Improving Local Law Enforcement: Lessons from Education

Let me say from the outset that I am not against the police. My late brother served on a city police force most of his working life, as have his son and grandson.  My concern is simply to ensure that our law enforcement services in communities across the country are able to do what the public expects of them and that the public understand how quality is defined and ensured.

            That said, the recent killing of George Floyd, the spate of killings that preceded it, and new killings since then have made it clear that there is a problem to be solved.  Let’s not demonize all police officers because of the actions of a few.  Instead, let’s make sure that US. communities, big and small, across the nation can be confident that their local law enforcement agencies—and the professionals who work in them—develop and refine the professional skills and organizational practices that are needed in a rapidly changing social and technological environment.  

            There are many very specific issues of public policy, organizational policy, and individual professionalism that need to be articulated to ensure that law enforcement agencies and individual police officers meet the professional standards for the field.  However, I’d like to address some organizational approaches that might facilitate how the law enforcement community establishes  standards for the field.  

I spent most of my career in education. My sense is that the way school districts and colleges/universities have organized to develop standards of professional practice in education offer some examples of how law enforcement agencies and governments might organize professional standards in that field.  Here are some thoughts on how models that education institutions have created could be applied to strengthen public confidence in local law enforcement.

Law Enforcement Agency Accreditation

Around the United States, colleges and universities have created regional associations through which they ensure quality at the institutional level.  Pennsylvania, for instance, is a member of the Middlestates Commission on Higher Education (MSCHE), created in 1919 and recognized by the U.S. Secretary of Education and by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation as the body that accredits more than 525 higher education institutions in five U.S. States, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands.  It describes itself as:

a voluntary, non-governmental, membership association that defines, maintains, and promotes educational excellence across institutions with diverse missions, student populations, and resources. It examines each institution as a whole, rather than specific programs within institutions.

As a membership organization, MSCHE brings institutions together to set standards and then to review each other to ensure that all members are meeting those standards.  Standards are in the following areas:  

Design and Delivery of the Student Learning Experience
Support of the Student Experience

Educational Effectiveness Assessment
Planning, Resources, and Institutional Improvement

Governance, Leadership, and Administration

Each member institution agrees on a periodic peer evaluation of the institution’s achievements in each of these areas.  This includes data collected annually and a peer review every five years.  There are counterpart accrediting commissions in other parts of the U.S., all of which are recognized by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA).

This model could be adapted by law enforcement agencies across the country, allowing for coordination of local agencies at the state level and, through regional accrediting commissions, at regional and national levels.  The result would be a new professional community that can work to ensure that law enforcement agencies address both local needs and national policy concerns.    

State Licensure/Credentialing

Pennsylvania has 500 individual school districts that range in size from 200 students to 140,000 students.  All teachers in these districts must be certified by the State Department of Education before they can be hired to teach in local schools.  Similar certification requirements can be found in other states.  The statewide professional certification model could be easily applied to law enforcement as an enhancement of current training and certification practices for police officers.  It would help guarantee that all officers have received training in how to operate in communities that are diverse not only racially, but religiously, culturally, and by how individuals earn a living.  It also would provide a standard for evaluating professional performance of law enforcement officers and the agencies in which they work.

Continuing Professional Education

Continuing professional development should be a requirement for all law enforcement professionals.  Standards for professional development could evolve through the work of the regional accrediting commissions, with input from state credentialing agencies.  Professional development can take many forms—conferences, webinars, credit and noncredit courses, etc.  All forms could contribute to micro-credentials that could then be aggregated into college credits, leading to senior officers having a degree or equivalent professional certification.  Achievement of a micro-credential could be a threshold for special assignments and related salary increases and future promotions.

Bringing State associations together to review state standards and agree on regional standards would be an important step toward raising the professional stature of policing in the U.S. Turning these standards into a licensing/certification system for officers is a natural product of the national conversation that would result. 

Public Higher Education in 2030

In these challenging times, it is sometimes helpful to think about how today’s innovations--and today’s struggles—will change the world we live in.  Recently, a friend—himself an international leader in open and online education—challenged me to think about how all the innovations in technology and the struggle for institutions and individuals to keep pace with the accelerating pace change will impact our colleges and universities in the years ahead.  “What,” he asked, “will public universities look like in 2030?”  

            It is near impossible to paint a detailed picture of the future.  However, his question got me thinking about current innovations that might have an ongoing impact on our institutions and on how we think about higher and continuing education as both individual and institutional actions.  Here are some thoughts about specific innovations that might help shape the higher education environment that my grandsons may experience.  I am sure there are many more potential change agents out there, but I hope these will help start a discussion. 

The K-14 Movement  In 2020, a few states—led by New York—made the first two years of college tuition-free in public colleges and universities for resident high school graduates.  By 2030, we can expect that this K-14 movement will become a standard feature of public higher education—that most young people will be expected to complete the first two years of college, just as their parents were expected to complete high school.  This could greatly increase enrollment demand in general education courses and could also increase the demand for associate degrees in many disciplines.  A universal K-14 environment—which would include both general education and some professional studies at the associate level—would also change how colleges think about the role of general education and its relationship to both the high school curriculum and the upper division professional studies.

Micro-Credentials  In Thank You for Being Late, Tom Friedman wrote that, while a baccalaureate degree used to prepare one for a career, today it just prepares students for their first job. This is because of the continuing acceleration of both technological and social change—what Christopher Beha, editor of Harper’s magazine, called “the Age of Acceleration.” One way that colleges and universities can respond is to create an ongoing relationship with graduates and employers, offering continuing education in the form of micro-credentials that allow new professionals to stay in touch with changes in their fields. The demand for micro-credentials will vary, depending on the professional discipline, involved.  In some cases, they may begin after the associate degree—the end of the K-14 phase of education.  In other cases, they may allow an institution to continue the education of alums who enter a profession after their baccalaureate degree or even after a graduate degree.  Ideally, credits earned in a micro-credential could be applied to the next highest degree, giving new meaning to the ideal of “lifelong learning.”

Collaboration  We have begun to see institutions collaborating to deliver graduate degrees and specialized courses so that all their students have access to the best possible education, regardless of their geographic location.  One example is the Great Plains Interactive Distance Education Alliance (IDEA), which allows state universities in the U.S. to ensure that their students have access to the best possible academic resources in specialized undergraduate and graduate degrees, and CourseShare, through which institutions in the Big-Ten Academic Alliance can share access to specialized language and area studies courses housed at other campuses. This idea should continue to expand to include new professional areas and also to include international collaborations.

            These elements have existed in higher education for many years.  Over the past decade, on-line technology has greatly increased the use of these nontraditional approaches. More recently, the Covid-19 pandemic and other events have accelerated the acceptance of online and remote teaching within the mainstream.  

            The questions for us in 2020, as we look ahead to 2030, are simple (more simple than the answers, I suspect): (1) what elements of today’s state-of-the art technology and pedagogical innovations will have lasting effect and should, as a result, be moved more quickly into the mainstream? And (2) how should the continuing and eLearning functions, which have thrived on the fringes of some institution for more than a decade now, be mainstreamed so that faculty and the institution, generally, can use them to respond to the changing needs for higher education?

            I hope this encourage discussion of topics that should be addressed to help our institutions and governing bodies better prepare for 2030.              

            THOUGHTS??

To the Class of 2020

College graduations are always times of mixed emotions.  On one hand, there is the exultation of having completed a life goal.  On the other hand, graduation often means bidding farewell to friends who you may not see again, leaving behind a life filled with great memories, and, ultimately, facing the unknown on one’s own.  

This year marks the 50th anniversary of my own college graduation.  1970 was a year of tumult and early closures, as students protested the country’s war in Vietnam after National Guardsmen killed four and wounded nine protesting students at Kent State University.  At Penn State, the spring term ended early. We were all glad when graduation day came. 

This year, it was a very different kind of disruption. Graduation came in the midst of a global pandemic that has hit the United States harder than most other countries, cancelling face-to-face instruction and closing campuses across the nation.  Most U.S. colleges and universities cancelled the formal 2020 graduation ceremonies in favor of “virtual” commencements over Zoom or another streaming video service.  Penn State was no exception. Town has been unusually empty and quiet as a result.  However, this past week, we’ve noticed small groups of students, decked out in their graduation robes, posing for photos at the Nittany Lion Shrine, Old Main, the Penn State Arboretum, and other landmarks—finding a way to memoralize their college achievement and create new memories to share in the years to come in the midst of social distancing.  

In 2005, I had the honor of giving a graduation speech at Penn State-Shenango, where I began my college career in 1966.  The campus was celebrating its 40th anniversary, and I was delighted to have the opportunity to speak with the graduating students.  I wanted to share my remarks from that day below as a way of wishing our 2020 grads all the best as they begin their careers in these very turbulent times.

Penn State Shenango Commencement Speech, May 2005

Thank you, Dr. Leeds.

First, let me say congratulations to the graduates who are here with us today.  I also want to recognize our graduates’ families, friends, and loved ones.  No one achieves a goal like this entirely on her own--you all deserve a share of the congratulations tonight.   

I also want to thank Dean Disney and Dr. Leeds for inviting me to be here.   I am especially proud to join you tonight for several reasons.  First, as a Penn State administrator.  Second, as a Penn State Shenango Alum.  Third, as a Shenango Valley native.   And fourth, this year Penn State Shenango is celebrating its 40th anniversary of service to the community here in Western Pennsylvania.   I am a member of the second class to go through the campus.  I graduated from Hickory High School in 1966.  I am a classic Penn State first-generation student.  When I was in high school, I had few prospects of ever attending college.  However, some of my teachers told my mother and me about this new campus that would allow me to attend Penn State without having to bear the expense of leaving home and that would allow me to continue to work part-time while I studied.   The campus was not yet at its current physical location—our classes were held at Kennedy Christian High School during my freshman year—but the very fact that Penn State was here in the Valley was a godsend to me back then and it has been the same for many other students as the campus has grown and become a part of downtown Sharon over the past four decades.   So, it is a distinct honor for me to be back with you this evening.

Back in those days, you could only complete the first two years of a baccalaureate degree at the campus.  I finished my undergraduate degree at University Park in 1970.    The following month, this book came out—Future Shock by Alvin Toffler.   It was, as the cover on the paperback edition said, “a runaway best seller.”  But more than that, it was a kind of social exclamation point that announced that something very big was happening in our world—it proclaimed the beginning of the Information Revolution.  It described the many changes that were beginning to take shape in our culture .  Especially explored a variety of changes—changes in science and technology, in organizations, in families, in education, in relationships—and the challenges facing us as individuals and as a society learned how to cope with increasingly rapid and radical change.   Most of us were only vaguely aware of all this in 1970, but it was not long before we all began to feel the impact and began to sense that things would never be quite the same.  

            

Well, we are now more than a full generation into the Information Revolution.  Most of you who are graduating today know no other world than a wired—and increasingly, wireless—world.  Most of the rest of us have trouble remembering what it was like in the “old days.”  (Notice that I did NOT say the “good old days”).   And yet we are still discovering the true dimensions of change that the Information Revolution has created—and is still creating.  We are, in a very real way, in the same situation that Penn State’s graduates of a century or more ago might have been:  they were a generation into the Industrial Revolution and I am sure most of them could not have envisioned what the 20th century would bring.  We look out today on the edge of the 21st century and only one thing is certain:  there is a lot more change to come.   Some of them will be what one author calls “predictable surprises.”  But some will be total surprises.   It’s going to be an exciting ride.  And it’s time for you to take your turn at the wheel.

One that is still unfolding but that has incredible potential for transforming how we will live in the world in the coming decades—is how the Internet and wireless communications are transforming the concept of “community” in our lives.  We all live in several different overlapping communities.  Our family and friends are a community that we take with us throughout our lives.  We also have our local, physical community—like the Shenango Valley itself—where we have many different kinds of associations and, often, where our cultural heritage rests.  And, as we move on in life, we develop communities that share professional interests and communities of interest around other dimensions of our lives.

            

Today, those communities are no longer as tied to local geography as they used to be.  A generation after Future Shock, we know from experience what Alvin Toffler was telling us:  that the Information Revolution was not about technology, but was about US.  I work with Penn State’s online courses.  My professional community is national and international.  Just in the last two weeks, I have interacted with colleagues in the United Kingdom, Brazil, Mexico, and Norway—all without leaving State College (a town that my graduation speaker in 1970 described as “equally inaccessible from anywhere in the world”).  Students in our online courses come from all 50 states and all 7 continents.  Their experience of a learning community is a bit different from mine 40 years ago.   

            

For me, at my age, all this is an adventure.  For you, well, it may be pretty normal.  But this idea of technology is changing how you will define your community in the years ahead is well worth thinking about.  All of you have the ability now to carry your communities with you wherever your life’s work will take you.  For some of you—and I hope this is true of a good many—it will allow you to stay right here in Western Pennsylvania and still be citizens of a rich community of colleagues and friends far from here.  Pennsylvania is facing a powerful challenge.  Many of our communities—and the Shenango Valley is a wonderful example—were shaped by the needs of the Industrial Revolution.  The challenge—and it is an immediate challenge for all of us—is to re-envision our communities for this new economy.  We’ll need your leadership here at home or wherever your careers take you, to make that happen.

            

Tonight, you have received your degrees from Penn State.  But I think it is important to note that you did not “receive” your education.  It hasn’t been handed down to you.  Instead, you MADE your education.  You had lots of help from faculty members and other students, but it is YOURS.   In the process, you’ve created a new capacity within yourself to face the changes ahead.  One thing we DO know about the world that the information revolution has created is that, for us—because the world continues to change rapidly—education doesn’t end tonight.  It is a lifelong process.  I wound up getting two more degrees from Penn State as an adult learner.  I hope that, as you move forward you will continue to turn to Penn State for renewal and to help you to reach new goals as you move ahead in your life.

For tonight, though--from one alum to another—congratulations and the very best wishes for the future.

Thank you.

America's Ragged Individualism

Our radical politics is not new. I’m reading the first volume Henry Adams’ History of the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson. Published in 1889, it begins with a look back at the realities of life and the nuances of American culture in 1800, the year Jefferson was elected as the third President of the United States. It includes an example of conservative versus liberal thinking that, if anything, is even more extreme today.  Adams—the grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams—began his history with a wide, yet detailed look at American culture and the difficulties involved in travel at a time when the frontier was never far away. 

“If Americans agreed in any opinion,” he wrote, “they were united in wishing for roads; but even on that point whole communities showed an indifference, or hostility, that annoyed their contemporaries” (Adams, p. 46).

            As an example, Adams quotes Timothy Dwight, President of Yale from 1795 to 1817, on the Rhode Island state legislature’s refusal to fund the completion of an unfinished turnpike designed to cross the state:

“The principal reason for the refusal, as alleged by one of the members, it is said, was the following: that turnpikes and the establishment of religious worship had their origin in Great Britain, the government of which was a monarchy and the inhabitants slaves; that the people of Massachusetts and Connecticut were obliged by law to support ministers and pay the fare of turnpikes, and were therefore slaves also; that if they chose to be slaves they undoubtedly had a right to their choice, but that free-born Rhode Islanders ought never to submit to be priest-ridden, nor to pay for the privilege of travelling on the highway. This demonstrative reasoning prevailed, and the road continued in the state which I have mentioned until the year 1805. It was then completed, and free-born Rhode Islanders bowed their necks to the slavery of travelling on a good road” (ibid.).

This was, apparently, not an exception to the rule. As Adams noted, “So strong was the popular prejudice against paying for the privilege of travelling on a highway that in certain States, like Rhode Island and Georgia, turnpikes were long unknown, while in Virginia and North Carolina the roads were little better than where the prejudice was universal” (p. 47).

Flash forward a couple of centuries to 2020.  On May 3, Heather Cox Richardson wrote this in her Letters from an American blog:

Jeff Kowalsky’s photograph of the “American Patriot Rally” at the Michigan statehouse on April 30 shows a large, bearded man, leaning forward, mouth open, screaming. Positioned between two police officers who are staring blankly ahead above their masks, he is focused on something they are preventing him from reaching: the legislature. His fury is palpable.

The idea that such a man is an “American Patriot” is the perverted outcome of a generations of political rhetoric that has celebrated a cartoon version of “individualism.” That rhetoric has served a purpose: to convince voters that an active government that regulates business, provides a basic social safety net, and promotes infrastructure—things most Americans actually like—is socialism (para. 1-2).

            This kind of extreme individualism, which separates the individual from any responsibility to community, has been a force in American culture since the beginning. That said, this is not the spirit on which the nation—and the national culture—was built. For every radical individualist icon there are countless more Paul Reveres, Nathaniel Hales, Abraham Lincolns, Martin Luther Kings, and many others--whose identity is tied closely to their achievements and sacrifices on behalf of their community.

            In that sense, America is at its best when it functions as a community of individuals helping not only themselves but also their families, their neighbors, their communities. That has become so apparent during the current pandemic, whose real heroes are not politicians or corporate execs but doctors, nurses, technicians, janitors, food processors, truck drivers, mail deliverers, police—people who put their lives at risk to protect and serve their community.

            As for “socialism” versus “conservative” let me say this. In a democracy, government is not a separate monolith, but simply how we organize ourselves to protect and defend each other. We pay taxes to support the services we need, be it road-building or health care or protection against those who would abuse our community or cheat or take unreasonable advantage of us, and we elect fellow citizens to make sure that the work gets done.  The issue, ultimately, is to determine what kind and what amount of services and protection we, the citizens, need.  This is where politics must be focused and engaged.  Labels like socialism and conservatism separate people and make it that much harder to come together and solve problems.

---

Adams, Henry. History of the United States 1801-09. New York: Literary Classics of the United States 1986.

Richardson, Heather Cox. Letters from an American. May 3, 2020. https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-3-2020?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cta

Building New Alliances for Media-Supported K-12 Learning

As we enter the last weeks of the 2019-20 school year, it is becoming increasingly clear that many communities across the nation will not be ready to return students to physical attendance at their public schools.  Many schools have experimented with technology during the past six weeks. We have a brief summer to help schools prepare to build on their experiences with remote/distance/online instruction as they begin the 2020-21 school year in the fall.  Here are some suggestions for how higher education institutions involved in online learning can help their K-12 colleagues in this crisis.

1.         Build a national Open Educational Resources library for K-12.  Many institutions have begun to build libraries of open educational resources (OERs) to reduce cost and avoid duplication.  Community colleges have collaborated for several years to create a national collection of online texts, lectures, interviews with experts, laboratory experiments and other demonstrations, and a wide variety of other experiences. Other collaborative efforts are underway among public and land grant universities. Over the summer, institutions should work together to gather and collect OERs keyed to specific areas of the K-12 curriculum, creating a national library of free online materials, organized around K-12 grade levels and subject areas.  The goal would be to have at least one higher education institution in each state that would coordinate with the national network and with local schools to match OERs to the state’s curriculum and make them available to local teachers.

2.         Create a national catalog of online higher education courses that can be taken as dual enrollment courses.  Many lower-division college/university courses can be taken as “dual enrollment” courses that allow students to simultaneously earn credit toward high school graduation and college credit at the offering institution. The resulting credits are transferrable to other institutions.  Higher education institutions should work together to create a catalog of online higher education courses that qualify for dual enrollment.  Within each state, at least one community college and one public university should then promote the availability of these courses to high schools in the institution’s service area and offer to accept credit for those courses if taken successfully by a high school senior.  

3.         Universities that offer online webinars for teachers should collaborate to develop webinars and professional development courses to help prepare K-12 teachers in key disciplines (English, mathematics, the sciences, history, U.S. government, and social sciences) to make effective use of online content and methods.  Given the short time available to prepare for fall, this initiative might begin by universities working together to develop a series of webinars on effective online communication and teaching skills in the different disciplines.  Ideally, these would extend through the first six-weeks of K-12 instruction, so that teachers have a network through which they can learn, but also share successes and problems. In time, though, this could evolve into a collection of courses that teachers could use for advanced certification, as well as ongoing networks of K-12 teachers guided by experienced online university instructors in their disciplines. 

4.         Work with public media outlets to effectively extend K-3 programming to the schools.  Around the country, local Public Broadcasting Service stations were among the first educational media outlets to work with local school districts and state Departments of Education to match their daytime children’s programs with state curriculum standards in order to provide at-home learning opportunities for students in elementary and middle school grades.  Public broadcasters have a decades-long experience in serving local school curricular needs in their daytime broadcast schedules.  The next step in reviving this mission is for stations—through their state and regional networks and in close coordination with state Departments of Education—to identify unmet needs and then seek federal funds to produced new programs and OERs (along with necessary professional development resources) to meet those needs.  This is an opportunity to revive a program development relationship among colleges of education, discipline-based faculty, and public broadcasters to establish a new relationship with K-12 teachers and students. 

Collaboration as a Key

            This is an immediate problem that requires a quick, but comprehensive solution.  The key to success, I believe, is for higher education institutions to collaborate within the various families of institutions (community colleges, public/land grant universities, liberal arts colleges, etc.) to share the load and share the resulting professional development programs.  We have seen this kind of collaboration already in several aspects of the online movement.  The Community College Consortium for Open Educational Resources (CCOER) is one example.  CourseShare, a collaboration among the land grant Big Ten Academic Alliance institutions, is another.  The key to quick success is to use these and other similar alliances to get a head start on creating a sustainable new environment that can support the curricula—and expand the capabilities--of local K-12 schools in the future.

            This, I believe, could be the hallmark achievement of the new decade, not only creating new content but encouraging new ways to engage students at all levels in learning across the curriculum in a maturing information society.

Beyond Community: Thinking About Life After the Pandemic

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of my undergraduate graduation from Penn State. It had been an unusual spring on campus in 1970. It was the height of the Vietnam War.  The military draft had been reinstated, and many seniors knew that they were likely to be drafted shortly after graduation. The killing of students at Kent State by the National Guard radicalized students across the country. Opposition to the war led to demonstrations on campus that spring, some of it focused on opposition to military research. The demonstrations led to riots on campus.  The riots led to classes being cancelled and the term brought to a hasty, early end.    

We never really finished that semester, but as things quieted down, the University went ahead with graduation ceremonies anyway and sent us on our way. We all trooped into Beaver Stadium in our caps and gowns, listened to a speech (the memorable remark was that Penn State was “equally inaccessible from any part of the country”) and picked up our diplomas on the way out.

Fifty years later, the campus is again closed at graduation time. This time, the cause is not a foreign war or student protests, but the global corona virus pandemic that found its way to the U.S. in February and closed the University—in fact, all universities, all public schools, and almost all businesses—starting in March and projected to last at least through the end of May.  Campus has been closed now for almost a month. Students were encouraged to go home in order to obey the statewide “social distancing” requirement. As a result, the town feels almost empty and very quiet.  Fraternities are closed or sparsely populated. Apartment houses—the focus of major building spree over the past few years—are largely empty. Grocery stores are full of masked shoppers but most other businesses are closed. Meanwhile, courses—both at the University and in local school districts—continue through online distance education. The University has announced that the 2020 spring graduation will be “virtual”—an online experience that honor social distancing.

            Looking back, I have to say that life went on pretty much as normal after the campus riots of 1970. The biggest changes had little to do with student activism and much more to do with the Information Revolution that began in earnest at the end of the 70s, when satellite changed how we distributed information and paved the way for national cable networks, and the 90s, when the Web was born. We’ve become used to the Technological Revolution and its impact on how we live and work, although there is yet much to be done to give all citizens equal access.

            We don’t know yet what will happen after the pandemic, but Jim Fong from the University Professional and Continuing Education Association, has just come out with a piece, “A Glimpse into the Future Economy after the Pandemic”, that suggests some of the changes that may flow from today’s pandemic.  Here is how he sees the challenge facing us after the 2020 pandemic subsides and we all venture out of our physical isolation:

The massive lifestyle and workplace disruptions experienced over the last month, and likely to last at least another month or more, have accelerated the shift to the new economy, one that is fueled by automation, artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and robotics. Society has suddenly become more accepting of not only online learning, but the delivery of prepared meals, contactless retail, remote meetings, flexible schedules, home-life balance and mental health, data-driven health prevention, remote workforce collaboration, and digital currency. Another unintended consequence is an acceleration of generational conflict, as some generations have adapted better to self-quarantine while others find it challenging.

         Jim sees the potential that the experience of living through the pandemic—and the “social distancing” regulations that have been imposed because of it—will stimulate long-term social change in everything from healthcare systems to international supply chains to acceptance of robotics and automation, transportation of both people and goods, and even nutrition.  He also foresees changes in how we communicate in businesses and within and across cultures.

            The “stay at home” rule that we are now under has given me a chance to read more.  I recently finished John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which dramatizes how the experience of the Dust Bowl and Great Depression of the 1930s challenged the long-held social values of a family of tenant farmers in Oklahoma—the Joads. Their story gave me a perspective on the pandemic by bringing into sharp focus the price that working people pay when society is disrupted, whether by industrialized agriculture or by a pandemic. We should not—we cannot—embrace the kinds of dramatic change that are being considered as leaders ponder re-inventing the economy and the society it supports without fully understanding the impact on all sectors of our society and ensuring that all are protected.  The story of The Grapes of Wrath is an important lesson.

I’ve also used some “stay at home” time to read Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari.  In it, he argues that, while all animals are able to communicate in one way or the other, what distinguished Homo Sapiens from other early humans was our ability to extend the concept of community beyond the family and beyond the “tribe” by developing a skill with language that allows us to invent new ideas and bring people together around abstractions.  It is an issue that was very much alive in The Grapes of Wrath. My question:  In the post-pandemic world, as we build new supply chains, new transportation and business systems through technology, will we be able also to realize new cultural values that will hold us together in new kinds of communities that extend beyond national and cultural borders and help us solve the unique problems that will surely arise in this new environment? Will technology help us to see ourselves as part of a larger family or will it encourage a re-tribalization?  This is not an issue arising from political bias.  It is a basic question that we need ask—and answer—in times of great change such as we appear to be entering today.

Rural Broadband: A National Mandate

We are learning many lessons from the coronavirus pandemic. One of the most important is not related to the virus but to our ability to function in the new digital environment. As schools close and classes move online not just at universities but at many public schools, we are witnessing the value of broadband access to our communities.

            The Industrial Revolution demanded the creation of a new communications infrastructure—Rural Free Delivery to keep our rural communities (and agricultural economy) vital, the national highway system to help get raw materials to factories and finished goods to market, radio and television to link us together as a community by giving us shared experiences. So, too, does the Information Revolution demand equal access to the Internet as a right of citizenship as work decentralizes and more professionals work from home. Broadband access is essential in this environment. Increasingly, communities that lack access lack the ability to survive in the new economy.

            This has become a stark reality in the coronavirus pandemic. In Pennsylvania, all public schools have been closed for two weeks. Many districts have closed their physical facilities and are using a variety of online resources to continue instruction during this period. However, in some districts, especially in rural areas, students don’t have access to broadband from home. These schools have had to simply close their doors, leaving students to be home-schooled by parents or, in some cases, to simply not have access education during this period.  

            The situation would also affect businesses that need to close to avoid their employees being exposed to the virus. Without bandwidth, employees are unable to work remotely.  They risk losing their jobs. Their employer risk losing business—and, ultimately, the community risks losing an employer and jobs for its citizens.

            In today’s world, broadband is not just a commercial service. It is a necessary part of the communications infrastructure that allows workers to live in a small community and still be gainfully employed. It is what allows small, rural communities to be vital in the global information society.  

            We need, at this point in the evolution of the new economy, the same kind of national vision for broadband that gave us the interstate highway system. I hope that both political parties will give voters their plans to achieve universal broadband as a resource that must be available to all citizens in the information age.