Category: Politics

Share the Bill of Rights over your Thanksgiving dinner

We the people
This is old news, but it’s new to me (which just shows how out of it I am!). Back in January the Knight Foundation published a study of over 100,000 US high school students which found that these kids (who will be in my classes over the next several years) didn’t understand the basic U.S. constitutional guarantees of freedom and (perhaps worse) really didn’t care a whole lot. Over 1 in 3 felt “the First Amendment goes too far in the rights it guarantees”, which doesn’t bode well for the rest of us. As Knight Foundation President and CEO Hodding Carter III said

These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous. Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.

Subsequent analysis of the data also suggests that comfortable suburban kids were “less appreciative of the First Amendment” than their rural and urban counterparts. While depressing, this isn’t totally surprising. Sadly, it’s not obvious that Our Fearless Leader would find any of this to be cause for concern.

Today we (largely) enjoy the freedom of the Internet and I can ramble on about things that strike my fancy without, for example, worrying (overly) about the implications of criticizing the government. We’d best hope, though, that these kids come to better appreciate some of these freedoms before they run the show. This Knight Foundation is obviously thinking along similar lines, as they’ve set up FirstAmendmentFuture.org specifically to address these kinds of concerns.

As a simple step, I might suggest an idea my wonderful mother brought up last year (when we were still reeling from the disappointment of the ’04 election): Read the Bill of Rights out loud as part of your Thanksgiving celebration. It’s a fine and wonderful thing to celebrate and give thanks for (a whole lot better than a striped piece of cloth), and reminding ourselves what those amendments actually say and mean in our lives can’t be a Bad Thing. Conveniently, they’re mostly quite short, so getting through them no problem. If memory serves, we got so into it last year that we went through the entire set of Constitutional amendments, not just the first 10. And this with WeatherGirl not even being a U.S. citizen or growing up with Thanksgiving as a holiday! :-)

(This all assumes you’re in the U.S. and do this whole Thanksgiving thing, of course. If you’re not or don’t, then I still recommend reading the Bill of Rights, though, as it’s a fine little document. I’m all for exporting [and importing!] ideas, I just prefer not to do it at gunpoint.)

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Why UMM students need to vote on the levy

Abandoned classroom, based on Old School 30 by Lainmoon on Flickr
Below is a letter to the editor for the University Register, UMM’s student newspaper…

Tuesday, the 8th of November, the residents of the Morris Area School District will turn out to vote on a proposed school levy. While most UMM students realize that they can vote in this election, I realize that many are unsure as to whether they should vote in this election. My purpose in this letter is to try to convince you, the UMM student, that as members of this community you absolutely should vote in this election, and that its outcome will have a direct and powerful impact on your experience as UMM students, and the experience of students to come.

Of the many reasons why students should care deeply about the outcome of this election, I think the starkest is also one of the simplest: the quality of the Morris Area schools has a profound and direct effect on the quality of UMM’s faculty and staff. As Peter Wyckoff said in his recent piece for The Counterweight

Let’s say you are not moved by the plight of my kids and their peers. You, fiscally conservative UMM student, still should vote for the levy. Why? Because the fates of UMM and the Morris Area Schools are intimately entwined. If local school quality erodes, UMM faculty and staff will leave. I, for one, love UMM. The one thing, however, most likely to cause me to abandon ship is if the local schools become inadequate for my children. Talented UMM professors feel this way too.

Peter’s comment focus on the concerns of faculty and staff currently at UMM, but they apply just as strongly to our ability to recruit and retain top quality staff and faculty in the future. Last year I was on three search committees: the Computing Services Director, the Digital Services Librarian, and a tenure track faculty position in Computer Science. In each of these cases, one of the first questions almost every candidate asked was about the quality of the local schools. This was by no means atypical of my past experiences on other searches, and is, I suspect, representative of the attitudes and concerns of candidates in the vast majority of UMM searches.

To date I’ve been able to respond by honestly and openly discussing our family’s positive experiences at Morris Area Elementary. If this levy fails to pass, leading to the deep cuts that are inevitable given the current financial situation, it’s going to become much harder to answer those questions, and consequently harder to recruit quality people. So the risk of Peter and others like him leaving is a double hazard: Not only do we lose great people, but we run the risk of being unable to replace them with equally great people.

Communities are complex creatures, with subtle and deep connections. As UMM students you are, obviously, important and powerful members of the UMM community. What is not always as obvious, however, is that you are also important and powerful members of the Morris community. Your choices affect the larger community, and the choices of the community affect you.

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