VIII. An Organizing Strategy for the Educational Reform MovementThis study was written in late 1968, for circulation in the national infrastructure of the ed reform movement. We were at a key nexus: the first significant funds had become available for use at the regional and national levels, in the form of a $300,000 Ford Foundation grant to the National Student Association. This was a strategy paper in the debate about what to do. It is heavily dated in that higher and richer orders of organizing than those it discusses have since developed; and in the way it still deals with an elitist concept of organizer that we may be outgrowing. I include it because, beneath these archaic particulars, it is an attempt to apply some of the thought of the previous chapters to the problems of an actual movement. The processes of growth it considers can be seen at work in any contemporary movement, and similar models and strategies are relevant -- particularly to movements faced with the problem of coordinating action on a national scale. =================================== May I be nostalgic and suggest that the public birth-cry of the educational reform movement sounded in Berkeley in the fall of 1964, as one voice in the song of hope and anguish we called the Free Speech Movement? The first of our Free Universities held its classes in the stairwells and on disaster drums in the basement of Sproul Hall, during the sit-in which climaxed the FSM. During that one evening, we tried formally to create a new style of learning in liberated territory. And to me, that scrap of our history is like the fossilized imprint of some green leaf in the mud of politics that nurtured and preserved it. In the fallout of analysis that followed the FSM, articles about student discontent with higher education began appearing. Now, four years later, in over half of America's 2,500 colleges students are at work on their own initiative to change the System; and in each of the others some groups of students are ready and aching to begin. To make a panoramic description of today's ed reform landscape is a problem in itself. • Colorado State University has just catapulted out of permanent backwoods inaction, with 2,000 kids involved in a thrust for student power built around a beer-on-campus issue. With this, the first discussions of ed reform have begun; and the first travelers from Berkeley and Washington have arrived to bring legal resources and workshops on organizing skills. • At the Urbana campus of U. Illinois this spring, over 500 students in semi-coordinated groups got into organizing undergraduate pressure-groups in the departments, a teacher/course evaluation project, a teaching assistant organization, curricular reform. a dormitory self-governance movement, and so on. This fall a free university of 1,000 students has formed, hippies are passing out pot brownies on the main quad, and student government and off-campus people are preparing an ed reform center to knit together regional work. • At San Francisco State, ed reform activities passed this degree of scattered complexity two years ago, and have since become rich with interconnections and political and institutional sophistications. The teaching assistants have a union, the free university develops ambitious summer programs, the institution's mechanism of generating new courses has been restructured, already the administration has moved to clamp down on the flood of students seeking independent study. The Main SequenceSo much is changing so fast, one is always behind. It makes sense not to try to take a wide-angle static photograph of the movement, but to speak in terms of the process of its unfolding growth. For plans made on the basis of the present state of a changing system and its needs -- for one example, which only seems sophisticated, consider university planning based on statistical trend-projections -- are doomed to irrelevant maturity. If we want to nourish the future, we must forget its present face and examine its social metabolism. Anyone who travels campuses discovers their patterns of development. For me the best analogue is the Main Sequence of stellar evolution: As diffuse, inert gases draw together, star-life condenses. Then a typical star goes through a ten-billion-year sequence of changes, consuming its substance in radiant nuclear reactions which grow, with time, progressively more intense, more complex and rich in heavy elements, hotter. As the byproducts of each reaction accumulate, another reaction begins in them before its predecessor is played out. Now and then there are explosions, novae; perhaps a super-nova, which obliterates most of its substance and leaves it to die as a stellar ember. Different stars, with different initial masses, trace out variations on this evolutionary theme -- too small, they never blow; too large, they go through all the changes very rapidly, shatter in brief bright light. Campuses are much the same. Ed reform activity condenses out of the diffuse quickening consciousness of our generation, often out of its political turbulence: out of people coming together to work. It starts with a free speech issue, a reform committee, a free university. Sooner or later it moves, in a fairly predictable way, through the spectrum of what I will call "first -order activity," most of whose elements are visible at Urbana. Eventually more sophisticated "second-order" activities are generated -- I will get to them presently. There are similar evolutionary sequences in other sectors of the campus ecology of change: the black sector, the cultural sector, and so on. Tutorial programs mature to community action groups. Free U's give rise to underground newspapers and black student unions. Film societies and rock groups nourish political organizations. Black and white organizers make community theaters and colleges. In the campus, as in a star, all processes connect, and each change feeds back into all. Ultimate brothers should not bicker so among themselves as we do. Within the campus and our lives -- if I may flourish the metaphor -- the "ultimate stellar heat" that is being approached is not an institutional form or condition but the perfect heat of free individuals living in harmony with their desires and rhetoric. For this is the goal of "educational change," is it not: that we manage to live the lives of learning that we believe and say are possible. This vision suggests a strategy for campus organizing: to stimulate all the accessible varieties of first-order activity, perhaps with deliberate indifference as to whether they be "political," "educational," "cultural," etc.; and, when appropriate, to catalyze second-order activities. >Cultural DiffusionThis campus model differs from its stellar cognate in that the main evolutionary track is not fixed but evolving. A simple example: the student power/beer issue at CSU was in many respects similar to the free speech eruption at Urbana two and a half years earlier that triggered the politicization of that campus' consciousness. But the change in subject reflects the national shift from student movement-consciousness being phrased largely in political terms to its being phrased in broader cultural terms. And the CSU outbreak, while still resulting in a traditional first "cops on campus and arrests" scene, was accompanied by chalk-ins on the quad, a body paint-in, a temporary liberation of the student center, and massive sensitivity training by imported organizers. So, in short. the base from which beginnings are made has become much richer and more sophisticated. And so on up the line: the whole evolutionary track is drifting westward, so to speak. This drift is one aspect of the phenomenon we've been calling cultural diffusion, roughly phrased as: "the kids in the boondocks are as hip at thirteen as we were in the City at sixteen, and it's all the telly's fault." In this case, the traveling of organizers is partly responsible for the drift -- that is, for the self-acceleration of our change. In other cases, the media are more strongly involved. But in the ed reform movement's rapid evolution, the media -- even campus papers or the Xeroxes circulating in the national infrastructure -- lag behind the word and training borne by travelers, who go out from or around to the campuses, moving through conferences and crash pads and nascent regional centers. In part, the leading edge of change spreads through travel because we don't have a sufficiently flexible and responsive communications network. In part it is unavoidable, for, increasingly, training is of a complexity and sophistication that our present media cannot adequately convey. By and large, people are more effective than paper or videotape as spreaders of social knowledge. And I think that cultural diffusion -- the increasingly simultaneous propagation of our social and cultural forms, as they are created -- is the most accessible accelerator pedal on the motor of our change. This premise is a strong motivation for the organizing strategy I am working up to propose for the national level of the ed reform movement. Its basic theme is to facilitate the travel, training, and interaction of organizers, via a decentralized institution designed as a network to create and circulate not information but social knowledge: organizing skills, analytic techniques, training games, information with action consequences. The Free University, A Decentralized FormLet me sketch some other features of the process from which this strategy derives and which it's intended to nourish. One trace is in the visible institutional shell the ed reform movement has grown, which, with the flesh beneath, expands section by section, building in some organic symmetry whose prognosis is by now almost apparent. The free universities are the movement's most concrete institution -- character-istically, a decentralized form. San Francisco State's Experimental College, the first one really to flourish, sprouted in a primitive form in spring 1965. By 1968, there were some 250 to 300, with more appearing weekly at places like Nazareth Normal Teachers College. No one person had visited more than a minor fraction of those now in existence. Only two conferences had brought more than a handful of them together; yet they were already beginning to intercommunicate heavily by interchanging travelers and organizers. Whether defiantly autonomous or partially subsumed in the structure of the parent institution, all free universities are variations on one basic, primitive model of a decentralized arena for educational experiment. (On how many campuses is their motto, "Anyone Can Give/Take a Course"?) The main feature of this model is: (decentralized editorial control) + (centralized administrative facilitation). An Historical Example of This FormBefore 1958, radical student political activity was splintered in traditional, inflexible, sectarian political groups. On many campuses, the New Activism began with the formation of an "umbrella organization," a nonsectarian left/liberal coalition of those who wanted to organize new political activity. Such umbrella organizations sheltered and nourished special-interest groups -- in peace work, civil rights, education, etc. -- until they were strong enough to make a go of it independently. Berkeley's SLATE, formed in 1958, was the Western prototype; by 1960 there were at least seventeen umbrella groups on West Coast campuses. As late as 1969, this function was being served on many campuses further back on the Main Sequence by SDS chapters. Within the domain of political organizing, umbrella groups fit roughly the same model: (decentralized editorial control) + (centralized administrative facilitation). And, like the free universities, they are rich breeding grounds for new groups to form in. This decentralized form facilitates new growth. (Notice that this model may be translated from campus space to group space. There it describes the operation of a learning group whose members have not bound themselves to a central focus, but coordinate their independent activities and share common resources. Another example appears at the end of Chapter IX.) Social Forms and Their ProductsFree universities have spread by a social organizing process of the form: (organize a real example) + (propagate by media and contact) over (people ready to move). Processes of this form catalyze growth that is independent and spontaneous; spreads rapidly; and is deeply decentralized, in that its forms and standards are under no central control, not even an aesthetic one. (1) Other examples are to be found in the proliferation of echo-communities of the Haight after her media exposure: and in the rash of campus sit-ins and movements that followed the FSM. I think it significant that we see here decentralized institutions and organizing forms being propagated in a decentralized fashion. This harmony between nature and growth may be characteristic of, or at least achievable by, reflexive institutions. (See chapter IV.) Some of our organizing games, like the Totalitarian Classroom, come naturally to commenting upon themselves; they are inherently reflexive. They are generated by an uncentered network of organizers, and are spreading by a process of the form: (involvement in an example) + (training). Such a process, in our lush days of conferences and mobility, is sufficiently rumor-quick that it rapidly escapes control: nobody knows who's playing these games now, or in what form. Our games aren't the only ones spreading in this way: think of the touchy/feely technologies. What all games spread by such a process have in common is that, like folksongs, they inspire ingenious local adaptations. Second-Order ActivityA crucial question is whether the present decentralized forms and process of the ed reform movement can generate and sustain activities more sophisticated than those mentioned so far. Evidence suggests that they can. Within themselves, free universities are evolving beyond their initial spontaneous model, devising self-funding procedures and experimenting with ongoing series of programs. Among themselves, they are beginning to link up in regional cooperations and establish regional news networks. Their early organizers have done their shots and departed, and are now coming together to learn how to work toward change in ways that build on what they've learned already. Such activities I call "second-order" because there seems to be a clear distinction in perspective, commitment, complexity, and skills between such activities (and their organizers) and those classed earlier as "first-order." Among other institutional marks of second-order activity are these: The movement has begun to support trainers and critics drawn from its own ranks. General cooperation between campuses is evolving in quite a few regions. (Some regional alliances are condensing more rapidly because traveling organizers have been put in the field to encourage them.) Those who have done local first-order organizing are beginning to form intentional learning communities, which seem to represent the leading edge of our institutional experiments. Second-Order OrganizersFirst-order organizing skills are those involved in a typical first-order activity, like a free speech movement or the founding of a free university. They include power-structure research, primary charisma, contingency planning, running a communications center, and so on. Second-order skills have only recently begun to develop and are more wildly various. They range from grant-getting and the teaching of self-funding skills, through training in sensitivity techniques and social technologies, to coordinating and consoling organizers. Their common denominator is that they are used to help first-order organizers start doing their thing, or do it better. In this function, second-order organizers are powerful agents of cultural diffusion, for the edge of our collective knowledge is in their persons and not otherwise accessible. This is because at present overviews of such knowledge can accumulate only among those who travel. (2) Second-order organizers began to appear as a recognizable class in 1966. By 1969, there were fifty to one hundred of them working in the ed reform movement (not all full-time). The critical factor in their development and training is travel. A person does a first-order organizing shot: say he leads a student government power trip. Maybe he begins to travel then, or -- equivalently -- maybe travelers drop in on him, attracted by the fire. He graduates or drops out of school, wants to make more change, doesn't know how, begins wandering to find people to learn and work with. In the intense education of the mobility net he begins to learn a new order of business. Given this perspective, what is an appropriate strategy for helping the ed reform movement grow in the near future? Each of America's motions -- assassination, election, rising expectation -- stirs up more available energy for social change among the young. The high schools shake with more (and more sophisticated) action now than the colleges did in the mid-sixties. On every campus there are groups of people ready to come together in first-order activity. So strategies for the liberation of energy are redundant: there is free energy aplenty and more on the way: the problem is to help it learn how to express itself. "The soil of energy is abundant," you would say, if you were a Taoist gardener in this springtime of change. "and everywhere first green appears. What use have I for sowing?" Similarly, strategies aimed primarily at stimulating first-order activity are redundant. There is already so much first-order activity that only a few of its special facets are even catalogued. If you plot the growth-in-time of the numbers of free universities, dope-smoking fraternities, student curriculum committees, demonstration arrests, and so on, you will find their graphs to be logistic curves: exponential growth curves which have not yet begun to level out. That is to say, concretely, that by 1972 there will be as many campus underground papers, free universities, teacher/course evaluation groups, and so on, as there are presently tutorial projects. [2008 note: This estimate proved roughly true.] The present processes of the ed reform movement – unenhanced, and with no additional institutional structure -- are spreading these activities adequately. Granted, we would like them to spread more rapidly and become more sophisticated and of higher quality. But in fact, the only strategies we know for stimulating first-order activity involve sending second-order organizers to campuses, or having campus people travel for interaction and training with second-order people. And this, from another perspective, is second-order apprentice training. In short. the circumstances of our process lead us necessarily to strategies that concentrate on second-order organizers and activity. The free-university strategy of centralized facilitation and decentralized control has a crucial quality that cannot be reproduced on a national scale: all the interaction involved is face-to-face, between people who generally are involved in the facilitated activities. But here is one intermediate strategy -- centralized administrative media facilitation of decentralized first-order activity. An example is NSA's Tutorial Assistance Center, which tries to service a thousand tutorials with directories, contacts, studies and reprints, advice about grant-getting, etc. Such administrative facilitation might be useful in the ed reform movement. But there are better ways to invest our limited resources on the national level than in producing, coordinating, and shipping paper. NSA's Student Government Information Center is another example of this model in operation over a landscape of concerns much more similar to that of the ed reform movement than is the tutorial landscape, and it has been an inert entity. The main aim of TAC's strategy has been to upgrade the tutorials, and in this its success has been at best very limited. So there isn't much evidence that this strategy genuinely aids change; and no one suggests that it accelerates change. Its main virtue seems to be that funding agencies can recognize programs based on it as plausible and safe. But the time for taking on projects because they are fundable rather than because we believe they are efficacious -- as NSA did with its teacher/course evaluation program -- is past: there is real work to be done The best strategy for furthering the movement seems to me to be to multiply the second-order organizers and to aid them in using their skills and developing new ones. That is, to put our national resources into the leading edge of the movement's change, accelerating and extending its development. Considering it as an institution, we should nourish its most advanced, tender, and tentative parts -- like the intentional learning communities now forming -- rather than its established features, like the free universities. While watching a great cataract whose pool was so turbulent not even a fish could play in it, Confucius noticed an old man swimming. He hurried to the rescue: but when he got there, the old man was walking on the bank with his hair tousled, singing. "I thought you were a water sprite," said Confucius, "but when I see you close, you're a man. Do you have a special way of swimming?" "No, no special way," said the man, "I began swimming here in my earliest days, I grew up happy at swimming, and it has become my nature to swim here. I enter and go down with the water in the very center of its whirl and come up again with it when it whirls the other way. I follow the way of the water and do nothing contrary to it by myself; this is how I swim." (3) To move in accord with the nature of the medium. Maoist guerrilla strategy is one adaptation of this metaphysic to a social organizing process. I am suggesting another. There is a process of growth and change now at work in the ed reform movement whose product pleases us. We should facilitate this process as unobtrusively and naturally as possible, "following the way of the water" All we know of how second-order organizers come to be and do their thing is the present developing structure of their training and activities: a structure of human play in a network of travel and mobility. To further the movement, enhance this network and its play. Let me suggest an organizing model that our present resources could bring into being. Begin with the stubs. These are work-oriented intentional learning communities whose main product is change in the system of higher education (usually in some geographic region). Stubs are beginning to form naturally as second-order organizers come together to invent ways of working on a continuing basis. In late 1968 some stubs were: • The Pennsylvania Project: five organizers fielded by NSA under an OEO grant, to service rural Pennsylvania colleges, who set up base in York, Pennsylvania. • The Institute for Educational Development: a self-supporting group of seven organizers who originally worked together in the Catholic College Circuit, and who set up in Philadelphia on an ongoing basis. • The New Learning Community: a group of nineteen who began regional ed reform activities from their base on Manhattan's lower West Side.
(Four were second-order organizers; most of the rest, Antioch work-study students. ) • Dragon's Eye: a motley group of self-supporting organizers who tried to build a work center in Berkeley. Other stubs were then forming in Washington, D.C., Minnesota, Champaign-Urbana, and so on: they had only begun to appear in the previous half year. Intentional learning communities will spread by the same process-model as have the free universities. Their number will multiply with the natural increase in second-order organizers, and as more and more of us spend enough time in the distinctively cold and stressful climates of organizing to feel our need for some new basis of warmth and community to sustain our selves and our work. The stubs are important, not only because they hold an increasing number of our most highly skilled people, but because they are already becoming regional nexuses, ganglia where organizers meet and rest and base themselves during travel. Such nexuses are the main structural feature of the mobility network we are developing. To cap a stub is to provide it with resources for: • Crash-space and food for several days, for a fairly large number of people (ten to twenty), once or twice a month. • Private apartment and shared office space for several people for longer periods (up to four months). • Open space adequate for large meetings and training sessIons. • A mimeograph and supplies; electric typewriters; an adequate phone budget; secretarial services. In addition-anticipating the function of the capped stubs -- some freeing of the time and skills of the resident organizers will be necessary; and thought should be given to this when planning or budgeting for the capping operation. (It is difficult to estimate a typical capping budget at the time of this writing; but $8,000 per year per stub, give or take 50 percent. seems reasonable.) The stubs, like the Free U, are open space for the ed reform movement: particularly because they are just sprouting and are mostly undifferentiated functionally. The capping operation is designed to open more space for things to happen and grow in: unused or multi-use architectural space, social space in the rich interactions of a diverse stream of people. Indeed, the stubs will probably be more open to change and growth to the extent that they bring together people working in related but diverse areas of change -- like politics, media, the arts -- not just educational reform. The main aim of this strategy is to train and field second-order organizers. Given a national network of capped stubs, or some equivalent structure, we have a board for a decentralized organizer-training game. An organizer moving on from first-order activity enters the network at some nexus. It confronts him as an extended library of information, skills, social technologies, experiments-in-progress. He must learn how to learn from it: this is a game, at which he develops his own style of play as he moves along.
He moves between stubs, visiting few or many. He learns to solve the problems of travel on limited resources by hitching, sharing rides, bargaining for his transportation costs. Some stubs are cold, unfriendly; others are warm; at some he lingers until someone kindly tells him, "You should move on, you're not learning anything here." From one stub, he surveys the ed reform activity in the campuses of its region. From another, some campus-action circumstance beckons, and he enters it for the duration at whatever level of skills -- mimeograph cranker, political theorist -- he has. He meets the heavies and others resident and transient at stubs: learns from them, dislikes some, works closely with others, goes out with them on team campus visits, learns what he can do on a campus. Always he is enmeshed in the constant circulation of information. strategies, skills, and interaction that are the life of the movement and its training medium; and his travel makes him a natural agent for this circulation. He is free to devise his own learning strategy; or he may seek those in the network who will help him "map out a program. " In return, the network and its people are open to him. That is, there are the open space and resources to accommodate his travels, and the people of the network are receptive to his presence and role -- even, or especially, if he has not yet developed his capacity for work -- and take on his companionship and training as a brotherly duty. The success of such a strategy, of course, depends as much on the cultivation of a group ethic as it does on the development of an institutional structure. But what else can I say about that here? (Another description of this model is that it establishes a network of multi-function experimental laboratories, independent but intercommunicating. The parallel to models for scientific and technological research-and-development is obvious. ) Assume that funds are available, from a Ford grant or otherwise. Define an apprentice (second-order) organizer as one who does not yet generate his support from his work skills. The game will involve the number of apprentices proper to the network's capacity (which will expand as the capped stubs grow and multiply). Each apprentice will receive a partial travel allowance; a subsistence allowance for personal spending: and an allowance for room and board at the stubs, plus office space and use of facilities. (Exclusive of travel, the cost could probably be kept to $150 per apprentice per month. We have as yet no useful data on how long it takes apprentices to become self-supporting.) Rather than have apprentices bargaining with stubs for their keep, it would probably be best to have a central administrative facility make periodic payments to each stub, on the basis of actual apprentice residence and use of facilities. (Yes, I am suggesting sort of an F.T.E. for the ed reform movement. though rates would vary from stub to stub.) Fully developed, this system would provide a significant fraction of the ongoing capping budget of each stub. The main problem would be to keep the central facility from exercising control over the process. This could be done by making sure that the selection of apprentices was a decentralized function of the second-order organizer network, and that the apprentices were free to choose their own itineraries. What real approach to this ideal is possible? Most stubs come into existence as already self-supporting and more or less headed toward the goal of drawing this support directly from their skills. But their budgets for space and facilities are pitched to basic subsistence; from their perspective, capping is a luxury operation. It is too early to tell if their work will free enough money for capping (though in some regions student governments might be persuaded to join in providing a capping budget). If this turns out to be possible, apprentices could actually use the network for not much more than the price of their food. In this time of available energy and people ready to move (but unskilled), each of our beginnings runs the danger of being overloaded and swamped as soon as it becomes known. (4)
The organizer game, however fully it is played, needs some form of entrance criteria, some way of determining who gets funded and who gets to stick around to learn and work. The problem can be approached in a number of ways: all have their thorniness. What is essential, I think, is that control over the criteria and their application be decentralized: that is, be in the hands of those who inhabit the network and do the work and training. (Though the ed reform movement began to develop national funding from monied institutions, it had no trace of a mechanism to insure decentralized control of the planning for and disposition of these funds.) Let me suggest an extreme model for decentralized control of the organizer game, one whose elements go beyond the narrowly political. Change happens so fast, even when we anticipate it we come out behind. There are growing among us not only new skills and new forms but new modalities of work. The vocation of social change involves more and more intimate parts of our selves; and we are finding that we must work together and hang together in new and deeper ways in order to be able to continue working and learning. For this reason, and because the new social forms we are building are designed ultimately for ourselves, we are beginning to come together in what I have called intentional learning communities, which might better be described as young work-families. The stubs were the first institutional trace of this mood. Around them, one senses strongly another mood which has been growing: there is a brother/sisterhood of change in which we are mutually involved. Perhaps we are ready to make this mood more explicit, and in establishing the training game to further not only a developing institution, but a social psychology and an ethic. Suppose the stubs, as they form, were to constitute themselves explicitly as work-oriented families with the additional commitment and learning that this entails. There would then be a simple model for cooperation and interchange between them; and for the recruitment of apprentices and their entrance into the network as travelers. That is, the stubs would form a coalition of work-families, a decentralized craft-guild for educational change. Members of one family would be welcomed in any other and have priority for accommodations, etc. Apprentices would be chosen, with a seriousness appropriate to the act, by the families independently; and their access to the network (and whatever central funding) would be legitimized by this selection. This would solve the problem of entrance in a full social form; though there are stronger and less institutional reasons for proposing this crystallization of our growing mood. ================================== (1) Other forms yield other products. For example, the political organizing processes of Mississippi Summer (1964) and Vietnam Summer (1967) took the form: (develop a theoretical model) + (implement it in simultaneous locations by cadre and contact), again over (people ready to move). Arguably, the forms and standards of action involved were less diverse. (2) One political consequence is that almost all the real power for decisions on the national level -- aside from the major chunk that gets lost somewhere in trying to satisfy the NSA bureaucratic structure -- is in the hands of a relatively few traveling second-order organizers. Local control of national policy is remote. And organizing strategies that centralize the future institutional growth of the ed reform movement -– by, say, pumping the available national money into an Ed Reform Center in Washington -- are not likely to make the problem of local control and flexibility any easier. But the strategy I'm proposing points at tying in second-order organizers more intimately to the specific regions they work with. (3) This is my paraphrase of Chuang-tzu's Book XIX, Chapter 9. In Book III, Chapter 2, the tale of how the ruler Wan-hui's cook cut up oxen for nineteen years, without needing to sharpen his knife, is a better illustration; but it is longer and more elliptical. (4) Within six months of this writing, travel between uncapped stubs swelled to the point of straining their resources and internal community. Go to: Top | Next | OLSC Contents | Home |