Agent of Democracy

Higher Education and the HEX Journey

David W. Brown, Deborah Witte

• Publisher: Kettering Foundation
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781945577338
• Topic: Bildung
• Subtopic: Hochschulausbildung

The professional mind-set prevailing in higher education today often ignores the "common goods" that only democratic self-rule can provide. Why? Some say the professional mind-set is profoundly antidemocratic, especially when it presumes that specialized knowledge and experience is a sufficient substitute for a democratic process of participating equals. Although there are currently many higher education experiments in which the public does set the agenda for research and actually conducts much of the work, there are still too many projects ostensibly done for the public with nothing to be done by the public. How, then, can the academy, with such a mind-set and its preoccupation with hustling prospective students and chasing after academic luminaries, be of any help in renewing democratic practices?

In Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey, editors David W.. Brown and Deborah Witte, a Kettering Foundation program officer, explore the linkages that have been forged between higher education and a "healthy democracy." This volume celebrates and expands on the journal Higher Education Exchange, an annual publication of the Kettering Foundation edited by Brown and Witte. For more than 10 years, HEX has published case studies, analysis, news, and ideas about efforts within higher education to develop more democratic societies. Agent of Democracy features essays by 10 thoughtful theorists and practitioners whose work regularly appears in the Higher Education Exchange. Their work is a contribution to the resurgent movement bent on strengthening higher education. Chapters in this volume include:

"The Engaged University: A Tale of Two Generations, " Peter Levine

"The Limits of Public Work: A Critical Reflection on the 'Engaged University', " Mary Stanley

"Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission?, " R. Claire Snyder

"Public Work: Civic Populism versus Technocracy in Higher Education, " Harry C. Boyte

"Public Work at Colgate: An Interview with Adam Weinberg"

"Reconstructing a Democratic Tradition of Public Scholarship in the Land-Grant System, " Scott Peters

"A Portrait of a University as a Young Citizen, " Jeremy Cohen

"The Makings of a Public and the Role of the Academy, " Noëlle McAfee

"The New England Center for Civic Live—A Decade of Making a Difference, " Douglas F. Challenger

"Democracy's Megachallenges Revisited, " David Mathews

CHAPTER ONE

The Landscape of Higher Education

The Engaged University: A Tale of Two Generations

The Limits of Public Work: A Critical Reflection on the “Engaged University”

	The Engaged University: A Tale of Two Generations
	Peter Levine

The Higher Education Exchange, an annual publication devoted to public scholarship, deliberation, and other forms of civic work in colleges and universities, first appeared in 1994. It became a venue for discussing and debating a new set of practices on college campuses, which included service learning, efforts to capitalize on the increasing diversity of students and faculty, community-based scholarship, and experiments with deliberation. Although various, most of these practices shared an important feature: they were open-ended. That is, their organizers did not try to drive participants toward particular views, but instead created opportunities for discussion and practical experimentation that might lead in unexpected directions. This open-endedness did not imply a lack of ideals or commitments. On the contrary, participants were committed to democratic participation, diversity, consensus building, and constructive problem solving. Those values have deep roots in American political history. I will describe their reemergence since 1994 by telling a story about two interacting generations.

“Instead of throwing all professors together into a single category … I would draw distinctions by discipline, by type of institution and career path, even by age and generation.”

(“The Engaged University:
An interview with Peter Levine,” HEX, 2003.)

The Theory of Generations

Because human beings are born continuously, a “generation” is a something of a fiction. However, Karl Mannheim argued that most people are forced to develop a stance toward news, issues, and governments when they first encounter the broader world, usually late in adolescence. Thereafter, the psychic cost of reevaluating one’s political stance is not worth the price, unless a major event (such as a war or revolution) forces a review. As Mannheim wrote, “even if the rest of one’s life consisted in one long process of negation and destruction of the natural world view acquired in youth, the determining influence of these early impressions would still be predominant.”

Mannheim’s theory implies that a major event will have especially profound and lasting effects on people who are young when it occurs. Such an event can cause people of similar age to coalesce into a generation that has an enduring character. Mannheim called this process of coalescence “entelechy.”¹ He developed his theory in the 1920s (influenced by the unmistakable impact of World War I on those born after 1890); but recent statistical evidence supports his theory that people develop lasting civic identities in adolescence.²

Boomer Faculty

In 1994, as at all times, several generations were present in American colleges. Faculty and staff born before 1945 were certainly influential and active, as they are today. However, two younger generations were especially relevant to the story that unfolded in the pages of HEX.

First, consider the large cohort of professors who had first encountered the public world—and academia—during the Johnson and Nixon administrations. This was a tumultuous time, marked by war, assassinations, social movements, protests, and a sexual revolution. Campuses were at the center of the tumult. Students provided prominent national leaders for all the major social movements of the day; most male students were confronted with a powerful political dilemma in the form of the draft; young people experimented with new lifestyles in revolt against their parents’ generation; and urban campuses were sites of struggle as many central cities burned. According to data collected by Sarah Soule and Ann Marie Condo from newspaper archives, the United States saw more than twice as many “protest events” per year between 1964 and 1974 than during the 1980s. In 1970, more than half of all protests were initiated by youth (including college students), whereas only 10 to 20 percent had youth leaders in the 1980s.³ In other words, student and youth protests were an important part of the national political scene in 1970 but were either rare or unnoticed 15 years later.

Thus a large cohort of professors developed their fundamental attitudes toward the world in general, and academia in particular, at a time of political upheaval when colleges and members of their own generation, defined as “students,” played a leading role—not only in the United States, but also (and with more consequence) in countries like France, South Korea, and Chile. They came of age conscious of a “generation gap” and prone to see colleges as sites of political opposition, critique, and even revolution. Even 30 years later, half of the Baby Boomer generation agreed that “my age group is unique,” compared to [just] 42 percent of the Generation-Xers who followed them.⁴

Between the Boomers’ formative years on campus and the appearance of HEX, things had calmed down considerably. Some prominent leftist intellectuals had moved to the right. Some had adopted postmodernist theories that, if they were political at all, certainly lacked any political “praxis” (i.e., an answer to Lenin’s question, what is to be done?). Some Boomer academics had held onto their radical values but had become disillusioned with colleges’ political potential as most of their students had abandoned sixties-style activism. Some, technically part of the baby boom but in graduate school after 1975, faced what David D. Cooper called “the chronically depressed conditions of an insanely competitive job market,” making ends meet by teaching adjunct courses at several institutions and never having the time or power to be active politically.⁵

“Intellectuals are also entitled to participate not as professionals but as citizens with personal opinions and interests, just like everyone else’s. But when they adopt that role, they must make sure not to claim or imply any special authority.”

(“Public Intellectuals and the Influence of Economics,” HEX, 2001.)

Finally, some had developed a new perspective that, while still reformist and egalitarian, was increasingly pragmatic, open-ended, and solicitous of institutions, of existing communities, of civic culture, and of public deliberation, regardless of its outcome.

Cooper wrote in HEX that he “was bent on nourishing the fragile bond between the inner life and ethical responsibility to work, institution, and community.”⁶ He contrasted this civic commitment to the standard approach of his academic discipline, which was “abstract, contentious, and theory-driven.” Edward Royce could have been describing Cooper when he wrote a HEX article about scholars who were not so much interested in “social criticism” as in using “their intellectual capital to inform, educate, and empower ordinary citizens.”⁷ These people played a central role in HEX.

The shift that I am describing was ideological. Cooper, Royce, and other contributors to HEX made points incompatible with Marxist and postmodernist political theories. They were eager to strengthen and enhance existing forms of democratic politics and recover local traditions. They were also inclined to listen to what their fellow citizens were saying, instead of suspecting that other people had been manipulated by capitalism, advertising, or politicians to adopt positions contrary to justice and their own interests. They rejected the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase.

When HEX was founded, less than one in five Americans identified themselves as “liberals” in the National Election Studies poll, compared to 35 to 40 percent who called themselves “conservatives.” (That remained the ratio in 2004.) Therefore, academics who held open-ended discussions with their fellow Americans had to listen to a lot of arguments and premises associated with the political right. Professors who believed in open-ended deliberation might disagree with these conservative opinions, but they couldn’t dismiss them or bypass them. The fundamental premise of deliberative politics is that one ought to take other people’s beliefs and opinions seriously and treat them with respect. If average Americans deserved to be listened to, and if a plurality voted for conservative politicians and causes, then the ascendancy of the right could not be dismissed as the result of nefarious tactics by elites (e.g., campaign donations, media manipulation, and the like.) It had to be treated as a legitimate popular movement and the authentic point from which many Americans entered conversations.

“I think it should be pointed out that the culture of American universities is not uniform; rather, it is passionately contested.”

(“What Is ‘Public’ About What Academics Do?: An exchange with Robert Kingston and Peter Levine,” HEX, 2004.)

Nevertheless, the new civic politics was not itself right-of-center, or moderate, or otherwise easy to categorize ideologically. Some proponents thought that civic engagement and dialogue might unleash radical and unpredictable social change; new political vistas would open. Some believed that the political equality and respect intrinsic in truly open-ended public deliberation was more radical than the economic redistribution promised by an activist state.

Gen-X Students

In 1994, when many professors were Boomers, their students predominantly belonged to Generation X (born between 1965 and 1984). A typical undergraduate of that time had begun to pay attention to the public world during the relatively uneventful administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Members of Gen X formed a relatively small cohort, raised in the shadow of the much more numerous Boomers, and they had the weakest sense of their own distinctness as a generation. In fact, no entelechy had occurred during their formative years. However, the X-ers shared a sense that they had arrived too late for the dramatic events of 1965 to 1975, yet they lived with the consequences of their parents’ choices. Further, they were marked by rising economic anxiety and a belief that their individual performance in school would have profound effects on their economic futures. For “high-performing” students, including those who were female or people of color, some new opportunities seemed to have opened up. But the obverse of opportunity was risk. Students believed that they stood alone in the economy, unable to fall back on unions, neighborhoods, or even intact families. Especially after the recession of the early 1990s, higher education seemed the indispensable key to security. The economic value of college, rather than its potential for social change, was its most salient feature for students and their parents alike.⁸

The annual survey of incoming first-year college students conducted by the Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) reveals significant changes between 1970 and 1994. In 1970, seventy-nine percent of the entering freshmen identified “developing a meaningful philosophy of life” as an important goal. By 1994, that was a choice of just 46 percent. The trend line for “becoming well off financially” moved in just the opposite direction: 36 percent identified it as a major goal in 1970, compared to 72 percent of the Gen-X freshmen in 1994.

Leftist students (2.2 percent of freshmen in the 1994 HERI sample) deserve special consideration, because in my experience they provided a disproportionate percentage of campus activists, leaders of student associations, and partners for the Boomer professors who were working on public projects in the 1990s. These young leftists were different from earlier generations of progressive /activist students, precisely because their formative experiences had occurred during the Clinton administration. Before the 1992 election, most activist students of the left had favored “community service” if (and only if) it sensitized people to problems like poverty and racism and led to political action. They preferred voting and fundamental change through state action, fearing that service might become an end in itself or a palliative. These were some of the explicit conclusions of a Wingspread summit on service that I attended in 1988 as a student. Thirteen years later, Campus Compact brought a new group of activist undergraduates (including some conservatives) to Wingspread to discuss civic engagement. These students, summarizing the experience of the 1990s, said:

For the most part, we are frustrated with conventional politics, viewing it as inaccessible. [However,] while we are disillusioned with conventional politics (and therefore most forms of political activity), we are deeply involved in civic issues through non-traditional forms of engagement. We are neither apathetic nor disengaged. In fact, what many perceive as disengagement may actually be a conscious choice; for example, a few of us … actively avoided voting, not wanting to participate in what some of us view as a deeply flawed electoral process.… While we still hope to be able to participate in our political system effectively through traditional means, service is a viable and preferable (if not superior) alternative at this time.⁹

I suspect that a major reason for this rejection of formal politics was the failure of the Clinton administration to achieve goals prized by leftist students, following the built-up hopes of the Reagan and Bush years. The spike in youth voting in 1992 gave way to a substantial turnout decline in 1996 and 2000. However, the rate of student volunteering increased just as turnout fell. As Bill Galston and I wrote in 1997:

C...