Person of the Day: Leo Burke, teaching the commons to MBA students at Notre Dame

You would expect Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business to focus its teaching on making profits from the world as it is instead of asking students to explore how to fundamentally change it. But that means you probably haven’t met business Professor Leo Burke — a former entrepreneur, Motorola executive and, in his student days, manager of the Notre Dame football team. At first glance, Burke ’70 hardly seems a rabble-rouser.

Excerpted from a longer and more extensive profile:

“The purpose that’s driving Burke’s life right now is an ancient idea he believes will be crucial to the future of humanity and our planet: the commons. At first, the term can provide more confusion than inspiration. Many people think of the commons as a park in downtown Boston or as communal grazing lands seized by English noblemen before and during the Industrial Revolution, turning many self-reliant peasants into unwilling factory workers.

Burke explains that “commons” has taken on a broader definition over the past 10 years, which could ultimately affect life in the 21st century as much as industrialization did in the 19th and 20th. The commons has now come to mean everything that we share together, which is owned by no one individually. This includes air and water, parks and roads, the Internet and scientific knowledge.

“The total inheritance of humankind upon which life depends,” is how Burke describes it. That’s from the website of the Global Commons Initiative, a project he’s launching out of Mendoza. But here’s the shorthand explanation he uses frequently in the classroom and conversation: “The commons means a world that works for everyone.”

Burke stresses the commons is not some abstruse theory — it’s part of the fabric of our daily lives. “You are actually participating in the commons, whether you know it or not, when you are volunteering at your local library, organizing a blood drive, doing a project with the Knights of Columbus or working with open source software.”

This idea of managing resources everyone shares depends on old-fashioned virtues like cooperation and collaboration, which play a huge if little-noticed role in making the world go ’round — even in a nation like the United States devoted to individualism and private property.

Burke and others in the nascent commons movement point out that modern life would be impossible without all the things we share — starting with water, the atmosphere, biodiversity and the bounty of nature. We also depend on human creations such as language, cultural customs, stories, religious practices, scientific knowledge, civil society and public services. These natural and cultural riches are not the exclusive property of anyone. They exist for everyone to use, exchange, improve upon and pass on to future generations.

Even the market economy with all of its rewards for individual initiative, commons advocates say, would fall to pieces without a solid foundation of commons-based institutions: the legal system to settle disputes, police enforcement to protect property, schools to train employees, regulatory agencies to protect people’s interests, educational institutions to do basic research.

One example of the commons at work is the Internet, which was not developed by Apple or Google but by the U.S. government, thanks to our tax dollars. It has become the information and communications nexus of the modern world precisely because it is based on the ideals of sharing, not hoarding. The Internet offers a textbook example of how a commons functions.
But the workings of the web are now on a collision course with copyright laws, which lock away information and creative work from anyone not paying for them. Copyright, along with patent laws, serves a useful purpose by making sure people can benefit from the success of their creations. But copyright laws have grown increasingly repressive through the years.

The original Copyright Act of 1790 established a 14-year copyright with a chance to renew for another 14 years if the creator was still living. The Sonny Bono Act of 1998 sets copyright at 70 years beyond the death of the creator, or 120 years from the time of creation if owned by a corporation. Some have charged that this disrupts the natural creative cycle of human civilization, in which ideas and culture become available for everyone to use and reinvent.

So how do we reward creators for their work but not stifle everyone else’s creativity? Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig looked to the workings of the commons for a solution and came up with the Creative Commons license — a system in which writers, musicians, photographers, designers and others allow people to freely share their work but retain the right to charge for commercial uses. Today, Creative Commons licenses are recognized in 50 countries, including the United States, and cover more than 150 million individual works.

In his classes, Burke assigns the book Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes, co-founder of the organization On the Commons. Barnes proposes that commons assets such as the airwaves, the Internet, watersheds, groundwater, city streets and the atmosphere be managed for the benefits of everyone.

Barnes translated this commons idea into legislation to curb global warming, which has been introduced in Congress by senators Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Under Barnes’ Cap-and-Dividend plan, we all are equal owners of the sky and must impose increasingly stiff restrictions on carbon emissions to protect our property. By the same token, any fees companies pay in compensation for their pollution should be distributed to the American public equally. This approach differs from President Barack Obama’s Cap-and-Trade proposal, in which companies keep the profits from buying and selling the right to emit carbon.

Writing in the international magazine Kosmos, Burke declares, “What makes the commons come alive are human relationships — the dynamic interactions of people working together to address shared needs.”

David Bollier, co-founder of the international Commons Strategy Group and author of Silent Theft, says Burke’s own way of working seems to mirror the commons itself. “Not having ego hang-ups and the need to take credit for everything allows him to work in powerful ways of putting people and ideas together.”

Through the Global Commons Initiative, Burke has established both MBA and undergraduate courses in the commons at Notre Dame, launched an open-source commons curriculum available to everyone (now part of the London-based School of Commoning) and is working with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research on an “Introduction to the Global Commons” curriculum. Once associate dean for executive education at Mendoza, he has now cut back to half-time teaching and research so he can travel the world forging partnerships with commons advocates and scholars.

Still, a question remains: As important as the commons may be, why study it in a business school rather than in humanities or social science departments?

Dean Carolyn Woo, who helped Burke create the Global Commons Initiative before she left Notre Dame in December, reels off five answers to that question without stopping for a breath. 1) Understanding the global dimension of business is essential for anyone in the work world today; 2) Managing complex systems, including the interdependent relationships that characterize the commons, will be necessary for tomorrow’s leaders; 3) Safeguarding God’s creation is at the core of the Mendoza College’s purpose; 4) Paying attention to the commons promotes the school’s mission to “ask more of business”; 5) Giving students a wider view of the world on many levels will better prepare them for the future.

“The culture we live in today is so competitive,” says Woo, who left the deanship to head the international Catholic Relief Services. “There’s this whole idea that there is only one winner, and everyone else loses. We want people to realize that we are not always keeping score, that our capacity to care for others is part of our own growth.

“Notre Dame’s founding mission is that we do good for society, not just for ourselves,” she continues. “The global commons is one more aspect of broadening our perspective to serve other people.”

Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the importance of the commons: “The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind” [No. 2403].

Burke’s research documents commons principles in Roman law and the Magna Carta as well as encyclicals by popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. “Throughout history the commons has focused on those resources necessary to sustain life,” he writes. “As such, it is closely related to the ‘common good,’ a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching.”

For all the excitement he generates among students and colleagues about the potential of the commons to help us solve seemingly intractable problems like economic inequity, ecological decline and social alienation, Burke is candid about the forces that threaten our shared inheritance.”

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