Kettering Foundation

Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey

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 anti-democratic, 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?

Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey, from David W. Brown and Deborah Witte, the editors of the Higher Education Exchange, explores 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. 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. Below are descriptions of these powerful and enlightening essays.

Chapter 1: The Landscape of Higher Education
Peter Levine, research scholar and director of CIRCLE, writes about the engagement of the “Boomer faculty,” a generation shaped by the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s, with Generation X and their “rejection of formal politics.” Levine compares these two generations with the “Millennial Generation,” which he sees as having a greater interest in formal politics. But he notes that all three of these intersecting generations are committed to the “open-endedness” of “democratic participation, diversity, consensus building, and constructive problem-solving”—“values [that] have deep roots in American political history.”

Mary Stanley, an independent scholar formerly at Syracuse University, weighs in with her view of the landscape of higher education, a view very different from Levine’s. As she sees it, many in the academy have boarded “the democracy train,” while ignoring the market-driven “neo-liberal train that seems to be gathering the whole of humanity, forcing its passengers to rush even faster to a temporal and spatial world that just might destroy our capacity for community.” Globalization spares no one from the consequences of unbridled capitalism and she fears that “the larger political economy becomes the weather; out there, not of us. Or the ‘thing’ gentleman and ladies don’t discuss.” Stanley discusses her ideas in an interview here.

Chapter 2: The Civic Roots of Higher Education
Claire Snyder, director of academics for the higher education program and associate professor of political theory at George Mason University, reflects on an important, but neglected, story about the “civic roots” of higher education. Snyder questions whether higher education’s civic mission is adequate for the 21st century. “If democratic citizenship involves acting collectively to achieve common goals, then what does higher education need to do to prepare citizens for that task?” She explores her uncertainty that higher education will “play its historic role in helping democracy work as it should.”

Chapter 3: Public Work: The Perspective and a Story
One important perspective that has emerged lately in the research came from Harry Boyte, co-director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at the University of Minnesota. The idea of “public work” articulated by Boyte suggests that “democracy is, in fact, a kind of work. Its labors occur in multiple sites, enlist multiple talents in addressing public problems, and result in multiple forms of common wealth. The public works of democracy create an environment of equal respect.”

Boyte’s essay is followed by “Public Work at Colgate,” an interview with Adam Weinberg, provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at World Learning and the School for International Training, who tells how one institution put “public work” to work. At Colgate the administration moved away from a professional model of service to students by infusing the campus with the spirit of public work. Colgate administrators helped students begin to think of themselves as a community, with responsibilities toward others for creating a healthy living environment. Over a period of seven years, campus life was successfully rebuilt around principles of civic learning, garnering national attention for both the campus and the surrounding community.

Chapter 4: Public Scholarship: The Perspective and a Story
Scott Peters, associate professor of education at Cornell University, addresses “public scholarship” and the land-grant colleges and universities that have been forging partnerships with the public. He responds to a question posed by Noelle McAfee, another contributor to the book, who asks, “What kind of civic relationship is possible between the academy and the public?” Looking ahead, Peters suggests that public scholars face the task of reconstructing the democratic tradition of public scholarship in the land-grant system and questions whether they will succeed.

Jeremy Cohen, professor of communication and associate vice president and senior associate dean for undergraduate education at Penn State University, argues for “purposeful democratic learning,” or, “learning to be democratic.” Cohen argues, “We have failed as educators to fully grasp the fact that nothing about democracy, not its theory and certainly not its practice, is hard wired into anyone.”

Chapter 5: Public Making: The Perspective and a Story
Noelle McAfee, visiting associate professor of philosophy at George Mason University, offers her perspective on the potential of higher education institutions for “public making,” or “public building.” McAfee asserts that academic institutions can be an important ally through their “research and teaching with a newfound respect for public work.”

The perspective of “public making” needed an institutional story to ground it, and Douglas Challenger, associate professor of sociology at Franklin Pierce University, has certainly lived that perspective in the work of Franklin Pierce, which is allied with the community of Rindge, New Hampshire. Challenger tells the story of the ups and downs of that civic journey, and a “pivotal moment” when those in Rindge “realized that they had the answers to their own local problems and had grown to trust deliberative community dialogue as a way to access their own collective wisdom.”     

Chapter 6: Democracy’s Megachallenges Revisited
In the concluding chapter, David Mathews, the president of the Kettering Foundation, characteristically looks through the other end of the telescope and asks, “What does all the ferment over democracy mean for higher education?” He provides this answer: “The world is struggling with the meaning of democracy as current problems challenge old forms. Questions of where academic institutions will weigh in—and how—are inescapable. The way these questions are answered, knowingly or not, will be the ultimate measure of how accountable colleges and universities are to the public.”

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