"To Serve a Larger Purpose": Engagement for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher Education

10. Civic Engagement on the Ropes?

Chapter 10 Civic Engagement on the Ropes? Edward Zlotkowski H as the civic engagement movement “stalled,” as some, including the editors of this volume (p. 4), have claimed? Does service-learning need to be “disciplined” in order to survive (Butin 2006)? Mark Twain once famously quipped: “The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Can the same—mutatis mutandi—be said about the recent alarm being voiced in some corners of the engagement camp? Certainly, few would deny that in a relatively short amount of time— approximately two decades—the civic engagement movement has made some impressive gains. In a 2005 essay entitled “The Disciplines and the Public Good,” I outlined some of the ways in which the academic ­ disciplines have embraced a civic agenda, and a year later, Nicholas Longo, James Williams, and I introduced our edited volume Students as Colleagues: Expanding the Circle of Service-Learning Leadership (2006) with the following paragraph: By many measures, the adoption of service-learning as a legitimate teaching-learning strategy in American higher education has been a remarkable success story. Over the course of the 1990s, we saw the founding and flourishing of the Corporation for National Service as well as the Community Outreach Partnerships Centers (COPC) program coming out of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. We have seen the phenomenal growth of Campus Compact from a few hundred members to over 1,000 institutions, and the founding of affiliated state compacts in almost two-thirds of 218 • Chapter 10 the states. We have seen the publication of 21 volumes in the former American Association for Higher Education’s (AAHE) series on service and the academic disciplines (Zlotkowski, 1997–2006)—a series that helped prepare the way for many other discipline-specific publications and initiatives. Indeed, we have seen the disciplinary associations themselves begin to take on the work of engagement, from major initiatives at the National Communication Association to more limited but nonetheless significant developments in the sciences and the humanities. . . . Associations organized by institutional type— associations such as the American Association of Community Colleges, the Council of Independent Colleges, the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges, the private Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)­ working through the United Negro College Fund—have launched significant engagement efforts designed to redefine higher education in a post–Cold War world. So extensive has the service-learning literature become that it is now too large for any single individual to master. (p. 1) To be sure, Students as Colleagues goes on to suggest that new strategies will be needed before service-learning is “able to exert a truly transformative influence on academic programming.” In other words, it recognizes that much more needs to be done if this “teaching-learning” dimension of the scholarship of engagement is, at last, to fulfill its potential in helping effect civic renewal. Such a recognition, however, was less a cry of alarm than a call to embrace new opportunities. Furthermore, this call was married to a decidedly concrete set of recommendations, namely, strategies that would empower students to assume new positions of responsibility in the service-learning, if not the overall civic engagement, movement. The remainder of this chapter argues that both these positions—that is, a reframing that stresses opportunity more than alarm, and a reframing that stresses concrete strategies and relevant constituencies—offer our best hope for the future of civic engagement in higher education. Pragmatist Principles In November 1994, the College Board convened an invitational seminar on the future of liberal education in the United States. Bruce Kimball, author of Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education (1995a), was invited to give the keynote address, and shortly thereafter, the work on which he based his address, “Toward Pragmatic Liberal Education” (1995b), was published as the central essay in The Condition of American Liberal Education: Pragmatism and a Changing Tradition (1995). Robert Orrill, the executive editor of that volume, sums up Kimball’s argument as follows: Civic Engagement on the Ropes? • 219 Closely examining recent reform proposals, he makes a carefully wrought argument that a new and distinctly American version of liberal education is emerging in the closing years of the twentieth century . This reform “consensus” can best be grasped, he believes, if we understand how its core elements or themes . . . fit with and are “deeply rooted in the resurgent intellectual tradition of pragmatism.” (p...