Three More Updates

I’m pretty sure this is the last update of the year, which will make this the last issue of the volume. Was going to add some new stuff, but the word count got too big.

Racial Politics Summer School

In the first week of June we held our third annual Racial Politics Summer School (soon to be renamed the Summer Institute—thanks Don Palmer!), bringing together graduate students and faculty instructors from across the country. Part of our broad project to remake the discipline from our small part of it—we can only control what we can control—it was everything we could imagine and then more. The first two iterations were designed to give grad students a broad overview of the discipline, with lectures rooting the four major subfields (American Politics, Comparative Politics, International Politics, Political Theory) in racial politics. Particularly given what’s been going on the past ten years or so, not just domestically with the Trump elections, but internationally with the rise of the right, getting graduate students to see how the discipline they’ve taken up has simultaneously worked to political produce racial difference and to disappear that production from the record…well you can see how that might have empirical and important political implications. 

This year we decided to focus on political economy, examining how the neoliberal turn, whatever name we’re coming up with to describe what’s happening now, labor regimes, populist political movements, are all intimately connected to racial politics. That we were able to double the number of attendees and add a virtual component, all coming under budget, is a testimony to the work of everyone involved. Our postdoc T Smith deserves a lot of the credit, as does our administrative staff (Tracey Billers, Martha Sullivan), and our graduate assistant (Maryam Nahal). Thanks to all the faculty involved (from Hopkins, Angie Bautista-Chavez, Zophia Edwards…from elsewhere, Marquis Bey, Bernadine Hernandez, Sid Issar, Joe Lowndes, Kim Johnson, Mireya Loza, Jamila Michener, Sally Nuamah, Mallory Sorelle, Chloe Thurston).

Given the attack on the university and on DEI, it’s worth considering how to build something like this going forward. Graduate student numbers are decreasing and academic units across the country are falling victim to cuts. Does something like this have a future? I think it does—if for no other reason than the fact that doing political science right requires teaching it in this manner and we only teach it in this manner if we train enough people to think about it in this manner. But what form does it take? We’ve been spending approximately $20K/year to bring students in, house them, pay for their meals, and pay honoraria for junior faculty (senior faculty have largely forgone honoraria). One model might be an all virtual model. If we were to move to something that was totally virtual, we could reduce the costs significantly, and perhaps make it possible for more to attend, but we may end up losing something as far as cohort development goes. Special shout out to alumni Lionel Foster. In an effort to kickstart black alumni giving, Foster’s begun an initiative designed to support this and related projects. 

Race, Racism and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science

Along related lines I talked here about “Race, Racism, and the Crisis of Democracy in Political Science” in the Annual Review of Political Science. It’s finally out. Abstract:

If you want to take a look at it, you can find it here. Even if you’re not a political scientist or current connected to the academy I think you’d get something from it. There are all types of problems with the overall backsliding concept, but I think going forward we’re going to spend a lot of time unpacking this concept both as it connects to the United States and also as it connects to phenomenon more globally, and again as it relates to the construction of political science itself. I was listening an episode of The Political Theory Review featuring Natasha Piano’s work Democratic Elitism: The Founding Myth of American Political Science. Piano’s work focuses on the Italian School of Elitism, and how the school’s been misinterpreted by American political scientists. I plan on picking it up…but there’s a moment near the end when the interviewer asks Piano why American political science treated it the way it did. I think if you read the Annual Review article, and take its ideas seriously, you’d come up with a different answer. 

Baltimore County Public Library Series

I mentioned Ron Daniels’ What the University Owes Democracy? Re-reading it for the first time since he published it a few years ago. He begins the book with the story of Central European University, founded by philanthropist George Soros in the post-Soviet era to make the transition to the post-Cold War era smoother. It was one of the first victims of Hungarian President Viktor Orbán’s regime.

Daniels was involved in CEU’s accreditation review and was in Budapest in 2019, able to see CEU’s struggle first hand. Writing a couple of years later with the benefit of hindsight Daniels made the following observation:

It isn’t clear Daniels has taken his own writing, much less the literature on democratic backsliding to heart. 

Earlier in the year I reached out to the Baltimore County Public Library system to see if they’d be interested in a series on democratic backsliding. The idea was to have a set of conversations between political scientists of different subfields to talk about democracy, about democratic reversals, and about the potential for democratic renewal. We settled on a three lecture series, delivered in two libraries on either side of the county. I was able to get a few of my colleagues to join, and we finished the first part of our series at the end of June. 

(sorry I don’t have a better picture—didn’t want to take a picture of the audience)

The structure was simple—we’d have three conversations that would focus on the concept of backsliding, what causes it, and what we can do about it. Each conversation would last about 45 minutes or so and then we’d take questions and answers. My hope was that the conversations would at least do a little bit of work in informing citizens, in supporting libraries themselves, and then in bringing together people interested in working on both. The conversations were insightful, and well-attended. I imagine others have to be doing something like what I’m doing…but I know that here in Baltimore, we barely used university expertise to figure out what to do in COVID, and haven’t taken advantage of faculty expertise for a range of other issues. 

So in a few weeks we’re going to take up the next series in Perry Hall.

And I’ve just reached out to one of my former hometown libraries and I’m going to give a lecture there as well, on July 28. 

For all the forums we’re having at a national and global level, I think one of the simplest things universities can do to support democracy is work with public libraries in the way I’m doing. 

Errata

In my haste to get the last few issues of this volume out, I made a note to myself (and apparently to all of you) to write a bit about the changes Brandon Scott made that may have had some effect on reducing crime rates in the city. These changes include increasing resources for youth summer camps, extending the city’s recreation hours to 11pm, partnerships with organizations like B-360 (a group that uses Baltimore’s 12 o’clock boy bike culture as a developmental tool). But perhaps most important locally is treating violence as a public health issue rather than a crime issue per se. And, again, that it’s part of a national trend—Chicago for example has seen a 40% drop in certain forms of violent crime compared to last year.