[Ci4cg-announce] How Civically Intelligent is your College or University?

Thu Jul 14 10:43:42 PDT 2016

I like the overall idea and the outline rubric, Doug. I am somewhat skeptical about trying to adapt the word "intelligence" to measure progressive social values. I realize, however, that you are heavily invested in the term "civic intelligence", and I respect the goals I think are behind that. It sort of reminds me of adaptations of the word "violence" to mean essentially the same thing as "injustice" (e.g. "structural violence", "economic violence", "cultural violence"). To the extent that I admire the hopes here, and I definitely do, I think trying to rank universities according to this rubric is a good way to promote the idea of civic intelligence. Universities tend to be thought of in relation to concepts such as "intelligent" and "smart", so using the word "intelligence" to judge their social values might be effective for that reason.

A challenge I see for this approach is that the concept itself may be so contentious that it will have a hard time getting traction, and may even spark a powerful counter-movement. The experience of trying to identify "peace" with "justice", which has had big names behind it (e.g. Martin Luther King) as well as an academic field of sorts (peace studies), may be instructive in that regard. An alternative approach, although one that would carry the project away from your concept of "civic intelligence", would be to assess universities according to somewhat more conventional (though still problematic) notions of intelligence, i.e. ones that relate to knowledge as opposed to values, and that can be tested objectively. How do students at different universities do, for example, on Simon Baron-Cohen's Reading the Mind in the Eyes test? Or, in the social welfare domain, how much do students know factually about topics like homelessness, economic inequality, police violence, and the effects of war on civilian populations? I bring up these ideas not to say that you should change your focus, but just that there are multiple ways to push back against the dominant and oppressive identification of universities with the ability to solve logic puzzles, and we should probably go at that from multiple angles.

Todd

Todd Davies
Symbolic Systems Program
Stanford University
Stanford, CA, 94305-2150 USA

email: davies at stanford.edu

phone: 1-650-723-4091

office: 460-040C

web: web.stanford.edu/~davies<https://web.stanford.edu/~davies>

________________________________
From: ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org <ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org> on behalf of Peter Day <P.Day at brighton.ac.uk>
Sent: Thursday, July 14, 2016 3:38 AM
To: Doug Schuler; ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org
Subject: Re: [Ci4cg-announce] How Civically Intelligent is your College or University?

Thanks for this Doug

I like this a lot.....please feel free to keep me informed of developments......am busy on other projects right now but might like to think about ways in which we could include this in my modules.

Best

Peter
________________________________
From: ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org [ci4cg-announce-bounces at scn9.scn.org] on behalf of Doug Schuler [douglas at publicsphereproject.org]
Sent: 14 July 2016 05:13
To: ci4cg-announce at scn9.scn.org
Subject: [Ci4cg-announce] How Civically Intelligent is your College or University?

Believing that this is relevant to many people on the list I'm pointing people towards an article of mine about ranking institutions of higher education.

I'm trying to make the case that colleges and universities should think about themselves in terms of civic intelligence.

I describe about how my students and I developed the idea and present the skeleton of a rubric. http://www.sigeneration.ca/civic-intelligence-university-college/

We're hoping to go to the next phase: putting more flesh on the rubric and using it to rank some schools.

I'd love to hear your thoughts in relation to this idea. Or if you'd like to help!

— Doug

PS. I sent a (nearly) identical note to the ciresearchers list....

Douglas Schuler
douglas at publicsphereproject.org<mailto:douglas at publicsphereproject.org>
Twitter: @doug_schuler

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Public Sphere Project
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/

Mailing list ~ Collective Intelligence for the Common Good
      http://scn9.scn.org/mailman/listinfo/ci4cg-announce

Creating the World Citizen Parliament
     http://interactions.acm.org/archive/view/may-june-2013/creating-the-world-citizen-parliament

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (project)
     http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/lv<http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/>

Liberating Voices!  A Pattern Language for Communication Revolution (book)
 http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11601

___________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned by MessageLabs' Email Security System
on behalf of the University of Brighton. For more information see:
https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is/computing/Pages/Email/spam.aspx

___________________________________________________________
This email has been scanned by MessageLabs' Email Security System
on behalf of the University of Brighton. For more information see:
https://staff.brighton.ac.uk/is/computing/Pages/Email/spam.aspx
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.scn.org/private/ci4cg-announce/attachments/20160714/bfe05fef/attachment.html>