Citizen Solution: How You Can Make A Difference

9. Citizen Professionals

9Citizen Professionals Citizen professionals need to shift from acting as outside experts who fix problems to working collaboratively with their fellow citizens. This shift depends on professionals developing civic identities once again — and seeing themselves “on tap, not on top.” The civic efforts of professionals show the importance of having wisdom, not simply knowledge. D        , with experts in charge, broad forces are also at work to democratize knowledge. While large institutions try mightily to keep secrets, they find it harder and harder to do so. One of the distinctive features of the knowledge revolution today is that information is harder and harder to hoard (community organizing lore abounds with stories of the inside sympathizer who leaks information at critical moments of a community struggle against a bank or developer or chemical company). Information is not used up if it is given out. In many cases, it increases in value. Efforts to hoard information can lead to stagnation—a lesson learned by Soviet bloc officials, by tobacco company executives, and by intelligence officials after September . Information lends itself to sharing transactions. If it is unusual to think about the values and concepts that frame and 143 guide activity in this time of excessive specialization, skillful efforts to do so produce considerable power. Anne Fadiman, describing the disastrous encounter between American medical practice and Hmong culture in her book The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, also recounts striking examples of alternative democratic practice that increased the power and effectiveness of professionals who showed respect and paid attention. Doctors like Dwight Conquergood were successful in introducing public health practices in Thai refugee camps by drawing on Hmong cultural symbols and by showing connections between western medicine and traditional practices. The power dynamics in this process—a productive conception of power, rather than simply a view of power as static, zero-sum force—are analyzed in more detail in the Afterword. The explosion of the Internet in recent years—the World Wide Web, blogs, Internet journalism, and a host of other innovations—has begun to create a new context for professionals. One way to describe the professionals who decide to work with citizens, rather than acting on them, is that they are “citizen professionals.” Citizen professionals are proud of their knowledge and the craft of their discipline, but they also know their limits. Citizen professionals are citizens who see their specialized knowledge as “on tap, not on top,” in the words of community organizers. They recognize that solving complex problems requires many sources and kinds of knowledge. Minnesotans are pioneering in this approach. The Making of Citizen Professionals Civic life depends on professionals who see their work in communal and public terms. In recent decades professional development programs have taught professionals to look at people in terms of their deficiencies , not their assets, and to be detached from the civic life of communities . This view weakens professionals’ own citizenship, creates standardized , uprooted models of professional practice, and erodes civic 144 • T H E C I T I Z E N S O L U T I O N muscle. It also is a little-observed cause of subtle patterns of racial and class prejudice among professional elites. Today, professionals are trained to think in highly individualist terms, detached from civic and communal life. In her study of professional graduate education, Professional Identity Crisis, Carrie Yang Costello finds that aspiring professionals from minority backgrounds often face a forced choice between their home cultural communities and professional cultures. This creates a serious “identity dissonance.” As one Filipino student put it, “In the legal culture you have to adopt a different way of being, a different vocabulary and way to carry yourself. . . . When I go home, if I act the way I do [at Berkeley law school], my cousins and my friends say, ‘You’re kind of whitewashed.’”1 Citizen professionals develop unique styles grounded in local civic cultures. They learn respect for the insights of those without formal credentials. They recognize that they have much to learn from communities where populist values of cultural roots, community vitality, and equality are alive. They also build skills of collaborative public work that help energize and activate broad civic energies. A recent collection by Scott Peters and his colleagues, Engaging Campus and Community, recounts stories of University of Minnesota scientists who have public-work practices. Scholars who...