparate elements together: politics and education. I have organized a series of discussions in which students having no knowledge of politics can contribute to a conversation, along with the political elite on campus, on what politics means to them. I guess one could metaphorically associate this effort with the training wheels needed for what is hopefully a life-long career marrying civic responsibility with education.

My motivation for pursuing what can be an all-too-frustrating task was initially selfish. I was a political science major. I didn't have the guts to denigrate characters in political attack ads or the logical skills needed to practice the law. I liked living and working on a college campus as an undergraduate. Voila. Student affairs allows me to straddle the line between politics and education.

But, as many a graduate student has come to know, this line I speak of is fictional. That's the lesson I have learned this year, perhaps nowhere better than these dialogues. Navigating a curriculum rooted in social constructivism, understanding that there is never a "right" answer, but merely socially-constructed knowledge, has sharpened my realization that politics is in everything we do. Yes, it's in presidential elections every four years. It is in the partisan bickering and strategizing that goes on in Washington. But it is also in fraternity and sorority elections. It is in where you get your coffee in the morning. It is in the choice of news you wish to consume. Politics is everywhere.

My experience with undergraduates at my former place of employment and my current institution reveals to me that I was not alone in seeing the line. Politics can be compartmentalized into a convenient box. Students associate politics with Washington DC, voting, Congress, and the like. In one of our political dialogues this month, one of the students expressed boredom with politics. "Whenever I see politics on TV I change the channel," they explained. "It's just not fun. I don't really want to get involved." Yet, the act of channelsurfing itself is political. They did get involved in their decision to forego public affairs programming.

Unfortunately that involvement was unseen, and small in magnitude. I am recognizing that while student affairs practitioners and scholars spend quite a bit of time on social justice education, we tend to spend less time on civic education, developing the set of tools needed to engage in one's community. While service-learning and voter registration drives have been trendy on college campuses over the last two presidential elections, engagement in local and state politics continues to suffer. It's no wonder students associate politics with dysfunctional Washington.

If we were to take a problem-solving approach in our student affairs practice, we might make some headway.

Embracing a problem-solving approach to learning would be appropriate if we seek to rid higher education of the “mind/body split” that compartmentalizes intellectual discussion from one’s public actions (hooks, 1994, p. 16). A problem-solving approach would require the construction of deep and sustainable relationships between student affairs educators and the rest of the faculty, staff, and administration; a problem-solving-based model would necessitate an emphasis on the common good, meaning that students would see departments and offices role model this approach by collectivizing agendas as much as possible and placing the institution’s mission (which would ideally emphasize problem-solving) above their own. In addition to the construction of strong relationships, a problem-solving approach would encourage student affairs educators to create Freirian relationships with students; with an emphasis on community problem-solving, student/teacher and teacher/student “learn from and teach each other” – “doing ‘with’ rather than ‘for’” (as cited in Manning 1994, p. 95).

In this model, collaboration is the name of the game. The common good is at the heart of this effort, with problems uniting academic disciplines, student affairs staff, and students as opposed to egos, departments that are siloed off from each other, and disengaged students. To get here, we do need to re-examine our social justice efforts.

In order to face society’s problems today, our students must first begin the process of understanding and exploring their identity, their values, and how they view difference. In addition, the educational nature of problem-solving demands from students the ability to see an issue from another’s perspective. Following these tough lessons, students also need to learn about power and privilege, the source of many of the problems our students will be trying to solve.

Politics does not have to be perceived as a bad thing. The derivation of the word -- “polis” is the Greek word for a city or state, thus “politikos,” or politics, means affairs/issues of the city/state -- is hardly negative. However, college students unfortunately associate the broken system currently in Washington with politics; consequently, "politics" gets a bad name and other, more positive opportunities for political engagement become invisible. With just a bit more effort, student affairs practitioners can reveal the other side of politics -- civil conversations, learning from others, changing their realities to help themselves and others -- and align programs with our institutions' "citizenship"-laden mission statements.