Greg Mortensons’ Three Cups of Tea has become the essential teaching tool universities always wanted it to be. The narrative of hope and attendant fall from grace forces consideration of the important challenges of representation, service, development, storytelling, and advancing human rights. Unfortunately, many voices inside the academy seem as eager to nurture an archetype of Mortenson as thoughtless villain as others were once willing to paint him in bold strokes of perfect humanitarian. The truths are certainly interwoven and overlapping in between. It is our job as university educators to not only see this nuance, but to build our students’ abilities to do so as well. Professors who understand and approach the Three Cups debacle as a teachable moment are dabbling in the real and profoundly challenging work of community-engaged teaching and learning, even if their particular courses do not leave campus.
There are several debates within and surrounding service-learning in higher education that are highly relevant to the Mortenson scandal. First, there is the assertion that community-engagement has no proper place in higher education (as in Fish's
Save the World on Your Own Time, see
reply by Dan Butin)
; that either the promotion of values is inappropriate or that community-engaged work is necessarily less rigorous. Second, there is the ongoing
concern with naïve development amateurs – often our students and even professors – who, Mortenson-like, bumble into communities with high ideals and little else.
What professors using Three Cups of Tea as a common text had was a compelling contemporary narrative that stirred our emotions through use of a time-tested American Hero trope in the vein of Wyatt Earp, Luke Skywalker, and even now Jason Bourne: a regular, unsuspecting humble guy is moved suddenly to action through forces beyond his control. Composition and writing professors had (and now have even more so) an opportunity to examine Three Cups for the common tricks of the trade it employs, from hinging on this easy narrative to dichotomizing good and evil and, as Krakauer has made clear, compressing time, dramatizing events, and simplifying cultures.
Of course, we do not use every compelling contemporary narrative as a common text at our universities. What captured the public and academic imagination about this text was that it offered a simple solution to the often intractable challenge of development; it advanced education for all and thereby played upon a common value for most Americans; and it offered Love in a region where many Americans could only see potential for warfare.
Now that the exposé has hit the presses, we are all – lay and academic alike – retreating to our comfortable spaces. We’re seeing a backlash from development bloggers and academics who study development. They’re critical of Mortenson's seeming naivety and they’re likewise concerned about Nick Kristof’s celebration of the “
DIY Revolution” in aid and development.
“By taking on this book [Three Cups of Tea] as a campus-wide reading, are we committing ourselves to teaching first-year students the history and politics of this region that Mortenson elides? Are we willing to approach this book as a compelling – but quite probably misleading – narrative about a politically important region? Or are we going to leave our students with the impression that this is an accurate portrayal of Northern Pakistan and the “Muslim World” that Mortenson conflates it with?
I feel we should present our incoming students with a common text that we feel represents good research, subtle analysis of the complexities of the world, and real insight into cultural difference without relying on oversimplifications. This is our students’ introduction to the “life of the mind;” we should endeavor to make it a positive example of how to approach understanding the world.”
There are different kinds of texts, different kinds of research, and many different types of vast oversimplifications of the world. There are better forms and worse forms, but there are no perfect forms or methods for representing people, cultures, and their places within geopolitics. Mortenson provided (and, I think, may still provide) a compelling narrative that many students could identify with, that includes an accessible pathway into serious discussion about how methodology, disciplinary lenses, and experience informs interpretations. Anthropologists, political scientists, and economists with more than a decade of training on specific methodologies would view the region differently from an emergency room nurse and serious mountain climber (the latter being Mortenson). The political scientist would likely view the region too much in terms of power; the economist likely too much in terms of constrained decision-making relating to finite resources, but each method would offer its insights and be vulnerable to important critiques.
We have the opportunity to sharpen our students’ analysis skills by looking at the types of books they’re most likely to read after they graduate (creative nonfiction having a much stronger claim on the adult reader market than peer-reviewed journal articles), even while acknowledging that those books (and indeed all books) are imperfect. By examining popular texts we are explicitly developing the skills students will need to be informed and deliberate consumers of popular culture in its many forms. We are developing skills required for good citizenship.
Within this broad understanding of the many potential sources of knowledge and the challenging social and environmental issues we face, what the service-learning community uniquely admits, I think, is that it is always easier to shame imperfect attempts at advancing justice than it is to make a difference. And the community’s bias, while steeped in critical accounts and questioning, is that it is still important to attempt to (hopefully with humility, insight, and real direction from community partners) build a better world.
At this point it’s unclear whether the charges leveled against Mortenson will prove to be definitively damming for the work of the CAI, but in any case it’s worth reviewing how before or after this specific scandal thoughtful professors have the opportunity to use this and other popular “development solution” narratives to engage in the critical analysis that we are charged with developing in our students. At a minimum, anyone reading the book with students should ask: “What is development?” “What are human rights?” and “How do we know?”
only the ability to analyze the presentation of data and the implicit arguments about human nature, but also the insight to recognize the danger of sweeping narratives. Such works are by necessity ideological commitments that draw on particular facts within the broad sweep of recent history, ultimately combined and presented as comprehensive understanding.
Careful readers will have noticed that I failed to mention the evermore popular Esther Duflo. Indeed, her work cannot be characterized in the same way so easily – and her carefully developed empirical analyses have supported some debunking of the relatively recent “microfinance as panacea” mythology that, pre-
Mortenson, permeated American hopes for the developing world.
As a recent reviewer suggests, however, the danger in Duflo may be that in putting so much emphasis on carefully constrained social experiments to fight poverty she ignores the real forces of power and oppression that must be addressed. These writers all have strengths and weaknesses in their analysis and due to the limitations of their particular lenses, just as is the case with Mortenson. As an educator, I find it helpful to use popular texts and narratives as entry points into considering how academic writers’ insights help us better understand our limitations and potential.
As professors and students consider the question of human rights they have the opportunity to engage in many other important discussions through review of that many more essential authors. Does education ‘count’ as a human right? Does everyone deserve access to it? How should one respond to concerns that it may interfere with the group rights also recognized by the United Nations? These questions are extremely important for analysis in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, political science, and of course many interdisciplinary areas. They lead to consideration of writers such as Jack Donnelly, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Ignatieff, Arturo Escobar, Gustavo Esteva, and Madhu Suri Prakash. The children and families Mortenson portrays help illuminate the importance and relevance of the human rights construct and attendant debates.
I have already alluded to applications of this story in composition classes, suggested a set of relevant economic development readings, and shared several prominent human rights writers. In each case, I have only scraped the surface of the particular topic area. That admission calls attention to strengths and weaknesses in community engagement: it is inherently interdisciplinary, it examines issues in their full complexity, and it does not permit tidy and decisive conclusions. Professors currently using the Mortenson text should not be “promoting” the text as much as using it as a place from which to permit students to consider how their own values and analytical abilities relate to the Mortenson story.
The process of bringing students through many important relevant texts, asking challenging questions, and leaving students to make choices about important debates that are of course still unresolved by leading human rights scholars (e.g. the debates surrounding education and group rights) is the process of liberal education. Students must ultimately choose. What community engagement does is demonstrate clear relevance and contemporary application. And this set of challenges: making real decisions about contemporary issues in light of compelling moral arguments and current practices, is why community-engaged thinking is ultimately more challenging than traditionally isolated analysis where thinkers may select assumptions and dictate parameters.
Everyone must make choices. When we as academics choose to emphasize weaknesses in community engagement by pointing to the imperfections that accompany all human efforts, we risk paralysis by analysis for many important initiatives that do more good than harm. Despite the clear missteps Mortenson made, I strongly suspect he has done more good than harm. That suspicion is no doubt based on a culturally contingent bias toward individual human rights that suggests the importance of education and gender equity for all people, in all places. That tentative suspicion of mine may reasonably be construed as imperialistic, naïve, and harmful, but it is nonetheless where I sit after rather thorough review of development history and related texts.
Mortenson’s story points toward many more teaching opportunities that once again indicate how complex these kinds of efforts are and point to one of my original assertions - that this scandal calls attention to the ongoing important concern with naïve development amateurs -
- The Aga Khan Development Foundation has a strong record of and infrastructure for building and staffing schools in the region. As Duflo’s analyses (and development experience for those who have it) make clear, building schools is never enough. Why did Mortenson act alone, why did CAI pay so little attention to school operations, and when (if ever) is it appropriate for similar “social entrepreneurs” to so completely, perhaps naively, follow their instincts?
- Clear standards for nonprofit accounting and board oversight exist. Just as business schools frequently use case studies to learn from failures and successes, university community engagement efforts, public administration, and nonprofit management courses should consider this case and other failures
- How much naivety is too much? Any person working in any field today can reasonably state that they began in a relatively more naive position. Policymakers and corporate managers regularly engage in cost-benefit analysis to determine whether to keep or cut programs and products. CAI got a lot wrong, but built many schools and educated many children in the process. Some of their missteps seem to be due to insufficient understanding of the extent of tribal differences in the area. That is, while many communities wanted schools, at least a few had no interest. Still, for the children who gained access to schooling and education, is CAI providing these opportunities at a more affordable rate than large aid organizations? If so, is their bungling in some communities enough to undermine their total efforts?
These three questions – Why not partner with established efforts? How well-versed in best practices must one be to begin human rights and social change work? And to what extent do missteps by naïve actors undermine their broader efforts? – are the questions that plague young DIY development workers and many service-learning programs. It is absolutely clear that past development efforts have frequently been harmful because of insufficient consideration of these and other foundational rights questions considered earlier. And it’s also clear that many social change movement supporters and leaders were young and naïve when they began their efforts due primarily to viscerally felt outrage at the horrible treatments visited upon “others” in the name of tradition. Universities have an opportunity to recognize these important questions early and expose students to relevant debates often, so that we do as much as we can to sharpen students’ skills as readers, potential development actors, and engaged citizens.
It would be simpler to maintain the traditional university, to forgo promotion of community engagement or consideration of contemporary, relevant books on pressing topics that do not follow academic norms for research, review, and presentation. But we must remember that to do so is to promote the status quo rather than to unsettle students’ expectations and assumptions by engaging them with real and relevant issues. While we must not fall back into the once clear arrogance and paternalism of the university as the center of solutions for others elsewhere, we must also do all that we can within this challenging and difficult world of multiple, legitimate claims to truth, to prepare our students to be builders of a world that continues to improve access to options and basic human rights for all. There it is, of course: that’s my bias again. But to educate with attention to the continent nature of human rights is not to preach so much as to prepare students for critical analysis and awareness of the importance of judgment and questioning in the world as we continue to build it. Mortenson’s story is ultimately part cautionary tale, part narrative of possibility.
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Development is notoriously hard to define. However defined, it sometimes works and sometimes fails fantastically. To analyze the most popular academic writers and books on development (e.g. Sachs’ End of Poverty, Easterly’s White Man’s Burden, Collier’s Bottom Billion, or Moyo’s Dead Aid) one needs not
