Democracy's Education

Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities

Harry C. Boyte

• Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780826520371
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Educational Policy

Today Americans feel powerless in the face of problems on every front. Such feelings are acute in higher education, where educators are experiencing an avalanche of changes: cost cutting, new technologies, and demands that higher education be narrowly geared to the needs of today's workplace. College graduates face mounting debt and uncertain job prospects, and worry about a coarsening of the mass culture and the erosion of authentic human relationships. Higher education is increasingly seen, and often portrays itself, as a ticket to individual success--a private good, not a public one.

Democracy's Education grows from the American Commonwealth Partnership, a year-long project to revitalize the democratic narrative of higher education that began with an invitation to Harry Boyte from the White House to put together a coalition aimed at strengthening higher education as a public good. The project was launched at the beginning of 2012 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which created land grant colleges.

Beginning with an essay by Harry C. Boyte, "Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work, " which challenges educators and their partners to claim their power to shape the story of higher education and the civic careers of students, the collection brings world-famous scholars, senior government officials, and university presidents together with faculty, students, staff, community organizers, and intellectuals from across the United States and South Africa and Japan. Contributors describe many constructive responses to change already taking place in different kinds of institutions, and present cutting-edge ideas like "civic science, " "civic studies, " "citizen professionalism, " and "citizen alumni." Authors detail practical approaches to making change, from new faculty and student roles to changes in curriculum and student life and strategies for everyday citizen empowerment. Overall, the work develops a democratic story of education urgently needed to address today's challenges, from climate change to growing inequality.

PART I

Democratic Narratives

In his work on moral philosophy, After Virtue, Alasdair MacIntyre challenges the forgetfulness about our common narratives that pervades the modern world. “I can only answer the question ‘What am I to do?’ if I can answer the prior question, ‘Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?’”¹

Contributors to this section are great storytellers of higher education, helping us to remember its democratic story, of which we are a part. Remembering this story and its many expressions is crucial for deciding and acting on “what we should do.”

Note

¹Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 216.

1

HAR MEGIDDO: A BATTLE FOR THE SOUL OF HIGHER EDUCATION

David Mathews

What’s the connection between American higher education and a town (Megiddo) on a mountain (har) in the ancient Middle East? Any connection may seem unlikely. But bear with me.

In January 2012, the White House hosted a meeting called “For Democracy’s Future: Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission.” Later in March, we discussed what had happened in Washington at the Kettering Foundation. (Kettering, by the way, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan, nongovernmental research foundation rooted in the American tradition of inventive research.)

We were talking to Caryn Musil and Elizabeth Minnich, both from the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U), about a report that had been made at the Washington meeting, which was prepared by a committee that included Derek Barker, a Kettering program officer. The report proposed a number of steps that academic institutions could take to benefit American democracy.¹

At some point in our conversation, Derek noted that an eight-hundred-pound gorilla had been in the room when the Washington committee drafted its report. The “gorilla” had an agenda quite different from the one the committee was considering; the objective was to make colleges and universities more productive and efficient in order to stem the growing cost of a college education, which has significantly outpaced inflation. No one introduced the gorilla, but everyone knew he was there.

Elizabeth Minnich recalled other meetings where these external pressures and higher education’s own concerns were being discussed. The tension between the two agendas is significant. Colleges and universities are being asked to cut expenses and do more with less while at the same time reach out and do more for external constituencies. The tension was so great in one of these meetings that an academic participant said she felt like pulling out her hair!

Struck by how powerful this tension is, I was reminded of the fateful battle at Megiddo in 1479 BCE when Thutmose III attacked and eventually drove out the prince of Kadesh. The clash was prominent in Middle East history and appears to be the basis for the biblical “Armageddon.”

Today, a great battle appears to be looming on the plains below the mountaintop citadels of higher education. The attacking forces want to put more productivity requirements on academe. These forces draw their strength from public concerns about the high cost of college and the lack of jobs for graduates. This attack is already having effects, such as more reliance on less expensive adjunct faculty.

Making the case that higher education doesn’t have responsibility for graduating young people with job skills at an affordable cost would be difficult. I certainly wouldn’t try to do it. After all, from the time of the colonial colleges (which trained ministers) to the present, institutions of higher learning have recognized that students need to be prepared for their careers. And it would make no sense at all to argue against cost effectiveness. I’ve heard of campuses where students live in their cars and skimp on meals in order to make ends meet. Still, there is reason to be concerned about the implicit assumption in the attacks that higher education is largely for the benefit of individuals and that any social benefit is the sum of these individual gains. The counterargument is well put in a chapter in What Is College For?, where Ellen Condliffe Lagemann and Harry Lewis argue that “higher education has vital purposes beyond aggregated individual economic benefits.” Lagemann and Lewis fear that such purposes have “fallen by the wayside.”²

In the fortress at modern Megiddo where these citadels of academe are located, the defense is divided. One camp consists of academic traditionalists who champion the cultivation of the mind and fly the banner of excellence. The other camp is a polyglot array of the new legions of outreach: civic engagement, public scholarship, and community development. A richly heterogeneous lot, they have no common banner.

I admit that using the battle at Megiddo as an analogy is shamelessly over-dramatic and potentially misleading. The attacking forces today aren’t trying to destroy colleges and universities. Nonetheless, the stakes are high; in the current clash, the mission and role of higher education are at issue. While the destruction of higher education’s Megiddo is unlikely, colleges and universities could be severely damaged by slow starvation from want of outside resources.

Could this clash be avoided or even made constructive? Some see constructive change coming through a greater use of technology, as in massive open online courses (MOOCs). Yet, while appreciative of technology, I hesitate to give up on face-to-face instruction and the educational value it brings.

I would suggest a defense that is really an offense. Get off the mountain and form a new compact with the public, an alliance based on making a closer fit between both institutions of higher education and their missions and the public and its problems.

In this new offensive, higher education would make use of its history as a movement in support of the great democratic movements in America. These movements gave higher education a soul, an animating spirit. Beginning with turning colonial colleges into “seminaries of sedition” during the American Revolution and continuing with the creation of the state universities to provide leadership for a new nation, American higher education has been shaped by public purposes.³ These purposes are reflected in the founding of the agricultural and mechanical colleges, in creating colleges for African Americans and Native Americans, and in establishing community colleges. In every case, higher education has been enriched by an alliance with citizens who have a great cause. That is exactly what I am proposing now when I suggest that the democratically inclined in academe might find much in common with a citizenry concerned with having a stronger hand in shaping the future.

Unfortunately, this history has been fading from higher education’s memory. I recall an observation from a report, The Changing Agenda for American Higher Education, on a 1976 Airlie House conference, which was sponsored by the then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. The report includes a quote from Earl Cheit, dean of the business school at the University of California, Berkeley, who said, “review procedures, regulation, litigation now command so much attention from college and university officials, it is easy to forget that for most of its history higher education in the U.S. was a movement, not a bureaucracy.”⁴ Why is recapturing academe’s history as a movement essential? Because the movement reflects a public mission.

What public concerns today might bear on the mission of colleges and universities? Americans are anxious about the future. Some are worried that the country has lost its moral compass as news of another ethical lapse is reported. People fear that even communities have lost much of their sense of community, of responsibility for the common good. Many Americans long for a return of prosperity, but that involves more than having a well-paying job. They want meaningful work for themselves and for their children. They want our nation to be a nation of producers, not just consumers. And most Americans want to have a stronger role than they have now in a political system that seems to push them to the sidelines, unable to make a significant difference.

Using a phrase coined by Ben Barber, I would call this a struggle for “strong democracy.” That is a democracy where, in Harry Boyte’s terms, citizens are producers of public goods rather than just consumers of services, constituents of politicians, or simply voters.⁵

What is higher education’s relationship to this quest for a strong, citizen-centered democracy? Unfortunately, that question is being overshadowed by cost and productivity issues. As I’ve said, ignoring these issues or demonizing their advocates isn’t going to be effective. After all, reducing costs is key to realizing two values higher education holds dear: greater access and greater diversity. The trouble is that the preoccupation with costs and career readiness is obscuring the equally valid concern with higher education’s role in democracy.

The good news is that academe has been trying to reach outside its walls for some time. There have been efforts to legitimize the scholarship that has public relevance and to give students opportunities to serve worthy causes. Having studied the relationship between higher education and the public for more than thirty years, the Kettering Foundation hasn’t before seen anything like the current interest in civic engagement.

This civic initiative is widespread. Most of the energy is coming from faculty members who want to integrate their scholarly interests with their public lives.⁶ And nearly all types of institutions are involved. The initiatives reach down into academic disciplines, into the professional schools—even into the nature of knowledge itself. Some academics are looking into the civic roots of disciplines from political science to speech communication, and others advocate restoring the liberal arts to their role as civic arts.⁷ Recent conferences recall what Aristotle said on moral reasoning and what Isocrates wrote on the importance of public deliberation.⁸ And some professions are moving beyond technical skill and expertise to look at the social and political dimensions of their work. (See Bill Sullivan’s pioneering study of civic professionalism.⁹)

For all of its promise, however, the civic engagement initiative in academe faces some serious challenges. One is to give greater intellectual integrity to the initiatives. Nearly everyone involved would say they serve democracy, yet what they mean by democracy varies considerably. That isn’t the problem, however. The problem is that there is too little analysis of those meanings, which opens civic engagement to the charge that it is largely rhetorical, a public relations Potemkin village with good intentions but little substance.

Ideally, advocates of public scholarship, service learning, and similar ventures would explain what they think democracy is and what it requires—and then critique what they are doing by these standards. This would be an open, shared analysis. Scholars interested in community economic development may already be moving in this direction by looking into the relationship between their concepts of community and development, on the one hand, and concepts of democracy, on the other.¹⁰

This kind of internal critique could put the work citizens do as citizens alongside the work of scholars and professionals to see if they are aligned and supportive, or, if they aren’t, how they might become mutually beneficial. Journalists have come closest to doing this when some have compared the way they name problems with the way citizens give names to problems. Journalists tend to describe problems in professional terms; people name problems in terms of what is deeply valuable to them.

Other challenges to engagement initiatives on campus include the almost total absence of trustee participation. For years now, the Kettering Foundation has tried in vain to locate a conversation among trustees about their own relationship to a citizenry that wants to get off the sidelines. Although trustees ostensibly represent these citizens, we’ve only met a handful who have wanted to address people’s concerns about the future of our democracy. Recently there has been an effort to see if civically minded alumni might fill this vacuum.

The need for tenure standards that recognize public scholarship is an obvious challenge. Another is creating spaces within the institutions for initiatives in strong democracy, spaces that provide structure without the constraints that come from the typical academic silos. Fortunately, there are some new centers dedicated to strengthening public life that are trying to create this space. Of course, there are many kinds of institutes that make useful contributions, but the ones in the best position to turn civic engagement into democratic engagement are those that focus on building a greater capacity for citizens to do their work, work such as the collective decision making that is the key to collective action. We have found more than seventy such centers or institutes so far, and the number is growing.¹¹

Still another on-campus challenge—and opportunity—is in the way students come to see themselves as political actors. Strategically, students are critical as a source of energy for civic engagement, particularly when their idealism is instructed by mentoring faculty members. On some campuses, faculty and students have come together in classes where the faculty introduce students to a deliberative politics they can practice every day—a politics of shared problem solving.

There are also campuses with promising experiments to push beyond service and service learning (both are valuable) to embed students in ongoing community problem solving. Auburn University students are spending their summers in towns across Alabama as part of a civic engagement program called Living Democracy. The students don’t just drop into the communities; they live there long enough to see the consequences of their work.¹²

The ultimate test of the civic engagement initiatives on campus is whether they connect with the struggle for stronger democracy off campus. Restoring a sense of mission and public purpose to colleges and universities can’t be done without engaging the citizenry—on its own terms.

In an essay entitled “Ships Passing in the Night?,” I reported on Kettering research that found a significant difference between the questions citizens pose as they struggle to solve the proble...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work
• Part I. Democratic Narratives
• Part II. Policy Makers and Presidents as Architects of Change
• Part III. The Faculty Experience and Faculty as Agents of Change
• Part IV. From Citizen-Student to Citizen-Alumni: Students and Alumni as Agents of Change
• Part V. Community Organizers Consider the Challenges
• PART VI. Possible Futures
• Part VII. Summing Up
• Contributors