Teaching in the Laboratory of Democracy

I found myself thinking about the sector I work in and just why teaching matters so much to me especially this year - as we face an existential election over the future of liberal democracy.

AI image by Dalle - “laboratory of democracy at a major university”

America’s nonprofit sector is not exactly beloved by those who reside on the political poles in this country. The far left believes that private philanthropy is just charity-washing for billionaires on the cheap, and that the charitable tax deduction is far too high a price to pay for services that should be rendered exclusively by the government under a strict socialist system. The much larger extremist right (which entirely controls one of the two main political parties in this country) believes that nonprofits are part of the liberal world order, embody a dangerous “woke DEI conspiracy” and give cover to a secular do-gooderism that’s only a step away from hard-core communism.

You’ll not be shocked to discover that the author of an occasional newsletter entitled The Liberal sees in that same nonprofit sector a vast middle ground of goodwill, good intentions, and necessary ideological compromise in the cause of helping people. If anything, it’s underfunded and less cohesive than it should be - given the vast investment of capital ($500 billion a year or more) and commitment of labor (at least 10 percent of the American workforce, about 17 million people, more than the populations of 46 states).

As many of you know, I spend part of my professional life teaching. Over about 15 years across two universities, it’s become part of who I am, and the close collaboration with students and other educators has been a source of inspiration and motivation. It’s deeply challenging, and it forces me to shuck off the hide-bound conventions of well-worn habits and assumptions.

This is my 10th year as an instructor in the Nonprofit Management masters degree program at Columbia University, and I found myself thinking about the sector I work in and just why it matters so much to me especially this year - as we face an existential election over the future of liberal democracy. I’m sharing this essay I wrote for the Columbia School of Professional Studies website. 

This is a year during which we will hear almost daily that American democracy is on the line, that the 2024 election will decide the future of our republic, and whether U.S. civil society will continue to function. 

My strong belief is that the U.S. nonprofit sector and its influence on the NGO sector globally is a major component of a democratic civil society, and, while it is imperfect and clearly flawed in some respects–like democracy itself–it is a major engine of positive social change and improving people’s lives.

The growing and almost feverish distrust of all institutions has created a significant challenge for nonprofit organizations. The storyline is both blurred and simplistic. There is too much emphasis on politics, polls, personalities and the horse race—and not enough insight into how change actually happens.

As an instructor in Columbia’s M.S. in Nonprofit Management program, my mission on campus is to strengthen democracy via a channel that lies generally outside of politics. In my view, our Nonprofit Management program is a de facto laboratory of democracy, and our wide-ranging and challenging curriculum is training the next generation of leaders who will work on remedying society’s greatest problems.

You can read the full essay here, and I urge you to do so. It’s the second in a series of occasional essays that there focus on the role of our program in encouraging leaders in the sector - the previous entry covered the Capstone course that I teach and why it’s such a great experience…for the instructor.

Yet that real world keeps on spinning. Pandemics disrupt entire nonprofit programs. Senior staff leave to take other jobs. Board members object. Executive directors disappear to accompany the bodies of those lost to Covid back to their home countries. All of these things have happened to my own Capstone classes just in the last few years. And those are the more extraordinary events! We’re also coping with competition for time and engagement with upcoming galas, major conferences, crisis communications, fundraising deadlines, and just the hard work our clients churn out every week.

Despite these challenges, I’ve never been part of a bad Capstone. Every single Columbia M.S. Nonprofit Management team has done stellar work, and frankly, shown the grit and resilience necessary to get the job done for our clients.

That’s due in part to another crucial aspect of the Capstone experience that both challenges (and in some cases, flat out frightens) our students and guarantees a worthy project in the end. I’m talking about collaboration.

In this latest essay, I quote the late-great social critic Pablo Eisenberg of Georgetown University, who always believed the nonprofit sector was both important and could achieve much greater things if it was committed to a unified approach and rooted more firmly in social justice.

Eisenberg believed that the next generation of nonprofit leaders would have to both assert the importance of our sector in civil society and be bold enough to move beyond technocratic collegiality in order to challenge the stale status quo of “acceptable” poverty, institutional prejudice, and widespread injustice.

“That is the genius of our independent sector; it is at once the protector and enforcer of democracy,” wrote Eisenberg in one of his last essays for the New England Journal of Public Policy.

In 2024, that role will be challenged - and I hope that the nonprofit sector will not shirk its calling to help save liberal democracy from the barbarians of fascism.