January 14, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: First-Year Writing II

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I’m not gonna lie, probably the hardest part of my Spring semester is going to be the week we watch Fruitvale Station in my First-Year Writing II classes (as part of a unit where they write a comparative analysis of a couple films/TV shows/multimedia texts). I wish I felt we were in a better place as a country than we were 15+ years ago when that film’s events took place, or a decade+ ago when the film itself was released. I wish it didn’t seem so clear to me that so many of my fellow Americans would watch that film and argue that Oscar Grant got what was coming to him, or worse. But a central aspect of what we do in the classroom is to try to engage with our toughest conversations, to develop individual voices and ideas, but also and perhaps especially as communities. So this hardest part of my semester might well be the most important part of the semester as well.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 13, 2025: Spring Semester Previews: Graduate Research Methods

[Another Spring semester is upon us, and with it my annual Spring semester previews. This time I’ll focus on one skill I’m excited to be teaching as part of each of these courses. Please share what you’ve got going on this semester and year as well!]

I write and think a lot about dualities, and more exactly about analyzing them rather than seeking to reduce them as is our natural human tendency. But I’ll admit that there’s a particularly complicated one that I struggle with maintaining in my own work: the duality of nuance and clarity, of trying to approach our subjects as the multilayered things they are, while at the same time trying to stay what we have to say about them clearly and compellingly. I think finding a way to do both of those at once is at the heart of what I do—as a thinker, as a writer, as a teacher, as a public citizen—and so I’m very excited to make it the heart of my Graduate Research Methods syllabus as well. For example, we’ll start by reading both The Turn of the Screw and the manifold contexts and lenses that inform how we read it—and our goal will be to keep a sense of just how nuanced this text is, while still figuring out how to express our own takes on it with clarity. I’m excited to work with our phenomenal grad students to practice those vital skills!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What’s on your radar?

January 11-12, 2025: The Great Society in 2025

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a number of Great Society laws, leading up to this post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

Honestly I think I said a good bit throughout this series about what we can, should, and must learn from both individual Great Society laws and programs and the overarching, progressive emphases of this administration and moment. So I’m simply gonna add one follow-up thought here, courtesy of Honest Abe himself:

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.”

Am I saying we are currently engaged in a civil war? Not exactly, although I think our moment qualifies at least as one of profound civil conflict (that’s only likely to deepen in the coming years). And in any case, I believe Lincoln’s more central point was about the nation’s ideals being put to the test. I would argue, and I hope have argued throughout this series in fact, that the Great Society both exemplified and amplified many of those ideals. And I know that 2025 and beyond will test the Great Society and our ideals alike in all kinds of ways. I’m out of the predicting business, but I know I’m proud to be in that fight with y’all.

Spring semester previews start tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 10, 2025: Great Society Laws: Immigration and America

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On one definitively inclusive thing the 1965 immigration law did, one more complicated effect, and the bottom line.

I hope this entire series has made clear just how broad and deep was the Great Society’s commitment to progressively and positively affecting American society. But I have to admit that it’s still a bit surprising to me, in the best possible way, to remember that making federal immigration policies more progressive and inclusive ended up on that list. As I’ve argued since at least my third book, the period beginning in the 1920s was the first time in American history when our foundational diversity was genuinely threatened by the federal government, thanks largely to that decade’s quota laws and the restrictive immigration policy they produced. So it was far from a given that even a progressive administration would be able to challenge, much less reverse, those four-plus decades of policy and history—and yet Johnson’s Great Society program did so, through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (also known as the Hart-Celler Act), which did away with those nationality- and ethnicity-based quotas and made immigration to the U.S. from much of the world far more possible once again.

The 1965 law did so by instituting a number of other systems of preference through which to categorize and admit immigrants. That’s an entirely understandable and even necessary step, and moreover many of those new preferences made perfect sense, including an emphasis on family connections which directly challenged the ways in which immigration restrictions had for nearly a century sought to break up American families and through them communities. But at the same time, I would point to another and far more problematic preference that went back to the restrictive policies but was deepened by the 1965 law—the overt preference for wealthy arrivals which has long been enshrined in the “Million Dollar Visa” policy. I’m not naïve enough not to understand the rationale behind such a preference, and that particular policy does include an ostensible requirement that these wealthy arrivals create jobs for other Americans (although I would be pleasantly shocked if they were indeed required to do so). But at the same time, my personal preference is still and will always be the same one enshrined on the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal—for “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The division between wealthier and less wealthy immigrants was on full display in the most recent presidential election, as illustrated by Elon Musk (himself a self-confessed undocumented immigrant in his early days in the US) becoming one of our most vocal cheerleaders for the Trump campaign in general and its xenophobic narratives in particular. But as telling and significant as such divisions and debates are, I think they ultimately can be a bit of a distraction from the more defining question: whether we see immigration as a key aspect of the Great Society, of the best vision and version of the United States; or whether we see it as a threat to those things. The 1960s Great Society answered that question potently through its inclusion of the 1965 immigration law among its programs and policies; the next four years will test whether and how those of us who agree can continue to fight for immigration’s and all immigrants’ place in our great society.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 9, 2025: Great Society Laws: Medicare and Medicaid

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

How the Great Society reflected two distinct ways of thinking about health care, and why the second in particular is still urgently needed.

One of the life lessons we all learn—or rather we hope to live long enough to learn—is that aging ain’t for the faint of heart. I don’t know how long exactly a relatively healthy human body is designed (not in an Intelligent Design sense, to be clear, just in the biology and chemistry/nature and evolution sense) to live, but it seems clear to me that in the modern world our life expectancies well outpace that plan, leading to all the potential (and likely, if not indeed inevitable) health and medical issues that come with aging. Before the creation of Social Security in the 1930s, aging Americans were pretty much entirely on their own when it came to such challenges; but that new program alone wasn’t quite sufficient to really deal with those health and medical realities, and so the Great Society added a vital new element, the health insurance program for seniors known as Medicare. As the son to a pair of older parents, I’ve seen first-hand how vital both Social Security and Medicare are to helping folks and families navigate these inevitable challenges of aging, and I truly can’t imagine how anyone survived the arc of life in America without them (and it seems clear that many, many more folks did not, or at least did so with far more challenges still).

Although Medicare is an entirely communal and indeed a socialist program (yeah, I invoked the American Bogeyman, but it’s the truth, folks), I would argue that it nonetheless reflects an individual approach to health care, or rather a resource designed to help individuals and families navigate their own health and medical challenges. Given the Great Society’s emphases on both a “War on Poverty” and social safety nets, it’s not surprising that in the same years—and indeed in the same law, the Medicare and Medicaid Act (also known as the Social Security Amendments) of 1965—the administration also created a more overtly community-focused health insurance program, Medicaid. Designed as a way to guarantee a baseline level of health insurance and thus health care for the most disadvantaged Americans, Medicaid quickly evolved to include a number of related and even more overtly community-focused programs, including for example the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) that offers access to not just health insurance but also community health programs for all American children and families.

Medicare and Medicaid are in many ways, as their names suggest, parallel and complementary programs. But I do believe that the latter is more community focused than the former, and likewise and even more importantly represents a recognition that health insurance and health care are communal needs, that access to them profoundly affects not only individuals but also and in many ways especially communities for the better (and the absence of them does so for the worse). One of the most frustrating aspects of the last couple decades in American politics (an incredibly long and competitive list to be sure) has been the collective unwillingness of so many Americans to a) recognize that programs like Medicare and Medicaid are already collective and governmental and, again, socialist; and b) extend that awareness to a recognition that collective health insurance and policies, such as the idea of “Medicare for All,” would represent a vital step forward in guaranteeing access to health insurance and care for all Americans. That’s one Great Society lesson we desperately still need to learn.

Last Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 8, 2025: Great Society Laws: Economic Safety Nets

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On three distinct and equally important ways that the Great Society created safety nets.

1)      Housing: In that section of Monday’s post on the Civil Rights Act of 1968, I noted that part of that law (Title VIII) came to be known as the Fair Housing Act. That important set of policies and protections was made much more possible by a distinct federal law from a few years earlier: the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1965. Besides adding a number of programs and protections to federal housing policy, this 1965 law also created a new Cabinet department, the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Given the federal government’s central role in such longstanding discriminatory practices as redlining, it was particularly important that the Great Society make equal opportunity to and accessibility of housing a significant focus, both to redress such specific histories and to do what it could to guarantee this vital resource for all Americans.

2)      Jobs: If housing is a great example of a safety net resource, though, it’s also just a baseline on which more must be added to help move individuals out of poverty and toward prosperity. Exemplifying the Great Society’s efforts towards those broader goals was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which as President Johnson argued was intended “to eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty in this nation by opening to everyone the opportunity for education and training, the opportunity to work, and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity.” And for those critics who might worry about the dangers of federal government overreach, it’s worth adding that this law pursued those shared goals primarily by creating Community Action Agencies, local organizations that would help individuals, families, and communities in their areas in specific and targeted ways.

3)      Food Stamps: Whether or not an individual is able to find and keep a job or jobs, however, it’s important to add that far too often more of a safety net is needed to keep folks and families on the right side of the poverty line. Even before the Great Society, President Kennedy and Congress had recognized that fact and launched the Food Stamp Program (often known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP) in 1962 to help Americans purchase food and related resources; but the Johnson administration expanded and cemented that program with the Food Stamp Act of 1964. Over the sixty years since, “food stamps” have become almost as frequent a target of misinformation and prejudice as “welfare,” and with just as little cause; as the Great Society’s contemporary activists the Black Panthers knew well, if folks are hungry there’s very little that education, or jobs, or any other resource can truly offer them.

Next Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?

January 7, 2025: Great Society Laws: Education and the Arts

[60 years ago this month, President Lyndon B. Johnson—fresh off his successful re-election campaign—created his Great Society program, pushing Congress to help him (as he put it in his 1964 speech acceptance the presidential nomination) “build a great society, a place where the meaning of man’s life matches the marvels of man’s labor.” So this week I’ll AmericanStudy a number of Great Society laws, leading up to a post on what we still desperately need to learn from these histories.]

On two specific significant laws, and one broader effect of the Great Society.

As the son of a lifelong early childhood educator I am perhaps biased, but to my mind one of the most under-appreciated (and certainly one of the most transformative) of the Great Society laws would be the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965. Part of Johnson’s overarching concept of a “War on Poverty,” this hugely influential law represented a major reform of and deepened federal commitment to public education in the United States overall, and disadvantaged students and families in particular. The Act’s dual emphases on guaranteeing equal access and shrinking achievement gaps comprised a radical new perspective on how the federal government should approach education policy, one supported by significant and ongoing commitments of money and other resources, and over the sixty years since those emphases have been complemented and extended by additions involving bilingual education and stronger protections against discrimination (toward students and teachers alike), among others.

Later in 1965 (it was a very busy year for Great Society laws and programs!), a separate Congressional law created the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), which became instantly and remains to this day the most prominent federal arts organization. The NEA’s original mission statement linked both the organization and the arts themselves directly to education, in and out of classrooms: the NEA is “dedicated to supporting excellence in the arts, both new and established; bringing the arts to all Americans; and providing leadership in arts education.” But at the same time, the NEA’s significant annual grant funding in particular is importantly available to any and all artists and creators, individuals and communities, with no necessary connection to particular educational institutions nor to educational goals (which of course are far from the only place or role for the arts in society). These are complementary but far from directly overlapping 1965 laws, that is.

But I do want to push further with my connection between these two laws in one additional and important way. I agree with the framing that the Education Act was tied to the War on Poverty, as access to education is crucial to connecting all children, families, and communities to the opportunities that can help alleviate poverty and lead to better futures. But to quote one of our most famous teacher characters, “medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” I really love that the Great Society supported the arts in education as well as the arts overall, and expressed clearly through such emphases and priorities that both arts education and the arts are part of all lives and communities, rather than in any way more elective or elite. We would do well to extend that emphasis today.

Next Great Society law tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think?