THE TEMPLE ISSUES FORUM

INNOVATIONS IN PEDAGOGY FOR CIVIC ENGAGEMENT[i]

Herbert W. Simons

TempleUniversity

In a crowded auditorium at TempleUniversity, a Temple economist and a Swarthmore psychologist square off on the question: “Is capitalism good for the poor?” The debate proves provocative, so much so that a local public affairs radio station invites the academics to air their differences on Radio Times, its award-winning talk show. Tapes of that talk show will later be dissected by students training to assume the roles of discussion moderators and panelists. “What would your first question to the economist have been?”, they are asked. Then, “what did you think of the moderator’s question?” Then, “how would you have answered it if you were the economist?” And so on, for round after round of Q & A.

Welcome to the Temple Issues Forum (TIF) and to its student arm, the TIF Debate and Discussion Club (TIF D&D). Launched as a faculty initiative in 1998, TIF is mainly in the business of public affairs programming. TIF Debate and Discussion Club (TIF D&D) is a registered student activity with two distinct branches. PDD, the Public Debate and Discussion Group, gets training in public debate and discussion and stages forum events of its own.. TDT, the Temple Debate Team, represents a return of competitive debate to Temple after a twenty year hiatus. A listing of TIF events is provided in Appendix A. A record of TIF video productions as well as PDD events is provided in Appendix B. Details about most TIF and PDD events can be found on the TIF website:

TIF originated as a campus-wide activity but then became known to a regional audience by way of co-productions with WHYY (91 FM) of “Radio Times Live at Temple.” With recent conference presentations featuring video highlights of TIF’s all-day 9/13 forum on the 9/11 terrorist attacks, news of TIF has spread, and some universities—among them Colorado, U. Illinois-Chicago, and Drake—have been considering ways to adopt the TIF model while adapting it to their own special needs. TIF and TIF D&D seem to me to be both exportable and expandable. That is a claim I will defend in the final section of this paper. Characterizing the TIF model is the task of the first section of this paper. The middle section is about the TIF Debate and Discussion Club, and particularly its PDD branch. .

TEMPLE ISSUES FORUM

The basic components of the TIF model are as follows. (1) Two or more competent advocates for opposing positions, (2) are engaged in a public discussion or debate, (3) superintended by an experienced moderator, (4) on a current events or campus issue, (5) which is expected to be of widespread interest to the university community. (6) The forum is presented live (7) in a discussion-friendly auditorium, (8) before an audience consisting largely of undergraduates, (9) and in a manner calculated to stimulate audience involvement and participation. TIF has done several such events per academic year, recently with WHYY, and oftentimes in cooperation with other institutional entities at Temple, such as academic departments or research centers. An executive committee makes policy, approves topics, and oversees the work of the Coordinator. A much smaller advisory committee works closely with the Coordinator to organize, publicize, and stage TIF events.

Mission

From its inception, Temple Issues Forum was committed to Robert Putnam’s vision of the engaged—or reengaged—university. (Putnam, 2000) Lamenting the turn toward careerism at many universities, its faculty planners saw TIF as a way of reasserting traditional academic commitments to preparation for citizenship and the life of the mind. TIF was also inspired by Gerald Graff’s pioneering efforts at redesigning university curricula so as to air differences among faculty over educational goals, methods and perspectives, rather than keeping them hidden from students. Graff called it “teaching the conflicts” (Graff, 1992). And TIF was inclined toward widening the conversation, rather than restricting it to elites. In Gerard Hauser’s words, it was committed to “rhetorical democracy.” (Hauser, 2002)

Temple, then, was to become a place at which faculty and students tested ideas in John Stuart Mill’s “free marketplace of ideas.” (Mill, 1947/1859) Issues which faculty normally took up behind closed doors, or in the single teacher classroom, were now to be addressed publicly and collectively. Expertise was to be given its due, but everyone present was to be afforded the opportunity to speak.

Issue Selection and Treatment

Moreover, the issues had to engage the audience; they needed to matter or be made to matter by the manner in which they were presented. These values found expression at TIF’s very first public event: “Should Faculty Take and Defend Controversial Positions in the ‘Studies in Race’ Classroom?”

Faculty advocacy in the classroom had been a topic of widespread concern at least since the sixties. (Gleiss and Smith, 1992) It had been on the academic front burner during the period of the culture wars. (Graff, 1992; Sparks, 1996) Its power to arouse was born home to me personally at an election debriefing back in 1984 after the conferees had been shown a scathing critique of the religious right in a documentary put out by the liberal “People for the American Way.” I was much moved by the documentary and contemplated showing it to students in my class on persuasion, but I wasn’t at all sure how to teach it. Should I stand behind it? Critique it? Affect neutrality? Counter it with a video more sympathetic to the religious right? I decided to ask the conferees what they would do and wound up triggering intense debate. “A professor’s job is to profess,” said one professor. “A professor’s job is to educate, not advocate,” said another. “Your job is to teach students how to think, not what to think,” said a third. “That’s an untenable distinction,” said a fourth. “Where I come from,” said a fifth, they’d hang the people who made that video.” (Simons, 1995) Recalling the discussion of faculty advocacy at the election debriefing, I knew that the topic was ripe for a Temple issues forum.

Indeed, issues of faculty advocacy versus academic neutrality have circulated through a number of TIF events, particularly as regards race. Temple benefits from being a racially diverse public university. It also has a “Studies in Race” requirement, put in place a decade ago after an ugly, racially tinged incident outside one of the dormitories. “Studies in Race” was born in controversy, and the politics of getting it approved required that it have many course variants, with multiple and perhaps conflicting objectives. Students and faculty continue to be divided over the requirement, some complaining that it does not go far enough in exposing white racism, others alleging that some course variants combine propagandistic intent with the power of the grade. Launching Temple Issues Forum with the question of whether faculty should take and defend controversial positions in the “Studies in Race” classroom was a way of signaling TIF’s intention to address tough issues, including highly sensitive campus controversies. It also guaranteed that panelists and audience members could speak from experience. And it bid fair to advance consideration of a real problem. Three faculty members who had taught “Studies in Race” courses and three students who had taken them comprised the panel, and they were encouraged by the faculty moderator (a highly regarded journalism professor) to limit their opening comments to five minutes each. So too were audience members encouraged to restrict their remarks, and panelists were discouraged from responding to every audience comment or question. The idea was to keep things moving and to involve as many people as possible.

Building Attendance

How does one get commuting undergraduates at a public, urban university to come on their own in large numbers to hear three faculty members and three students discourse on the topic of faculty advocacy in the “Studies in Race” course?

The answer is that you can’t—or at least that we couldn’t, not back in 1998 when TIF began. Students had to be coerced to come by their instructors. And this is how we built attendance. Early on, the TIF executive committee (initially composed of “friends of Herb’s,” but since diversified to include representation from a wide array of schools and colleges serving undergraduates) decided to stage forum events so as to coincide with classes, and to select topics and times with foreknowledge of which faculty teaching at which hours would be most likely to bring their classes. Events were advertised by way of flyers and posters and some people came because they wanted to come, but faculty-mediated coercion was TIF’s trick. Still, students’ ratings were consistently high. They enjoyed not just the controversy but the break from routines, and especially the sense of community—of classes coming together for deliberations on an issue. Thus, at that fateful first panel discussion back in Spring, 1998, I recall a Journalism class, a Composition class, a class in Social Administration, and a couple of Studies in Race classes. Only years later were we able to pull in purely voluntary audiences of fifty or more.

WHYY and Community Outreach

On October 7, 1999TIF’s audience increased exponentially from less than two hundred to twenty thousand or more. The occasion was a conference and mayoral forum on “Higher Education and the City,” co-sponsored by various civic organizations in the City and featuring three hours of Radio Times as well as television rebroadcast by WHYY of the mayoral forum. The topic had been suggested by Temple’s Vice-President for Administration and supported by area civic and business leaders. They knew that the economic future of the City, and indeed of the Greater Philadelphia area, depended on its 70+ colleges and universities

In May, 2000 WHYY approached TIF with a proposal to co-produce four events at Temple in the next academic year, each involving two hours of Radio Times. In the meantime I had been following up on the “Higher Education and the City” initiative along with the former dean of Temple’s College of Arts and Sciences, Carolyn T. Adams. Together we plotted creation of an umbrella organization for area college students and recent graduates, designed to enrich their lives during their time in Philadelphia while also encouraging them to take up roots in the area. Toward that end we organized a conference at WHYY in October, 2000, on Philadelphia as College Town, again featuring Radio Times, and attended by leading representatives of town and gown. Out of the conference came our much sought organization, the Greater Philadelphia Collegetown Project (GPCP). Staffed by recent graduates, it has brought area Student Life administrators together, as well as representatives of student government, while also managing a very active website, Campusphilly.org. Once having helped create GPCP, TIF returned to its main business of public affairs programming. Meanwhile, the TIF/WHYY connection continued into the next academic year.

Event Planning and Execution

On October 3rd, 2000 TIF/WHYY held the first of their co-produced events, “Radio Times Live at Temple.” The question for discussion was whether there should be a moratorium on capital punishment in Pennsylvania. Hour One, on state and national issues, featured Pennsylvania Attorney General Mike Fisher (in 2002 a gubernatorial candidate) and Ray Brown, host of an Emmy award-winning legal affairs shown on New Jersey public television. Hour Two, on capital punishment in Philadelphia, featured the chief of homicides in the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office, and David Rudovsky, a prominent civil rights attorney and Penn professor. Presiding both hours was the venerable Marty Moss-Coane, whose talk show on public radio commanded a loyal listenership. The third hour was given over to lunch and informal discussion. A team from Computer Media Services was on hand, as usual, to videotape the proceedings and interview selected audience members.

By all accounts the event went exceedingly well. The auditorium was filled to capacity. The topic was engaging, the sound was good, the panelists responded well to Moss-Coane’s probings, audience questions and comments were insightful, and everyone remembered to turn off their cell phones. How did it happen?

Preparation for public affairs productions requires adherence to the rule that whatever can go wrong will go wrong unless anticipated in advance. Even then, there are no guarantees. Thus, provisions must be set in place for responding quickly to emergencies: a late arrival by a panelist, a faulty sound system, a crowd in excess of a room’s capacity. Experience helps, but so too does dumb luck.

Planning for the October 3rd event began the previous Spring and required seemingly endless meetings, e-mail exchanges, and telephone conversations with the scores of people who make such events work. Particularly vexing was the task of panel selection. One learns early on in arranging such events that there is no such thing as perfect balance, and that the varieties of expertise relevant to a topic exceed the number of slots available, or considered manageable, on a panel. Complicating matters is the need to combine balance with expertise each hour. And so our event advisory committee went through lists of people in proximity to Philadelphia who had received media attention on the subject of capital punishment in the aftermath of the recently announced Illinois moratorium. They included victims’ rights activists and DNA specialists, legislators and religious leaders. Many seemingly competent advocates were considered but none invited, not until we had found a formula for combining desired varieties of expertise with desired varieties of balance. Fortunately, one member of our advisory committee was well connected to major proponents of a moratorium, the other to major opponents, and the people we contacted were eager to appear on Radio Times.

TIF Post-9/11

Immediately following the terrorist attacks, TIF sprung into action. By 9/13 it was ready with an all-day forum on “The Bombings and Beyond,” with faculty panels on Roots of U.S.-Middle East Conflict, The Changing Nature of National Security, How Have the Bombings Changed America’s View of Itself?, and Media’s Responsibility. The Counseling Center was on hand with a scroll at the entrance to the auditorium on which students could register their feelings, and the Center also presided at a final session, Coping with Stress. As these issues were addressed, others emerged. Temple’s new President, David Adamany, stood up from the rear of the auditorium to denounce assaults on Muslim students, and to declare Temple’s four square commitment to the right of dissent. A student asked why Temple had remained open when others had shut down. Her comments were met with enthusiastic applause. But when a faculty member responded that class attendance had been made optional, and that many students were grateful for the opportunity to process 9/11 in class, she too received enthusiastic applause. Between sessions, informal meetings took place, some of them recorded on video. At one such meeting a student expressed his ambivalence toward the remarks made by Joseph Schwartz, a democratic socialist who was Chair of the Political Science. They were disturbing, said the student, because they ran counter to what he usually heard on CNN. He even thought some comments were unpatriotic, an assault on the American Way. But at the same time, he was intrigued by them, found them highly informative, wanted to share them with his union buddies, whose immediate thought after the bombings had been to “go out and kill some Arabians.” Still, he found Schwartz intimidating, not easy to relate to, and he told the interviewer so, in Schwartz’s presence. The conversation shifted to the topic of intimidation, and concluded with consensus on ways to reduce the barriers to open discussion between students and faculty. All this is captured on TIF’s professionally produced video, “Bombings and Beyond.” And all this was made possible just two days after the terrorist attacks because TIF had been in business for three years and was able to mobilize for the event in a hurry.

Subsequent to that forum TIF and WHYY combined for a Radio Times special on “U.S. Response to the Bombings,” then an hour on “Ethnic and Racial Profiling of Arabs and Muslims.” Then, as the Israelis occupied cities on the West Bank and the Palestinians continued their suicide bombings, TIF asked a panel that included a senior Israeli political strategist, how President Bush should be dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. All the while TIF D&D’s Public Debate and Discussion Group was staging post-9/ll events of its own.

Administration and Budgeting

As stated earlier, TIF policies and program selections are made by its Executive Committee (formerly the Planning Committee). Program proposals are evaluated and honed in committee, and those selected assigned to an event advisory committee. The reward/punishment for a good proposal is often hours spent helping organize an event, and perhaps moderating it. Disputes in committee most frequently arise over whether a proposal fits TIF’s mission of presenting controversies rather than promoting positions. This distinction may in itself become a matter of controversy. For example, a committee member upset by what he perceives to be insufficient ideological diversity on campus, and in TIF programming, proposes that this very problem become the occasion for a TIF forum. I find the proposal attractive, but a dispute arises over what, in Temple’s curriculum, ought to be considered controversial, rather than indisputably true, hence in need of being addressed from different perspectives. Thus are there tiffs about TIF within the TIF Executive Committee.