Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Institute for Social Ecology

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. (non-admin closure) ─ The Aafī (talk) 11:51, 16 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Institute for Social Ecology

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Institute for Social Ecology (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log)
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Longstanding lack of secondary sources to demonstrate notability. Likely fails WP:GNG. An attempt has been made to redirect but this has been disputed. Lithopsian (talk) 14:00, 24 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. Lithopsian (talk) 14:00, 24 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Organizations-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 14:12, 24 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Vermont-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 14:12, 24 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Note: This discussion has been included in the Article Rescue Squadron's list of content for rescue consideration. Thriley (talk) 02:37, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. I did a quick search and found additional sources [1], [2], [3], in addition a news story already on the page provides some good history: [4]
Blair Taylor, the ISE program director, has been recently quoted in an article by Vice: [5] and in a New York Times opinion piece: [6]
The ISE is a living institution that exists beyond Bookchin- he died in 2006, nearly 15 years ago. There is plenty of sourcing now available that demonstrates it meets WP:GNG. There is likely plenty more out there, especially in older newspapers that might not be easily accessed in a simple internet search. Thriley (talk) 03:03, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep per GNG secondary source coverage:
  • https://www.nytimes.com/1986/11/09/us/neighbors-say-ecology-school-wouldn-t-fit.html
  • https://www.vpr.org/post/incubator-social-change-institute-social-ecology-celebrates-40-years
  • https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v39/n09/wes-enzinna/bizarre-and-wonderful
  • https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/institute-for-social-ecology-marks-40-years-of-anarchy/Content?oid=2420020
According to the Guardian, the ISE "won an international reputation for its courses in social theory, eco-philosophy and alternative technologies". According to Jacobin Magazine, the ISE was "a central hub for all manner of charismatic teachers and utopian dreamers", and "ISE offered some of the first courses in the country on urbanism and ecology, radical technology, ecology and feminism, activist art and community. There really was nothing like it." Notability does not expire even if the ISE is much smaller and less known today then the 70s during its peak of influence. -- GreenC 04:48, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep The article reads: While the three-month summer programs had hosted an estimated 300 participants, the Institute has since become smaller, but continues to offer smaller programs. But the New York Times article is significant coverage in a reliable source. I agree that the Guardian quote confirms notability of this institute as well. Dream Focus 04:53, 3 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Relisted for further discussion as requested.
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, Malcolmxl5 (talk) 05:48, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep. For reasons listed above. This was already closed as a Keep. And there was a clear consensus. 7&6=thirteen (☎) 15:08, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Come on. The "keeps" all came within the last 24 hours of the listing shortly after it was listed at Wikipedia:Article Rescue Squadron – Rescue list. Same for these below post-relist responses after it was again pinged on that page. It's egregious canvassing. czar 05:14, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Comment The editing history of the article should make clear that 7&6=thirteen and I had been working on the article, including [7] minutes [8] before [9] this discussion first closed [10], and we have both [11], as well as GreenC [12], continued to work on it since then [13]. I also kept it on my watchlist and didn't need additional notification when it was re-listed. Beccaynr (talk) 16:15, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The editing history makes clear that this "interest" in the article only came after it was posted to the Article Rescue Squadron, which was my point. Several people were canvassed to this discussion in the last 24 hours of its listing and the comment above calls that a "clear consensus". It is more accurately a manufactured consensus. czar 08:04, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Per WP:CANVASS, "In general, it is perfectly acceptable to notify other editors of ongoing discussions, provided that it be done with the intent to improve the quality of the discussion by broadening participation to more fully achieve consensus." Per the ARS Code of Conduct, "Please note that WikiProject Article Rescue Squadron is a Wikiproject intended to improve the encyclopedia. The project is not about casting !votes, nor about vote-stacking." Beccaynr (talk) 02:40, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This discussion had closed just as I had been about to comment on how changes made to the article seem to make it more clear as to why a redirect to Bookchin's article is not feasible or appropriate, including the removal of what had appeared to be unsourced WP:OR describing the Institute and the addition of sourced information for the Institute's self-description, as well the addition of secondary sources that include a focus on co-founder Dan Chodorkoff. As noted above, and with this VT Digger article added to the article, secondary source coverage has been found and most of it has been incorporated into the article. Coverage of the Institute has been WP:SUSTAINED over time, providing WP:ORGDEPTH from WP:MULTSOURCES, so WP:ORGCRIT appears to be satisfied. Beccaynr (talk) 15:47, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Keep This is a sizeable institute with notable alumni like Matt Hern and notable faculty like Cindy Milstein. Too much useful detail to make a merge practical. Ambrosiawater (talk) 19:09, 8 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reviewing the actual sources:
Source assessment table:
Source Independent? Reliable? Significant coverage? Count source toward GNG?
NYT Yes Yes Yes ✔ Yes
Vermont Public Radio No entirely consists of quotes from those affiliated with the Institute; fails WP:ORGIND Yes ~ ✘ No
London Review of Books Yes Yes No only mentions the Institute in passing, where it is covered in the context of Bookchin's life ✘ No
Seven Days Yes ? alt weekly Yes ? Unknown
NYT opinion piece Yes Yes No passing mention of the Institute's director ✘ No
Vice Yes ~ no consensus on reliability No passing mention of the Institute's director ✘ No
Guardian quote Yes Yes No Bookchin's obituary, where the Institute is mentioned in passing for its relation to Bookchin in a single sentence ✘ No
Jacobin Yes ? partisan mag No same—passing mention ✘ No
This table may not be a final or consensus view; it may summarize developing consensus, or reflect assessments of a single editor. Created using {{source assess table}}.
czar 05:14, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I have to disagree with this assessment of 'passing mention'. Notability is what is said, not how much is said. To say "ISE offered some of the first courses in the country on urbanism and ecology, radical technology, ecology and feminism, activist art and community. There really was nothing like it." is a direct assertion of notability not a mere "passing mention". And this quote is by an academic professor - Damian F. White is Head of the Department of History, Philosophy and the Social Sciences, Associate Professor of Sociology and Coordinator of Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies at the Rhode Island School of Design which is affiliated with Brown University. -- GreenC 14:43, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The GNG does not say that every subject of bombastic claims needs its own article. "How much is said" in sources is the basis for whether the topic needs its own article. Even in the sources provided, the vast majority of what we can paraphrase based on this sources is the Institute's relation to Bookchin. czar 08:04, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I also disagree with the conclusions of the source table, which is also incomplete because it does not review all of the sources that were in the article and have since been added. As to the VPR article, it does not "entirely [consist] of quotes from those affiliated with the Institute;" the beginning of the article states, "Social ecology is an academic discipline that favors a democratic and communal approach to social, political and environmental problems. Vermont has played a seminal role in the development of this somewhat obscure social science, thanks to the Institute for Social Ecology founded in Plainfield in 1974," and then continues with reporting and commentary throughout the article about the Institute and its history. Per WP:ORGIND, the author is independent and the content is independent, and it is significant coverage. Beccaynr (talk) 18:13, 9 March 2021 (UTC) Also, VTDigger appears to be a reliable source, and the 2020 article that is missing from the source assessment table is independent per WP:ORGIND and provides significant coverage. Per WP:GNG, "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material." Beccaynr (talk) 20:46, 9 March 2021 (UTC) As to the London Review of Books source, the discussion of the ISE is so much more than a trivial mention, I am using a comment collapse template to quote it:[reply]
Enzinna, London Review of Books, 2017
Accompanied by a group of social ecologists he left the Bronx in 1973 and moved part-time to Vermont, where he’d been invited to lecture at Goddard College. The university soon asked him to head a full-time undergraduate programme, the Institute for Social Ecology (ISE). Bookchin was wary of the academy, and dismissed other radical professors for their ‘refrigeration’ in the universities, but Goddard enticed him with a riverside plot called Cate Farm: a nine-room brick farmhouse, barn and forty fertile acres. It was an ideal place to experiment with transforming technological ‘instruments of domination and social antagonism’ into ‘instruments of liberation and social harmonisation’. Students built thousand-gallon fish tanks, composting toilets, geodesic domes, wind turbines and Vermont’s first solar-powered building. They read Marx, Kropotkin, Adorno, Mumford, Buber and Bookchin’s own writings. Staff and students skinny-dipped, hiked and partied together. In summer, the community swelled to nearly 200 students, drawn by Bookchin’s growing notoriety and guest lectures by Grace Paley, Margaret Mead and Anna Gyorgy. [...] Small cadres at places like the ISE would need to cultivate social-ecological attitudes that would enable the democratic organisation of society, and acquire the practical and political acumen to create a world in which technology served the needs of local ecosystems and their human and non-human inhabitants. It was, in other words, a proposal for an economy that Bookchin hoped would be neither communist nor capitalist but what he called ‘Communalist’. [...] Bernie Sanders, a 39-year-old socialist filmmaker and political neophyte, challenged Paquette in the 1981 mayoral race, lending his support to the assemblies. [...] Seven months later, Goddard College went bankrupt, and the ISE lost its home at Cate Farm. When a wealthy supporter offered to buy the property and donate it to the institute, all seemed saved – but after purchasing the land, this supposed friend of the movement got rid of the geodesic domes, composting toilets and fish tanks, and turned the property into a private farm. Bookchin and his followers soon found another home in the village of Plainfield, on a much smaller plot of land and without any institutional support. It was here that Janet Biehl, a 33-year-old copyeditor from New York who had been captivated by Ecology of Freedom, arrived in 1986. From the first day of class held in a flower-filled meadow, she was both perplexed and mesmerised by Bookchin, a gnomish 65-year-old with catfish whiskers, whose bottom lip seemed to cover his moustache when he grinned. He dressed ‘like a janitor, with a tyre air-pressure gauge in his front pocket’ and infuriated some of his colleagues and students by driving around campus in his car, ‘even for short distances’. His first date with Biehl was at Dunkin’ Donuts. Bookchin defended his diet as an expression of his proletarian roots, and dismissed criticism of it as the bourgeois scapegoating of individuals for the crimes of corporations and governments. But his taste for Big Macs and gas-guzzling cars struck many as ludicrous. ‘The thing that got people was the Twinkies,’ another student told Biehl. [...] In​ 2004, as an undergraduate, I drove with a friend from upstate New York to Plainfield, Vermont, hoping to hear Bookchin speak. I didn’t know that he was no longer much involved in the Institute for Social Ecology. Then 83 years old, he spent his days at home or scooting in a motorised wheelchair around downtown Burlington. One of the senior faculty at the ISE snorted when we asked about the institute’s founder. The small white farmhouse used as classroom and lecture hall was dilapidated. ‘Are you here for the ideas?’ he asked my companion. ‘Or just to, like, hang out with your boyfriend?’
Beccaynr (talk) 21:07, 9 March 2021 (UTC) As to the 2014 Seven Days article, it also appears to contribute to significant coverage as a reliable source, including because it was featured in a 2013 Editor & Publisher article 10 Newspapers That Do It Right 2013 and has won many awards from the Vermont Press Association, including in 2013. Beccaynr (talk) 21:35, 9 March 2021 (UTC) So as an update so far, based on my assessment above:[reply]
Source assessment table:
Source Independent? Reliable? Significant coverage? Count source toward GNG?
1986 NYT Yes Yes Yes ✔ Yes
2014 Vermont Public Radio Yes Yes Yes ✔ Yes
2014 Seven Days Yes Yes Yes ✔ Yes
2017 London Review of Books Yes Yes Yes ✔ Yes
2020 VTDigger Yes Yes Yes ✔ Yes
This table may not be a final or consensus view; it may summarize developing consensus, or reflect assessments of a single editor. Created using {{source assess table}}.
Beccaynr (talk) 21:51, 9 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The subject (ISE) is an organization. Organizations tend to receive hagiographic coverage in secondary sources and are subject to more stringent notability criteria, WP:ORGCRIT. Sources that predominantly quote from people affiliated with the organization, i.e., are not the original analysis of the source, do not meet WP:ORGIND. The Vermont Public Radio article is the epitome of this. That the source has topic sentences before paragraphs of direct participant quotations does not constitute analysis or distance from the subject.
You say I missed a source—which? The Institute is incontrovertibly mentioned in passing in the VTDigger's profile of Guzman. The Capitalism Nature Socialism article's author is self-declared as an active member of the Institute since the 80s and a "core faculty member since the early nineties". Moreover, it underscores my point that the Institute is primarily covered in context of its relation to Bookchin, hence why I recommend covering the Institute within his article (as it was) and only splitting out when warranted by an overabundance of secondary source coverage, which we have seen so far that there is not. czar 08:04, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
I disagree that the VTDigger article (the source not included in your table) is trivial coverage per WP:ORGDEPTH, because there is detail about the history of the ISE, and Guzman's commentary on the organization:
Luis Guzman: Vermont one of safest places in world right now, VTDigger, 2020

The actor Luis Guzman has made Vermont his home since 1995. But his deep connection to the state was cemented more than 20 years earlier when he joined other Puerto Rican teenagers from New York for a visit to Goddard College.

“It gave me a different perspective on life and humanity,” Guzman recalls of his first visit in 1974. “I discovered a new sense of freedom when I came up here. The fresh air, the vibe, growing your own food, solar energy. These guys were doing all that type of stuff. I was going to the quarry and swimming and everybody was butt naked. Oh, hell, yeah!”

These guys were the students and teachers at the Institute for Social Ecology, a hotbed of alternative energy and agriculture technology housed at Goddard’s Cate Farm, which abutted the Winooski River in Plainfield. Goddard sold the farm in 1981.

The institute was co-founded by Murray Bookchin, an anarchist/theorist, and Dan Chodorkoff, an urban anthropologist who was responsible for bringing Guzman and other members of a Lower East Side activist group called Charas to Vermont. The 18-year-old Guzman and his Nuyorican compatriots were doing work similar to the institute’s back in their neighborhood, or Loisaida, as the Puerto Ricans referred to it. Charas created a community garden, built a geodesic dome with Buckminster Fuller, rehabilitated abandoned housing with sweat equity and transformed a vacant public school into an arts center.

Chodorkoff, who now lives in Marshfield, remembers young Guzman as having “tremendous energy and smarts. He was just a really magnetic person.”

“I remember coming up here in the fall when the foliage was in full explosion,” Chodorkoff recalled. “It was really something to see it through Louie’s eyes, this kid from the Lower East Side who had never experienced fall foliage in all its grandeur. I think he was very taken with that.”

The focus on co-founder Dan Chodorkoff by VTDigger as well as other independent and reliable sources, and the LRB source above that confirms the ISE is more than Bookchin, add support for why after the removal of the unsourced WP:OR description of the ISE from the article, it does not appear to be feasible to only cover the Institute as if it is primarily related to Bookchin. As to the VPR article, there appears to be substantial reporting and some commentary on the organization, even with all of the quotes removed:
The Incubator For Social Change; Institute For Social Ecology Celebrates 40 Years, VPR, 2014

Social ecology is an academic discipline that favors a democratic and communal approach to social, political and environmental problems. Vermont has played a seminal role in the development of this somewhat obscure social science, thanks to the Institute for Social Ecology founded in Plainfield in 1974. The institute started at Goddard College and operated out of Goddard's 90-acre Cate Farm, which had a brick farmhouse and a huge dairy barn that served as the institute’s lecture hall and fabrication workshop.

The institute’s far flung alumnae recently gathered in Marshfield for a reunion. Co-founder Dan Chodorkoff served as its director when it began in 1974. [...] Alternative energy was also an early focus of the institute. [...] Many of the institute’s students went on to teach there. Joseph Kiefer earned a masters in social ecology in 1980 and later founded a Vermont non-profit called Foodworks active in gardening and nutrition. When he started his masters in the summer of 1977, there were 120 student in the social ecology program. [...] That new way of thinking was very much influenced by the institute’s social ecology guru Murray Bookchin, a charismatic political theorist and by all accounts, a brilliant intellectual.

Bookchin passed away in 2006. In an documentary in progress by his son Joseph, Bookchin recalled his early influence on the environmental movement. [...] Bookchin was so far ahead of his time that in 1964 he warned of global warming. In 1962, his book “Our Synthetic Environment” was published six months before Rachel Carson’s landmark environmental classic “Silent Spring.”

Grace Gershuny worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association and helped the U.S. Department of Agriculture establish standards for organic food. In the mid-1980s she taught bio-regional agriculture at the Institute for Social Ecology. Gershuny now teaches in the sustainable food systems program for Green Mountain College. [...] And just as Murray Bookchin was ahead of his time on an array of environmental and political issues, so, too, has the institute been prescient in some areas of public policy.

Nine years before Vermont passed legislation requiring labeling of genetically modified foods, students and faculty at the Institute for Social Ecology were agitating against GMO foods.

Among the 50 people who gathered in Marshfield for the reunion was Chaia Heller, who joined the institute’s faculty in 1985 and taught a course on feminism and ecology. Heller has also taught anthropology at Mt. Holyoke College.

Her doctoral dissertation focused on a French union that created a moratorium on genetically modified foods in France. [...] No one will accuse the Institute for Social Ecology of being apolitical. From its involvement in the anti-nuclear movement in the mid-1970s to more recent affiliations with the anti-globalization, Occupy Wall Street and climate justice movements of the 21st Century, the institute has embraced activism as part of its mission.

Beccaynr (talk) 23:39, 14 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Also add GNG: "Significant coverage is more than a trivial mention, but it does not need to be the main topic of the source material. It doesn't matter what the "main topic" or "focus" of the source is. What matters is our topic has more than trivial coverage in the source. -- GreenC 02:14, 15 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.
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