December 17, 1998
Penn National Commission

"Public Discourse in Action Lunchtime Presentation"

Led by Stephen Steinberg and Judith Rodin

Celebrating the Conversation: Public Discourse in Action Lunchtime Presentation

Mr. STEVE STEINBERG: ...lunchtime conversation, and we'll give you other opportunities to continue it. I--they will continue to serve coffee. I know that when I listen to an after-lunch speaker, I'm always sitting there saying, `Where's the coffee?' about halfway through. So I--I've asked them to continue to serve that.

Like many of you, I have--full of metaphors and images of--cinematic metaphors after this morning's conversation, and two of them are competing in my mind. One is the--the image of the track star settling into the blocks, watching the officials raise the bar that he or she has to jump over. And I think as I listened to the conversation this morning, it got more and more daunting. The other image, and I--perhaps it's a better one, is of the young screenwriter who's finally gotten a meeting with a producer in Hollywood--and, of course, there's an--an art to this that Neal can tell us more about--and has exactly 60 seconds to make his pitch.

Well, here comes the pitch. And I--like the screenwriter, what I'm going to try and do is give you the plot. Many of you have commented that the Commission process, which has now gone on for three years, has been hard sometimes to get a sense as to how the pieces fit together. And I think that's been true for Commission members. The staff certainly has worked very hard to try and--and do that, but because of the nature of the process, we thought it would be useful at this juncture, as we make the transition that President Rodin described this morning, to try and highlight the plot, where we've been, where we're going, and what we are trying to achieve. Necessarily, this'll be very schematic. There's a lot of substance behind each of these bullets that we obviously can't talk about, but I hope it will be helpful.

So here's the story line. We have talked within the Commission for three years amongst Commission members. We're now, as many of you here represent, widening that conversation, with media, with the public, with our guests. And we are moving into a public programming phase of the Commission project, where we hope to take what we have learned and put it to work. In a sense--we were talking after the presentation this morning--what we want to do is help people say no, say yes, or say `It's more complicated than that,' if that's what--what they need to be saying.

Just to remind you of where we began, in 1994 and '5, there was a widespread sense of the deterioration and decline crisis in public culture, in lots of different spheres: in the media, in politics and so forth. We have summarized those perceptions in this way: that discourse was highly polarized, uncivil, unproductive; that leaders were too timid, that they were following their constituencies rather than leading; very importantly, that communal life seemed to be increasingly fragmented; that communities and subcommunities had a great deal of difficulty bridging the barriers that separate them and reintegrating; and that public moires, tolerance of differences and self-restraint had really begun to break down, and at that particular moment, there was a sense, really, that this was deteriorating very rapidly; and finally, as we talked extensively in Los Angeles last December, that the boundaries between private and public spheres of our lives and of our officials' lives and of our culture had really begun to disappear.

Talking about that situation, we designed a project that had at least three major goals. One was to bring academic resources to bear on this major social and cultural issue. Another was to demonstrate what we believed to be the essential connections between theory and practice, that we should not silo our knowledge in the academic setting, but find new ways, since the old ways seemed not to be working, to bring it to bear in the public sphere. And finally: that we could perhaps reinvent, as a number of you have reminded us, the notion of what a national commission or a study group of this sort could do. And that's one of the reasons, as Dr. Rodin described this morning, we decided and promised you at the very beginning we would not just write a report, give it to somebody else and tell them what to do, and then go home.

So what have we learned? We've learned--we--we came to the conclusion very early on, and we heard it again this morning: that incivility is not new, that the signs of incivility and unproductive discourse and the coarseness of culture has always been there in a portion of at least the American culture, probably of all cultures; that this is not a new phenomenon. What is clear, however, is that it is more loudly amplified, that it seems more dominant. But the phenomenon itself is not new. I did an interview a few weeks ago in which a reporter asked whether something had changed, and I gently pointed out that human nature has not changed in the last five, 10, 15 years. What's clearly changed is the culture and the context in which these behaviors are--are be--are going on.

Secondly, we a--in talking about that, we concluded that public discourse has been thinned by the same fundamental social forces that Mr. Gabler was describing this morning: technology, mass communications, mass markets, mass entertainment, globalization, urbanization; take your pick. Those are forces that we are not going to roll back in any fundamental sense, at least in the near--near future.

Thirdly, we concluded that an engaged and productive public discourse is of central impors--importance to a democratic society. We tried to restate and articulate that a year ago. I want to underscore its relationship to the notion of community and the way in which a democratic community functions, its inclusiveness and its ability to engage in a productive discourse as the heart of what holds a community together.

We articulated the need to thicken public discourse by stimulating more, for shorthand, good discourse around the bad, rather than just trying to suppress the bad. And, with David Ryfe's help, we found that good public discourse probably means something different. And we heard it again this morning. I--I've said to Neal that he was right on target in terms of many of the things we'd been talking about, and--and it is very evident. The aim in our review of the--of the literature in many of our discussions is to promote a good public discourse that integrates the rational, the argumentative, the deliberative, the appeal to evidence with the other notions of representation and reciprocity and respect that we've given the rough title of relationality to. A good discourse consists of both of those, and the task is to integrate them in a way that is functional for a democratic society.

Finally, we saw, through the work of the leadership group and our discussions in a number of settings, that effe--that in effective discourse, leadership is extremely important, that we need to focus on the whole issue of discourse leadership, along with all the other things that we train leaders to do, and that a new set of institutions--museums, foundations, universities--have begun to emerge as the core, as the instrument, for fostering inclusive discourse communities.

Now since we put that list together, I just want to highlight a few findings that are in the research material that we made available for this meeting, but I think they are very much congruent with what I've just described. One is the implication of Ian Lustick's simulation study that small leadership ins--interventions may pr--may be very important for improving discourse and stabilizing diverse communities. I think that's an important results. Mark Schultz's review of the literature on forgiveness suggested that cognitive reappraisals of painful experiences may, in fact, be able to foster forgiveness and re--and reconciliation, and that some of the concerns that this might dredge up painful memories and experiences that would then fester might be--I believe his word was `overstated.'

And finally, the--we have identified a set of interesting new discourse practices and programs that are beginning to emerge. We have representatives of s--of a number of those programs here with us today. We have also begun an examination that Graham Dodds is carrying out of political apologies, which turns out to be an area that has been unexplored. And, as Joyce Appleby's report on the work of the community in the 21st-century working group brought for--brought forth very strongly, and as we saw in Los Angeles, museums, universities, foundations and their role as the progenitors as--if you will, of community, is going to be increasingly important.

With those findings in hand, that has led us to a--to articulate an overarching strategic oja--objective for the work of the Commission as fostering a more robust and engaged public discourse, and we have essentially identified that as a more important concern, that incivility and rudeness and crudeness. And the task before us is to make that kind of discourse, positive discourse, relevant--more relevant than the crudeness, and ha--and use it to form substantial, enduring and inclusive communities.

So how are we going to do that? What can the Penn National Commission contribute that doesn't duplicate the work of others and that can facilitate the kind of integration of reason and narrative that we have been describing? We've concluded that the overarching goal for that task is really the creation of a national movement around the issues of public discourse and its role in the formation of community.

In this task, we th--we see f--in this task we see three major challenges that have to be carried out. One is to create a national network of venues, of places. Some of those already exist in universities and museums and libraries and others--institutions, but clearly, most of the people working in those environments are isolated, and we hope to be able to stimulate the creation of more such venues. Secondly, the creation of a national cadre of discourse leaders, of individuals in every walk of life, we--it--be it politics or the media, be it lawyers, community leaders, journalists, who take as part of their role as a community leader the facilitation of a productive discourse and the leading of a productive conversation. And finally, for ei--either of those to be effective, we clearly need to create models, as Kathleen has emphasized repeatedly, of exemplary discourse practices. Without that, people will lose hope. They will not see that better behavior is possible. I am mindful of the comments that a number of you have made that people want to do better, but they don't know how. And the models of exemplary discourse, putting them into practice, is a critical part of that task.

We've imagined three pieces in fulfilling tho--that agenda. One is a set of partnership programs in which we would create and are planning to create, with professional, institutional, and membership and community associations, joint programs that take the insights that you have produced and work with them to put that into the language, the media, the mechanisms of those various communities. This may take the form of leadership training, of materials, as well as direct discourse programs, and clearly these partnerships will play a relationship--a role in the larger exemplary discourse programs that I'll talk about in a moment.

Many of you have commented, through the course of our work, that if we don't focus on universities and the creation of good discourse communities in universities--that, one, we will have no credibility, and two, we will have missed an opportunity to have enormous impact with a vehicle that is ready to hand. So, as President Rodin discussed this morning, the notion of the civically engaged university has become one of the central elements in our thinking about how we go forward. We see the creation of discourse communities and discourse leaders as part of the central aspect of all the civic engagements that the leading universities of all kinds in the 21st century will need to engender, the kind of civic engagement that will be the hallmark of those institutions.

So colleges and universities are clearly natural discourse venures--venues. They are centers of multiple discourse communities, both internal and external and bridging the ex--the internal and external. And finally, there are a number of national organizations with whom we are beginning to develop partnerships; for example, Campus Compact in the University of Pennsylvania, and the Commission will host a president's leadership colloquium here next June on the issue of civil engagement with the issues of productive public discourse and creation of discourse communities at the heart of it.

Finally, going back to the notion of exemplifying good discourse practices, we are in the early stages of imagining a set of public programs, and as you know, we have brought a new staff member. George Stallay, who I hope many of you have had an opportunity to meet, on board to help us with this. Many of you have raised the idea of citizens' debates around the occasion of the fall 2000 elections. We think that that is a very useful focus, that it--we can use it to link the venues and the leaders and the other programs that we have in mind. Perhaps a theme for that would be the issue of citizens setting the agenda, rather than relying on politicians to tell them what the agenda should be.

We are developing programs for an annual discourse award and a report card or a measure of the improvement of public discourse. We think the whole notion of national conversations needs to be reimagined. This was one of the areas of discussion that was stimulated by Alex Boraine's conversation with us in Los Angeles. We think that citizens' conversations are probably more important than leaders' conversations. And we are developing a--a strategy in conjunction with these other elements to do that. And then, clearly, there are a whole set of materials, publications, videos, Internet resources, coming out of the Commission. Much of that already exists, but it needs to be, and is being, edited and redesigned for a very different audience.

And finally, looking a little farther ahead, there are the opportunities to create partnerships with educators to work in the schools, with human relations professionals who engage in this kind of interaction every day, and with some of the exemplary discourse groups who--that are with us today.

And I think it's apparent that part of this ongoing program needs to be the continuation of some of our research endeavors. The modeling of leadership and discourse community interactions that Ian Lustick has begun is clearly going to be very fruitful. Graham Dodds' work on political apologies, the work that Mark Schultz and the Solomon Asch Center on--for the study of s--ethnopolitical conflict, on forgiveness and reconciliation, clearly has much to teach us about how to be effective.

Looking a little farther ahead, there are two areas that we really haven't even begun to investigate very much, though some of you are experts in them. One is the--our international discourse programs. We've looked at those domestically through David Ryfe's latest study. But clearly there are international programs that would warrant the same kind of attention. And then the--the notion of large-scale empirical measures of the improvement of public discourse, and we--we h--there are a number of you who have expertise in that area that we hope to draw on.

So to wrap this all up, we are imagining this a rebranding, if you will, of the Commission's activity under perhaps a rubric like the Penn Public Talk Project, which would be more accessible than the Penn National Commission, and--though we will always make clear that is based on the work of the Commission. And just to show you how the pieces fit together, the storyboard, I guess, would look something like this, the goal being a national movement to improve the conduct of public discourse as an--as a step towards the creation of stronger communities, the means being the creation of networks, of venues, discourse leaders and models of exemplary discourse programs, partnership programs, public programs. It is our expectation that, as many of these are developed--that we will essentially create free-standing spinoffs that would hopefully take on a life of their own.

And I hope that--that it is clear that we see this kind of effort as one of trying to create a movement much like was done with community service in the '80s and '90s that takes on a life of its own. We are well aware that we can only do so much, that this is not the kind of endeavor that any one organization or one program can control. What we hope to do is throw a frame around all the best practices and help leverage those in a variety of settings: the research--continuing research program. And then, clearly, we need to continue the development of supporting materials and media and public relations that support all of those activities.

So that's the story line. That's my pitch. And with that said, I will ask President Rodin to moderate the discussion.

Dr. RODIN: You can moderate from there...

Mr. STEINBERG: Fine.

Dr. RODIN: ...comments and questions. And this is very much in the nascent stages, and so input is--is not only desirable; it's required as we go forward, very much still in the formative period. Please.

Mr. STEINBERG: Jim.

JIM: I think this is great. But one question for possible further reflection: If the goal is a more robust rather than a thin public discourse--as I gain weight I feel better about that--but I wanted to focus...

Mr. STEINBERG: You and I can talk about that later.

JIM: I want to know what `robust' means. Is it--is it more representative, more inclusive, more informed, more communicative, more ro--and robust--robust sounds good, but it--it could...

Mr. STEINBERG: OK.

JIM: There are different aims. Do we want a more informed public? Do we want a public that is--that understands and--and--and where public--do we want more public spaces for public discussion? How do we make sure people are not left out? I mean, there--there are so many different dimensions of this, depending upon the meaning of `robust.'

Mr. STEINBERG: Yeah. I--I think it's very clear, from our earlier discussions, from this morning, from the research, that what we want and what we need are all of those things, that a discussion that is just deliberative or just argumentative or just rational or just appeals to evidence, is not the public discourse that we need. At the same time, a discussion that is totally devoted to the airing of emotion, to narrative, to past experience is also inadequate. The task, as we see it, what a robust discourse consists in, is the integration of those two models.

And I think that gives very real meaning to the notion that incivility is not the issue, because that conversation may be very uncivil, may have elements of rudeness and crudeness and profanity and all those other things, but I think one of the key things that we have seen is that, at least in some cases, it's that kind of robust conversation that creates community, that you don't have a community set rules and then have a conversation, because then there's nothing left to talk about. You have that conversation as an instrument to the creation of community, which can then go on to set up its representative processes and decision procedures and so forth.

So I think one of the important things that has come out of the Commission's work is to understand the intimate tie between that kind of robust discourse and the formation and strengthening of community. Joel.

JOEL: I just simply would ask you to underscore that, because, you know...

Mr. STEINBERG: Yeah.

JOEL: ...the--you said it when you talked about those ...(unintelligible) issues. But if--if the notion there is that public discourse is a means of creation of community or strengthening or renewing the community, I think you ought to say that, because that's really how we got into public discourse in the first place.

Mr. STEINBERG: Right. Right. The--the point is very well taken, and--and I think as you can well understand, we are sometimes so close to this that things that--that we have built into our mind-set and our understanding of it don't always get translated explicitly. I think one of the--well, th--that's--we will do that.

Unidentified Woman #1: And one of the things that's easy to consider is that people are much more likely to engage in a public discourse if they think it's actually going to be effective around a particular issue. And yet, you have quite good models whereby, for instance, now it's quite common in the UK for the government to found NGOs to stimulate public discourse around a particular issue with the promise that they will take seriously the issues that are raised in the village halls, the community halls, etc. So there's two things there. One is that it needs to be public discourse that also can have some power to influence, but it is also quite useful to have a tie-in somewhere with a recognition by government and politicians themselves that they value this. And that is not easy, because politicians often prefer to take their de--their decisions without the necessity to consider the public discourse.

Dr. RODIN: Steve...

Mr. STEINBERG: I...

Dr. RODIN: ...let me comment on that, too, because I didn't know that that was the--the model in the UK, and--and I think that's marvelous. The model that I--I was working from in the United States is the--is the model now in corporate America called workout, where you will have really empowered employees dealing with a very specific problem. The discourse, as I've read some of the materials, is--is extremely rich. And then you have a commitment on the part of the corporate leadership that's able, in fact, not only enact--not only help plot the recommendations but that it will be the employees that have the opportunity to enact those recommendations.

And we've been talking with a variety of elected officials, some in very significant roles, who are engaged with us in the notion that that might be a very interesting thing to try in American politics. And so if we can enrich and now will have an example, which I--I would appreciate knowing more about. But that's precisely it. It can't be--even in our deliberations over the last three years, where we've been most engaged, it has been really focused on issues and not just theory or--or rhetoric. And so we know that engaging in discourse about real and serious issues where there is the capacity to make a difference, and that difference is tangible, will move the will to engage in a very different kind of discourse. It's not just for its own sake, which is quintilateral in abstraction.

Mr. STEINBERG: And--and I just should add, one of the things we've heard very clearly in our conversations with many of you over the last nine months is exactly that need, to make s--that a good conversation has outcomes that aff--that people need to see will affect something that they care about. It starts with a concern that they have in what Tom Rand has called work to do together, and it ends in effective network. And without that, something like the president's National Conversation on Race is totally artificial. And that's a--a great challenge in reimagining the whole notion of national conversations in a productive way. No one, to my knowledge, has really quite been able to do that. It also needs to be localized and needs to be concrete. So it's--you're very much aware of that ...(unintelligible). Paul.

PAUL: In that same spirit, without trying to, you know, anchor this whole discussion on a real problem, which is crucial ...(unintelligible) but here's--here's one, and it has to do with the apology and--and reconciliation. Why don't we commit--now there's a movement going on--the press is very anxious to get the--an apology as an alternative to litigation, and at--at the--there's a national level; there's legislation in Congress, there's state legislation to achieve this. You know, as you know, litigation is more (unintelligible) means, and punitive damages is the neutron bomb. And what the press wants is an alternative of an apology, which eliminates the neutron bomb. Why don't we--that would be a good example of an application where the press is now obviously very close to what we're doing, where it's going to start apologizing more in order to save itself from financial ruin. That's all part of the larger picture that we want ...(unintelligible).

Mr. STEINBERG: I think that's exactly the kinds of ways in which the--some of the research papers ties into the programmatic development. Like some said, it's a movement ...(unintelligible). You and Jay Rosen and Graham Dodds certainly can put your heads together and pursue that line in a hurry. (Unintelligible) will be quite unique. Neal.

NEAL: I think it's ...(unintelligible). And I have only one item that I'd like to raise a little question about, and that is are there means to creating a national cadre of discourse leaders? I became a little nervous. A little Orwellian, I'm afraid, in its sound, and at the very least, a scene for (unintelligible).

Mr. STEINBERG: OK. Fair--fair enough. I--I--I should say that, you know, programmatically, one almost has to be a little Orwellian in (unintelligible) but in a strategic ...(unintelligible) really (unintelligible) very small leadership interventions can be very useful, and all we want to do is help people out there in the communities and in various ...(unintelligible) feel empowered, as we talked about in our earlier meetings, to intervene, to structure a conversation, to have some resources that they can look at and say, `Oh, if you want to do this, you know, maybe deliver it (unintelligible) issues. If you want to do that, maybe a second set of issues,' and so forth and so on. One of the nice things, I think, about where we've ended up is that we are not wedded to a particular technique or format. What we want to do is throw a frame around all the good ways of approaching things, trying (unintelligible) and support them, and not duplicate what others are--are already doing.

Dr. RODIN: Steve, I think number two is not only a bit Orwellian, but I think it runs counter to--to some of what we were saying this morning, and what Bob Wevie was trying to say in talking about film. If--if we are to look for the non-leader-only model, where we really have a working communitarian view, and we want to create and empower everyone, potentially anyone, to become a discourse leader.

Mr. STEINBERG: And I want to say...

Dr. RODIN: And I think that's a--a--in fact, a more true characterization of what our thinking is.

Mr. STEINBERG: A more Jacksonian ap--approach is--was my gut reaction to what you were saying. And that--that really, I--I think, is a--I think that's why one of the kinds of groups that we want to partner with are membership associations, like AARP and so forth, with--that really carry that kind of member--or bring that kind of membership forward as--as potential leaders and participants. Jay?

JAY: I find this very helpful, as a commissioner, to know what I've been doing for the last three years. Congratulations on that. I'd also like to see how the--how the Commission's worked the Public Talk Project (unintelligible).

Mr. STEINBERG: Could you just speak up a little bit? I can't--I can't hear.

JAY: That's OK. I didn't say anything important. I did have some points. The first one is, did you give any thought to creating a journal that would be called Public Talk, and to provide a regular forum for addressing the conceptual development here but also towards comments of what--which could be done online or in some other form...

Mr. STEINBERG: That--that journal exists online as the part of the work of the Commission. One of the things we will be looking at is how to take that start--and, as you know, and we'll talk about it in a little bit, online enterprises are hard to--to penetrate the mind-set out there.

JAY: Right.

Mr. STEINBERG: Although we will be looking at where to go with that initiative there, and to make it more visible.

JAY: OK. Good. In that connection, I have a suggestion for you. Under the three means you have create a national network, create a national cadre of leaders and create models of exemplary discourses. I think there's one other thing that you can do, which would be gain a passkey to critique discourse practices as they arise and appear to you to be ...(unintelligible). And based on what you've said are the lessons of this Commission so far, it's not incivility that people ...(unintelligible). It can't be done in this way. These issues arise a lot with our public controversies or tests to create national discourse by the President's Commission on Race, and it would be very wise and strategic, I think, for the Commission to have the ability to say at critical moments that `This assumption or this practice is not only (unintelligible) or may not be as productive as you think for these reasons.' And it seems to me that everything you've discovered so far will lead to the tasking to be able to do that.

To give a little--a shorthand version of this, every time there's a big controversy and people are screaming at each other and there's sort of a major flare-up in the political culture, somebody hunts down Deborah Tannen and asks her why this is an example of a ...(unintelligible) culture at work. Well, in fact, you've developed something that's richer and more interesting in many ways than one person ...(unintelligible). You should do the Deborah Tannen thing as a kind of SWAT team--public discourse SWAT team response and be able to respond in the moment to attempts at creating public discourse that are off track or not likely to work or contain faulty assumptions and so forth. So that would...

Mr. STEINBERG: Two--two quick sort of responses to that. One would be (unintelligible) use of that, maybe, to solve the--the article in the life secti--section of Sunday's Inquirer is precisely about that. And we were saying that word of mouth--a family, for example, is probably worried about (unintelligible). And that is very much the ...(unintelligible) of what--what we learn from it. Two, the--in the programs that we are imagining in terms of citizens debates around the elections and so forth, the kind of critique that you're mentioning is very much explicitly something that--we would want to be part of that. So it's not just the one-shot assumption, but it's also been the discussion by the political experts like Matthew Morrow. It's the discussion by, like, Kathleen, who can talk about discourse, so that it's filled out in a much more elaborate ...(unintelligible). So that's certainly--yeah.

Unidentified Man: I'd just like to express a little concern about the finding (unintelligible) by coming to you, but the tenor and tone of the way in which you laid out the problems. And my concern is that the emphasis is exclusively on procedure. And I'd rather not that this Commission is primarily (unintelligible) procedure, but I think it's wrong to leave the impression that it is procedures that--that are solely procedures. At least from my point of view, it's all the procedures that got us into the problem, and that procedures can get us out. And there tends to be this impression that it's the press or it's the nature of the political system or something, that (unintelligible) the problem that come--I mean, and I--I'm quite certain that this is not a view which is universally shared by the Commission, but it--it seems to me that the way you present it sort of pushes in that direction.

And the alternative is that it's--that--that we--the problems that we face in our discourse have been created by the nat--the--the substantive issues that the society has faced and tried to solve in the last two--two or three--two or three decades. And I think it's important to recognize that--that that is a--a--that that at least has been a factor in all of this. And I think that the--the--the--so that the--a mention of--there's--there's very little mention in your presentation of substantive issues. There's very little--when you talk about org--civic organizations, there's very little reference--there's no reference to the civic organizations that are associated with those issues, particularly ethnic organizations, churches, trade--trade unions.

And I--I guess, from my point of view, it is in part, maybe in very large part, the nature of the issues, and not the lack of civil organizations but the way in which the power for civic organizations in our society became associated with particularly difficult--difficult--with particular positions on issues that have turned out to be particularly--particularly difficult. And I don't think to say that takes away at all from the notion that we can develop procedures and approaches that have--that--that will facilitate the way in which we deal with--with--with these--with these issues. But I guess I feel very strongly that universities, museums--that these organizations are--are no substitute for somehow incorporating back to trade unions and business and--and adversarial business, the churches with their--and ma--and--and ...(unintelligible) organizations into this--this--this--these civic discourses.

And--and--and I think it's important to avoid the idea that we're going to create an alternative civic society rather than--than draw back into the civic--civil--to a larger civic discourse the elements for a civil society that already--that already exist.

Mr. STEINBERG: I--I guess all I'll comment on that is to say that, certainly, the conversations ...(unintelligible) of discourse with the public are--we're talking about real conversations of real issues, not metaconversations about discourse ...(unintelligible) in place of that, as--as Jay points out. But we recognize that the metaconversation that, to some extent, the Commission is quite actively engaged in, is not the conversation; it--it's merely a way of getting clearer about what should happen there and what kind of engagements brought solutions to the issue.

Unidentified Woman #2: I think in one of your transparencies there was the expression of report card. I'm not sure where it's reflected here, in...

Mr. STEINBERG: In the research.

Unidentified Woman #2: ...in the research.

Mr. STEINBERG: Yeah.

Unidentified Woman #2: And I--I wanted to--to draw you out a little bit more. That--that strikes me as interesting.

Mr. STEINBERG: Well, I...

Unidentified Woman #2: What do you have in mind in terms of metrics or (unintelligible) how you--because this--this--in this one little sentence, I think this may be echo some of what Maria said before--I--I think naturally in terms of ...(unintelligible) Amnesty. Amnesty every year comes out with a report which really grabs the world on how good or bad we've been with regard to civilly--our relation to civic rights. And if something can be developed along these lines, that can be useful to the world and not just for internal consumption. And that's what I would like to hear more of from you.

Mr. STEINBERG: I--I think exactly what I want to say, which is that machinisms like some kind of report card, some kind of a so--solution for (unintelligible) would be useful as elements to develop consciousness of the way in which we engage, and who's doing ...(unintelligible), who's doing that and so forth. And then it should ...(unintelligible). I know that the Ansberg Sewell Policy Center had developed some of those measures. We have not really had a chance to look at exactly how to do that, but I do (unintelligible) at the end of the ...(unintelligible) on the 16 discourse programs that we ...(unintelligible) that one of the ...(unintelligible) issues and evaluation and methods of improvement and so forth, (unintelligible) and--on a larger society ...(unintelligible). So that is very much the direction in which we want to go.

Unidentified Man #2: Steve, just--just remember, we are going to be in the situation where the operation was a success but the patient died. It's not about evaluating the discourse. It's about outcomes. Right? And so it may be that we find an outcome that works, and the whole process will (unintelligible). So it's got to be very--I think that's particularly--at least ...(unintelligible) are concerned with.

Dr. RODIN: You--you can't cover the entire community so that--to hearken back to Michael's comment and--and pick up on the faults, we will have to define some outcome variables here. Will it be a certain kind of community capacity? Will it be more people voting who have engaged in another aspect of this process? Will it be reconnections among competing civically engaged groups each of them have? But some outcome variables are going to be very necessary, or there will be a process sort of turning on itself. And I--I think the variables clearly recognize that.

We've put a lot of ideas on the table, and--and what we will ask is that you think about this and continue to think about other ways that we can proceed with your input and--and with your take on what we accomplished and what we learned over the last three years, and the continuing thinking on your part about other ways or--or incremental ways to enhance the next phase on the basis of your insights with regard to what we learned certainly will be central as we move along.

Mr. STEINBERG: And particularly also which of these endeavors is most important. One of the things we've heard very clearly from many of you was do a few things well; don't be too bold. You know, we've laid it out there conceptually or strategically, in a somewhat global fashion, but we are very conscious of the fact that we need to start but we won't achieve all of this all at once. And--but we do think that we have a foundation to, shall we say, move the ball down the field ...(unintelligible).

Dr. RODIN: Well, we'd like to do a few things well, and we'd like to begin with those that seem to have the greatest impact.

Mr. STEINBERG: Right.

Dr. RODIN: So we--we've taken a very safe course, appropriately so, I think, over the last three years, and I think we've convened a--a wonderful group, and we have many interesting people. And we've had an extraordinary number of interesting speakers. And from the convening power of the Commission alone, I think that there has been a great deal learned and--and an enormous amount of benefit. But if we take on the challenge of a second phase, then we really need, I believe, to deliver important things in important ways that have the capacity to transform and allow us to fulfill some of the goals and aspirations that we communicated through the coordinate of the Commission, and we intend to do that and really will benefit from your help.

So, Steve, thank you for a very useful summary and a ...(unintelligible) of potential next steps. We'll take about 10 or 15 minutes...

Mr. STEINBERG: Ten minutes. Yeah.

Dr. RODIN: ...and then we'll begin our next session. Thank you.

Mr. STEINBERG: And--and we'll be back in the--in the ...(unintelligible).

List of Transcripts