Welcome to my publication. On Social Citizenship is my exploration of why Americans have been unable to secure rights to things like an adequate education, healthcare, housing, or basic income and what we can do about it. My own journey began when I started digging into the deep division between the college-oriented and hostile-to-college halves of American society. Most everything I will write here will circle back to education; it is the first and most important social right of citizenship, the one we are closest to actually realizing, and it is where we should begin working if we want to advance social rights here. For me, that action starts with creating a universal path to post-secondary, really life-long, education, but this is my bias as a higher education specialist (see “About Me” below).
This is a publication about the history of ideas and what they say about action now. Establishing egalitarian social policies has been difficult here (remember the fight over Obamacare?) because we have to overcome resistance rooted in our deepest and strongest philosophical tradition—“traditional” liberalism. These ideas are mobilized to make pragmatic market-centric policies seem like dangerous “socialism.” Advocates do manage to move the ball, but progress is painfully slow, and always insecure (the ACA is still under threat). To advance, we have to change our rhetorical approach. We also need to design new policies based on universalistic social citizenship principles. All of my posts will have something to do with one of these three themes: why things are the way they are, how we can change the world by changing the way we talk about the world, and how we need to change program design to reflect this philosophical shift. That’s a lot. I hope you will bear with me as I lay out my approach, step by step.
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Please consider becoming a paid subscriber to On Social Citizenship. I have no plans to introduce members-only content or paywalls, but if we build an engaged community around this material, we might be able to organize some members-only discussions or events. Your paid subscription makes it easier for me to keep writing and will help the site build momentum.
About Me
I’m a political scientist (Bachelor’s, Master’s, and Ph.D., all from MIT) with broad interests in American political thought and political development—looking at political questions through an historical lens. In the decade or so break between my Bachelor’s/Master’s degrees and my doctoral program, I worked in the administration of Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, mostly on public finance issues, and tax and economic development policy. I also prepared economic and tax forecasts for the Commonwealth. After my Ph.D., I held a series of one-year and adjunct college teaching gigs before taking a research position at the Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) where I eventually became Director of Research. In my twenty years there I became an expert on American higher education, with an emphasis on admissions and financial aid, especially for the highly selective sector of COFHE’s member institutions.
After semi-retiring in late 2021, I have done some higher education consulting but mostly have spent time exploring issues around social citizenship. This led to my book, The Tools to Be Free: Social Citizenship, Education, and Service in the 21st Century (Lexington Books, 2024). In The Tools to Be Free, I argue that access to post-secondary education ought to be a social right of citizenship and propose a large-scale service-to-school program that can create a universal path to college. I also argue that we need to change the way we advocate for social rights and other egalitarian policies—what we have been doing for the past century or so just hasn’t been working. Right now, I’m working on a second book, tentatively titled Membership, Equality & Freedom, that digs more deeply into the principles of social citizenship. This Substack series will give me a space to work through some of the ideas I want to get into the new book. I hope you can help me to work through some of the more difficult bits and help me figure out how to explain it all.
If you want to buy my book, I suggest going directly to the publisher. Here’s a link: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666960136/The-Tools-to-Be-Free-Social-Citizenship-Education-and-Service-in-the-Twenty-First-Century ). Use discount code LXFANDF30.
If you just want to explore, the Amazon preview for the eBook is fairly long.
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