Monday, August 07, 2006

poverty 101

THE SHEPHERD PROGRAM for the Interdisciplinary Study of Poverty and Human Capability is that rare kind of thing that can change your life. It is, its founders say, the only program of its kind in any undergraduate institution in the country. Any student in any major can sign up, but to earn the program's certificate, one must do not only the academic work -- reading liberal and conservative thinkers on theories of poverty and attending lectures on what it is to be poor -- but also complete a rigorous eight-week summer internship. Side by side with undergrads from Berea College, a largely low-income school in Kentucky, and from the historic black colleges of Morehouse and Spelman in Atlanta, they work, live with and live like the poorest of the poor, subsisting on $10 or less a day and bunking at institutions like the District's N Street Village women's shelter.

That the program is based at Washington and Lee University, a school for the elite and the privileged since 1749, is somewhat ironic. This is a school that, in some media and college rankings, turns out among the most CEOs, corporate presidents and political leaders per capita of any university in the nation -- about one-third of all graduates in a given year are from its Williams School of Commerce, Economics and Politics. W & L students are overwhelmingly white, largely from families who can easily pay the $27,960 annual tuition. Its reputation is Southern and conservative: It was one of the last all-male schools to admit women, in 1985, and this spring men from one fraternity were proudly sporting T-shirts with lines from a Hank Williams Jr. song: "If the South woulda won, we woulda had it made."

[snip]

The idea behind the intense study of poverty never was to turn out an army of social workers, and, by and large, it doesn't. "We still want to graduate lawyers, physicians, businesspeople, educators," says Beckley, who developed the program. "The goal is to have students understand how their profession impinges and impacts poverty. And, as a result, they may want to approach things differently."

[snip]

Beckley began teaching the program's survey course, "Poverty: An Interdisciplinary Introduction," in 1997. The experience of taking it has nudged some conservative students to the left and some liberal students to the right. Others -- Beckley estimates that one-fifth of the 1,700-member undergraduate student body now takes the class -- have been profoundly moved. Ingrid was one of these, and for her the class was a revelation on a couple of levels. Most obviously, it made her rethink her assumptions. "Before the class, I'd always thought of poverty as something in other countries," she says. "We are blessed with such abundance in America. I didn't realize how many people are left out."

In the class, she learned that the United States is among the poorest of developed nations by some measures, including infant mortality. She read conservative thinkers such as Lawrence M. Mead, a politics professor at New York University, who argued that the poor need to stop demanding handouts, and progressives such as Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, who wrote that real inroads in fighting poverty had already been achieved. Beckley challenged the students to confront their own stereotypes. Polls have shown that the prevailing view in America is that people are poor because of some character flaw such as laziness, promiscuity, addiction or moral failing, he taught. Was that true? Or were the flaws in the system: such as prejudice and economic or educational inequality? Could it be both?

Along with Ingrid's new perception of poverty came a desire to act. "I didn't understand that so many people are limited by the opportunities they're given, how we're nowhere near having an even playing field in this society," she says. "I think we are all called to do something about it."

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