2017 Election: Davis Schneiderman, Highland Park City Council

Name: Davis Schneiderman

Age: 42

Town of residence: Highland Park

Position sought: City Council (two-year unexpired term)

Family: My actor/writer wife Kelly Haramis and I met at Penn State’s Daily Collegian newspaper. We’ve been married since 1999. We moved to Highland Park in 2005. In 2007, we became parents twice in 6 months. My wife was three months pregnant when we went to China to adopt our daughter. Our daughters are now 9 and 10, and they attend Ravinia Elementary. My mother and father—who passed away two years ago—moved to the Highlands in 2010.

Does anyone in your family work in politics or government?: No, but my wife played a politician in a play last year.

Education: BA in English from Penn State University; MA in English and Ph.D in English from Binghamton University.

Occupation: My professional background provides a breadth and depth of experience relevant to the challenges faced by the Council. At Lake Forest College where I have worked since 2001, I am Associate Dean of the Faculty and Director of the Center for Chicago Programs, as well as Professor of English and Director of Lake Forest College Press at Lake Forest College. I have chaired academic departments and programs, and I am involved in strategic planning and budgeting. I help manage relationships with multiple external cultural institutions. I have served as principal investigator for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant connected to the history of land-use and urban planning, and I currently administer a Chicago-focused digital humanities grant from the Mellon Foundation helping faculty use, in part, augmented and virtual reality. I’m also a writer, editor, multimedia artist, currently preparing for a Paris conference where I will present on the events of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention.

I also lead the Second Wednesday book group at the Highland Park Public Library, and will facilitate the author discussion with this year’s “One Book, One Community” author Imbolo Mbue to discuss her book, Behold the Dreamers.

Reconfiguration 2.0 Community Team launch team member, 2.0 steering committee leader, elected by committee.

The single most pressing issue facing our (board, district, etc.) is _______, and this is what I intend to do about it.

The NSSD112 situation will require unprecedented collaboration with the school district, park district and the city. Our intergovernmental bodies are separate, but our fates are intertwined. It’s time to work together.

As the City continues to focus on its core priorities of fiscal stability, public safety, infrastructure investment, and community vibrancy, we must maintain emphasis on the interrelationship among quality of life, property taxes, and our collective aspirations. We must provide value for residents, so that the city remains as attractive for those on fixed incomes as well as for younger families.

We must revitalize our business districts. To do so, we must promote smart business and housing development that respects our community history, values, and historic architecture and housing stock. We should improve senior services, fix aging infrastructure, and provide assistance to those most in need.

Most importantly, we need independent voices who are willing to ask tough questions. I will be that voice.

What are the critical differences between you and the other candidates seeking this post?

I am different than my opponents because I have devoted my career to the liberal arts tradition that values, above all else, independent critical thinking. I will speak for all residents, listen to all sides, and take action when required to best represent our community. I am collaborative and work effectively with others, yet I will always ask hard questions and I am not afraid to fight for what’s right.

If you are a challenger, in what way has the current board or officeholder failed the community (or district or constituency)?

I’m running for the unexpired two-year seat that Paul Frank vacated when he was elected to Lake County Board.

The Council needs to work with other intergovernmental boards like the Park District and School District to more effectively find a community-supported solution to District 112’s reconfiguration challenges.

The last referendum process left our community divided, and the lack of cooperation and public communication among our intergovernmental bodies has eroded confidence in our ability to work together. Our tax dollars are split, but we don’t actually live in the silos represented by the park district, city, and school districts. It’s time to work together.

Describe the other issues that define your campaign platform:

My website provides more information on who I am, what I stand for, and why I am running.

I’ll add here, in brief, that we must do a much better job with our senior services. Our senior center does not meet the needs of our population. My father moved here in the last years of his long struggle with terminal brain cancer, and his experience along with that of my mother, now widowed, demonstrated to me how much more we need to do.

If you gain this position, what accomplishment would define your term in office as a success?

We need to revitalize our business districts, and must engage in long-range planning that can provide for realistic and appropriate business development and new resident strategies. We need to realistically assess the challenges of the coming decades, and provide plans that are achievable, and that provide flexibility to make changes in the future.

Please share with voters a story about wisdom gained from a mistake you made in your life or career.

When I was 23, I was newly engaged and ready to rent a house in downtown Ithaca, NY. Kelly and I found a place we liked, and worked out a deal that called for the landlord to cover the utilities. He asked us to meet him at a local restaurant to sign the lease, which should have been our first warning that something was amiss.

Over a meal of $10 burgers, the landlord proceeded to talk to us about all sorts of things—everything but the lease. Toward the end of the meal, the lease came out. He asked us to review and sign, which was of course another red flag we failed to see.

When the bill came, he said, “I’ll pick this up,” and although we noticed and meekly protested that the utilities were now our responsibility, he back-slapped us and indicated we had clearly misunderstood the actual arrangement.

How could the sponsor of our burgers be wrong? We must have certainly misunderstood.

We signed, and paid the price over the course of six terrible months dealing with an unresponsive landlord who bought us off for the price of a meal.

We learned then an important lesson that all agreements should be entered into with good faith, and with clear review. And we learned that the misdirection strategies of the dishonest are easy to find once life teaches you to read the signals.

I am willing to discuss my position on any topic openly. I will never pretend that I have all of the answers, but will always work to be a strong listener and communicator who can help to find those answers

My experience as an academic is predicated on ideals of civic engagement. I lead book discussions at the Highland Park Public Library, because community comes from collective engagement.

Here's two:

"The most practical kind of politics is the politics of decency." --Teddy Roosevelt

"Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.” – Virginia Woolf

Every department needs to constantly re-evaluate whether its actions are aligned with its mission. Every employee should be given the space to be creative in their work, while also possessing the support to know when the work has veered off track. We often do things because “it’s always been done this way,” and a reflective process will provide for stronger customer service, renewed commitment, and greatly appreciated outcomes.

I’ll give the example of our pensions issue:

The Council must grapple each year with the City's mandated obligation to fund the Fire and Police pensions. Because we operate under an external state mandate to fund, via a pension reform law, I would support raising this portion of the levy but only if the City continues to make significant contributions to the fund. Residents should not be asked to shoulder this burden without City participation. The City must recognize the difficulties any increased levy has on our most economically vulnerable.

More recently, the City decided to put $7.5 million toward these pensions. That is $2.1 million more than the requirement to cover a growing shortfall and includes $1.7 million from the City’s portion of state income tax. The most recent report from our independent actuary indicated that the City’s combined debt is $86 million and that we have slipped to 43% (from 45%) funding for the Police Pension Fund, and 47% (from 50%) funding for the Fire Pension Fund from the previous year. We are required to reach 90% funding by 2040, and by continuing to meet a yearly target, we can maintain our AAA bond rating which allows for more favorable borrowing. Should we fall short in our pension obligations, we risk a reduced bond rating that would raise our borrowing costs.

At the same time, we must balance our obligation to support the pension fund with our support for current residents. Spending too much on pensions in effect takes money away from current residents, and there are real questions as to the viability of the 2040 deadline. It is likely that state political forces will amend or extend the obligation as we move closer to a funding deadline. Nonetheless, we must act to meet the requirement, but we should only raise the levy when the City continues to contribute additional funds to keep tax increases as small as possible. At the same time, we should engage in a public advocacy campaign to ask our state legislators to intervene for sensible pension reform. We must thread a needle between supporting our police and firefighters, past and present, without unnecessarily draining our current resources.

What accomplishments in your past would you cite as evidence you can handle this job?

My advocacy during the failed school referendum along with my work on the 2.0 committee taught me a number of valuable lessons. First, good government is only as good as it ability to listen to constituents. That doesn’t mean everyone will agree, but it means that decisions and collective action must be backed by the confidence of the people. When we pretend that the problem is someone else’s, we not only shed our responsibility, but magnify our culpability.

The best advice ever shared with me was ...

Always re-read an email before sending, or a social media post before sharing, from Kelly, my wife.

What else would you like voters to know about yourself and your positions?

Throughout my career, I have fostered a commitment to diversity and inclusion. I facilitate an undergraduate fellowship program that is part of an $8.1 million grant to diversify the professoriate, and I coordinate an annual peace project competition with an international national foundation that funds global initiatives each summer.

I blog at the Huffington Post and often interview interesting artists and thinkers as a way to expand my own thinking. I’ve had the good fortune to interview Hairspray filmmaker John Waters, autism advocate Temple Grandin, Edward Snowden’s ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner, The Third Coast author Thomas Dyja, MIT professor Sherry Turkle, novelist and collagist and New York Times bestselling author David Shields, and novelist and MacArthur grant winner Aleksandar Hemon, among others. I’ve published novels, edited academic collections, edited and introduced the last novel from Holocaust survivor Raymond Federman (one my mentors), and collaborated with an amazing array of artists and thinkers including Paul Miller aka dj spooky, Roxane Gay (author, Marvel comics writer [!], and frequent New York Times contributor who generously remixed one of my stories!), Regina Taylor (actor and Goodman Theater associate), author Lance Olsen, poet Anne Waldman, and many others.

As a scholar of author William S. Burroughs, and a professor of English who has taught recent courses on podcasting, selfies and drones, remixes and mashups, the Grateful Dead, and, next year, emoji, I embrace new ideas and new ways of thinking (as evidenced by my counterintuitive college tips on Chicago Tonight.) I have learned that best way to lead is to listen, and the best way to listen is to step outside of one’s comfort zone. We won’t always find consensus, but we will be collectively better off for trying as hard as we can to understand other perspectives. My work has taken me all over the world, and I’ve spoken everywhere from the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington, DC; to Tangier, Morocco; to the Sorbonne; to the Chicago Humanities Festival (most recently this year with a drone-related video filmed at Olsen Park). Put another way, my perspective is global, but my activism is local.

It would be my honor to represent the people of Highland Park, if elected to City Council.

More via Davis Schneiderman's campaign website

Photo submitted by Davis Schneiderman