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By Janine Gaspari and Elizabeth Mathews

On February 9, 2017, students from Transparent GMU filed a lawsuit against both George Mason University (GMU) and the George Mason University Foundation, Inc. “in hopes of obtaining grant and gift agreements between private donors and the Foundation, which serves as the University’s fundraising arm.” The lawsuit was filed after the George Mason University Foundation, Inc. claimed their 501(c)(3) private status exempted the organization from FOIA requests previously filed by Transparent GMU. This movement is a sustained effort by GMU students, which started in 2014, to push for more transparency regarding private donations to their public university. The group got their trial day in court on April 24, 2018, which was followed by startling emails from the university president that admitted to donor influence in hiring faculty in GMU’s economics department between 2003 and 2011. The activism of students and a partnership with national organization, UnKoch My Campus, has led to significant victories for these persistent students. Janine Gaspari and Elizabeth Mathews are both undergraduate students at GMU, and Transparent GMU campus leaders. Introduction written by Emily McDonald.

Transparent GMU’s Mission

Transparent GMU’s mission statement is to “advocate for transparency as it relates to the corporatization of education and its adverse effects on George Mason University.” As part of that larger mission, the organization is currently focused on increasing transparency in GMU’s relationship with its donors. Many of GMU’s largest donors, particularly the Charles Koch Foundation and affiliates, are known to attach strings to the money they give to universities.

These stipulations impinge on academic freedom and independence in order to promote an ideological agenda. This is fundamentally opposed to the mission of a university, which is to provide a space for free inquiry and research based on empirical evidence. No one should be able to use private money to influence and/or buy academia.

Transparent GMU v. George Mason University

This lawsuit is focused on a specific set of agreements. The judge’s ruling will determine the extent to which the university foundation, the university, and donor relationships will be impacted.

It is possible that only the documents we requested will become public, but there is also a possibility that the GMU Foundation will no longer be legally considered exempt from requests based FOIA (Freedom of Information Act), which could bring about much more sweeping impacts. With the recent revelation by President Cabrera that GMU had accepted donor agreements from 2003 to 2011 that fell “short of the standards of academic independence,” our lawsuit is more important than ever. Because there is extreme secrecy and a weak culture of transparency around donor agreements accepted by the GMU Foundation, the scope of this issue at GMU is unmeasurable. Many more of these kinds of documents could be held by the GMU Foundation, but they refuse to release them to the public. Our lawsuit aims to make them do just that. We are saddened that it had to get to this point, and that the university was not more receptive to dialogue outside of the legal system.

In terms of relationships with donors on an individual basis, winning our lawsuit would show donors who wish to have undue influence at our university that they will no longer be able do so out of the public eye. For donors who simply want to give out of a love for George Mason and its institutions, then our lawsuit should change nothing. A common argument in response to demands for more transparency is that transparency deters donors. There is little evidence suggesting that this is the case. Higher education is better off, not worse off, with a strong culture of transparency, democratic values, and faculty governance.

The Bigger Picture

Private money is playing an outsized role in our public life, which directly threatens democracy, both in the university and beyond. GMU administration’s resistance to transparency is especially problematic because of the role GMU plays in the Koch network’s model for structural social change. This is a cycle that was engineered by Richard Fink, one of the Kochs’ chief strategists, to transform public life. The cycle includes universities, think tanks, and legislators. Universities produce research that is passed along to think tanks, which then translate that research into digestible policy reports.

The policy reports are then presented to legislators who then can make decisions based on that information. At GMU specifically, the Mercatus Center is an extremely effective Koch-funded think tank and lobbying firm. Thus, when GMU accepts money on terms that the public cannot access, we are unable to hold GMU accountable for their role in this cycle.

Realizing Transparency in Practice

We believe true transparency would have two parts. The first part would be for the university and its foundation to release all of its donor agreements to the public, past and present, to be reviewed for stipulations that give donors undue influence over our education. The second part would be to create university institutions that would give faculty final decision-making power over what kind of donors and agreements GMU will choose to engage with in the future. True transparency would require giving faculty the power to review and get the final say on all donation and gift acceptances. This will ensure that all donations comply with the standards of academic freedom, and the faculty should determine university governance. The only real way to create lasting change is to empower students, faculty and the public to have a larger role in how our university operates.

Photo by Emily McDonald

Moving the Push for Transparency Forward

This lawsuit is only part of our mission, and the starting point to more activism around donor transparency and academic freedom issues. We hope to continue pushing for full transparency of donor agreements and disaffiliation with donors with proven track records of seeking undue influence. We hope to continue empowering students, faculty, and staff to have a larger role in the governance of the university. That being said, donor agreements are not the only issues that require increased transparency at GMU. We hope to be able to use the momentum that we have seen so far to elevate other issues and campaigns that require increased transparency.

Our work strives to promote democratic decision-making at the university and beyond. We do this by advocating for more transparent donation acceptance policies beyond just our current lawsuit. This is imperative in an age of decreased public funding and increased private higher education funding. Universities are looking to private donors to bring in more revenue. Without strong donation and gift acceptance policies led by faculty, higher education can be up for sale to the highest bidder. Without transparency, universities can take part in shady deals outside of the public eye. This makes it extremely difficult for stakeholders such as students, faculty, alumni, and community members to hold universities accountable for their actions. Editor’s note: The Washington Post carried a story about Transparent GMU on April 24, 2018.

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By Briana Pocratsky

At points in American history, certain types of workers and forms of labor have been hypervisible, while others have been made invisible though processes of value assignment. By analyzing representations of laboring bodies, we can gain an understanding of how society has valued different workers and forms of labor. Similar to the category of “the working class,” “American workers” are often narrowly associated with whiteness, maleness, and industrial labor in the popular imagination. Contemporary dominant constructions of the working class elicit an image of a dirt-covered white man wearing a hard hat while standing, arms crossed, next to heavy machinery in “Small Town, U.S.A.” However, the category “working class,”¹ and the notion of “American workers,” intersects at multiple axes of identity, including but not limited to race, gender, age, and geographic location and also includes the service industry and industrial jobs.²

I visited the National Portrait Gallery to see the current exhibition “The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers.”³ I was interested in how the exhibition crafts a narrative of “American workers” and if it complicates dominant portrayals of work and workers in the U.S. Featuring approximately 75 works of various media, “The Sweat of Their Face” aims to capture points of the changing and multidimensional landscape of American workers over time and their relationships to labor, power, and emotion. The exhibition presents a range of topics and themes including slavery, war, child labor, exploitation, solidarity, the “everydayness” of work and depictions of heroism, joy, and despair.

Representations

The exhibition displays familiar representations of American workers, such as the Farm Security Administration documentary photographs during the Great Depression, including Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” (1936), and the WWII propaganda character and cultural icon associated with Rosie the Riveter. Well-known artists, such as Norman Rockwell, as well as less mainstream portrayals and artists are also included in the exhibition. Many representations unsurprisingly echo themes relating to Karl Marx’s ([1932] 1972) concepts of exploitation and alienation and Max Weber’s “Iron Cage.”⁴ In addition to portrayals directly offering a commentary on social inequalities in relationship to American workers, the exhibition also presents other themes to its audience, such as strength and dignity.

The two main entrances to the exhibition are used to loosely bracket representations across time, space, and identities in conceptualizing American workers. One of the entrances includes the work “Pat Lyon at the Forge” (1829, orig.1826) by John Neagle. The oil on canvas painting features Pat Lyon, a blacksmith and businessperson, who was wrongly accused of and imprisoned for robbing the Bank of Pennsylvania (a location that he made locks for). Years after proving his innocence, Lyon commissioned Neagle for the painting (Ward and Moss 2017).

The image features Lyon at the forge, sleeves rolled, and pausing in the midst of manual labor as an apprentice in the background looks at Lyon with admiration. Also in the background is Walnut Street Jail, a reference to his imprisonment (ibid.). Lyon chose to be represented as a laborer, contrary to the popular conventions of the nineteenth century when commissioned portraits were usually representations that conveyed an elite status (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 2018). Neagle’s portrait of Lyon captures the spirit of modern capitalism, illustrating Max Weber’s ([1958] 2003) concept of the Protestant work ethic in which hard work, frugality, and industry were at one time signifiers of salvation.

However, Weber argues that these traits have since become untethered from ascetic Protestantism, allowing capitalism to thrive on its own. The artwork at the other entrance of the exhibition is “Woman Cleaning Shower in Beverly Hills (After David Hockney’s Man Taking Shower in Beverly Hills, 1964)” (2013) by Ramiro Gomez. The acrylic on canvas work features a woman of color, a housekeeper, whose back faces the viewer; she is hunched over and cleaning a shower with a squeegee.

Gomez’s painting references a previous work, David Hockney’s “Man Taking Shower in Beverly Hills” (1964), which features a faceless white man, bent over, taking a shower in a very similar setting as the housekeeper from Gomez’s painting. Gomez has reframed a number of Hockney’s paintings, providing a commentary on class, race, gender, and immigration.

The faceless white, affluent male of Hockney’s painting, who leisurely takes a shower in a Beverly Hills home, seems unaware of the labor behind the maintenance of luxury. In an interview, Gomez elaborated on the faceless domestic workers in his artwork in relationship to his reimagining of Hockney’s art:

“Culture shapes and shifts as it moves. It influences perception. That is something that Hockney has always involved himself with: perception, the ways of rendering something three-dimensional in two dimensions. With me, I’m very curious how [my] work can re-shape and re-form what people had previously seen as the California life. People tell me they can’t see Hockney’s work the same way after. That was the goal for me” (Miranda 2016).

While Gomez’s painting makes a statement on its own regarding invisible and unrecognized labor, especially in relationship to the working-class Latinx community in Los Angeles (Ward and Moss 2017), the full extent of Gomez’s narrative can only be understood in context with Hockney’s work.

Taken together, these works provide a stark contrast of laborers and employers and their social statuses particularly as it pertains to agency and visibility.

Photo by Briana Pocratsky

Moments and Settings

“The Sweat of Their Face” exhibition includes representations of American workers whose identities and labor are often not valued, forgotten, or made invisible in the popular imagination. Representations, which often teeter between individuality and anonymity are never total or complete in relationship to the subjects or the history of which they are a part. Moreover, representation depends on who is behind the camera or the canvas and how the artist chooses to represent a subject. However, the exhibition pulls out moments in time and space across American labor history through fine art representations to highlight some cultural, political, and social settings while attempting to foster empathy along the way.

The direct stare in portraiture of a blacksmith, a newsboy, an enslaved woman, a weaver, a share cropper, a grape picker, a barber, a steel worker, and a sandwich artist or the genre art of the worlds in which work takes place in everyday life, such as a factory, a house, a home, a field, a farm, a mine, a street, an office, or one hundred stories in the sky collectively ask the viewer to pause and linger on the sweat of American workers. “The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers” will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery until September 3, 2018.

Notes

1. The label “the working class” and how it is conceptualized and measured often masks the complexities of individuals who fall under this category, making clear and concise definitions of “the working class” and other class categories difficult and problematic.
2. For example, depending on the parameters of the definition of working class (in this particular projection, working people without a college degree) and how people identify in terms of race and ethnicity, it is estimated that by 2032, people of color will comprise the majority of the working-class population in the U.S. (Wilson 2016).
3. David C. Ward, the National Portrait Gallery’s former senior historian and co-curator of “The Sweat of Their Face,” explains that the title of the exhibition refers to the Fall in Christianity, or “the biblical judgement that expelled Adam and Eve from paradise and enjoined them to work, that ‘in the sweat of their face, they shall eat bread’” (Ward and Moss 2017: 13).
4. Max Weber ([1958] 2003: 181) contends that the rise of rationalization and bureaucratization is occurring in everyday life. Unchecked rationalization and bureaucracy results in the Iron Cage, in which modern economic order “is now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism, not only those directly concerned with economic acquisition, with irresistible force.”

References

Marx, Karl. [1932] 1972. “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.” Pp. 68–125 in The Marx-Engels Reader, edited by R. C. Tucker. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Miranda, Carolina A. 2016. “From Nanny to International Art Star: Ramiro Gomez on How His Paintings Reveal the Labor That Makes California Cool Possible.” Los Angeles Times, May 4. Retrieved (http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cam-ramiro-gomez-paintings-david-hockney-20160502-snap-story.html).

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. 2018. “Pat Lyon at the Forge.” Retrieved (https://www.mfa.org/collections/object/pat-lyon-at-the-forge-34216).

Ward, David C. and Dorothy Moss. 2017. The Sweat of Their Face: Portraying American Workers. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution in association with the National Portrait Gallery.

Weber, Max. [1958] 2003. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc.

Wilson, Valerie. 2016. People of Color Will Be a Majority of the American Working Class in 2032: What This Means for the Effort to Grow Wages and Reduce Inequality. Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved March 5, 2018 (http://www.epi.org/publication/the-changing-demographics-of-americas-working-class/). 

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By Maria Valdovinos

In the last issue of The Sociologist I wrote about how Pancake Saturday (see Valdovinos February 2018) is not just about breakfast or pancakes for that matter (although there are plenty of them to go around), but rather about building a community and a positive social support network among returning citizens in the District. The most recent Pancake Saturday gathering was extra special; not only did we get to meet the newest cohort of the Aspire to Entrepreneurship program (see Valdovinos October 2017) but breakfast came with a healthy side of public sociology. There was far more listening, dialoguing, and community building than there was eating. We were all pleasantly surprised to see Councilmember Charles Allen stop by to meet the cohort’s newest members and to learn about the challenges of reentry in the District.

Charles Allen represents Ward 6 on the Council of the District of Columbia.¹ Allen was elected in 2014 and is up for re-election. He chairs the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety² and serves as the Council’s liaison with key stakeholders in criminal justice and reentry in the District.³ “The goal is not just to make DC a safe city, but also a just city,” Allen said as he shared with everyone his vision and goals for the District if he were to get re-elected.

For the Aspirants⁴ at the table, the goal of a “just city,” raised many issues of fairness and equity in opportunity, particularly as it pertained to access to traditional jobs, safe and affordable housing and city contracts for the entrepreneurs working to grow their small and local businesses. The Aspirants shared specific challenges they encountered in their reentry experiences, such as not being able to obtain paid sick-time benefits and the fact that “ban the box” still resulted in individuals being denied jobs because of a criminal history. Among the returning citizen entrepreneur group, the issue of access to city contracts came up almost immediately. The Aspirants shared that while the desire is to stay local it is not always to stay “small.” They also shared that they felt their chances to access city contracts were hurt because they could not donate to campaigns. Allen listened intently, noting that the contracting process should never work in a way where campaign donations give people an advantage in obtaining city contracts. He proceeded to explain the current process of securing and awarding contracts in the District, how that process should work and where it could be improved. Before jumping into another round of questions and answers, Allen thanked everyone for their insight, remarking that he had been unaware of some of the issues raised that morning.

As a student in public sociology, I have thought long and hard over the last couple of years about the nature of the public and our responsibility as social scientists to the discipline and civil society. In the past two years especially, I have worked to develop a series of arguments regarding the need to integrate what I have referred to in those papers as “subaltern knowledge” into criminal justice reform policy. Drawing from Antonio Gramsci’s use of “subaltern” in The Prison Notebooks, the use of the term is simply intended to describe how ‘knowledge’ and experiences are frequently and routinely overlooked when they belong to non-hegemonic groups or classes of people that are socially, politically, and geographically on the periphery of hegemonic power structures (Gramsci 1948).

Among the arguments I have made is that the seeming contradiction between public sociology and academic sociology characterizing the “public sociology wars” (Burawoy in Adam et al. 2011) also needs to engage the value placed on alternative and subaltern knowledge by key decision makers (such as policymakers), and the willingness of decision makers to legitimize this kind of knowledge. While far from the ideal of the Habermasian public sphere (where private people gather as a public and have direct access to the state and where this sphere is accessible to everyone), the question and answer forum that I witnessed during the previous Pancake Saturday was encouraging. For me, it reinforced the fact that unlike Weber’s articulation of the people of the state as an inarticulate mass, the public can in fact be very articulate. In the vein of C. Wright Mills and Charles Gallagher, I witnessed the power of linking individual biography and private troubles to public issues via what I have heard Graham McLaughlin refer to as “the ask.” McLaughlin is co-founder and chair of the board at Changing Perceptions.⁵ This is the idea that raising a question about a seemingly private trouble can reveal the collective and socially embedded nature of that problem potentially leading to a solution for what is in fact a public issue of wide scope.

Over the course of sociology’s history and development, the publics of sociology have included educated elites (Weber 1946), intellectuals more generally (Durkheim 1895),  intellectuals and the proletariat with the purpose of mobilizing (e.g. see Marx in Tucker 1978, The Communist Manifesto), intellectuals with the purpose of giving voice to the poor (e.g. see Addams 1910, 20 Years at Hull House), White Americans with the purpose of educating them (Du Bois 1903, The Souls of Black Folk), the sociological profession with the purpose of promoting reflexivity (Burawoy 2005), feminist activist-scholars with the purpose of “talking the talk” and “walking the walk” alongside testing their theories (Collins 1998), or policy audiences (Desmond 2016; Wilson 1990). This list is by no means exhaustive. Contrary to some arguments which have been leveraged within the discipline over the years, I would argue that at no point has science and instrumental rationality been sacrificed whether the move has been away from or towards engaged scholarship–activism.

The arguments I have made over the past two years pertaining to subaltern knowledge and criminal justice reform are at their core emancipatory and imply that the next step in the public sociology wars is to work toward the recognition that the co-production of knowledge is a legitimate and necessary enterprise. Such a step could potentially allow for public sociology and professional sociology to be in dialogue regarding the creation of new research programs and methods rather than a focus on the division of roles where the function of professional sociology is to produce knowledge and the role of public sociology is simply to communicate it.

Such a step could also create necessary and overdue connections with academic circles and policy circles to target urgent problems. In short, we must move from questions of knowledge for what (Lynd 1939), whose side we are on (Becker 1966) and for whom (Lee 1976) to questions such as knowledge from whom? To that end, when my turn to ask a question came, I asked Charles Allen what I thought was a simple question. How can stakeholders such as myself, a sociologist with scientific training, work to connect publics and translate various experiences into forms that are actionable for policy reform? How can we access policy circles to communicate the unintended and potentially harmful outcomes uncovered by the scientific research of some policy reforms (such as ban the box) to policymakers?

Councilman Allen at Pancake Saturday. Photo by Maria Valdovinos

Allen did not seem to have a concrete answer. Although, he recognized the importance of the connection between research and policy, it seemed that the proposition I had raised was somewhat of a new idea, potentially unexplored territory. Afterwards, however, one of the Aspirants came up to me and told me that she really appreciated what I had to say, and that she thought “I was someone to be reckoned with,” before quickly walking way. I have to admit that she left me speechless with her comment. The more I have thought about it, the more I realize the power in public sociology to overcome certain counterproductive debates and to refocus that energy into expanding the existing assumptions, theories, concepts, questions so as to catapult the types of changes needed in society. I walked out of that last Pancake Saturday with a strong re-assurance that there is not an essential incompatibility between public sociology and academic sociology.

Notes

1. For more information about Charles Allen see http://www.charlesallenward6.com/about
2. For more information on the Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety see http://www.charlesallenward6.com/judiciary
3. The stakeholders include the U.S. Attorney’s Office, D.C. Courts, Public Defender Service, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency, Pretrial Services Agency, Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Parole Commission.
4. The term Aspirant is a term used to refer to members of the Aspire to Entrepreneurship program.
5. For more information on Changing Perceptions and the Aspire to Entrepreneurship Program see https://www.streetsensemedia.org/article/entrepreneurship-returning-citizens-jobs-reentry/#.WvGg0i-ZORs

References

Addams, Jane. 1910. 20 Years at Hull-House. New York City, NY: The MacMillan Company.

Becker, Howard S. 1966. “Whose Side Are We On.” Social Problems 14:239.

Blau, Judith and Keri E. Iyall Smith, eds. 2006. Public Sociologies Reader. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Burawoy, Michael. 2005. “For Public Sociology.” American Sociological Review 70(1):4–28.

Collins, Patricia Hill. 1998. Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Desmond, Matthew. 2016. Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. New York City, NY: Crown Publishers.

Du Bois, W.E.B. 1903. The Souls of Black Folk. Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg & Company.

Durkheim, Emile. 1895. The Rules of Sociological Method. edited by S. Lukes. New York City, NY: The Free Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1948. Prison Notebooks. edited by J. A. Buttigieg and A. Callari. New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

Jeffries, Vincent, ed. 2011. Handbook of Public Sociology. New York City, NY: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Lee, Alfred McClung. 1976. “Presidential Address: Sociology for Whom?” American Sociological Review 41(6):925–36.

Lynd, Robert Staughton. 1939. Knowledge for What: The Place of Social Science in American Culture. New York City, NY: Grove Press, Inc.

Mills, C. Wright. 1959. The Sociological Imagination. New York City, NY: Oxford University Press.

Tucker, Robert C., ed. 1978. The Marx/Engels Reader. New York City, NY: W.W. Norton.

Weber, Max. 1946. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Oxford University Press.

Wilson, William Julius. 1990. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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This article was removed by request of the author.

The Sociologist has officially launched our latest resource called “Ask The Sociologist.”

This is space for our readers and the general public to send us questions about everyday life and have an expert sociologist provide feedback. The “Ask The Sociologist” section is a resource for all who want nontechnical answers to life’s vicissitudes, social conundrums, and challenges.  (You are welcome to ask us technical questions too!)

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