Excellence, Engagement, and Ethics in Election 2016

By Daniel Mucinskas

Back in the spring, we asked readers of our April 2016 newsletter to ponder the following questions with relation to the 2016 U.S. presidential election:

Excellence
1. What abilities and qualities do we expect a public office holder to demonstrate?
2. Who among the candidates has the skills to do the job with technical excellence? What information did you use to make your conclusions?
3. What factors of the political environment are allowing or preventing the achievement of public excellence today?

Engagement
1. What issues make you feel most engaged at election time? How does this influence your voting decision?
2. Which candidate do you feel is most engaged in carrying out his/her plans and serving the country? Why?
3. How can we overcome feelings of dis-engagement that many people have in the political process?

Ethics
1. What ethical principles should a candidate demonstrate to the public?
2. How do your own values and ethical considerations align (or not align) with your preferred candidate?
3. What steps can we each take to reach compromises or shared understanding of vexing ethical disagreements?

These questions ask readers to think through the lenses of excellence, engagement, and ethics, or what The Good Project calls the “three Es.” We have adopted the “three Es,” which originated from our Good Work study about how people do good in their professional lives, as guiding values.

With Election Day now less than two weeks away, we wanted to take this moment to remind all of our readers to pause from the chaos and set aside time to reflect alone or with others in civil discourse. You can use these questions as a guide to spark respectful conversations about the election or deeper analysis of your own values and those of others.

This election has brought to the fore many different fault lines in American society. Economic rewards have not been evenly distributed, and many people feel left out of the current system. The scope of America’s role in the rest of the world and its responsibilities to those in other countries has been debated. Conflicting visions of what US society should look like have arisen. As Howard Gardner has noted in his blog “The Professional Ethicist,” a crisis in the media and lack of “disinterestedness” has led many to distrust journalists. And many educators have had a difficult time making sense of these disputes and presenting them in a constructive way in their classrooms.

We invite you to share any reflections you may have from this election cycle, and don’t forget to set a positive example of civic participation for young people by voting if you are eligible on November 8 (or earlier)!

The Making of a Good Journalist

I am often asked to help design educational programs. Usually the requests come from individuals who have found the theory of multiple intelligences to be appealing and want to apply it with one or another population (e.g. how to assess the intelligences of middle school children and create an appropriate curriculum). Less frequently, though still often, the request reflects an interest in building on the work that my colleagues and I have carried out under the aegis of The Good Project (e.g. how to encourage cooperation among high schools students). Only rarely have those individuals who have approached me sought ways in which to combine MI thinking and approaches with insights and suggestions from The Good Project. And so when a request arrived to do just that—from a school of journalism in Argentina—it got me thinking.

My first thoughts centered on what intellectual capacities are important for a journalist-in-training. Newspaper, magazine, and media journalists deal with words—and so having a well-honed linguistic intelligence is crucial. Indeed, when a television personality simply reads the news stories off of a teleprompter, I consider that action to be “reading” and “performing”—not journalism. Journalists typically have to form relations with individuals—those whom they are covering, those whom they are interviewing—and so interpersonal intelligence is also vital. Nowadays, much of journalism also entails mastery of visual media, as in hosting and curating websites, and this new requirement draws on spatial intelligence.

Depending on what topics you cover, other intelligences come into play. And so, for example, if you are a business or finance journalist, your logical-mathematical intelligence needs to be honed. Or if you cover athletics or dance, bodily-kinesthetic intelligence is relevant and at a premium.

Of course, no journalist can be expected to have all of these intelligences developed to a high degree. This Is where collaboration or division of labor become important. But one can also enhance an intelligence by exercising it. Journalists who are assigned to a new beat may find that initially they lack the relevant intelligence, but there is no reason why they can’t develop it. If I can use a personal example, my naturalist intelligence is quite underdeveloped. But if I were assigned to cover food and restaurants, I presumably could strengthen that form of intelligence… hopefully not gaining too much weight in the process!

So far I have been talking about the skills that one needs to be a journalist—particularly a journalist who can turn out effective “copy” on various topics. But that is not equivalent to being a good journalist. In our conceptualization at The Good Project, the good journalist must be a professional. She must understand and seek to embody the principal values of journalism: carrying out thorough research, making sure that all sides of a story are covered, sticking closely to the facts, and, perhaps most importantly, not tilting the story in a certain direction because of one’s own personal preferences or biases. The phrase that I favor is being a “disinterested professional,” in the sense of not letting one’s own personal interests color the way that one covers a story.

How one becomes more than just a journalist but a good journalist is not easy. It certainly helps to have good values from home or from one’s early education—be it religious or secular. But the crucial time for developing the professional stance is during one’s training—at school, on internships, and on the first job. Crucial here are role models who embody the professional stance, who can talk about it in words, and who demonstrate how they deal with complex ethical situations, admit when they erred, and strive to do better the next time.

It has never been easy to become a good professional or a good journalist. Indeed, until the 20th century, the idea of a professional journalist had not been much developed. There was perhaps a “golden age” of journalism after the Second World War—particularly in Western Europe and in North America. But since the advent of digital media, the 24/7 news cycle, the desire for ever-bigger financial profits, and public lust for gossip and disinclination to pay for thorough, objective coverage, it has become even more difficult to carry out good journalism.

And yet, if professional journalism were to disappear from our world society, that would be a tragedy. We depend on journalists to remove the bravura surrounding persons and institutions and to help us understand what is actually going on. In the absence of such dedicated professionals, we are left with rumor, innuendo, and indeed complete lies, or “truthiness”—naïve belief in what one has heard before, without any sense of whether it has actually been verified. Ultimately, some groups would have to reinvent journalism in some form. But it makes much more sense to preserve its essential components, while adapting it to present conditions.

And in that mission, MI theory can be very helpful. Recognition of our multiple intelligences not only provides many more roles in journalism. It also opens the possibility that individuals can acquire news from many different media and modalities. And since we live a global, hyper-connected world, these avenues of communication hold the potential of delivering news of high quality to the population of the world.

The Making of a Professional: Where and When to Start

Most of us have a sense of which professionals are impressive—the astute and reliable physician; the fair-minded journalist who will only publish a story after thorough research; the empathetic professor who keeps up with the latest findings in her field. But where do these individuals come from? How are they formed?

While at one time, certain adult roles may have been passed down or inherited, we no longer think of queens or knights or jesters as professionals. However, one can discern analogies: several generations of doctors or lawyers in a family; families deeply involved in teaching; children growing up in a doctor or teacher family observing the behaviors, habits, and skills of the older generation and in many cases emulating the role models. Less frequently, older professionals may spot promising young persons and encourage a mentoring relationship. This can happen when an experienced teacher spots an adolescent who shows interest and ability in teaching peers; or when a high school debater comes to the attention of a veteran lawyer. Early signs of professionalism (we might call it “pre-professionalism”) are found in a youngster who understands the positive missions of their school, who joins into those missions, and who eventually takes a leading (if not leadership) role in the achievement of those missions.

This abstract characterization of “pre-professionalism” cries out for concrete specifics. And indeed, at every school, such specifics reliably abound. What happens when a new child comes to school and is unfamiliar with the norms? How is an incident of cheating handled? How does the school community react when there is a tragedy in the family of one of the students, or, indeed, when harsh weather or a fire damages a home, a business, or a church in the neighborhood? Or even an institution that is not much admired? And when there are epochal political events in the larger society, are these discussed in school and are reasonable (or even unreasonable) actions considered and carried out?

Whatever the prompt, some students will instinctively behave constructively and, alas, some students will be by-standers or even trouble makers. Here the role of the adults—both those in school and those parents and neighbors who are part of the broader school family—is salient. As is often quipped with respect to parents, “Children don’t listen to what parents say, but they invariably notice what their parents do.” And equally important—sometimes, more important—is what the older children, the admired role models, do (or don’t do).

In this context, negative role models must also be considered. Sometimes, particularly if they are attractive in one way or another, such seductive role models can encourage immature or even damaging emulations. However, as we learned in our own study of excellent professionals, young persons also gain lessons from those whom they do not admire. Frequently, these professionals told us of anti-mentors, tormentors, and negative role models who taught them exactly what they did not want to do and how they did not want to be.

Recently, it has become fashionable to say, “One should never waste a crisis.” Perhaps there’s an ounce of truth in this expression, but it would be foolish—in fact “stupid”—for educators to wait until an actual crisis erupts. Here is where simulations, games, dramatic enactments, and role play can be timely. From the time they enter school, young people should be aware of problems and conundra that may arise, the range of possible responses, and which responses are likely to be effective, which not, and why. Such rehearsals, if carried out with seriousness, can be of considerable help in the formation of good young people.

And of course, the explicit curriculum is as important as the hidden curriculum. Whether it is in humanistic subjects, like history or literature, or in more scientifically oriented subjects, like biology or physics, students should be alerted to the ethical dilemmas that can arise, how they have been dealt with (or swept under the rug), and what might or should have been done.

But these class exercises gain efficacy when they are reflected in the behaviors and attitudes of teachers and administrators every day, and they lose all power and credibility if the lessons from “upstanders” in history or literature are undermined by the decisions and actions of leaders in one’s midst.

There is a long distance from the milieu of middle and high school and the atmosphere of our hospitals, law offices, and university campuses—and thus plenty of time either to further develop one’s professional muscles or, less happily, to see them atrophy. And the values learned at home (and in religious institutions) are certainly formative. But I would wager that in many cases, when we admire a professional, we are looking at behaviors and thought patterns that were launched in school, well before youngsters even knew the word “professional.”

Ethical Quandaries: What To Do? What Not To Do?

For professionals (and, no doubt, many others as well), ethical quandaries arise all the time. For example, as a teacher and adviser of students who have diverse strengths and needs, I have to decide how much time to devote to each of my students. As a researcher, I have to decide how to credit members of a team, each of whom depends on authorship for professional advancement. The key questions with respect to such dilemmas: 1) Is one aware of the issues?; 2) How does one think about them?; and 3) How does one decide on what to do and then act appropriately?

As it happens, recently, over the course of 48 hours, three ethical issues arose in my work life, broadly construed. Perhaps one day I can write about the details but, alas, not at present. (Ethical quandaries typically involve specific people and situations, and it is unethical to write about them—unless you are a skilled writer of fiction.) What I can do is reflect on the way in which I thought about and then handled each challenge. It turns out that the three issues differed on a major dimension: the degree of freedom I had to discuss them with others.

a. In Case 1, the information involved was completely privileged. If I spoke to anyone about the situation, I would risk doing something very destructive, since there was no way to hide the identities of those involved. I ruminated at length about the issue, but the rumination took place entirely in my own mind. What kept the exercise from being completely solipsistic is that I was able to imagine what others might say. I could react to their imaginary comments, anticipate their reactions, and draw comparisons with other similar issues under analogous circumstances.

b. In Case 2, the issue, while sensitive, was one about which I could speak to others. The problem was that only individuals familiar with the personalities involved, and how they have interacted over time, could provide useful suggestions. And so I was actually restricted to a very few people’s input (though, as in Case 1,  I could have imaginary dialogues with anyone whose voice, so to speak, I could conjure up).

c. Case 3 was the easiest one to deal with, with respect to advice from others. It did not involve information that was confidential, nor was it highly technical or context-specific. I was able to consult with a wide range of individuals, including those who knew the issues and personalities as well as those to whom I had to explain the situation from scratch. I did end up giving greater weight to the advice from individuals within my professional circle.

It’s been wisely said that the quickest way to a bad decision is to think about it in isolation and not to solicit a range of opinions. Thus, the most important thing not to do when confronted with a quandary is to assume that you have all the answers, or, equally bad, the right answer. Having time to ruminate is also advisable; and sometimes what appeared to be a complex or intractable situation resolves itself or at least becomes clearer. Whenever possible, however, it is prudent to speak to as many persons as practical and to weigh their input carefully. The crucial variable, then, is to whom to speak, and how much knowledge they should ideally have.

I just used the adjective “wise”—and perhaps the situation I’m describing provides some insight into the nature of wisdom. Once, when I faced an ethical dilemma which was highly sensitive, I thought about my acquaintance (let’s call him Solomon) who knew the most about the general issue without knowing any of the players. We had such a useful conversation, and Solomon’s framing and advice were so “on point,” I felt no need to speak to anyone else. Of course, if he had not been available, I might well have sought advice elsewhere or conducted an extensive imaginary conversation with Solomon before making a decision and acting upon it.

Of what does Solomon’s wisdom consist? On one point I am quite clear: he has encountered many comparable situations over the years. And whether or not he remembers the details of each, he remembers the configuration and the possible solutions well enough so that he can arrive readily at apt advice.

In the end, the buck stops with the person faced with the ethical dilemma—in this case, with me. I might or might not make the wisest decision. Contributing to the wisdom are the number and types of conversations that I can have with others, either directly or in my imagination, and how I weigh and synthesize what I’ve heard and learned.

Whatever decision is made, I should add it to my file of vexing cases; refer to it when possible; be pleased, though not smug, when the decision turns out to have been well-advised. And in the frequent cases where the decision was less than desirable, I should figure out what can be learned from this failure and how to do better the next time Fate hands me a vexing ethical dilemma.

Exploring Ethical Standards in Digital Stewardship

Matt Weber is the Director of Digital Communications Strategy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This blog does not represent the views of his institution, or maybe, it kind of does.

In the fast paced world of social media, it’s critical to permit the occasional pause. This may be challenging with short news cycles and miniscule attention spans for a growing, voracious audience, but it is also essential.

Each day, as a part of my role as Director of Digital Communications Strategy at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), my morning inbox is filled with countless requests for amplification and dissemination of digital content, to be shared out through our myriad distribution channels. Over half of HGSE web traffic comes from pulling our social media levers, with robust Twitter and Facebook audiences measuring over 100,000 followers on each platform. Our commitment to social media as a driver for engagement has been the linchpin in launching several successful digital campaigns over the years.

The necessity of pausing to reflect when wielding these lines of communication was brought home to me sharply when, in February 2016, I posted a blog about the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump. A member of our faculty had written the op-ed in The Washington Post, critical of Trump’s candidacy. In fact, the subtitle of the article included the words “We Must Stop Trump.” As this was a faculty member’s op-ed published in a mainstream media outlet, the post was an obvious candidate for sharing. We took an attributed quote from the article and shared the link on our Facebook page on a Monday night.

What followed was a 24-hour cycle of comments, emails, and frustration over the fact that HGSE shared this article on its Facebook page. Some of the more representative comments remarked: “HGSE would do well to remember that they don’t speak for all educators…” and, “While I agree, I would prefer my alma mater not opine on presidential politics.”

The reactions to the post caused me to think deeply about the unique opportunities and challenges of my position. Our guidelines in the Office of Communications are two-fold: delivering examples of meaningful impact and cultivating community. These are the two pillars intrinsic to the standards we developed over six years ago. Our digital channels must constitute a lively, microcosm of our institutional mission and succeed in communicating that mission through examples of it in practice. Our curated panoply of content must all reflect back on the collective output of our institutional work and strengthen a wider community committed to the broader themes. This content can take the form of a simple Instagram photo of the campus at sunset or a dense, longitudinal research study shared on Facebook. Yet not all decisions yield the intended result; these guidelines can turn out to be a bit more complicated in practice.

In reading the commentary from the public critical of the posting, I paused and double-checked on why I had shared this article. A verse of T.S. Eliot’s came to mind: “We had the experience but missed the meaning.” (“The Dry Salvages,” 1941)

This quote reminded me of the ways in which I should hold myself accountable as the gatekeeper of these channels. I never want to lose sight of the “why” in the daily repetition of the “what” and “how.” The “what” is any digital content connected to our institution—research, alumni news, events, faculty writing, etc. The “how” is in deciding what channel, framing, and timing makes best sense in optimizing content distribution. Yet knowing the “why” is of critical importance to good ethical stewardship of dutifully representing one’s institution. Perhaps, I thought to myself as I paused, I had made a mistake in posting the Trump story. A self-audit would help me discover if I had broken with our standards.

I posted this article because it represented the opinion of a member of our faculty in a mainstream outlet; it was related to the faculty member’s general work; and regardless of the opinion of the work, our channels are meant to provide meaningful amplification of our community member’s opinions (there is no sifting or sorting out of content based on political views). Indeed, if the piece had been of the opposite persuasion and supportive of Trump, we would have featured it identically. This was an important standard which should have been clear to me and which I needed to share with our audience.

In a response to our Facebook critics, we institutionally replied on this Facebook thread that the school itself does not opine on politics but rather shares the many perspectives of individuals in our community. As a matter of record, we tend to be quite open and de-regulated. In six years of managing these accounts, I have only had to delete a few comments.

On further reflection, I would add the following points. The curator of a site should think carefully about what the site can do and what it cannot do; and the curator as well must try to anticipate how the readers will react to the material that is posted. Especially with reference to an audience that is well educated, people are always looking to see “who” is behind the “what” and asking the “why.” We see this discernment in which cable news channel one wishes to watch political coverage; we see it in the activism of staff writers for newspapers and publications. We see it on Twitter through profiles stating “My views do not represent the views of my institution,” and we see it in less digitized ways on the bumper stickers of employee cars in company parking lots.

As a brand author and architect of how a chorus of individual voices is aggregated and conveyed to a diverse audience, I cannot emphasize enough the value in always remembering to pause both before and after critical actions. In retrospect, I wish that I had better signaled to the audience that this was an essay that took a political point of view; that it is was our policy to call attention to any and all serious writing by members of the community; and that we would have without hesitation run an essay with a different view on the same topic. And as with all our postings, we welcomed thoughtful responses. Had I done so more clearly and proactively, I think that the reactions might have been less heated.

If you are involved in digital stewardship as I am, my advice is that you continually align your messaging with your institution, always check your own personal biases, and frequently ask “why” with attention towards both actual appearance and audience perception of who is the messenger. Beyond digital stewards, I believe this advice universally applies to anyone acting as de facto champion or spokesperson of a cause in both a public or personal context. My professional role is fairly anonymous but often our personal choices are not. Whether that is wearing a Red Sox cap in Yankee Stadium or ashes on your forehead on Ash Wednesday outside of church, be sure to know exactly why you are committing to ownership of this public messaging and reflect on how a timely pause can help you come to a more thoughtful understanding.

The full T.S. Elliot quote goes on to say: “We had the experience but missed the meaning. And approach to the meaning restores the experience in a different form.”

It’s a fairly simple lesson, but one we don’t always heed when the immediacy and access of public communication often results in a message that is half-baked. I wish you all the best in pausing to approach meaning in new form, which I hope you do… right now.