Enriching Kamala Harris' 'For the People' agenda

The Indian community is rightly excited about Kamala Harris’s candidacy for the U. S. Presidency. It makes the Indian community’s identity visible. It highlights the wide ranging contributions of Indian academics, IT engineers, medical professionals, and Technopreneurs.

It projects them as assets to the U.S. economy at a time when anti-immigrant feelings are on the rise. Here Kamala Harris’s own family background exemplifies and strengthens Indian immigrants’ image as a model community. She is a product of a highly intellectual family; her father is a professor at an Ivy League school, and her mother was a cancer researcher with a Ph.D. and is herself a highly accomplished individual.

David Brooks, New York Times columnist describes her formidable candidacy thus: “She is an amazing amalgam of different elements---highly educated elite meritocrat, Oakland street fighter, crusader, rough-elbow prosecutor, canny machine pol and telegenic rhetorical brawler.” These are rare attributes that enriches her candidacy as one with mind, heart, and zeal for action.

It is assumed that highly successful Indian entrepreneurs and high income individuals will generously contribute to her campaign. But Indian thought leaders, think tanks, and media should also begin to discuss new ideas for shaping her campaign platform, policy agenda, and building her image brand. The purpose of this article is to initiate innovative ideas for debate among Indian thought leaders and political activists.

In some ways, Harris represents John F. Kennedy’s spirit and style to address the challenges facing America in the current political climate. President Kennedy identified and created new frontiers. He created NASA for space exploration and the Peace Corp for helping poor nations. By this he enhanced intellectual contributions and quality of the heart. Here Harris has an opportunity to create her own great frontier. Her campaign slogan “Harris: for the people” has the potential for identifying and addressing the great frontier for the benefit of the people that can become the source of her policy agenda.

One such frontier is strengthening America’s, what we call, “Core Knowledge Infrastructure” or (CKI) for the benefit of the people. The components of Core Knowledge Infrastructure should not only include primary, secondary and higher education institutions but all agencies, systems, processes, procedures, directly or indirectly involved in knowledge creation, diffusion, evaluation, and quality assurance. Unique to U. S. knowledge infrastructure historically is its immigration system that facilitated global import of intellectual capital with a provision of varied visas for foreign students, researchers, technopreneurs, and scholars but now it is under siege.

Since the 21st century is defined as a knowledge century and it is growing exponentially on all frontiers, modernizing CKI, a major driver of U. S. global competitiveness and power is critical. However, in the last few decades this knowledge infrastructure has eroded and tilted for the benefit of the elitists and the wealthy. Politicians have acknowledged the issue of America’s visibly declining physical infrastructure but have missed addressing the core knowledge infrastructure. Overhauling CKI for the benefit of the people will open doors for the upward- mobility for families. It will also enrich her plan of “LIFT ACT” that aims at “lifting folks out of poverty.”

Accessibility to CKI will enhance exposure, knowledge and skills and open doors to opportunities for the people. Thus, upward moving families will become the part of the core middle class and form a lucrative consumer base and a source for corporate profits and enrich the US economy, a sign of conscientious capitalism.

Finland, a small country has a visionary plan to teach and train every one the basics of Ai (Artificial Intelligence). It aims to cover 1% of its population. They plan a free online course through their Open University. Finland’s knowledge infrastructure is not comparable with the U. S., a world leader in Ai. The U. S. needs a similar vision and focus of leadership on this challenge.

Ai is an emerging technology of the current century. America being a global leader in AI should lead the efforts of educating and training talented youths in the basic aspects of IT. This can be done through free online courses and other technology. It can be extended to youths in other democratic and friendly countries. This will encourage cross fertilization of ideas and knowledge and widen the global pool of intellectuals and skilled workforce. This can be leveraged with an appropriate immigration policy to meet the needs of a dynamic U. S. economy. Diffusion of knowledge adds to knowledge by varied contribution from global talents. For this purpose the support of U.S. Institutions of higher education can be obtained by increased funding through grants and aids.

To enrich these efforts, the support of America’s, hitherto, unnoticed important component of the knowledge sector is its Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their support is needed. Their unique strengths are: they have educated and trained culturally and linguistically diverse student body for more than a half century. They have firsthand experience in making knowledge accessible and affordable to people with limited resources. Their Alumni are leaders in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. They have globally diverse faculty and strong curricula in business, technology, and engineering. Some of them have a strong liberal arts tradition and curricula that includes cultural anthropology, history, and philosophy offerings, a rare combination at a time when we need to create an amalgam of technology and humanity to produce a pool of humanist technologists.

Kamala Harris being an alumnus of the iconic HBCU, Howard University, can pave the way to gain support from them and equip them with resources to strengthen their capacity to be an important player in making knowledge available to people.

The question is how Kamala Harris can address this as a part of her campaign platform. One way to do this is to announce, if she becomes the President, she will create Peoples’ Knowledge Commission for the benefit of the people. It will address issues and recommend policies to make knowledge accessible and affordable to people for upward mobility.

The Knowledge Commission should be composed of outstanding individuals in all branches of knowledge. It should have the following broad purposes including but not limited to it such as:

• Identify entities involved in knowledge generation process and determine their needs.

• Assess the role played by technology in knowledge enhancement and how it can be made productive to make it accessible and affordable to people.

• Identify ways to promote public, private, and nonprofit organizational partnerships for strengthening CKI.

• Assess the need and limitations of global diffusion of knowledge for cross fertilization of ideas to create a suitable immigration policy to leverage global intellectual capital for benefits of the people.

As President Obama made Health care affordability his signature issue, knowledge affordability for upward mobility can be one of Kamala Harris’s signature issues.

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Dr. Dinker Raval is professor emeritus of Morgan State University, Baltimore, MD, and a recipient of the university’s distinguished Iva Jones Medallion, and served as an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD. for two decades.