Photo by Fred LeBlanc John Fox, visiting instructor in complex organizations, talks with students in Complex Organizations/Politics 107s: Poverty in the United States, a new course Fox and politics professor Christopher H. Pyle began teaching this spring.

Do Americans hate welfare? John O. Fox posed the question to the sixteen students sitting around the oak table in Room 215 of Clapp Lab one recent afternoon. From a starting point—readings in Martin Gilens's 1999 book, Why Americans Hate Welfare—the conversation soon branched out to race, class and ethnicity, stereotyping, and bigotry. Talk eventually wound around to the intricacies of the nature of the human soul and the sometimes contradictory workings of the human heart.

These are emotional subjects, to be sure, but emotions are not the focus of Complex Organizations/Politics 107s: Poverty in the United States, the new course Fox and Christopher H. Pyle began teaching this spring. Rather, this is a course heavy on fact and analysis. Presented for consideration are studies, surveys, census tables, and the perspectives of political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, economists, historians, and preachers. Free market conservatives, "compassionate conservatives," uncompassionate moralists, liberal reformers, and radical socialists all have a place in the syllabus. One afternoon, students discussed welfare reform with a policy analyst from the federal Department of Health and Human Services who visited the class.

The course, Fox and Pyle say, addresses the haunting questions: Why are so many people poor in this most affluent of nations? And why is the gap between the rich and the poor continuing to widen? Hundreds of pages of readings, from a 1908 essay on the economic justification for the concentration of wealth to a 2000 report on families struggling to get along without welfare, offer perspectives on the question. Vivid accounts of what it means to grow up poor in South Boston, or to live beneath Grand Central Station, are also on the reading list. Urban poverty is explored, but so too is the rural poverty of northern Maine, Kentucky coal country, and the Mississippi Delta.

Students are gathering their own information as well. Some are comparing conditions at three elementary schools: a Holyoke school that serves an impoverished, predominantly Puerto Rican community; a middle class suburban school in Amherst; and an elite private school in Deerfield. Others are carrying out a similar mission at vocational schools in Holyoke and Northampton, while still others are volunteering a Springfield center that provides academic and vocational training for the homeless.
Fox concedes that he and Pyle have given the class a lot of work to do. But he says that the students need a substantial body of knowledge on the subject, so that they fully understand the issue from all sides—not just the side they feel sympathetic toward. The students, in general, have "a desire to be helpful, to be useful to people who don't have their advantages." To prepare themselves to be effective advocates for the poor requires not just reading, but critical reading, questioning and testing the assumptions and conclusions of the authors, Fox says.

Pyle notes that by heading out into the community to compare schools, or to make a personal connection with homeless people, students are continuing the work of Frances Perkins. Perkins, a Mount Holyoke graduate whose lifelong concern for the welfare of working people was fired by the appalling conditions she found when her class toured factories in neighboring Holyoke, became secretary of labor under President Franklin D. Roosevelt. "That's the tradition we're trying to tap," Pyle said.

Fox and Pyle bring complementary areas of expertise to the course. Fox is a visiting lecturer in complex organizations and an expert on the relationship between the tax code and social policy in the United States; he also teaches a course on taxation and the values of democracy. Pyle is chair of complex organizations and a professor of politics. Both were trained as lawyers.
Allison Smith '03 considers herself fortunate to be part of the class. Some fifty students tried to sign up, more than double the twenty spaces available. "This was a class that really wasn't offered anywhere else,” she says.

"It is rare, and it is telling that it is rare," Fox agrees. "This is not a subject that our best colleges and universities take seriously enough." In fact, he would like to expand Mount Holyoke's efforts, envisioning a certificate program that would bring together other courses that touch on aspects of poverty. For government, social service, and other organizations, Fox says, Mount Holyoke could become "the place to go if you want to get somebody who's graduating who's ready to run with the subject."
Elizabeth Dotts '03 says she enrolled in the class because poverty "has never been an openly discussed topic" where she grew up, in northern Alabama. Having the facts at her command will make it easier for her to bring the issue up with her family, she says.

Neither Fox nor Pyle expects their students to solve the ancient problem of poverty. They do hope, however, that each of their students will be able to add to the informed debate about the subject, to have some impact, however slight.
Or, as Pyle says, "We're not telling them that they have to go out and save the world. If they have an impulse to save a piece of it, we would be pleased."