Service, education are linked
"Things are seriously out of whack," Boyte said recently during a speech at the University of Utah.
Boyte's appearance this past week marked the first-ever co-sponsored event by the U.'s Lowell Bennion Community Service Center and the Hinckley Institute of Politics. His speech linked the subjects of community service, politics and higher education.
One of Boyte's main messages was how higher education can be the "midwife" for politics, to facilitate the rebirth of politics as something more than today's polarized, divisive version.
"We are in urgent need of a different kind of politics," said Boyte, who in the 1960s worked for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
College students, Boyte has found, already possess the appetite for dealing with differences of opinion in politics. He said students have discovered on their own that the two parties often have the same goals, just different means of getting there.
What needs to happen, Boyte added, is more people need to develop public relationships that openly deal with political differences.
Boyte recalled the days when the late Vice President Hubert Humphrey was a child, when Humphrey learned in his father's drugstore about politics and the difference of opinions it begets. Humphrey's father, one of six Democrats in a South Dakota town of 600 Republicans, created an environment for political discourse and would eventually become the town's mayor, Boyte noted.
"Everyone is a teacher and everyone is a learner," he said.
But those drugstores are gone, added Boyte, author of "Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life."
Nowadays, people rely on elected officials to do their political bidding while they go about their lives, focusing on personal achievement and success without asking the questions "why?" or "at what cost?" Boyte said.
The culture being taught on TV, for example, has Donald Trump telling a young man that if he wants to succeed he'd better forgo attending the funeral of a relative, Boyte said.
Finally, higher education has a role in which students can learn about the "politics of commonwealth" or the concern for common good, according to Boyte.
"We are living in a world which is hellbent toward privatization," he said.
Instead of working toward gated communities, personal wealth and creating bubbles of like-interests within our communities, students have the opportunity to reinvigorate the notion of a "common world" and to think about how they can help create a better society, he said.
E-mail: sspeckman@desnews.com
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