Higher Education for the Public Good: Emerging Voices from a National Movement (review)

What does society need from higher education? Can we deliver it? How? Tackling these questions, Higher Education for the Public Good joins generations of philosophers who have debated the purpose of higher education, solidly aligning with those who have maintained that our greatest purpose is to prepare an educated citizenry for a democracy.

In an era in which higher education is seen as a consumer good and governments steadily reduce their financial support for colleges and universities, this inspirational work calls us to reforge the social charter between America and higher education. Preceding the launch of the U.S. Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education, this book couldn't be timelier.

The volume is organized into six sections. Part 1, "Exploring the Public Good," reviews higher education's history of public service and describes an emerging social movement that could heighten the public benefits of higher education, if fueled with collective will and action. Parts 2 through 5 address different challenges that colleges and universities must overcome in their desire to serve the public good, and offer concrete guidance on ways to realign higher education with its historic civic mission. The final section, "Concluding Thoughts on the Public Good," underscores our collective responsibility to create a metamovement involving business, government, and education, and to engage in the critical reflective inquiry which must be a part of such endeavor.

Three themes run throughout the volume. First is an attention to academic matters: the core functions of educating undergraduates, preserving knowledge, and producing new knowledge. The authors identify obstacles that have prevented colleges and universities from achieving their democratic missions and propose a new model of an engaged university. The engaged university produces scholarship relevant to solving societal problems, builds civic engagement in the undergraduate curriculum, and teaches students to see the value of engagement and its relevancy for their own lives. Service learning is promoted as a pedagogical strategy.

An engaged university cannot be sustained without changing faculty roles and rewards. Faculty will ultimately shoulder the work of engagement. As an "add on" to their current responsibilities, it will fail. Engagement must be integrated and synergized across current teaching, research, and service activities. Yet such integration cannot occur until faculty reward systems value engaged scholarship. The volume takes a forward-thinking stance to address these issues and also to consider what changes are needed to prepare future faculty for careers of engaged scholarship.

The second theme looks at the individual and institutional leadership required to create and sustain an engaged university. Institutional differences are duly noted, acknowledging the degree to which different types of institutions have incorporated a concern for the public good in all their activities. A transformation is needed to bring all of higher education into consensus. The book calls on trustees, as guardians of the public trust, to ensure that institutions carry out both their civic and fiduciary responsibilities.

Expanding out, the third theme examines cross-sector issues. As Woodruff Smith (2003) noted, "For better or worse . . . American public higher education, the American public sphere, and American democracy are closely linked. They rise and fall together" (p. 69). The editors and authors envision the model of an engaged university as part of a "metamovement," challenging those in higher education to create a capacity for engagement across K–12 education, government, and business that will complement and support the work of colleges and universities. The authors thoroughly examine state governments' roles in supporting higher education, elucidating the tensions between public and private good and proposing specific policy directions to facilitate higher education's ability to serve the public.

What I like best about this book is its departure from philosophical "feel good" works by offering advice about what action to take and how to take it. For example, the book enumerates such institutional-level possibilities as models of service...