Tag: Ithaca

Public Humanities and Collective Education at Ithaca’s Socialist Night School

I’m taking a seminar on Public Humanities to inform my own public history work, particularly my approach to oral history projects and public events. For the first session, one of our readings—Robyn Schroeder, “The Rise of the Public Humanists (2021)—traces the history of Public Humanities as a concept to its birth in the 1980s. Since then, Schroeder reflects, there have been two somewhat distinct models of public humanities: vertical and horizontal. After giving brief summaries of the differences, this post reflects on my own research as well as my political education work with DSA. I conclude that Ithaca DSA’s approach to our Socialist Night School is exemplary of a horizontal, dialogical approach to collective knowledge production.

In her article on the public humanities, Schroeder explains that the “vertical” model promotes a “one-way flow of knowledge from the university to the public (15).” This is informed by a laudable desire to break down the barrier between the academic and public realms by sharing knowledge. The model is problematic, however, because it assumes that only academics have access to real knowledge and that the public is simply an empty receptacle waiting to be filled.

A horizontal model, on the other hand, takes a more dialogical and collaborative approach to public scholarship. It, too, seeks to break down the barriers between academia and the public, but does so in a way that avoids reifying the position of the university as the ultimate source of knowledge. Practitioners of this model seek to engage with communities to design and implement projects together with the ultimate goal of both advancing scholarly knowledge and providing real benefit to the community.

Naturally, I would like for my own work to follow the second model. Yet for me the lines appear more blurred, as I straddle the line between academia and the “community” that I study—that is to say, the radical left. My dissertation aims to be the book on late 20th century anarchist history that I would like to read, and which I think will be useful for my “own” community. It is based in large part on extensive oral history interviews and I am in constant dialogue and collaboration with others on the left, both within and outside of the academy. I hope that this public humanities seminar will provide me with more tools to further develop my approach.

In any case, Schroeder’s article made me reflect as well on the public programming I help to run through Ithaca DSA’s political education working group. I think that this programming, which includes an internal Marxist reading group and a public-facing monthly Socialist Night School, follows the horizontal model of dialogic, collaborative education and knowledge production.

Although I personally designed the syllabus for our Marxist reading group, it is based on ongoing conversations in the group about what we want to read. Given my own background in the material and my experience teaching it in a college setting, I inevitably play somewhat of a “teacher” role in the group. But we structurally decenter my role by rotating co-facilitation of the meetings and by organizing discussion in rounds so that everyone has equal chance to speak. For the coming year, we are planning a series of mini-units on various topics which will each be designed and implemented by different members of the group.

Our Socialist Night School meets monthly to provide public education and discussion about radical politics. The education is self-consciously dialogical and democratically oriented. Each month, we collectively decide on a new topic and choose two or three short readings, usually including a video, that attendees are encouraged but not required to read. We then develop discussion questions to guide the conversation. The night school meetings themselves, which usually attract between twenty to forty participants, center collective discussion in small groups. Each session begins with a short introduction before we turn to an invited speaker to give a ten to fifteen minute informal talk. The remainder of the event is dedicated to discussion.

Discussions take place in breakout rooms of around four to six participants, each of which has a DSA member facilitating it. The discussions, which are structured in rounds so that everyone has a chance to contribute to each topic, often lead to vibrant personal and intellectual exchange. Indeed, they are crucial sites of collective knowledge production for the local Ithaca left, especially when they enable intergenerational exchange of experiences. After these breakout rooms are finished, we come back together to share out from the discussions and collectively reflect on what we have learned. We end by explicitly addressing how to apply lessons from the reading and discussion to our political work in Ithaca.

Rather than a vertical one-way flow of knowledge from the university to “the public,” the Socialist Night Schools exemplify the horizontal co-production and distribution of knowledge. This is a question of good teaching pedagogy just as much as it is one of Public Humanities as a discipline. Of course, the ultimate goal of the Socialist Night School is to collectively educate ourselves and to strategize about how to build a truly free and democratic world, beginning locally in our own communities. This is a project to which I remain fully committed.

Learning from Ithaca’s Socialist Mayor: Electoralism and Movement Building

In 1989, as the Berlin Wall fell and Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the “end of history,” the small college town of Ithaca, New York did something remarkable: it elected an openly socialist mayor. Benjamin (Ben) Nichols, a Red Diaper Baby and member of the Democratic Socialists of America, would go on to serve three terms as mayor, holding office from 1990-96.

Ithaca DSA recently organized a Socialist Night School to learn about this history and discuss lessons for today. We hosted the activist scholar (and wife of the late Ben Nichols) Judith Van Allen to give a talk and share her experience with Ithaca’s radical history. There are many lessons to learn from Ben Nichols’s campaigns and his experience in governing as a pragmatic socialist. Nichols’s successes encourage us to be bold and advance a transformative vision of municipal socialism; his failures teach us that local electoral work must serve social movements and help build grassroots power rather than misdirecting or co-opting our energy.

Although Nichols recognized the significant limitations of operating within the constraints of city government, he was able to achieve a great deal while in office. In the tradition of municipal “sewer socialism” that began in the early 20th century, Nichols attempted to put the city government at the service of improving Ithacans’ lives. He led the city to successfully demand a much larger “voluntary” monetary contribution from Cornell (which does not pay taxes), created “mutual housing” governed by residents, passed ordinances supporting domestic partnerships and freedom of reproductive choice, strengthened the community police board, built the Alex Haley Pool, and generally made the city government function more efficiently and democratically. His accomplishments can serve as inspiration for achieving concrete victories and passing progressive legislation in towns like Ithaca.

That said, errors in political strategy and lack of attention to movement-building left Nichols isolated and vulnerable to opposition. Various policies he passed alienated elements of his fragile progressive coalition and he was defeated by an “independent” candidate who took office in 1996. Surprisingly little has been written about this history. I plan to write more about this in the future, but I want to lay out what I see as the biggest lesson.

Ben Nichols was by all accounts a very charismatic and dedicated man who ran largely on the force of his personality. He was able to assemble a progressive coalition to back his campaign, but it was all aimed at the single purpose of electing him. The coalition identified a clear enemy—the major property developers—and mobilized around progressive issues, but they never developed a substantive political program or a strategy for building grassroots power outside of the mayor’s office.

The campaign for mayor focused almost entirely on GOTV (Get Out The Vote) efforts: identifying supporters and getting them to the polls. By Judith’s account, they never attempted to win people over to a socialist program to transform Ithaca. Although these GOTV efforts were successful in electing Nichols as an individual, they did not build a committed movement base that could support him and push him from the left. That meant that when he advanced legislation that alienated certain elements of his coalition, he had no mass base to turn to—or to hold him accountable. Ithaca’s DSA chapter put in a large amount of work to elect Nichols, but they did not seem to maintain an organic relationship with him once in office. Movement building was subordinated to progressive electoralism, which derailed and defanged the radical grassroots energy that could have produced more transformative results.

The main lesson for me is that local electoral work needs to be simply one element of a broader political strategy to build power from the bottom up and promote a municipal vision of socialist transformation. The position of mayor as well as city councilors should be accountable to the grassroots base. Individuals in these positions should run on a clear political platform and serve as representatives of radical organizations and social movements. They should work to restructure and democratize the city government—for instance, by helping to establish popular assemblies with real decision-making power. We can look to Murray Bookchin’s vision of libertarian municipalism for inspiration and models.

We have many lessons to learn from this experiment in municipal socialism, including the need to put local electoralism at the service of movement building. But perhaps the greatest takeaway is simply to be bold: we can and must articulate a visionary program of municipal socialism and run campaigns on this platform. If Ithaca could elect a socialist mayor within the right-wing context of 1989, then we can certainly do it today. Let’s get to work!