Reportback on the 2008 Summer Institute

Success!

The 2008 Summer Institute was a spectacular success. We had a full house and a terrific group of participants – smart and knowledgeable, with a collective treasure trove of organizing experience.

We had an unusually high percentage of women and people of color - more than 50% in both cases. Geographically, we had a great spread of participants - folks from all over the U.S. as well as from El Salvador, Sudan, India, Senegal, Mexico, Cuba, Turkey, Germany, Canada, Jamaica, Malaysia, D.R. Congo, China and Mali. This diversity helped to make this SI a particularly rich environment.

We also benefitted from the knowledge, experience and connections of our co-sponsors: Chicago Jobs with Justice, ICIRR (Illinois Coliation for Immigratn & Refugee Rights, and CAAAELII (Coalition of african Arab, Asian, European & Latino Immigrants of Illinois) and the Dept. of Economics/Social Justice Studies at Roosevelt University.

Program & Venue

We had many great workshops and plenaries on the Economics of Immigration and Migration. Participants commented that the workshops often provided concrete examples that illustrated themes that were discussed in the classroom. Plenary and wokshop themes included: Immigration Enforcement; What would a good immigration policy be?; Immigration: Myths & Realities; Climate change and migration; HIV Ban in U.S. iImmigration law; Worker rights and undocumented immigration; Hometown Associations; and Immigrant Banking. To see the full program, visit our website http://www.populareconomics.org/sched.html

It was really wonderful to be in Chicago and Roosevelt University, with its impressive egalitarian  history, was a great place to have the Summer Institute. The food and accommodations were good and it was a pleasure to be in the beautiful and historic Auditorium building. The participants enjoyed getting out and about the city and we were able to arrange a radical labor history tour that included a trip to Haymarket Square. 

We had a fun open mic event, emceed by Melissa Gordon, one of the participants. There was a moving performance by CIRCA (Center for Immigrant Resources and Community Arts) about an undocumented caregiver who can't be there for his own family back home because they depend on the remittances that he sends to support them. There was some lovely singing and poetry and a funny skit that made fun of the teachers and staff. 

It is noteworthy that we had a Immigration Working Group that had been meeting via conference call for near on a year. The original instigators were CPE members, Tom Masterson and Geert Dhondt and we soon added Suresh Naidu, Maliha Safri and Florian Kaufmann to the team. From January on we included our Chicago partners as well, so there was a large team of people who worked over many months to develop the curriculum and the program. I think this process helped in making the SI so successful.

Teachers, old and new and staff

Given that we were away from our home-base and our usual pool of CPEers, all of the teachers and staff were pressed into uber-service: giving workshops, moderating plenaries or speaking on the panels. Fortunately everyone rose to the occasion most brilliantly and survived the double duty with not a word of grumbling.

The teaching teams were great. Tom Masterson and Ozgur Orhangazi the participants in the international class. Tom provided the raw material for two funny skits, one performed by somenlightenede participants and one by the other teachers - both of which riffed on his soft spoken (sometimes inaudible?) style. Helpfully, halfway through the week a large sign appeared in the international classroom that read, "LOUDER!" Volume issues not withstanding, their students heaped praise on them in the written and oral evaluations.

Maliha Safri and Florian Kaufmann taught the U.S. class and had a particularly big job because we had decided to substantially integrate the issue of immigration into the U.S. curriculum. Although a fair amount of the revisions had been done in advance, there was still a considerable amount that had to be done at the Institute. This meant that on top of the intense schedule of teaching, Florian and Maliha put in extra long hours (for which they endured a great deal of ribbing from the other teaching team). They deserve a special acknowledgement for their herculean effort which was deeply appreciated by their students.

Florian hadn’t been a member of CPE, but was recruited early on because of his expertise on immigration. Despite the fact that he had limited teaching experience, he was a big hit in the classroom. The participants particularly liked the rapport between Florian and Maliha. At the wrap up, one of the African American participants quipped that he “wasn’t bad for a white European dude,” and another young participant offered to help him with his look. Apparently pulling out his shirt tail, undoing a couple more buttons, and losing the glasses would be the first steps of his makeover.

Ozgur was also brand new to CPE but proved to be a wonderful teacher and we were lucky that he was able to bring his expertise on the financial markets to the international classroom. His workshop on the Financial Crisis was packed (sadly enough for the other two concurrent workshops). A good half hour after his workshop, I saw two people out in the hall continuing an intense discussion about the financial markets, interest rates and inflation.

Special thanks to Geert Dhondt who provided invaluable volunteer labor throughout the SI - helping with registration, printing documents, copying, lugging around coffee and food for breaks and just helping out with whatever. Many thanks also to June Lapidus for hosting the Summer Institute at Roosevelt University and providing much logistic and financial support.

Finally again, a huge thanks and congratulations to the teachers who were absolutely brilliant and a pleasure to work with. 

Warm fuzzies and chills

The sharing circle at the Friday graduation was overflowing with warm fuzzy praise and high emotion - there were even presents (Chicago mugs) from the participants and expressions of love (something that we economists aren't used to hearing reference to in our professional lives). We had a couple of skits - my personal fave was Maliha's impersonation of Ozgur. Check out the wiseguy clip on the SI08 Facebook page that one of the participants set up. Sadly the quality of the recording isn't v. good. There are pictures there too. We ended the week with a late night outing with a bunch of participants where we (well, some of us) went for a chilly skinnydip in Lake Michigan under the city skyline. Maliha said that going for a swim in the buff was a CPE SI tradition - although nobody else remembered having heard of it before. Well - we'll see if it carries on next year.