Cooperation, Not Compromise in the Classroom

>> Chester Finn: Considering how polarized and politicized our college campuses have become, is there any point in even trying to teach civics to today's undergraduates?

>> Josiah Ober: So I think, Checke, that there are really two choices here. Either we can say that this is a hot culture war and we can engage at the level of real conflict, or we can say that it is a situation in which there's a lot of disagreement, a lot of problems on campus, and our job is to try to lower the temperature, try to use our skills as educators to reset and therefore try to get back to a time in which it's possible for us to speak civilly to each other as citizens engaged in a common project.

>> Chester Finn: Whoa, that's Professor Josiah Ober of Stanford University, known to his friends as Josh. And I'm Chester Finn of the Hoover Institution, known to my friends as Checker. And it's pleasure to be talking about civics and civic education in higher ed with Josh Ober today. But I want to follow up.

You pioneered, you reborn civics at Stanford as a subject for undergraduates. I believe you've even made it compulsory for all undergraduates to get a taste of. How on earth did you do that?

>> Josiah Ober: Well, it took a little bit of doing. We're still not compulsory for 100% of our incoming students will decide or the faculty senate will decide on that in two years time.

But it is compulsory for two thirds of them and we're well on our way. So how did we do it? Well, basically it began because a group of faculty about seven years ago decided that Stanford was really derelict in its duties to the citizens of the United States, to its citizens, and in fact was in violation of its founding charter, which calls for civic education or something very like it, as well as education in the ordinary topics of science, humanities and so on.

And so we sent a basically request, a demand to the president as part of a long term planning process saying Stanford is derelict. Do something about it. We have a plan. It would involve mandatory course for incoming freshmen and then a lot of other courses that we would develop.

We kind of thought this was a shot over the bow. Didn't know that anything would really come of it. But in fact it turned out the time was right. So the university eventually began to grind through the process of formalizing this. It took a lot of work on our part to bring a lot of faculty on board who were initially suspicious about it.

But ultimately we were able to do that. We lined up some outside donors who were very keen on basically moving forward with they helped us because we were able then to show the university that there really was donor interest and we were able to bring on board some terrific teachers, showed what could be done.

And after a few years time it had some momentum. And by now we really have what is, I think the leading project in civic education, at least at the kind of university Stanford is.

>> Chester Finn: A few years time indeed. You said seven years, and you're not quite universal yet.

I mean, I know you're a student of ancient Greece and Rome, so maybe that's made you a patient man. It sounds like a lifetime, you persevered.

>> Josiah Ober: I think that when you're trying to think about how you change an institution like Stanford in terms of its basic commitments, what it's doing, what Stanford is, and how it's perceived as a university, it's simply not possible to turn on a dime.

In Stanford, like I think other universities, is basically an aircraft carrier. If you're going to turn the aircraft carrier, you can, but it takes a long time. If you're going to slow it down or speed it up, it takes a long time.

>> Chester Finn: So did this ignite a culture war in the Stanford faculty?

And if not, how not?

>> Josiah Ober: So it did not. In fact, the proposal to begin the process seems to you a leisurely process, seems to be a surprisingly quick process of getting this approved. Was unanimously approved by the faculty senate, and things usually don't get unanimously approved by our faculty senate.

That was the result of a lot of work. There were a number of us involved in this. We spent a lot of time trying to bring people on board with it. And I think ultimately the people who would be fundamentally opposed to any sort of civic education just decided it wasn't a hill worth dying on.

They were going to lose. They were going to lose pretty badly if they tried to oppose it. And ultimately, ultimately they decided it wasn't worth exposing themselves to that kind of sort of shameful failure at a moment when I think an awful lot of people really across the spectrum recognized that really we need to do something about improving civic education, civic engagement in the country.

>> Chester Finn: Well, I surely agree with that, but say a little bit about what's actually in it, because one way to build consensus, of course, is to be so vague and generic that there's nothing to argue over.

>> Josiah Ober: So this was one of the really important things in terms of getting some donor support to bring on board some postdoctoral scholars to bring on board a couple of lecturers who could help us do the really full time work of syllabus design in a committee, and it had to be a committee that brought in faculty from various parts of the university.

It's generally true, I think, in this kind of environment, that those who are willing to do the most hard work, who will always be there at the meetings, who are always well prepared at the meetings, are going to get to have a biggest say in how the thing is designed.

In this case, it was the syllabus for the course that's now taken by two thirds of Stanford's incoming students, and I hope in two years time will be taken by all of them. So we were able to really put some spine into this course to make it a really serious course rather than a bit of everything for everybody.

Of course, nobody ever gets exactly what they want. This isn't my dream course in civic education. It's probably nobody's dream course, but I think it actually is a really good course that does reflect a lot of what one might hope that at the university level students would be exposed to in their first year, have then potential for building on that in the rest of their college.

>> Chester Finn: Can you give an example or two of the actual content? I take it this is not your traditional high school civics course.

>> Josiah Ober: No, it certainly is not. And we very decisively chose not to try to do remedial education. So this isn't how many people are in The US House of Representatives.

It isn't three branches of government. Rather, we thought that we would center it around problems of cooperation. Basically saying that civics or government in a democracy requires a lot of cooperation among people who disagree pretty fundamentally about a lot of things. It requires the possibility or the potential to engage in bargaining as well as just asserting what your demands are or what your rights are and expecting everybody else to simply accept your non negotiable demands.

So it's basically a set of cooperation problems. And there's a good literature on this in social science. Economists are interested in cooperation problems. And it basically allows the students to think about the problem of citizenship in terms of their own lives. Because indeed cooperation problems are common to all forms of purposeful organization, including a university.

So we were able then to build out from that to some of the literature on cooperation and then begin to show them how, for example, the American founders were facing basically a set of cooperation problems. How are we going to get these representatives from 13 states with very different interests to agree on a common constitution?

That was a matter of hard bargaining and ultimately recognizing that the bargain on the table was the best one that was available. And so once again, we could integrate with, integrate history, American history with the background. General question of problems of cooperation.

>> Chester Finn: I hear you using the word cooperation, not compromise. Is that on purpose?

>> Josiah Ober: Cooperation often requires compromise. Basically, compromise means that in a negotiation I recognize that I'm not going to get everything I want and you're not going to get everything you want, you want. And there's going to be some point in which I'm better off inside the bargain that we ultimately strike, and so are you.

But neither of us have gotten everything. So in a sense that's compromise. It doesn't have to mean compromising your ideals. It doesn't mean having to compromise your belief in what would be the best outcome. But it does mean the understanding that if we're going to do something together, if we're going to pass a bill, if we're going to decide on new rules for whatever our organization is, we're going to have to recognize that we do have diverse preferences over particular outcomes.

And there is potentially anyway a bargain that is available that will make all of us better off than we would be outside of the bargain.

>> Chester Finn: Yes, I think people hearkening back to that hot summer in Philadelphia a couple hundred years ago typically would use the word compromise for most of the assembly of the Constitution for example.

Why the House of Representatives is population based and the Senate is too per se, regardless of the size of your state. But anyway, the fact that you're not doing a remedial civics course says to me that you're taking for granted, but tell me if I'm wrong, that an incoming Stanford student has already learned how many members there are of the House of Representatives, that high school has done its part.

Is that a fair assumption?

>> Josiah Ober: It is at least an assumption. I hope it's a fair one and indeed our choice not to simply try to recapitulate what I kind of imagine as 9th grade civics, since that's when I took it.

>> Chester Finn: 12th grade in many. States, but go ahead.

>> Josiah Ober: All right, well, yes, this was some years ago. So the notion was to try to assume that Stanford students do have at least enough basic knowledge or can get it, and that we can show them where to get it so that we can begin to consider the whole question of civics education as something that is actually intellectually exciting.

So they're learning a whole domain of understanding and of inquiry, or they're entering into that domain rather than just learning a bunch of rote facts. Now, without any rote facts, you're going to have a hard time entering into any domain. You'd have to have some knowledge to begin with.

But we didn't want to make this feel like your introduction to Stanford's idea of civics education is just recapitulating for those of you who did have this background, what you already had learned. That's, I think, going to be a way to sort of make people decide that this is drab, dull, in no way the kind of exciting education that they came here to get and that presumably they are getting in many of their other courses.

>> Chester Finn: As you know, it's in the civics education in the elementary, secondary world today. It's a time of great ferment and anxiety about whether the schools are doing right by civics, by U.S. history, by the whole swath of issues. From your perspective, as somebody that teaches college undergraduates at an elite college, what would you like the K12 system to have done before you get them in this realm?

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, I would like them obviously to have prepared students with the basic background knowledge of how the American constitutional order works. I think that's a pretty good place to start. I would like them to have had an experience or been engaged with American history in a serious way.

In a way that neither tries to whitewash everything and sets the founders on a pedestal. And imagines that somehow, at a certain moment, unique genius was brought to us and that we ought to genuflect to that genius forever after. I think that's a mistake and I think a lot of students will simply recognize it as a mistake.

On the other hand, I think it's equally a mistake to try to teach American history. And once again, what would I want for a high school background in American history? I think it's a mistake to teach it as simply a vicious power game that was foisted upon almost everybody else by a small body of viciously self interested elite.

>> Chester Finn: The litan of failure and victimization.

>> Josiah Ober: Exactly. So I think there's, you know, there's really quite a broad middle ground between recognizing that indeed there are lots of moral flaws in the way in which this country was founded and developed. By our current standards, slavery is just simply a wrong.

And I think we can all agree on that. But at the same time, the fact of moral flaws in a country's history does not equate to making the entire history that one of wickedness and of evil plots by bad minded people. So I think that there is a way to teach history.

What would I like them to have known about history that actually Actually allows them both to be critical about the history of America and also to be admiring of the remarkable things that actually have been achieved here.

>> Chester Finn: I want to bring you back to the college level, Josh, because you've recently created an alliance involving a number of colleges and universities in the civic space.

Can you say a bit about what it is and how you see it working?

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, we recently launched an alliance for civics in the academy. We have a charter membership of about 130 members. These are all individuals who are engaged in civic education at the college or university level.

Most of them are teachers who are working at the coal face, that is they're actually teaching real courses to students on a regular basis with civic content, whether or not it's a part of an organized program. Some of them are administrators who are engaged in setting up or trying to foster these civics courses, civics programs.

A few of them are people in NGOs that are interested in supporting civics in the higher education. But for the most part it's meant to be a body of people who are in engaged in the actual practice of educating students at the higher education level in some area of civics.

>> Chester Finn: That means are all sorts of different colleges?

>> Josiah Ober: All kinds of different colleges. We have state universities, we have private universities, we have large, small, very well funded, like Stanford, not very well funded. And at the moment we don't have a membership in the community college two year programs just because that's a different world.

We're hoping to be able to expand a membership there. But for the moment we're thinking about members in four year colleges and universities. But yeah, these are very different kinds of institutions, very different resource bases and very different backgrounds in terms of who is driving who is driving the mission of increasing civic education at their institution.

>> Chester Finn: So it's just like a support group, a committee of correspondence, how would you characterize the reason for having this?

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, well what we call it is a community of practice. And a community of practice is in some ways an older idea. There was a whole literature on this in the late 1990s that basically said that a lot of things that are not readily taught or learned through manuals or through top down orders being given and followed.

A lot of things that are learned by people who are engaged in a practice are learned from others engaged in that practice. So the classic example was Xerox copy machine repairman. And it turned out that some groups of Xerox copy machine repairmen did terrifically well. Their copy machines got up and running again fast.

Other groups didn't do so well. And those of us who go back to the age of Xerox copies remember that grim notice that the copy machine is on the blink. So the question was, why are some of these groups doing better than others? And people who did the study tried to correct for all of the possible reasons that one group might do better than the other.

Turned out that the key thing was the groups that really did well talked with each other about what they were doing and they talked informally around the water cooler. They just swapped tips about what works, workarounds. Yeah, the manual says this, don't do that, do this other thing.

And it turns out that groups that didn't do this, that people just followed the rules, followed the manual-

>> Chester Finn: And didn't talk to each other.

>> Josiah Ober: Didn't talk much with each other, were much less effective. So we think the same thing is true for civic education. We think we can learn from each other, we can read each other's syllabus, we can talk with each other about how did you get that program up and running?

How come you didn't get mugged by the people who hate the very idea? How are you working with a mandate from a legislature that requires civic education in a certain way? So I think that it is going to be much more effect nationally in terms of creating a sort of national commitment to and rolling that out to civic education.

If we have people who are engaged in talking with one another about what works, what doesn't. I think the very idea of sort of the network is what we're aiming at rather than association in which a group tells everybody what to do.

>> Chester Finn: So this sounds very much like exploring an unexplored continent, actually.

Put on your hat as a historian for a second. Was there ever a golden age of civic education in higher ed in the United States? Or are you really starting de novo?

>> Josiah Ober: So there was a time in which civic education was really thought to be quite central to what colleges and universities were doing.

When we began pushing for the program here at Stanford, we looked back at the archives and we discovered, somewhat to my surprise anyway, that Stanford actually had had back in the 1920s, a mandatory year long course for all students. And remember, Stanford was co-ed. So this was men and women together called Problems of Citizenship.

And basically Problems of Citizenship was designed around really two issues, questions of freedom and questions of cooperation. So we're in some ways recapitulating something that Stanford and Stanford was not alone. It turns out that there were a lot of courses like this once upon a time, were very committed to and then over the course of the next 70 years, became uncommitted to for reasons that we could explore.

>> Chester Finn: Wow, so 100 years ago, this was thriving at Sanford and some other places, too.

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, and you can sort of see in part, what was motivating it. There had been a period of very high immigration leading up to the 1920s. So there were a lot of new Americans who didn't grow up or hadn't grown up with, as it were, the background of whatever one thinks was American culture at that time.

And the 19th Amendment, which gave women the vote, had just been passed. And suddenly you have a whole body of people, half the. Population of the country is now expected to act as citizens. And so, there was a lot of sense that we really should be doing something to bring up those who have come here, women as well as everybody else.

>> Chester Finn: A little bit like the schools of big cities assimilating immigrants into the English language and things like that.

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, yeah, precisely. So I think it really was thought of in those terms. But when we found, we actually found the syllabus of this course, and it was striking how intellectually demanding it really was, it wasn't just remedial.

And that then became part of the inspiration for us to try to say we want to then have a 21st century version of this that will really address the question of civic education in a way that is equally exciting. But now deals with questions, for example, of what are the challenges of technology, of social media and so on that simply weren't there in the 1920s.

>> Chester Finn: That's really interesting. I did not know any of that background. And it's also helps to have a precedent for something that you are proposing. There's-

>> Josiah Ober: It's absolutely true. When we were pressing our case on this, we could start with the founding charter, and said that you're in violation of contractual responsibility to offer this.

But meanwhile, and Stanford was not always in violation, indeed, our predecessors believed this was of fundamental importance and this really was part of Stanford's brand and could be again, and should be again.

>> Chester Finn: Really interesting, so I want to lay a radical idea on you that also integrates, or intersects with the K12 part.

Again, is it a pipe dream to imagine that civics education might become some kind of an admissions prerequisite for a college like Stanford? Just as many colleges require language, or some proficiency in math, or something else before you can even come here.

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, I think it, in the near term.

You thought seven years was a long time. I think that would be a very optimistic thought. But I think that if Stanford, other elite universities, other very well regarded state universities led with admissions, takes into account civic education, that is going to be a thumb on the scale.

We're looking for people who can jump into our first year course with some real background. And we're a little worried about bringing in people who might be otherwise qualified who don't have that background that gets out to the college counselors, gets out to at least parents who pay attention to these sorts of things.

And they begin to bring pressure on school boards and so on to say, look, you know, we want our kids to get into, you know, whatever it is University of Minnesota stands for.

>> Chester Finn: Make it a plus factor on admissions.

>> Josiah Ober: Exactly.

>> Chester Finn: Rather than necessarily a prerequisite.

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, and eventually it may just become a de facto prerequisite.

>> Chester Finn: That's interesting. The other intersection that's important with K12 and higher ed in this realm, and I don't know to what extent this is a Stanford issue, but preparation of teachers is something that higher ed does.

And there's a lot of talk about today's high school and elementary school social studies teachers not knowing much about things like civics and history. What's higher ed's job here?

>> Josiah Ober: Yeah, so I think that here we're going to have to be working with those who set the rules for certification for teachers, which are states typically.

>> Chester Finn: State certification. Yeah.

>> Josiah Ober: That's a very complex question. But I think if once again, if leading institutions of higher education, well regarded state universities, private universities, begin to push for the idea that this really ought to be at the center of what every student who comes to their institution learns.

It begins to once again put some pressure on the education schools that do prepare a lot of teachers to begin to take this more and more seriously. Now, it's going to help if we get people in the US Congress and so on who begin to say this is really an important thing, we're willing to put some funding behind it.

It'll help if legislatures in the states begin to think this is really an important thing, we ought to put pressure on or indeed mandate that state funded institutions that are preparing teachers do indeed prepare them well to teach civics. So I think it's partly a matter of just turning up the ratchet, building pressure on those who might be recalcitrant about doing this, to see that really and truly this is what is demanded of them both by the citizenry and by the institutions that they have some respect for.

>> Chester Finn: You're making the important point that it's not just a faculty thing, it's not just a self starting thing within a university, it's also a public policy issue.

>> Josiah Ober: Absolutely.

>> Chester Finn: Legislatures and other policymakers could have a considerable effect here.

>> Josiah Ober: That's right, and once again, in terms of thinking in the longer term, to the extent to which places like Stanford or University of Minnesota.

I have a BA from University of Minnesota, so that's my go to. But at any rate, to the extent to which these kinds of places do in fact educate the leaders of tomorrow, which they certainly intend to do, and to I think an extent they do, then we can imagine getting people in positions of real policy influence, lawmakers, those engaged in regulatory agencies of various sorts.

Who will have started out with the kind of education that leads them to feel that this is important, this ought to be furthered, that ought to become more and more standardized. That's the long game, But I think that in the end, if we're talking about matters of education, we have to be thinking at least in relatively long terms.

Once again, insofar as we really want to change the culture of civics, we want to change the way people imagine themselves, their duties, their responsibilities, as well as their rights as citizens or as aspiring citizens. Then we have to be willing to do the work that is going to be really that of a generation.

>> Chester Finn: Sounds, I don't know if I'm as patient as you are, but that does sound right to me. One more thing, we can't, we can't leave today without bringing up your recent book, which seems to me almost a primer for civic education, especially the way you were describing the Stanford course with an emphasis on cooperation.

Can you say about a book a bit about the theme of your book with Brooke Manville?

>> Josiah Ober: Yes, indeed, so the book is called the Civic How Democracy Survives, Brooke Manville Friend of co-author in other work and really a great intellectual force. Brooke and I basically decided that if we were going to be as interested as we were in the whole civic realm in the problem of democracy, we really needed to say something about what we supposed would be a kind of background work that would say, well, here's the way to think about it, here's the way to think about democracy, and here's the way to think about how democracy flourishes, how at least it survives, rather than only worrying about how democracy dies.

As you know, there's a lot of literature about how democracy dies.

>> Chester Finn: The death of democracy, yes, the other.

>> Josiah Ober: Side of it seemed to us quite important as well. So we started out by saying how would we define democracy? And we decided that we needed to have the most basic possible definition.

And our basic definition of democracy is no boss but one another. Democracy is not having a king, not not having a gang of oligarchs in charge of your life. The only people who are your boss are your fellow citizens, ordinary people like yourself. And that means people with diverse opinions, diverse preferences over outcomes.

And that means you're going to have to find a way to compromise, to negotiate with, to bargain with them. So that's really the core of the book, is that democracy, if you want not to have a boss, does require that you engage in bargaining with people that you probably disagree with on some pretty important matters.

>> Chester Finn: Well, in early 2025, that sounds like a lesson worth taking seriously in the United States and a fair number of other countries, I'd say.

>> Josiah Ober: I think that is exactly right. Our book, just like our work on civic education, tends to focus, I think it should, on what's happening here in the United but it's not the only democracy that needs to re engage with the whole question of what really are the duties as well as the rights of the citizen and how can the institutions of a given country work towards giving citizens the kind of basic skills, the basic knowledge, the basic dispositions, the kind of character that they need in order really to be effective in carrying out their duties as citizens.

>> Chester Finn: That is fantastic. I want to thank you, Josh. I want to also remind our colleagues and our friends and our audience that coming up soon is Civic Learning Week for the United states, including on March 13, a terrific civics summit at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. I co-sponsored with iCivics.

I know you're on the program. I know a lot of other really interesting people are on the program and I think it's a kind of important culmination of some of the work we've been doing, and it's not going to take seven years to get there. So thank you again, Josh Hober.

>> Josiah Ober: Thank you very much, Checker Finn.