The ‘group project’ is, in my experience, the worst part of high school. More a game of chicken than a collaborative effort, the goal of a group project is to do as little work as possible in the hope that your partners panic and pick up the slack before the deadline. Because I did not yet understand the free-rider problem, I usually blinked first, scrambling through a massive pile of work in the middle of the night. The final grade was never good. From my perspective, this was a grave injustice: Teachers were penalizing me for the (in)actions of others. The 1949 Geneva Conventions say collective punishment is a war crime, I thought, so drag the pedagogical radicals to the Hague.
When I came to college, I was excited to put the horrors of collaboration behind me. It is strange, then, that I voluntarily spent over a year helping to organize the biggest, unruliest group project I have had the privilege to join. Every issue of the Harvard Political Review is the product of about 50 writers, editors, designers, photographers, business managers, coders, and staffers. As publisher, my job was to make sure that everyone got along well enough to make magazines and to maintain the website. This was very hard. I can think of no other organization on campus that collects everyone from socialists to Tea Party conservatives, much less one that asks them to produce around 200 color pages per year and mail them around the world.
Yet the HPR works, the same way that a bumblebee mysteriously manages to fly with a tiny pair of wings. To give you an idea about how unlikely this is, in my time as publisher we had a multiweek disagreement about the title of our longform initiative — Red Line — because it sounds like “redlining,” the racially charged practice of denying services based on residential zones. Although the debate was relatively mild, ultimately resolved by making the logo clearly reference the Red Line from the Boston T subway system, it shows how principled our staffers are, how willing they are to challenge decisions and take a stand. I was first drawn to the HPR because of this vibrant spirit of dissent, although this culture makes it a challenging group to manage.
The most astonishing thing is that the HPR works without the normal institutions that resolve extreme disagreement, such as an arbitration system. The only real rule is that the magazine itself does not take editorial positions — if it did there would be riots, because our writers are a wonderfully angry bunch who can disagree with anything.
The HPR functions for two simple reasons: (1) everyone on the HPR cares about making something good, and (2) they are held to a strict deadline. Deadlines are important, because people have an incredible capacity to resolve passionate disagreements if they need to send a magazine to the printer in the next 12 hours. Plus, since everyone is invested in the organization, no one is willing to tank the project if they do not get their way. I have come to believe that strong leadership is just a matter of finding good people, letting them do what they love, and giving them totally made-up due dates. In this environment, collaboration emerges naturally between the most unlikely people, like that song featuring both Coldplay and Rihanna.
The most important thing about the HPR is that it does not ask people to compromise their beliefs. I think that good conversations about politics can only occur with an expectation of disagreement. If I end up agreeing with someone I am debating, it usually means we did not differ substantially in the first place. As publisher, when I set a deadline, I was only asking the staff to turn in a PDF by a certain date. I was not asking that they be happy with it, or for it to represent an optimum middle ground of the opinions of the people behind the scenes. After all, a good magazine should have a bit of fire in it.
Op-ed columnists around the country lament the lack of civility in American politics today. They get upset when students protest a speaker, or when people have a hard time reaching a middle ground. I tend to believe that passionate disagreement is normal, and that wishing for anything else is a fantasy — certain groups of people have incommensurable interests. If anything, democracy thrives when people show in public how different their beliefs are; disagreement makes our ideological fault lines clearer, giving people more ability to position themselves according to their needs and values.
I would love to bring one of these op-ed columnists to the HPR, because our little magazine perfectly shows how people can learn from each other and work together without agreeing even once — again, and this cannot be repeated enough: The key to collaboration across difference is deadlines. After all, there are great benefits to a bit of incivility during sharp debates on matters of principle. I have sharpened my arguments by reading articles I disagree with. I have even, on occasion, changed my mind.
Image Credit: Unsplash / Bank Phrom