Confronting Ecological Crisis in Appalachia and the South: University and Community Partnerships

Foreword

vii Foreword Work That Is Real Marge Piercy tells us in one of her poems, The pitcher cries for water to carry and a person for work that is real.1 These lines came to mind while I was reading the stories in this book. As I read them I could feel the truth Piercy was trying to communicate in her poem. But I felt and learned a lot more. That’s because the stories in Confronting Ecological Crisis in Appalachia and the South aren’t about people who merely cry or yearn for real work. They’re about people who jump in and do it. The realness of the work in the stories of community-university partnerships you’ll read about in this book stands in stark contrast to the artificiality of so much of what we do and experience in both our communities and our universities. Carefully staged public meetings, hearings, and forums in communities; scripted role plays; case studies; and lectures in university classrooms—whatever value such activities may sometimes have, they often feel like meaningless rituals without consequence. And they rarely, it so often seems and feels, involve much work that is real. So what makes work real? Simply put, work is real when it matters. When it makes a difference. When it calls for and enables individual and collective initiative, improvisation, innovation, spontaneity, and creativity. When its steps and outcomes aren’t fixed or predetermined by a set of “best practices,” an “evidence-based program,” or a cookie-cutter recipe or blueprint. And not least, when people who are engaged in it are honest with each other about what they feel and think and believe. This probably sounds like a mere truism, something everyone already knows. And of course, it is. But the real work you’ll read about in this book has a provocative edge to it that’s simultaneously refreshing viii Foreword and troubling. The edge has to do with the ways students and faculty members engage with their community partners. They do so not only as scholars and scientists but also as activists and advocates who openly take sides in real-time, on-the-ground battles that pit one set of interests against another. Battles that have real consequences for real people and communities. Battles that hold in the balance the integrity of a region’s environment and the physical, economic, cultural, and political health and well-being of its people. Battles, in other words, that matter.2 For those who have long called on universities to be on the side of “the people” instead of corporations and other powerful interests, all this is refreshing.3 So why and how would some see it as troubling? In short, because it violates a widely held principle about the university: that it should be neutral, unbiased, and detached. For a pointed description and defense of this principle, listen to John Taylor, a professor of philosophy from Michigan State University who wrote a book that was published in 1981 under the title The Public Commission of the University. In his book Taylor claimed that the modern university was established as “a neutral ground beyond politics or ideology, upon which questions of public importance might be debated.” According to him, the university is supposed to be “a neutral assembly of scholars gathered for the critical exchange of ideas.” He declared that it “must enact the role of an impartial observer, set apart from all of the estranging contests that divide us, in action or passion, in the neighborhood , the market and the forum.” In order for the university “to perform its public office, to do its proper work,” he wrote, it “must preserve itself beyond partisanship and beyond advocacy.”4 While Taylor’s conception of the neutrality of the university included a negative function of refusing partisanship and advocacy, it also included a “positive” function of criticism. “By the neutrality of the university I understand the obligatory refusal of the corporation to identify itself with any of the partisan positions that are contested in theory within it or that are agitated in fact beyond it,” he wrote. “But I intend also, besides this bare obligation of detachment, a positive commission. The positive exercise of neutrality in the university is what ordinarily we entitle the function of criticism.” With respect to criticism, Taylor made an astonishing claim: “All the university can offer in any of its functions is criticism.” He acknowledged that the function of criticism from...