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138 pages

English

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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," Noelle McAfee"The New England Center for Civic Live-A Decade of Making a Difference," Douglas F. Challenger"Democracy's Megachallenges Revisited," David Mathews

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Higher education

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Publié par	Kettering Foundation
Date de parution	01 janvier 2008
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781945577338
Langue	English

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AGENT OF
DEMOCRACY
Higher Education and the HEX Journey
©2008 by the Kettering Foundation
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey is published by Kettering Foundation Press. The interpretations and conclusions contained in this book represent the views of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of the Charles F. Kettering Foundation, its directors, or its officers.
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to:
Permissions
Kettering Foundation Press
200 Commons Road
Dayton, Ohio 45459
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
First edition, 2008
Manufactured in the United States of America
ISBN: 978-0-923993-27-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2007942208
Contents
Introduction Why This Book?
David Brown and Deborah Witte
Chapter One The Landscape of Higher Education
The Engaged University: A Tale of Two Generations
Peter Levine
The Limits of Public Work: A Critical Reflection on the “Engaged University”
Mary Stanley
Chapter Two The Civic Roots of Higher Education
Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission? Historical Reflections
R. Claire Snyder
Chapter Three Public Work: The Perspective and a Story
Public Work: Civic Populism versus Technocracy in Higher Education
Harry C. Boyte
Public Work at Colgate: An Interview with Adam Weinberg
Chapter Four Public Scholarship: The Perspective and a Story
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
Chapter Five Public Making: The Perspective and a Story
The Makings of a Public and the Role of the Academy
Noëlle McAfee
The New England Center for Civic Life—A Decade of Making a Difference
Douglas F. Challenger
Chapter Six Democracy’s Megachallenges Revisited
David Mathews
Introduction Why This Book?
At a Kettering Foundation 1998 seminar on the professions and public life, William Sullivan warned that:
Today’s discourse about education … is described primarily as a vehicle for individual advance. But there is something called common goods, or public goods, that are worth achieving too, because without them our particular goods are not stable or secure.
Like Sullivan, Kettering has a longstanding concern that the professional mind-set prevailing in higher education ignores the “common goods” that only democratic self-rule can provide. Why? The professional mind-set is profoundly antidemocratic when presuming that one’s 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 sets 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. When colleges and universities collaborate with the staff of civic organizations, it is often just professional to professional even though the rhetoric is that they are “engaging communities.”
Sullivan’s warning and Kettering’s concern are similar to Tocqueville’s early caution about “administrative despotism [which] does not destroy anything but prevents much from being born” and Dewey’s later observation that hierarchical and narrow specialization is “inimical to the development of a responsibly democratic polity and the full development of individual personality.”
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? As one academic insider recently noted:
It seems to me to be an incredible proposition for faculty to be attempting to convince community members that they can help lead them to more active, participative and democratic processes that are not in effective practice on their own campuses.
Kettering, however, has never given up on the potential of those in the academy to put aside the professional mind-set and play a constructive role in renewing democratic practices in which there is a place for everyone. Kettering created the Higher Education Exchange ( HEX ) in 1994 as a place of exchange among those across the country already exploring the linkages between higher education and democracy. Kettering wanted to know what institutions are doing to assist in the work a sovereign public must do, what faculty are doing with citizens to coproduce new knowledge, and how students are learning the skills and habits of democratic self-rule.
Now in 2007, this book looks back at what Kettering and HEX have learned and looks forward to the prospects for the academy being a better ally, less the adversary, of democracy.
How the Book Is Organized
Three years ago David Brown, coeditor of HEX , wrote “Talking the Walk: Making Sense of HEX (1994-2004),” recounting how HEX got started with a “nascent conversation” among:
educators who could learn from each other … where everyone should have access and opportunities to improve what they find—much like what good teaching and research are about, or a healthy democracy for that matter, which is the Kettering Foundation’s central concern.
Soon after, we asked eight of those educators to fashion a book that explores the linkages between higher education and a “healthy democracy” that have been forged and those that offer some promise. We were sorry we could not include the other distinctive voices, a hundred or more, who have contributed to HEX since 1994. Nonetheless, those who came together had a range of experience and points of view that we thought were representative of what we call “the HEX years.”
The book is rooted in what these eight educators have written for HEX over the years, and we have salted each chapter with quotes from their prior contributions. We did not want, however, a stew of their previous writings, but instead new pieces informed by their current work and the conversations they shared at Kettering workshops over the two years the book was in development. At the workshops, they used a deliberative process, not for the sake of compromise or consensus but knowing that together they could fashion a richer understanding of what higher education can do to revitalize democratic practices. Everyone understood that such an exchange helped curb any pretensions that someone could somehow get things “right” before engaging others in the ongoing narrative that developed. As veterans of the academic scene, no one had any illusions that there would be agreement and some were puzzled by being paired up in chapters, but we stuck with it so that differing views coexist in the book, just as they did in the workshop conversations they shared.
Chapter One—The Landscape of Higher Education
To start things off, we asked Peter Levine, research scholar and director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at the University of Maryland, to describe from his vantage point what has been going on in higher education since Kettering first published HEX , or what David Mathews referred to as the “landscape.”
Of course, when any group of people views a landscape, each person may see and remember different highlights. For Levine, what first distinguished the HEX years was the engagement of what he calls “Boomer faculty,” a generation shaped by the tumultuous 60s and 70s, with Generation X and their “rejection of formal politics.” The engagement of these two generations turned them to various forms of voluntary public work, which included service learning, deliberation, public scholarship, and using diversity to “expand the cultural commons.” Levine sees a greater interest in formal politics with the coming of the Millennial Generation, shaped by the events of 9/11, but he notes that these three intersecting generations are all committed to the “open-endedness” of “democratic participation, diversity, consensus building, and constructive problem-solving … values [that] have deep roots in American political history.”
Knowing that Levine could not provide a comprehensive picture of the higher education landscape, at least not in one opening chapter, we asked Mary Stanley, an independent scholar, formerly at Syracuse University, to weigh in with her view, knowing that it was likely to be very different from Levine’s. He himself pointed out in a HEX 2004 interview that “the culture of American universities is not uniform, rather it is passionately contested.” That is certainly true in the chapter that he and Stanley share.
As Stanley sees it, Levine and others have boarded “the democracy train,” while ignoring the market-driven “neoliberal train that seems to be gathering the whole of humanity, forcing its passengers to rush ever faster to a temporal and spatial world that just might destroy our capacity for community.” For Stanley, globalization spares no one, including those who labor in academia, from the consequences of unbridled capitalism.
She argues that too many in higher education are too much the unwitting allies of globalization when they retreat into civil society. She fears that “the larger political economy becomes the weather; out there, not of us. Or the ‘thing’ gentleman and ladies don’t discuss.” For Stanley, Kettering and her HEX colleagues are obviously part of that polite company.
She thinks that higher education institutions must do more than just acknowledge those who share her dissenting view. They should, given Levine’s stress on open-endedness, make room for the consideration of macro changes to deal with “the conundrums, contradictions and tensions globalization brings to all institutional sectors, including their own.” Although Stanley is far from satisfied, she does not totally despair. For her, the “world-spanning, neoliberal political economy so vast and seemingly uncontrollable,