There, I said it. The cat is out of the bag. I’m just crazy enough to try to update a 50 year old literature on status competition and institutionalism with a focus on inequality.

In a sign that I may, indeed, be a secret member of the radical left, UC-Davis’ Center for Poverty Research has extended me an invitation to work at the Center as a Visiting Graduate Fellow.

That means I’m going back to Cali.

I will spend the session fleshing out the connection between policy and the organizational responses to structural change. That joins my proposed dissertation chapters on the social history of for-profit higher education and the challenges of prestige and legitimacy to social mobility and credentialism. Or, at least, that’s what I told the fine folks at UC-Davis.

The project is called, “Profit, Poverty, and Policy: Are For-Profit Colleges Commodifying Poverty or Providing Pathways out of Poverty?” My qualitative research and field work makes a case for the connection between social inequality and the expansion of the for-profit college sector. I’m hoping to corroborate those findings with empirical evidence about that connection at the structural level.

I’m following my hunch about changes to the Personal Responsibility and Welfare Act in 1996 (which specifically classified “short term credentials” as a means of remaining eligible for welfare) and the dominance of for-profits in both sub-baccalaureate credentials and gendered/racialized labor roles in allied health care and administrative level work. I also ask if there is a price threshold for the mobility utility of a credential and if that price threshold is positional: different for different kinds of folks. The end result is a policy paper and, hopefully, a new dimension to my own research.

]]> http://tressiemc.com/2013/05/17/profit-poverty-and-policy-going-back-to-california/feed/ 0 Screen shot 2013-05-17 at 5.33.47 PM tressiemc22 http://tressiemc.com/2013/05/15/profit-highered-and-lessons-on-the-prestige-cartel/ http://tressiemc.com/2013/05/15/profit-highered-and-lessons-on-the-prestige-cartel/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 21:07:35 +0000 tressiemc22 http://tressiemc.com/?p=1540 Continue reading →]]> My friend Aaron Bady (who may one day learn to spell my whole name!) had the foresight to publish his excellent analysis of temporality, future fetishization, and MOOC evangelism at his online home.

He encouraged me to similarly publish my talk.

Here’s the thing: I go off script. A lot. I mean, I go way off script.

Here’s the other thing: I rewrote this talk two hours before I delivered it because doing so has become my process.

However, I resent that every enticing web link has become a portal to a video. I despise watching videos and I am always hoping for text. To Aaron’s point about fair engagement and to my own fetishization of the written word, I’m sharing a version of the talk I gave at UC Irvine on for-profit higher education.

In this talk I tried to do two things that I often try to do and one thing that I’ve not yet tried to do. I tried situate for-profit higher education in conversation with all of higher education and I tried to situate it within larger social processes. And then I tried to tell a story that did not require charts.

Here goes the text as prepared, if not exactly as how it was presented:

Profit and Prestige Cartels

Thank you to Catherine Liu and the Humanities Collective here at UC Irvine for having me.

Thank you to Aaron Bady for not blowing a hole in the time-space continuum when he decided to exist outside my twitter feed.

When she invited me, Catherine said, “please no charts and such!” and I think she expected resistance. What she did not know is that I grew up reciting Paul Laurence Dunbar poetry to entertain my mother’s guests, that I was an English major in undergrad and once fancied myself a slam poet. I came late to charts and such and I’m always happy to get back to my storytelling roots.

And that’s what I’d like to do today.

I’d like to talk to you about the story of for-profit colleges and then I’d like to offer a counter-narrative, as it were, the story I would tell about profit and higher education “markets”.

So let’s start with what for-profits are broadly. Everyone likes to tell me the joke about how “aren’t all colleges for profit; he he” Trust me I’ve heard that one. Yes, we all increasingly participate in profit seeking activities but the difference lies in what one can do with that profit: it’s the difference between profit-taking versus reinvestment. I would argue that profit-taking restructures the fundamental relationship between the higher education organization and how it conceives of education and how it affords education to its students.

We are told by the for-profit sector, increasingly politicians and probably saddest of all for me, education researchers, that the for-profit model of education “delivery” will disrupt, innovate, cagebust and unbundle higher education. A note here about language. I don’t have to tell you how powerful it is. Indeed, if stories are a fundamental characteristic of human consciousness and development – our ability to imagine a subjunctive future separates us from the apes as surely as do opposable thumbs – then language is the means by which we construct our humanity, our stories. When the story of profit and higher education tells us it will disrupt, innovate, cagebust, unbundle it is using the language of markets. It is telling a story of education as a tool of markets, a serf that exists at the largesse of market morality and financialization. When we use that language to resist our commodification we are limited in the possible outcomes. We are, as Graeber has  noted, restricted to talking to the king – here the almighty market – in the king’s language. Or, to borrow from Audre Lorde, I might ask if the master’s tools ever have a chance of disrupting the master’s house of profit and markets.

How did higher education become a market? That’s a story that is integral to the narrative being sold about the calcified higher education system that is so in need of disrupting and innovation. I put this before you because in CA recent legislation would have you take for granted that “something” needs to be done about public higher ed and that the only real debate left is about what should be done. I have argued that the extent to which higher education needs “something” to be done depends greatly on one’s larger perspective of history, economics, labor, and comparative education. It’s almost heretical but I do not think that “failure”, as we define it currently — on-time graduation and no interruptions in one’s course taking — understands the uniqueness of the U.S. higher education system. The flexibility of our sprawling, decentralized system actually allows “non-traditional” students frequent points of entry into higher education, making it possible for them to earn a credential, even if they do not earn it in six, ten or even twenty years. This fluidity is a rare benefit afforded the working poor in our culture and to harden the system in the name of linear progression seems to me to be the exact wrong thing to do. But that is neither here nor there today. Today, I’d like to counter the dominant narrative about for-profit higher education similarly to how I have done in other articles and how the faculty at San Jose State recently countered by asking: if for-profit ed models are the answer, what precisely is the question?

The dominant narrative, rooted in market morality – all in the pursuit of profit is right and proper – would tell us that the question is how can education better serve the needs of the labor market. That’s how you get to SB520 which is a market solution to a problem no one can prove exists as they say it exists!

Now, here’s where I”d like to pull out and tell you a different story.

I did eventually become a sociologist and as a sociologist I believe in the social as a unit of analysis. I believe in groups and patterns. Economics talks about groups but they are always imagining them as a mere collection of individuals, these roving bands of rational actors. These rational actors will make decisions within the unquestionable framework of the limits and needs of the market and those decisions will act back on systems like education. When they do not, education is broken.

Aaron talked about profit and enclosure in his talk on MOOCs and it is here that I think our talks are in conversation with one another. I have followed the trajectory of MOOCs and have marvelled at how they have so obviously learned from the uneven success of for-profit colleges that, even as their financial dominance has expanded, has not been able to wrest the mantle of legitimacy from traditional colleges. I convened a conference last year at Duke. I invited many from the for-profit sector. I was honored that several took me up on the invitation. I expected contentious debates but I was shocked to learn which debates were contentious. It was not accreditation woes or legislative challenges that fired up the for-profit leaders in the room. Instead, it was a fairly innocuous mention about credits from for-profit colleges not transferring universally into traditional college programs.

The room erupted!

One executive tossed out the term “prestige cartel” to describe the unilateral dominion of traditional colleges over the articulation process. It is a fair charge: how can traditional colleges simultaneously convict the for-profit sector for not providing institutional mobility to their students while they largely control the acceptability of credit hours earned at for-profit colleges? So, you see, I saw SB 520 here in California and laughed at its ingenuity. Rather than fight with institutions for legitimacy, MOOC owners attempted to end run them through legislative sanction. It’s really quite brilliant, if not endemic to the ideological shift that MOOCs and profit-seekers in higher education would have us make: that the authority for certifying knowledge rests not in institutions — particularly not with public institutions — but with individuals. The first step in creating a higher education “market” of a “public good”, is to shift the understanding of education from being a social good to an individual good. Markets need individuals. Markets need rational actors. MOOCs have learned.

If you’re  like me and you believe that a collection of individuals is more than just rational actors making constant cost benefit analyses then you can start to imagine a different story. In my interviews with for-profit students I try to understand the social and institutional processes that they experience as individual lives; how are they embedded in these larger constructs. They often look like me and that isn’t lost on either them or me. We sit across from each other at a table but miles away in social distance and frequently the interview is derailed as they question me about how I got here and not there; and what’s the secret. They know there is one and they are right: it’s being born lucky but who am I to tell them that luck is all we’ve been able to come with as a solution to poverty and human dignity? Time and time again my respondents tell me a story of economic insecurity, fear, and instability. They have worked for years, many younger students have seen their parents and siblings work. It was not always “good” work as we would likely imagine it but it had dignity and more importantly it existed. Just as the for-profit sector was going through its recent phase of mergers, acquisitions and corporatization that fueled the expansion we’re now in engaging our social structure was also rapidly changing. Kelleberg writes about the dissolution of good jobs – livable wages and decent working conditions. We know that there are fewer and fewer such good jobs. Internal job markets have collapsed as industry turned people into human capital and “maximized their competiveness” by hollowing out upward mobility in the labor force and reducing any corporate responsibility to workers. People experience that competition for ever scarcer resource as insecurity. And humans are not designed to live forever suspended in uncertain conditions, ever shifting underneath their feet as the dominant ideology of success and worthiness requires stable middle class respectability as a marker of decency.

So people are casting about for the means to protect themselves against that insecurity. They are looking for a way to not only afford decent housing but to buy the house in the neighborhood that feeds into the good k-12 schools that will give their own kids a better chance at a life not marred by the insecurity that keeps them up nights. They are looking for a way to be respected at work, to be respected in their communities, to locate their position in the larger social structure and to find it congruent with their ideal selves. They are looking for dignity and rest. That we have constructed the only means for achieving those things as credential hoarding can be understood as “market demand” but I would call it mass insecurity. Again, language, tools, kings and masters.

If we accept my story of profit and higher education market we get to different kinds of questions that lead to different kinds of policies. Rather than disrupting higher education because it does not serve the needs of the market we can ask the market why it does not serve the interests of human beings. Why, as corporations increasingly use their moral authority and political will to limit their tax exposure and their contribution to social institutions like k-12 schools, why is public education being refashioned to provide them the “human capital” they require to continue their abdication of the greater social good?

That’s a different question than the ones being asked right now and that’s because it’s a different kind of story. It’s a story that makes sense of not only why for-profits have expanded and why they are increasing their lobbying of political bodies but also why for-profit students are disproportionately black, Hispanic, female and first generation. Although only one in 20 students who attend degree-granting institutions attend for-profits, 1 in 10 black students, 1 in 14 Latino students, and 1 in 14 first generation college students is enrolled at a for-profit college. The shared economic and social insecurity of minorities,  women, and mothers would make their overrepresentation in for-profits make sense, yes? I mean who has more pain to respond to than poor mothers and black and brown people? And organized to respond to that social pain is an integral part of the for-profit enrollment process and organizational distinctiveness.

Now, that’s the ideological stuff, right? Let’s be practical and real. We aren’t about to upend the authority of the markets over our political system or our educational structure. I may concede that. But we can come out of our ivory towers to engage these issues. Because we have not done that well…at all. For 30 years we’ve been content to let for-profits serve people who aren’t “our kinds of students” but let me tell you something about the walls we’d build around poverty and pain? It’s always porous. You can’t wall off social and economic insecurity and treat it as tangential to your core function. All that shit – that pain that instability that insecurity that voiclessness – it always expands, always.

We can do what we do here. We can talk about it. UC does this better than we do where I’m from. But we can’t just talk to each other. We have to talk to other institutions, disciplines, people who aren’t “our kind of people”.

I think we have to accept that traditional colleges like ours have benefited from inequality. That’s biting us in the ass now because it’s being used to say we’re elitist as if we weren’t designed to do precisely what we’re doing. I mean c’mon. So let’s accept that part of our own story and say yeah we’ve got other stories too. We’ve got stories of civil unrest, courageous impolitic research that shift data that justifies different kinds of stories differently. We can still do that.

We can invite the world to see us talking about this. We can invite nutcases like me in from outside to rant about this. We can pressure our institutions to be more political. Where are we are in some of these debates? My god. White papers are one necessary way to go but we can and should do more. Where are our organizations? Do we need another conference as much as we need to fight back against the successful crusade of one nutcase senator who would defund almost all social science research: the kind that provides the data that says hey, our schools are unequal, our workplaces are gendered, we do have income inequality. Do you think we get that kind of research from the University of Phoenix or Western Governor’s University? No and they know that.

We can’t rewrite the dominant narrative but that doesn’t mean that the dominant narrative can’t be rewritten, just not by us alone. We have to engage this as central to the weaknesses of traditional higher education but those weaknesses aren’t the ones profiteers would tell us they are. We aren’t lacking in innovation or even really in access. We’re lacking in storytelling. And that’s something we can do something about.

I often find it difficult to convince those in “real” colleges that they are in dialogue with for-profit higher education. After all, they’re not “our kind of students“. This juxtaposition of MOOCs and for-profits is the first time I think this has worked particularly well. As I said at the lecture, we get to MOOCs by way of the lessons venture capitalists have learned from for-profits’ uneven success in penetrating the real currency of higher education: prestige. As the founder of 2tor has been rumored to have said, they can’t build prestige so they’ll just borrow it from existing institutions.

I also took this opportunity to talk about something I do not often have a chance to discuss with social scientists; namely, how we cannot wall off inequality. The many issues we’re facing today are not naturally occurring phenomenon. They are the consequences of deliberate policy decisions that exacerbated inequality in K-12 with the foolish belief that poverty and its ill effects can be controlled. There is not a wall high enough or wide enough to protect us from the decisions we would make for other people’s children. Higher education’s issues are economic issues — a vastly unequal economy with stagnated wages and collapsing internal labor markets — and K-12 issues — residential segregation, tracking, and unequal funding. We thought we could send our kids to good schools and never have to reckon with how they benefit from someone else’s inability to attend those good schools.

I also remembered how important sharing space with brilliant people is to one’s own intellectual development. By the end of the first hour of engagement, I had furthered my thinking about the transformation of education from that of a social process — with legitimacy and authority residing in the institution — and the MOOCification/profitization process of transforming the individual into the education authority. That is, after all, the ultimate ends of a market, yes? Individual rational actors negotiating with organizations for needs and wants.

Hello MOOCs and for-profits.

See the whole talk here:

MOOCs and For Profit Universities: A Closer Look from UCI Humanities Collective on Vimeo.

See tweets:
[View the story "MOOCs & 4profits: The Prestige Cartel Is Born" on Storify]

And see a response to the talk from a remarkable undergraduate who was in attendance.

And, as always, feel free to comment and share.

Degree completion is a good thing. I will say this and many will still ignore it but I’m just covering my bases here.

Degree completion is a good thing. Persistence is a good thing. Sticktoitiveness is a good thing.

But the real thing is that, for some students, being able to move in and out of college over time is a net positive and a defining benefit of our structure of higher education.

The many entry points of our higher education system is fairly unique among education systems in core nations. In what sociologists call rigid structures of opportunity like those in the UK, there are few entry points. You take a national exam, you place into a college track, you do it right or you fail out and you are never let back into the pipeline.

By contrast, the U.S. system can seem like a sprawling mess. You can fail out of high school, get a GED, fail out your first semester of community college, discover your love of continental philosophy at a Burning Man festival a decade later, transfer into a degree completion program, slay your GREs and get a PhD from Harvard.

It’s not a common story, sure, but it possible and that is because of the many points at which one can enter, leave, and re-enter our system of highered.

One of the rarely discussed consequences of the high cost of college for some students is that debt can effectively calcify a system whose flexibility is a strength. I think particularly of the kinds of students left behind after “churn and burn” institutional strategies like those employed by for-profits have churned and burned a path through college aspirations that would shame Sherman.

When you are more likely to be exposed to risk factors that making completing college more difficult — you are poor, you are a single mother, you are a first generation American — you are more likely to attend a for-profit college. You are also most likely to do so as “traditional” student or as one without credits from other colleges. That means you are more likely to pay full tuition for a college degree program in the most expensive sector of higher education. This is further exacerbated by the retail-wholesale difference between for-profits and traditional colleges. That basically means that for-profit college tuition is rarely reduced by institutional grants, state grants, and the like. So for-profit students tend to pay retail while traditional college students at schools with comparable sticker tuition prices rarely pay full price, ergo they pay wholesale.

So there you are with all those risk factors you started with and you do what many students in for-profits do: you drop out or stall out or take a year or so off.

Only your debt load is pretty high and you weren’t equipped for debt payments to begin with because, again, remember risk factors. So you maybe default or get behind on payments. You cannot transfer with defaulted student loans. To protect the integrity of the federal aid system, almost no college will grant you entry with a defaulted loan.

Or, let’s say you don’t default. But you are more likely to approach loan limits because, again, wholesale v. retail. So, your options for transferring or dropping back in when your life circumstances allow are effectively reduced to nil.

What happens in these scenarios? What is the social cost when a higher education system that is designed to maximize on the vicissitudes of our economic system by allowing for multiple entry points is compromised by “churn and burn” institutional practices that disproportionately impact the very marginalized groups who are most likely to benefit from the open-ness of that system?

Well, no one is asking but me that I know of.

And that’s a shame.

Because by setting the price of failure so high we effectively compromise the spirit of public good that drives our hyper focus on access and persistence. Maybe “failure” isn’t the problem as much as the current price of failure. Indeed, there’s an argument that “failure”as we increasingly define it — stopping out, time off, transferring — isn’t failure at all but a sign that our system is working as it should. The real failure would be undermining that functioning by subsidizing corporate educational profits at the expense of individuals.

It’s a problem we’ve yet to reckon with and I think the time will come when we will have no choice but to do so.

But, let’s say your product hasn’t quite achieved the golden ticket that is “taken-for-grantedness” in our culture. That’s the idea that something is seen as so natural and “right”, that challenging it’s rightness would be a social violation. For example, few people question anymore that college is a “good” thing. Sure, we ask if it should be so expensive, if it should look the way it does, etc. But the idea that college is a right, normal thing to aspire to and to achieve is pretty well established…for some colleges.

I have argued that part of the reason for-profit colleges must work so hard to defend their political right to exist — Senate hearings, legal cases, regulation — is because they are not fully ensconced in the cultural rightness of “real” college in the social imaginary. Something about them seems “off” to people. That leaves for-profit colleges vulnerable to attacks that traditional colleges do not face. For example, when for-profit leaders say that there are traditional colleges with graduation rates as bad or worse than theirs? They’re not lying. But those colleges benefit from the taken-for-grantedness of being considered a “real” college so you’re unlikely to see them in front of the Senate any time soon.

I say all that to say that when the joke is on you and you do not have the cover of rightness, you might need to worry. The joke could become taken for granted before you are and turning the tide against “rightness” is an uphill battle.

With that I give you SNL’s “The University of Westfield Online”, which I assume conflates online with for-profit like most people who aren’t higher education wonks usually do.

This is my first presentation on this data — my own data — and the project is not yet complete. This is also my first big sociology room! We’ll see how it goes.

This is not an argument for the unilateral benefits of graduate school for black students. I assume that the students in question want to attend graduate school. I, too, caution against the excessive accrual of debt in pursuit of a degree. I wish the calculation of risk were universal. It would suggest something akin to social and economic parity. Absent that utopian reality, black students have to take into account qualitatively different considerations in their calculation of the risk, cost, and rewards of pursuing graduate education. Blanket “don’t go” advice ignores that reality.

I seriously did not think this was ground-breaking. I forgot that the word “race” and, particularly the word “black”, is always ground-breaking.

I received lots of great feedback. Black graduate students especially went out of their way to send me thank you love notes for voicing their experiences. I am honored they thought I did that. I also got lots of feedback from black professors that I have read, cited, and admired. One Gloria Billings said eloquently on twitter: #blackphdizdifferent. I enjoyed that.

I also heard from poor and working class white students and graduates who said my analysis felt very familiar to their experiences in choosing graduate school. I appreciated that even as I made a deliberate choice to focus on black students in my piece. I am from rural North Carolina. The fact that poor white people exist is not news to me. I know we often have a great deal in common. In fact, I find I often have more in common socially with my white first gen grad students than I do second and third generation black graduate students. At minimum, southern working class whites often share my definition of what constitutes real banana pudding (BAKED, people! Not that junk in a Jell-O box!). I did make the distinction, though, for a few reasons. One, empirically it was a clearer argument. Two, race does still seem to exceed class effects in mobility outcomes. Three, I thought the most glaring omission from the advice I was responding to was that of the experience of black students. However, I strongly encourage people to write about this experience from non-black, non-elite experiences from across the ethnicity spectrum.

There was also a great deal of criticism. Someone took offense to me calling my HBCU undergrad “low status”. In the words of one of my committee members: acknowledging prestige doesn’t mean I personally believe it. The prestige hierarchy is a real social reality, even if I did enjoy pledging, stepping, football games, and my rhetoric courses at Dear Ol’ NCCU.

Then there were those messages that veered into professionally untoward. I will leave those alone.

Others misrepresented my argument as one that excuses the high cost of graduate school attendance for those without financial support. I do not know what more I could have said to be clear that I was not saying that. I literally say in the essay:

Along the way I saw lots of stories like this one recently published by Slate. It’s on the far right extreme of the “don’t go!” advice market, but it is indicative of what that advice entails. It’s some combination of an assessment of the academic labor market, the odds of getting a tenure-track appointment, the high cost of graduate school, and the emotional toil.

That advice is not wrong.

Beyond performing an interpretive dance to TuPac’s “I Ain’t Mad At Cha” I don’t know what I else I could have said to clarify that I do not think “don’t go” advice is unilaterally wrong. I think it is less wrong for some than for others. It’s called nuance. However, I’m still open to the interpretive dance with a causal diagram of my argument up on a screen if someone wants to provide me travel and a honorarium.

I was accused of being privileged. I don’t deny that. I have generous funding at Emory University. I absolutely write from that place. However, that’s a pretty limited privilege as far as social privileges go when one considers the empirical evidence supporting the saliency of race and gender and class, on all of which I hit the genetic crap shoot. As I have offered to do many times in the past, I am willing to trade my privilege for a white American’s non-privilege almost any day of the week just for funsies.

There were serious well-intentioned critiques, too. Many of them pointed towards the differences among degrees and disciplines. Point well taken. That is why my argument talks about graduate school and not specifically a PhD in Germanic Languages. Let me tell you why I did not make that distinction. I tell you in the opening paragraphs of the essay about my journey to academia. When I was reading all those guide books and essays the distinctions that are so meaningful to many of you (and now to me, yay professionalization!), were absolutely meaningless. Absolutely. You said “humanities PhD” and I heard PhD because what is the difference to someone not well-versed in the language of academia? Thus, the importance of social closure and information in vetting advice. For many people, graduate school is graduate school. Also, I do not think that differentiating among a masters degree in engineering and (the much maligned) PhD in humanities invalidates my conclusion that we “consider a calculation of social distance, cost, aspiration, prestige, and returns on investment” that “give students a patchwork quilt of tools to determine the graduate-school math for themselves”.

Clarifying such distinctions in a 1,000 word essay that doesn’t get you tenure and promotion anyway may indeed be an unfair onus. Thus, I do not put it on advice givers to clarify. I close by asking us to only reflect on the implicit specificity of our advice that is presented as universal. That can be as easy as saying “your mileage may vary if you are not white and middle class” and getting back to your point. Or, it can be as easy as narrowing the scope of your essay to black students as opposed to white working class first-gen students because you recognize the complexities of your intended subject. Or, it can mean recognizing that some students you advise are different from you and sending them to get more opinions from others who are less different than they are.

That’s all. Reflection and specificity is all I’m arguing for. Well, that and “race matters” but then we end where we began.

I try to post my presentations here ahead of such talks. This way the resources are online, people are freed from furious note-taking, and we can instead focus on having a conversation. So, ILA, I’m about to be in you in 5, 4, 3…

ETA:

Here are some resources that popped up in response to Q&A:

1. For those asking about scheduling social media time blocks, check out Hootsuite to schedule tweets in advance and Mentions.com to keep track of who mentions you (so that you can, hopefully, respond in kind). Caution, these tools aren’t  a replacement for ENGAGEMENT. No one likes the social media broadcaster: all tweeting, no exchange.

Feedly can also help you aggregate content from other people’s blogs so that you can read, online and offline, at your leisure.

Also, don’t forget all these websites/tools have mobile platforms. Engaging on my phone is actually how I do most of my social media stuff.

2. CFP hunting: Twitter is also useful here but also see H-Net by subject area.

Thanks for having me!

My thinking is that permanent records of our intellectual and emotional development should not be used as fodder for pushing an editorial agenda of a for-profit company. I sincerely hope Suzy Lee Weiss comes to understand why Indian headdresses, queer parents, and geopolitics that reduce a continent and a people to poverty porn are not useful tools in presenting one’s self as educated or human. Thus, my critique focused on the cynical editorial decision to profit from her while ultimately, implicitly betting that she’ll be at 30 who she is at 18. The Wall Street Journal did not leave a lot of public room for Suzy to grow.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and I stood up and cheered after reading the Colorlines story about Aamira Fetuga. Aamira is an eight year old in Tennessee, where legislation to tie welfare subsidies to school performance and attendance had passed committees in both the House and the Senate. I thought this was one of the most draconian, punitive pieces of legislation since the Black Codes. It sought to do nothing less than construct compulsory schooling as a legal weapon against poor parents (something I have talked about before). In organizational theory we caution bureaucracies from making costly rules to outlaw something that happens so rarely as to be a non-issue. In the Tennessee law, an entire legislative system was being brought to bear on a statistical minority: willful, ignorant parents who don’t care if their kids go to school. It’s the flip-side of the welfare queen. The problem with both is that it is impossible to apply such laws to the mythical outliers without also punishing parents who cannot make PTA meetings because they work shift labor without sick or vacation leave. One person’s welfare queen is another person’s grandmother caring for the children of her children, who are trapped in segmented labor, an ineffective health system with a chronic disease, or a victim of crime and violence.

No matter how you looked at it, the law was absolutely using children to further a political goal.

Aamira Fetuga was just such a child and she resisted. She followed the legislators around asking the tough questions many adults, like myself, only asked while sitting on our fat duffs. And she seemed to have made an impact.

What is the difference between Aamira being used in a political battle and Suzy being featured in a media war for page views?

I would argue there’s a lot.

Suzy Lee Weiss was trafficking in snark for no other discernible purpose but to self-aggrandize her fait accompli and to mock what many in the culture wars feel are the sacred cows of “political correctness”. She is not arguing for any real change that does not amount to “look at me!”. Not that I would consider it valid but even an argument for a more transparent application of admissions discretion that takes into account economic diversity or some such position would have moved her argument from snark to critique. As it stands, the point was to poke liberals, throw some red meat to Wall Street Journal readers, and put her name in the paper. It worked.

In contrast, Aamira is participating in a basic democratic process. That we construct lobbying as the vehicle for the wealthy says more about us than it does about the activity itself. Lobbying used to be thought of as participatory democracy. Demanding that your elected leaders be held accountable to your interests is, ideally, part of our messy republic. That a child should participate only violates an arbitrary convention about age of consent, not a real law or social more. In fact, what Aamira was doing has a long history. When the Civil Rights Movement launched the Children’s Crusade it did so knowing full well the social conventions of “childhood” as protected and precious. The point of engaging children was to draw a stark contrast between the construction of white children as valuable and black children as animals, unworthy of social protection or rights.

The proposed law in Tennessee sought to do the same: make poor (mostly black and brown) children dehumanized fodder for political points. Aamira showed up, a living, breathing real child to draw into stark relief the difference between how the law would construct her and who she is in actuality.

That strikes me as fundamentally different than what Suzy Weiss did. Aamira’s is an act of supreme democracy. It deflects attention from herself to draw attention to larger issues of representation, equality, and social welfare. It made no one any money and to the extent that Aamira becomes a media darling, it will be an indirect consequence and not the raison d’être.

IF you have a problem with Aamira being “used” in this way then you must also have a problem with punitive laws that first used Aamira as cultural bait, political capital, and social scapegoat.

When you draw children into the war, don’t be mad when they show up ready to fight.

Rock on Aamira. You shame me and inspire me. And I am riding for you.