HS 400a: Great Debates in Social Policy
Spring 2016, meets Tuesdays and Thursdays 9 am – 12pm
Visiting Professor Deborah Stone
Office: Heller 346
Email:
Course Overview and Objectives
In this course, we engage the philosophical debates underlying the major questions of social policy by reading both classic and contemporary authors. Content-wise, the main objective is to reflect on the deeper value questions and philosophical assumptions that shape social policy.
Apart from the substantive content, the course also has pedagogical objectives. In my view, doctoral education is overwhelmingly preoccupied with teaching you how to “do things right.” Thus, coursework emphasizes learning how to fit your questions into other scholars’ theoretical frameworks and how to use methods that have received a disciplinary stamp of approval. That approach doesn’t leave much room for pursuing your curiosities and experimenting with how to find answers. In this course, I aim to give you space to foster your own creativity and to explore your own moral commitments and be able to build them into your work.
To those ends, Week 1 focuses on the nature of social inquiry and the relationship between knowledge and policy planning. I chose the readings to provide a range of views about what“science” is and about the kinds of knowledge people deem useful for policy making. In Week 2, we read some views on the nature of the creative process, how people get their big ideas, and the place of moral and ideological commitments in social science. Thesefirst two weeks are designed to let you step back and reflect on what kind of knowledge you are seeking and hope to produce, and to liberate you at least temporarily from all the “shoulds” of graduate education. In the remainder of the course, each week focuses on a key issue in social policy.
Other objectives for this course are:
To hone your critical reading skills, meaning the ability to identify and re-state an author’s argument; analyze how he or she goes about substantiating the argument; and recognize and analyze the rhetorical devices an author uses to be persuasive.
To hone your writing skills, meaning the ability to make an argument about a policy question; situate your argument in a larger theoretical and philosophical debate; and write clearly, engagingly and persuasively.
To hone your speaking and discussion skills, meaning the ability to present your ideas or question clearly; respond to questions; and advance group discussion by helping your classmates articulate their ideas more clearly through constructive questions and suggestions.
To bring some levity into graduate school and remind you not to take academic big-whigs or yourself too seriously.
To resist mindless use of bureaucratic boilerplate, professional clichés, jargon and buzzwords (never mind that I just used some…). See next section.
Statement on Integrity
I think each person should reflect on and develop his or her own standards of integrity. I do not use the standard university templates for this purpose because they let you off the hook and they permit, even encourage, mindless repetition of boilerplate, clichés, and jargon. Here are four thoughts on my own standards.
First, professional integrity is broader than academic integrity. In contrast to the prevailing norms in academia about researchers being “objective” and “unbiased,” I believe we do and ought to have moral commitments. Each of us believes certain things are morally right or wrong, and we organize our work and careers to act on our moral principles. In the policy world, we all aspire to use policy analysis and policy reform to make the world a better place,but each of us must think deeply about what we mean by “better.” (In some sense, this question is at the heart of each of the great debates in this course.) Most important, we should not be hired guns. In deciding whether to accept a job or to work on a policy project, we should first question the goals and premises of the work and ask whether they accord with our own best judgments. We should always be guided by our moral principles and continually ask ourselves how the work we are doing accords with them. Of course, anyone in public life will face “the problem of dirty hands,” as the philosopher Michael Walzer called it. We will have to make compromises with our moral principles, presumably because we think a particular compromise is the best outcome we can obtain under the circumstances. But, as my friend and colleague Judy Layzer put it to her students, “the point is to be aware when you are making compromises, not talk yourself into believing that you’re doing the right thing when you really know you’re compromising.” In short, it is not only permissible but desirable to have moral and ideological commitments and to let them inform your work.
Second, the prevailing norms in academia and the standard Heller template on academic integrity forbid collaboration with others except when explicitly allowed by the instructor. “Each student is expected to turn in work completed independently, except when assignments specifically authorize collaborative effort” (Heller School template on academic integrity, 2015). That rule reflects the profoundly individualistic political culture of contemporary U.S. and is out of synch with the more group-based and cooperative cultures of the rest of the world, especially the developing world. I encourage you to cooperate and collaborate, to discuss, argue, critique, and help each other develop your ideas. As in the standard university template, I expect you to write your own papers, but you don’t have to quote every word or phrase you heard from someone else; it’s enough to acknowledge someone in a note with a phrase such as, “I would like to thank so-and-so [or my study group, or my classmates] for suggesting this idea to me.” Of course you will put the idea in your own words and develop it.
Third, the standard university warnings on academic honesty put the fear of God in students about being accused of plagiarism: “[Y]ou must use footnotes and quotation marks to indicate the sources of any phrases, sentences, paragraphs or ideas found in published volumes, on the internet, or created by another student” (Heller School template on academic integrity, 2015). Such dire language leads students to rely way too heavily on direct quotations. You do not need to quote words, phrases, or ideas in common usage. And as a matter of good writing and good thinking, it’s best to put as much as possible in your own words. In my view, there are only four situations when you should directly quote someone else’s words:
1) If someone coined an original phrase or term, put it in quotes, attribute it to them, and be sure to define it or express it in other words. If it’s a new and unique usage, your readers won’t know what it means unless you tell them. Putting it in your own words is the best way to find out whether you really understand what the author meant. If you have a hard time expressing the phrase (or a longer idea) in your own words, that’s often an indication that the author didn’t really know or wasn’t clear about he or she meant. Sometimes this simple process of restating something in your own words can generate an important debate or critique.
2) Use long quotations only if the author’s prose absolutely “turns your spine to jelly.” That phrase and the rule come from Mr. Chester Mattson, my 10th grade Social Studies teacher, who gave me not only this and the next rule, but also the very idea that I could develop my own rules for quotation.
3) Quote a piece of text, such as a law, a document or a speech, if you want to discuss and analyze the actual words of the text. In that situation, you are laying the text on a table like a laboratory specimen for dissection.(Thank you, Mr. Mattson, for this rule, too.) This rule covers all those extensive quotations in ethnographic research and discourse analysis.
4) Quote someone’s words if you think what they said or wrote is so crazy, outrageous, or beyond the pale that your audience might not believe the person actually used those words unless you quote them. (Donald Trump comes to mind.) In that case, you are using quotations rather like evidence in court, placing the person’s words before a judge.
Finally, although most journals and academic publishers ask you to use in-text citation styles,my own view (Stone 2015) is that the APA style (American Psychology Association 2010), the Chicago style (Turabian 2010), and the MLA style (Modern Language Association,2008 ) allinterfere with narrative flow, if you see (Panek 1998) what I mean. One cannot write well using in-text citations. I encourage you to use endnotes or footnotes instead. I always compose with endnotes and then convert my references to my publisher’s required style once the piece has been accepted, but following my first principle of integrity above, I try to persuade publishers to let me use the endnote system by arguing that it makes for better prose.
Requirements
Class sessions
1. Be present! Do the readings. Start early, give yourself time to savor, ponder and analyze. Come prepared to teach the readings to your classmates and get their help understanding what puzzles you. Study hint: as you read each reading, pretend you are going to have to teach it to undergraduates. Before you launch into critiquing it (that’s what graduate students are mainly trained to do), explain to your imaginary undergraduates where it fits in the literature, what question it is trying to answer, what answer it gives, and most of all, why they should care about it. Justify why you assigned it to them.
2. Attendance should be near perfect. If you have to miss a class, come late or leave early, please let me know in advance.
3. Please let me know if you need any special accommodations for a disability or other life circumstances that might interfere with your attendance, class participation or meeting deadlines. You can learn about the process for documenting disabilities and requesting accommodations through Mary Brooks, Heller School’s disabilities coordinator ().
4. Devices: You are welcome to bring your laptops and tablets for notetaking and referring to readings if you don’t use hard copies. Any other use (Web surfing and e-mail) is the height of rudeness. If I get an inkling that anyone is doing anything but referring to assigned texts and notetaking, I’ll put an end to in-class device use for everyone. Please keep your phones turned off and tucked away. (Exception: if you have some kind of family emergency and need to be accessible, you may keep your phone on vibrate, but please tell me before class.) In short, back to Requirement #1: Be present and think of the common good.
Written Assignments
A “Letter to Your Grandmother” in week 1, which will be ungraded (for reasons that will be obvious when you read the assignment below).
Three short (3-5 page) papers sprinkled throughout the semester
One longer 10-page paper due after classes end, whenever the last date for papers due is. The last two class sessions will be devoted to students’ presentations of their final papers-in-progress so you can get feedback.
Please type your papers in 12-point font, double spaced (not 1 ½ ), with one-inch margins all around, and insert page numbers. I provide written feedback mainly by hand, so that’s why I ask for double space and margins. Name your file with your last name rather than the course number or name, and don’t forget to put your name on your papers.
The short assignments are what I call “Make It Your Own.” Each week I will write thought questions that ask you to apply one or more concepts, visions, arguments from the week’s readings to a topic of your choice. You will explore seeing your topic through a particular lens (theory, concept, argument) so that hopefully, you not only see your topic in a new way but also gain a deeper understanding of the theory. You may choose to write your short papers and the final paper on different topics, but if you want to use this course to explore a possible direction for your dissertation, I encourage you to select a topic that you will use throughout the semester as a sort of test case or laboratory specimen for applying each week’s readings.
All students are required to do the assignment on Equality (Week 3) and then may choose two more short assignments, but I’ll ask you to choose early in the semester and scatter yourselves so you’re not all doing the same ones, and so that you don’t leave all your writing to the end.
Grading:
Grades will be based roughly as follows:
Class participation:20%
Three short papers30%
Final Paper50%
If you’ve read this far, you’ve probably figured out that I don’t put great stock in objectivity and numerical precision. I do put great stock in active, kind, cheerful and creative engagement in class sessions. I also put great stock in improvement over the course of the semester and so I weight later papers more heavily.
Books Recommended for Purchase
We will be reading large portions of these books. I will put copies on reserve but you might want to have your own copy.
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow New Press, 2010.
Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge, Princeton University Press, 2001.
Deborah Stone, Policy Paradox W.W. Norton, 2012, 3rd edition.
TOPICS, READINGS AND EXERCISES
Week 1: Ways of Knowing
Michael Agar, The Lively Science: Remodeling Human Social Research (Minneapolis: Mill City Press, 2013), chaps. 1-2, pp. 1-64.
Richard Panek, Seeing and Believing (Penguin Books, 1998), chap. 2 “God’s Eye,” pp. 54-62–science as philosophy)
James Scott, Seeing Like a State, Introduction and ch. 1 pp. 1-52 [skip p. 36 from section called “The Code Rural that Almost Was” to p.44 (start again at “The Cadastral Map as Objective Information”). Note: the terms “cadastral and cadastral map” come up early but are not defined until p. 36. Jump to there to find the definition when you need it—or look it up!)
Recommended here: Alice O’Connor, Poverty Knowledge (Princeton University Press, 2001), Chap. 7 “Fighting Poverty with Knowledge,” pp. 166-95. We will read most of this book later in two sessions devoted to poverty, but take a quick peek now if you can, because this chapter exemplifies the “high modernist” approach to policy planning that Scott describes.
Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Random House, 1961), chap 2 “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety,” pp. 30-54. (Jane Jacobs uses personal observation, experience, shoe-leather research, and common sense to build theory. She was a mother and homemaker with no professional training in social science or urban planning, but her book became the Bible of Urban Planning.)
Joe Soss, “Talking Our Way to Meaningful Explanation,” in Interpretation and Method: Empirical Research Methods and the Interpretive Turn ed. Dvora Yanow and Peregrine Schwartz-Shea (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2nd. ed., 2014), pp. 161-82.
Recommended:
Bruce Spitz, “When Health Policy is the Problem,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, vol. 30, no. 3, June 2005, pp. 327-365. This article is a critical look at policy analysts as lobbyists for knowledge—their own—and our unquestioned belief that knowledge is the crucial ingredient for solving policy problems. It’s about the health policy field, but read it as a metaphor for policy analysis and policy research in general. Do you agree with his critique, and do you see parallels or counterevidence in your own policy area? Spitz spent many years here at the Heller School until he died in 2007.)
Week 2: Creativity and Moral Commitments: How Do People Get Ideas and Why Do They Pursue Them?
Jacob Bronowski, “The Creative Mind,” essay in his Science and Human Values (Harper and Row, orig. 1959, rev. ed. 1965), pp. 1-24.This is the essay that resolved my identity crisis as a sophomore in college. It liberated me to believe that I could be both a scientist and a creative artist. Bronowski argues that the essence of creativity, whether in science or art, is seeing a likeness between two apparently dissimilar things. In other words, creativity is metaphor-making in the mind. As you read this essay, think about whether it accords with your own experience of having new ideas and whether it explains (or accurately describes) other works of policy thinking that you find original.
Austin Kleon, Steal Like an Artist (New York: Workman, 2012) Chaps. 1-2, pp. 4-31. Kleon argues that “nothing is original” and we all build on the ideas of others, starting by imitating them in some way. I think he’s right—and I’ll also use this book to launch a discussion of the difference between collaboration and plagiarism.
Muhammed Yunus, Banker to the Poor (Public Affairs Press, 2003), chapter 4, “The Stool Makers of Jobra Village,” pp. 43-58. This book is Yunus’ autobiography of an idea, his idea of microcredit. In “The Stool Makers of Jobra Village,” he describes how he got the idea in a vivid, dusty-feet story. As you read it, think about the interplay of face-to-face experience, conversation, observation, nitty-gritty facts, sociological understanding, compassion, moral indignation, and intellect in Yunus’ re-conceptualization of poverty and economic development. How do and can we as policy thinkers bring all these things to bear in our work?