This has been happening for awhile. Then-dean of Earlham School of Religion Matt Hisrich warned us about some of this back in late 2020 when he revealed that Earlham College was raiding what had always been treated as ESR’s endowment. By all accounts the current EC president is doing his best after inheriting a mess but cutting programs and reducing staff isn’t goin to help turn it around.

Unfortunately, this spiral is becoming ever more common with small liberal arts colleges. The pandemic hit hard and a current drop in students (a baby bust that started in the 2008 recession) is just going to make things that much harder for these kinds of schools.

I appreciate Hardie writing this. Back in 2013 I got to know him as a fellow panelist at an ESR leadership conference and we’ve kept in touch over the years. In recent years he’s been on a task almost as quixotic as saving small colleges: he bought a paper, the Western Wayne News (publisher of this article), and has been trying to build a model of a sustainable local paper. I shared his great manifesto in defense of the open internet a few years ago and try to keep up with his blog. I’m glad to see Friends are sharing today’s article pretty widely on Facebook.

Earlham College has long been an invaluable part of the Quaker institutional landscape and Earlham School of Religion fills a need that no other school comes close to. Seeing these on the edge is worrisome for the whole Society of Friends. Guilford College in North Carolina has been having a rough go of it as well, though champions like my friend Wess Daniels have been passionate at drumming up support.

Earlham hopes big cuts foster long-term survival — Western Wayne News

Hoping to continue its acclaimed liberal arts education offerings well into the future, Earlham College in Richmond is…

Western Wayne News

I asked him what Quakers bring to protests:

One of the important things that we bring is our way of worship. And our way of worship helps to bring the temperature down. I think what the current regime wants is a violent movement opposing them. That plays out what they want (and certainly the assassination of Charlie Kirk plays into that scenario). What Quakers bring is a commitment to peaceful protest. And when we’re around, we can be that strong, committed, peaceful presence. And that’s important.

I also asked him a follow-up question of what we need to do to get out of the way and accept the leadership of others in social change. You can listen to his answers or read them in the show notes. 

She’s being given the award for her “fundamental contributions to the discovery of pulsars, and a lifetime of inspiring leadership in the scientific community,” according to a statement from the prize board. Bell Burnell told the BBC she plans to give all of her prize money to women, ethnic minorities and refugee students aiming to become physics researchers. 

You can read more about Bell Burnell on her Quakers in the World page.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2018/09/07/jocelyn-bell-burnells-1967-nobel-pulsars-breakthrough-prize-science/1220936002/

Tip of the hat to Doug Bennett for the suggestion and links.

I’ve been getting less patient with Twitter in recent months. Then-CEO Dick Costello acknowledged their failure handling abusive situations early in 2015 but nothing much seems to have changed. Having co-founder Jack Dorsey come back this in Jobsian fashion has been encouraging but only to a point—there’s a lot of weird ego involved in it all. Twitter’s inability to promote diversity and the tone-deafness of hiring a white man as diversity chief last month makes me wonder if it’s just finally going to do a full Yahoo and implode in slow motion.

But today something new: we’re looking at doing away with the 140 character limit. My initial reaction was horror but if done well it could be interesting. I’ve always wondered why they didn’t partner with blogging platform Medium (founded by another co-founder, featuring similar core principles). The key will be keeping the feed at 2–3 lines so we can scan it quickly, with some sort of button or link to expand past 140 or so characters.

One could argue that these “fatter tweets” is Twitter’s way of building the popular long-text picture hack into the system. Could Twitter management be ready to look at users as co-creators of the wider Twitter culture?

It was in college that I first heard Max Weber’s idea that bureaucracies grow to eventually see their own maintenance as their prime objective (Wikipedia has a section on Weberian bureaucracy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureaucracy#Weberian_bureaucracy). At the time I assumed we were talking about governments but it didn’t take long in the nonprofit world to see the phenomenon alive there as well. Resources go to the programs that can attract the biggest donor attention. Committee discernment gets short-circuited. Internal benchmarks become the measure even if the are disconnected from actual effect or mission. If a need arises from outside of the boundaries of the internal structures, it is ignores: there’s little incentive to address it.

The only real solution is to keep remembering why we’re doing what we’re doing. It’s the practice of self-reflection, it’s the exercise of asking what we might be called to. Perhaps this is a leader’s real job description.

I’ve been thinking again lately of the way the Society of Friends responded to the Tom Fox kidnapping, a story I recounted in “Why Would a Quaker Do a Crazy Thing Like That”(https://www.quakerranter.org/2006/06/why_would_a_quaker_do_a_crazy/). I think the underwhelming response was mostly a failure of imagination. Too many of the organizations in question had settled themselves into narrowly-defined mission silos of their own making. They didn’t know what to make of the situation. I’d like to hope that a Rufus Jones or Howard Brinton would have cut through the slack, and I am encouraged at some recent conversations I’ve had with some emerging leaders, but as a student of history I know these are eternal problems that are always ready to return.

My theory of media and social change is that 90% of the time we’re talking amongst ourselves, inviting people in to the conversation and building an infrastructure of community. It’s one-on-one work, slow, people intensive (but then that’s what makes it enjoyable, right?). The fruits of this labor become visible with unexpected opportunities–those times when we’re called on by a larger public to explain ourselves or describe the world as we see it. If we’ve been doing our background work–planting the seeds that is the people of our community–then we will be ready to step up to the challenge. If we’re not, opportunity slips away.

The history of Friends–maybe the history of the church universal–is one of missed opportunities; the miracle of faith is that sometimes we connect with one another in the love that is God and lay some more bricks and mortar for God’s kingdom on Earth.

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What Canst Thou Say?: Vision
Without vision, the people perish. Mostly because they get eaten by tigers they didn’t see coming. Isn’t that a joke from Calvin & Hobbes? I’ve been thinking a lot about vision lately.…

Malcolm Gladwell’s modus operandi is to make outrageously counter-intuitive claims that people will talk about enough that they’ll buy his boss’s magazine, books and bobble-head likenesses. I find him likable and diverting but don’t take his claims very seriously. He’s a lot like Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson, his sometimes sparring partner, which isn’t surprising as they work for the same magazine empire, Conde Nast Publications.

In his article, Gladwell takes a lot of potshots at social media. It’s easy to do. He picks Clay Shirky, another New York “Big Idea” guy as his rhetorical strawman now, claiming Shirky’s book “Here Comes Everybody” is the “bible of social-media movement.” Reading Gladwell, you kind of wish he’d get out of the echo box of circle-jerk New York Big Talkers (just getting out of the Conde Nast building’s cafeteria would be a good start).

Gladwell’s certainly right in that most of what passes for activism on Twitter and Facebook is ridiculous. Clicking a “Like” button or changing your profile image green doesn’t do much. He makes an important distinction between “weak ties” (Facebook “friends” who aren’t friends; Twitter campaigns that are risk-free) and “strong ties.” He cites the Civil Rights movement as a strong-tie phenomenon: the people who put themselves on the line tended to be those with close friends also putting themselves on the line.

What Gladwell misses is strong-tie organizing going on in social media. A lot of what’s happening over on QuakerQuaker is pretty strong-tie–it’s translating to workshops, articles, and is just one of a number of important networks that are forming. People are finding each other and making real connections that spill out into the real world. It’s not that online organizes creates real world changes, or even the reverse. Instead, under the right circumstances they can feed into each other, with each component magnifying the other’s reach.

One example of non-hierarchical involved social media is how Quaker bloggers came together to explain Tom Fox’s motives after his kidnapping. It didn’t have any effect on the kidnappers, obviously, but we did reach a lot of people who were curious why a Friend might choose such a personally dangerous form of Christian witness. This was all done by inter-related groups of people with no budget and no organizational chart. But these things don’t have to be quite so life-and-death.

A more recent example I’ve been able to see up close is the way my wife’s church has organized against diocesan attempts to shut it down: a core group of leaders have emerged; they share power, divide up roles and have been waging an organized campaign for about 2.5 years now. One element of this work has been the Savestmarys.org blog. The website’s only important because it’s been part of a real-world social network but it’s had an influence that’s gone far beyond the handful of people who write for it. One of the more surprising audiences have been the many staff at the Diocesan headquarters who visit every day–a small group has taken over quite a bit of mental space over there!

It’s been interesting for me to compare QuakerQuaker with an earlier peace project of mine, Nonviolence.org, which ran for thirteen years starting in 1995. In many ways it was the bigger site: a larger audience, with a wider base of interest. It was a popular site, with many visits and a fairly active bulletin board for much of it’s life. But it didn’t spawn workshop or conferences. There’s no “movement” associated with it. Donations were minimal and I never felt the support structure that I have now with my Quaker work.

Nonviolence.org was a good idea, but it was a “weak tie” network. QuakerQuaker’s network is stronger for two reasons that I can identify. The obvious one is that it’s built atop the organizing identity of a social group (Friends). But it also speaks more directly to its participants, asking them to share their lives and offering real-world opportunities for interaction. So much of my blogging on Nonviolence.org was Big Idea thoughts pieces about the situation in Bosnia–that just doesn’t provide the same kind of immediate personal entre.

Malcolm Gladwell minimizes the leadership structure of activist organizations, where leadership and power is in constant flux. He likewise minimizes the leadership of social media networks. Yes, anyone can publish but we all have different levels of visibility and influence and there is a filtering effect. I have twenty-five years of organized activism under my belt and fifteen years of online organizing and while the technology is very different, a lot of the social dynamics are remarkably similar.

Gladwell is an hired employee in one of the largest media companies in the world. It’s a very structured life: he’s got editors, publishers, copyeditors, proofreaders. He’s a cog in a company with $5 billion in annual revenue. It’s not really surprising that he doesn’t have much direct experience with effective social networks. It’s hard to see how social media is complementing real world grassroots networks from the 40th floor of a mid-town Manhattan skyscraper.

Related Reading:

• What Malcolm Gladwell Doesn’t Understand About Activism and Social Networks over on StudentActivism.net, via @public_historian.
• Friends and Hierarchy and Social Change. Jeanne Burns on QuakerQuaker.
• Make the Revolution from Anil Dash: “People who want to see marches in the streets are often unwilling to admit that those marches just don’t produce much in the way of results in America in 2010.”
• Social Media for Good and Evil, Strong and Weak Ties, Online/Offline,and Orgs and Networks from Beth Kantor

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