Dewey's Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform

Chapter 5: Penn and the Third Revolution in American Higher Education

AS EMPHASIZED IN CHAPTER 2, the president of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper, significantly helped John Dewey see the critically important role the schooling system must play in the development of a democratic American society. Unfortunately, Dewey’s work on schools suffered badly from his failure to see what Harper saw so clearly, namely, that the research university must constitute the primary component of a highly integrated (pre-K–post 16) schooling system that could potentially function as the primary agent of democracy in the world and in the United States in particular. As we emphasized, Harper envisioned the university as the “prophet of democracy, its priest and its philosopher . . . the Messiah of the democracy, its to-be-expected deliverer.”1 Democracy is the soul of America—its charter myth, its ultimate end-in-view. The American university, alas, has never played anything like the messianic democratic role Harper optimistically envisioned for it. But “the times they are a-changin’” and our work since 1985 has been strongly influenced by our own optimistic belief that  5 Penn and the Third Revolution in American Higher Education Nothing is of more importance to the public weal, than to form and train up youth in wisdom and virtue. Wise and good men are, in my opinion, the strength of a state; much more so than riches or arms, which, under the management of Ignorance and Wickedness, often draw on destruction, instead of providing for the safety of a people. BENJAMIN FRANKLIN TO SAMUEL JOHNSON (AUGUST 23, 1750) Harper’s vision may yet be realized. Does this optimistic belief show that we simply are suffering from a bad case of the delusionary utopianism long characteristic of American progressives and leftists? As we hope to soon illustrate, this is not the case. Following Donald Kennedy’s provocative lead in his book Academic Duty, we view American higher education today as in the early stages of its third revolution.2 The first revolution, of course, occurred in the late nineteenth century. Beginning at Johns Hopkins in 1876, the accelerating adoption and uniquely American adaptation of the German model somewhat revolutionized American higher education. By the turn of the century, the American research university had essentially been created. The second revolution began in 1945 with Vannevar Bush’s “endless [research] frontier” manifesto and rapidly produced the big science, cold war, entrepreneurial university .3 We believe that the third revolution began in 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war provided the necessary conditions for the “revolutionary” emergence of the democratic, cosmopolitan , civic university—the radically new type of “great university ,” which William Rainey Harper had prophesized would advance democratic schooling and achieve practical realization of the democratic promise of America for all Americans. The emergence of the new type of university a century after Harper had first envisioned it can be credibly explained as a defensive response to the increasingly obvious, increasingly embarrassing, increasingly immoral contradiction between the status, wealth, and power of American higher education—particularly its elite research university component—and the pathological state of American cities. To paraphrase Oliver Goldsmith’s late eighteenth-century lament for the Deserted Village, while American research universities flourished in the late twentieth century as never before, “ill-fared the American city, to hastening ills a prey.” If American research universities really were so great, why were American cities so pathological? After the cold war ended, the contradiction became increasingly obvious , troubling, indefensible, and immoral. The manifest contradiction between the power and the performance of American higher education sparked the emergence of the truly (not simply rhetorically) 78  Dewey’s Dream engaged university and the growing acceptance of the proposition that power based on a great capacity for integrated production and use of knowledge should mean responsible performance. In the aftermath of the cold war, accelerating external and internal pressures forced research universities to recognize (very reluctantly) that they must— and could—function as moral/intellectual institutions simultaneously engaged in advancing universal knowledge, learning, and improving the well-being of their local geographic communities (i.e., the local ecological systems that powerfully affect their own health and functioning ). We believe that after 1989 the combination of external pressure and enlightened self-interest spurred American research universities to increasingly recognize that they could, indeed must, function simultaneously as universal and local institutions of higher education—institutions not only in but...