Further Michigan Daily Reading

Dumi has some coverage of the Daily scandal over at the Blackblog, and I trust I’ll follow it more closely than I can. Here he is making an excellent point on a Daily story that put boycott in the title although nobody is considering one this time around:

Why does this matter, you ask? And you should. Because the past Daily Boycott left a bitter taste in a lot of people’s mouths. The boycott was poorly planned and executed, but I think it did have some positive results (if you want more commentary on what the boycotts did in my eyes, I’ll post it later). Since its planning and execution failed a couple of years ago, people are apprehensive to endorse another boycott. So how do you address concerns of a group critiquing you while delegitmizing their claim? Give them a headline with a strong amount of stigma attached. So throughout the day, numerous students will glance the cover of the Daily as they usually do and think, “Oh no, another boycott, I’m against that” and continue on with their day. Consider me a conspiracy theorist or a political strategist, but do send congrats to the Daily, even Sun-tzu would be proud.

Also, David Boyle’s post on Arborupdate has a few people talking.

Michigan Daily Criticized for Cartoons

This email is making the rounds in Ann Arbor:

——– Original Message ——–
Subject: the michigan daily is unacceptable
From: amoffett at umich.edu

Within the last two weeks, the Michigan Daily has published two extremely racist comics against the black community. After the first one was published the community went to the daily to express their concerns about the racist nature of the cartoons. their response? To publish this.

As you all know, the University of Michigan considers itself a “beacon of diversity” and the “leader” in the fight for affirmative action. Yet this is how much the black students at this university are valued. Students are being called nigger as they walk across the diag, asian students got peed on by two white students. At this point students of color (and their allies) have to stand up and say “enough is enough”

so what do i want from you? EMAIL THIS TO EVERYONE YOU KNOW. we have to let people know whats going on…

peace
alex moffett

Perhaps this is a good time to point out this information page from the Daily boycott of 2002.

See the cartoons: (1) and (2)

Maine Activists Launch ‘Rolling Justice’ Tour

A coalition of activists in Maine are launching an massive road tour on December 12 through the state they are calling “Rolling Justice” where community leaders will discuss the threat Samuel Alito could pose to our basic rights if appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Here’s the announcement:

Please join members of the Maine Fair and Independent Courts Coalition during the week of December 12 in a nationwide effort to draw attention to the nomination of Judge Sam Alito to the Supreme Court and give Mainers a chance to express their concerns about his troubling record.

Allies and activists will be getting in a van and traveling throughout the state to get people talking within their communities about what his confirmation could mean for Maine people. Local media outlets will be invited to cover the campaign in different areas of the state as we talk with people and gather petition signatures in stores, coffee shops and other gathering places.

We need activists to make the trips with us as well as local contacts at each stop to be present. This will be a particularly good opportunity for local activists to state their personal objections and thoughts on the nomination of Judge Alito. …

Exact locations will be announced shortly. If you are interested in traveling in the van or meeting us in one of the above locations, please email organizer at mainewomen.og for specific information.

The effort is organized by leaders of dozens of Maine citizen groups including the Maine Women’s Lobby. A detailed schedule is after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

Studying Political Organizing and Activism

I got this email about a class being offered at the University of Michigan Residential College next semster on community organizing. The course is being taught by RC Seniors Sarah Barcus and Ryan Bates and supervised by Professor Helen Fox.

Here’s the description:

RCIDIV 351 Section 5
Community Organizing: Theory and Praxis

Instructors: RC Seniors Sara Barcus & Ryan Bates, and Helen Fox Ph.D

Community Organizing Theory and Praxis is a student designed and led 2-credit (credit/no credit) mincourse. This course uses a comparative survey of US social movements since 1900 to examine the theories which have molded community organizing and social change strategies. The course is targeted at freshmen and sophomore students, though all, both inside and outside the RC, are welcome to enroll. The course meets Mondays and Wednesdays, 2:00-3:00 pm for the entire Winter Semester.

The course will focus on several core questions, including:

• -What IS community organizing? What theories of collective action underlay it?
• What are the effects of the rise of professional social change organizations (NGO’s?)
• How does social identity shape organizing strategies?
• Why do movements choose certain tactics? How do tactics relate to collective action?
• How has globalization affected community organizing strategies?

The course will look at the following movements, plus more, in depth:

• Early industrial unionism of the 30’s and 40’s
• Civil Rights and Black Power during the 60’s and 70’s
• LGBT AIDS activism during the 80’s
• Pro-Choice and Pro-Life organizing strategies during the 80’s and 90’s
• Farmworker unionism during 60’s
• The Chicano Rights movement
• The many currents of Feminism
• Environmental movements in Michigan right now
• Latin American solidarity in the 80’s Student solidarity in the 90’s

I have taught two related courses, not quite as ambitious in scope and specifically about student activism in both cases. The first course was my Honors 135.006 course offered Winter 2004 about the history of student activism at the University of Michigan. Although the administration likes to use Michigan’s unique history as a large, diverse, and active campus while recruiting students and faculty or fundraising, there have been few systematic efforts to study the contentious history. I found through my research and our explorations in the course that not only have activists been around Michigan for a while, their concrete demands and claims have often found their way into the highest levels of the administration. The Center for the Education of Women and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) can both trace their history to student activism. Furthermore, I would argue student activism in the 1960s and 1970s is a primary cause Michigan is a champion of “diversity” today. At the time I put together a simple webpage about the course, and I have just uploaded a complete syllabus with the majority of the course readings: History of Student Activism at the University of Michigan (PDF).

For PFAW’s Young People For project I designed a taught a course last spring on the History of Student Activism in the U.S. The syllabus was more of a challenge and I made several research trips to the Library of Congress and conducted a literature review at the time to identify some good readings for the class. I attempted to examine with the students how activists had changed the structure, curriculum, and values of their colleges and universities, and examine the role they had more broadly in impacting public opinion and serving as political actors in the broader community. Here’s the syllabus for that course, which includes most of the readings: History of Student Activism 101. I am looking forward to further developing this latter history of student activism course in my role as the coordinator of the Young People For progressive online academy.

Democracy in Online Journalism

Now that I am semi-employed, I have had time to catch up on projects and reading that I had been neglecting. This means that not only have I been reading quite a bit more, I’ve finally got around the trying to catch up on my Bloglines subscriptions. Reading through posts from the past couple months on a number of blogs I try to follow, I came across an interesting post from my friend John’s blog Prod and Ponder where he attempts to explain the failure of Indymedia and success of blogging.

John identifies consensus decision-making, Indymedia’s ambiguity of purpose, and political differences as the key reasons Indymedia has largely failed to meet its goal of becoming a viable community-based alternative to commercial media. Several years ago John had been heavily involved in the DC Indymedia site which was briefly successful before a number of people quit the endeavor over increased decision making difficulties, and a small faction assumed editorial responsibilities. Another activist who was involved in the site around 2000 — Zoe Mitchell — even dedicated her undergraduate thesis to examining the consensus process that the group used and concluded their technique was anti-democratic and failed to function as a viable process of participatory democracy. Zoe used to have her thesis online but her domain has expired, so I have uploaded a copy here:
A Critique of Consensus Process: Theory, Practice and Implications (.PDF, ~2 MB).

The network of Indymedia websites around the world all run similar software that allows any member of the public to contribute text and photos, and its organizers hoped it would become an alternative to mainstream, commercial media whom they felt ignored their causes and news. Others have sometimes blamed a lack of editing for the failure of these sites — after all, even if they do sometimes have good information, they’ll never build up a readership to be successful if it’s buried under irrelevant and trivial content the readers must wade through. John goes on to suggest blogging has been successful because it is a form of folk media, and what makes them successful is not the mechanisms of blogging such as the post, the comment, and links, but instead the genre that has developed: “the juxtaposing of the very personal, even mundane, with broader life, politics, and community.”

It seems what John’s analysis is missing (and what Zoe only suggested at in her thesis) is a consideration of alternative internal structures. For the most part I agree with their critiques of consensus process. For large, complex projects it is an anti-democratic decision making structure which rewards those who have the most time to sit around and talk, and can be an obstacle to the decisiveness needed to manage money and information in an informed and timely way. However, those fed up with consensus process all to often retreat to the command-and-control structure of the corporate world where decisions are (ostensibly) made by people in a clear chain of command. I even have a friend who is a journalist who has not entirely jokingly suggested what was ideal for media and perhaps society was a “benevolent dictatorship.”

While such thinking may work well for projects where the participants share closely aligned goals, I wonder if there is anything between these extremes. On the one hand, the “consensus process” of Indymedia is almost complete organizational anarchy — there are few defined roles and decision making can be arduous. Of course, in such an environment if decisions cannot be made collectively they frequently are made anyway, and a de-facto dictatorship may exist around an individual or small group of individuals. One of my students in a class on the history of student activism examined this precise phenomenon: although one “radical” group attempted to function with consensus, in reality all decisions were made by one leader. The other extreme of consciously choosing autocracy forces all democratic impulses of deliberation and discussion into an informal realm where it may take place, but has no formal role in decision making.

I find both alternatives lacking, and I would suggest there are options that lay between these poles beyond overly complex parlimentary process. Instead of retreating from the debate about decision-making entirely and resigning ourselves to corporate environments or individual projects, perhaps there can be a middle ground. In the two online projects I have been involved in, DCist and Arborupdate, I have self-consciously tried to ply this middle ground by holding regular staff meetings, maintaining transparency by sharing pertinent information with the entire group, and putting major decisions up for general discussion, all the while acknowledging some form of hierarchy. I have found that by taking this approach I build the trust of the people involved, and even when the group decides something to the contrary to individual minority opinions (which is rare), those overruled feel as if they found a fair hearing. I have also deliberately designed a structure where some who are more involved are members of a “core” group with more responsibilities, and those who choose a lesser level of involvement have lesser expectations.

Although this style may be slightly “harder” than simply throwing democracy aside and running the project without any concern to democratic decision making, I have found it has been successful. The reality of media means that quick and definite decisions are sometimes necessary, and a compromise structure can meet this need, as well as providing a clear process of editing to ensure high quality writing. Although perhaps not quite as efficient as the military-style decision making of a commercial outlet, it has helped us build a unique collaborative culture that I feel helps differentiate the site from other efforts.

The last reason the collaborative blog can be a success has to do with human motivation. The Indymedia model assumes the contributors will be intrinsically motivated and take it upon themselves to write up and submit articles. Of course, the only people who have this intrinsic drive are the few hard-core activists and others with an axe to grind. It isn’t that there aren’t people out there with information to share, it’s just that there is very little to motivate them to contribute.

The compromise structure I have experimented with acknowledges that (surprise!) many people won’t actually put effort into something unless they are asked or they feel it is expected. In the absence of clear, deliberate human relationships, none of the Indymedia contributors will be asked to contribute or be able to contribute in lesser ways. Using a busy email list the collaborative projects I work on frequently allow people who are otherwise too busy to write an entire article to submit some ideas or observations, and leave the heavy lifting to someone else who has the time that day. A hierarchical decision making structure also throws out the question of motivation, and reduces it to a one-way demand: the story assignment. Of course, virtually all reporter-editor relationships are more complex than that, however the complexities are not acknowledged formally.

John also argues blogs have not been successful because of their technical structure but rather the style of writing they encourage. I disagree: blogs have flourished as a medium because they take advantage of a number of intrinsic characteristics of the web. Even a seasoned web user likes myself finds the structure of Indymedia sites to be complex and non-intuitive. On the other hand, blogs place the newest stuff where you’ll see it first, provide a handy way to find past articles (they each have a URL and are in a clear chronological archive) and clearly allow a place to leave feedback. From a technical point of view they have taken elements of the Indymedia engine that are successful and eliminated those which are less needed to make it more clear to the reader what they are looking at. I would argue that if one could somehow inject all the content that would otherwise go in a successful blog into an elaborate site organized by categories and sections like Indymedia, it would not be as successful as the blog would have been. Is it any wonder, then, that the DC Indymedia site was recently re-designed to look and function more like a collaborative blog than its previous form.

Buzz Alexander Lauded for Teaching

Prison Creative Arts Project founder U-M English Professor “Buzz” Alexander has won a Carnegie Foundation award for his dedication to undergraduate teaching. The University press release quotes Alexander: “This award for our work brings recognition to a heretofore invisible national crisis—massive incarceration.”

BAMN Criticized by Campus NAACP Group

Alex Moffett, vice president of the NAACP, said BAMN tokenized and presented black students in a bad light when it bused in hundreds of black middle- and high-school students from Detroit for the Thursday rally on the Diag.

During the rally against the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, a proposal that could ban the use of affirmative action by the University and the state if it is approved by voters next year, the Detroit students were given microphones and could be heard yelling profanities and slurs at anti-affirmative action protesters at the back of the crowd. Moffett said the students came across as uneducated about affirmative action and faulted BAMN for putting them under the spotlight without preparation.

“Some of them didn’t even know why they were there — they were just there as tokens, so people would see a large number of black students,� Moffett said. “(BAMN was) just perpetuating untruths about young black students. As a community, we find that totally unacceptable.�

> Michigan Daily: “NAACP slams BAMN“