In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg has chosen Cathie Black to be Chancellor of the largest public school system in the United States. She is not an educator, never went to public schools, has never worked on school issues and didn’t send her children to public schools. But the mayor still confidently declared her to be the most qualified person, as The New York Times reported, calling Ms. Black “a superstar manager who has succeeded spectacularly in the private sector” and added, “There’s no one who knows more about the skills our children will need to succeed in the 21st century economy.”  Hers are market, not educational, qualifications for a management position in the NYC public school district.

In my and the country’s second city, Chicago, where I studied for my Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in the meanwhile, smaller issues are at stake, a local battle of symbols.  The Chicago Transit Authority is selling naming rights “for rail lines and stations, bus routes, retail concessions, and special events. Even the venerable (sic) CTA logo will be on the auction block,” the Chicago Tribune reports.

And where I studied as an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Albany, because of a budget crisis, five humanities programs, including French, Italian, Russian, classics and theater, have been suspended, apparently because these programs don’t contribute to the university’s and the individual’s bottom line. (link) Such majors don’t attract many students, and those who are so attracted upon graduation have trouble finding work.  But how can there be a university without the humanities? (link)  This hits close to home for me. Albany is the place where I decided to make the unusual move that has defined my career, starting my research by studying the sociology of theater.

How can it be that the business of the New York City school system and of my alma mater is primarily business, and not education?  This is disturbing.

The naming of public places is another issue.  The CTA faces a practical problem, needing to pay for a public good that requires public investment and maintenance that exceeds public capacity, especially in a troubled economy.  The authority recently concluded a $3.9 million deal with Apple Inc. to refurbish the North/Clybourn Red Line stop, partly in exchange for a future naming-rights contract for the station, which is near a new Apple Store.  I am not excited about the prospect, but it is a question of balance and judgment.  And the Tribune reports that the CTA “will be sensitive to avoid naming rights that are in poor taste or at all questionable. So don’t worry about seeing a Viagra Express or Miller Lite bus route on Rush Street.”

I think market penetration into previously protected public domains should be a matter of careful judgment and public discussion.  Sometimes the market can support activities that otherwise may be difficult if not impossible, perhaps DC and the CTA.  But sometimes it works against important autonomous values.  We should realize when goods other than market ones are at stake, and need to be protected and cultivated.  This is something I have been working on for much of my career, most explicitly in my second book, On Cultural Freedom.

As we judge and discuss this problem, we should draw upon commonsense and social science theory and research.  On the one hand, the traditional wisdom tells us that there is a time and place for everything, and on the other, a central thesis of the modern discipline of sociology examines a key characteristic of modern society as social differentiation.  The founders of the discipline made this central to their intellectual projects, from Max Weber’s notion of the institutional differentiation, to Karl Marx’s and Emile Durkheim’s explorations of the division of labor, to Georg Simmel’s analysis of individuation.

I think the centrality of this aspect of modern life is most clearly explored by Erving Goffman in his classic, Asylums, where he explores the rule by closely studying its breach in total institutions.  In normal society, different people do different things at different times.  When you are with family, you act one way, at work another way, with friends, yet another.  Depending on the situation, different rules, different expectations and different behaviors are forthcoming.  Commonsense and sociology agree.

Yet, in recent years, this solid bedrock of normal existence has been challenged by the workings of our economy and by the nature of our media environment, and I fear these challenges feed on each other.