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361 Imagining America: Engaged Scholarship for the Arts, Humanities, and Design Robin Goettel and Jamie Haft In 2001, a group of University of Michigan undergraduates spent much of an icy winter well away from the comforts of their Ann Arbor campus. Instead, they were conducting research in senior centers and community centers around the Michigan Central Railroad Station, a key transit point for the Great Migration, in which millions of African Americans moved to the industrial northern states in search of employment and education, and an important landmark in ethnically diverse southwest Detroit. Under the guidance of history faculty and a playwright from Detroit’s Matrix Theater, the students conducted oral histories and writing workshops, unveiling the hidden cultural and social life of the railroad station and its environs, and used the results to create a stage presentation entitled Homelands . The next year, Homelands was performed at the Matrix Theater by local high school students and for local audiences, and formed part of a multiplying group of cultural products , including an exhibit of historic photographs of the station, and a multimedia sourcebook documenting the partnership and providing a template of the project for other groups to use. This is engaged scholarship in the arts and humanities: created in an equal and sustainable partnership between the university and a community organization, and resulting in new and relevant knowledge both for the academy and for its public, knowledge to be provided directly to the public. As one of Imagining America’s early contributors noted: The local community must be the microcosm of our pluralistic, inclusive democracy, and the realization of our democratic ideals. Community is, in fact, democracy incarnate, where culture is woven into the fabric of our daily lives, not work as a decoration on its surface, or observed from afar as the province of the privileged few. (Myers, 2001, p. 4) R O B I N G O E T T E L A N D J A M I E H A F T 362 It is to support such engaged cultural work between higher education and community partners that Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life was founded. Ten years later, Imagining America is a consortium of eighty-five colleges and universities committed to building democratic culture by fostering public scholarship and practice in the arts, humanities , and design. The consortium brings together higher education and community-based artists, scholars, design professionals, and the public to reimagine the possibilities of higher education, with the goal of supporting member institutions as they develop their potential for civic engagement and collective problem solving. In the following sections, we discuss the founding of Imagining America and the importance of developing a common language and culture; Imagining America’s annual programming ; current national initiatives; and organizational challenges. Each of these sections is related to Imagining America’s overarching goals of constituting public scholarship as an important and legitimate enterprise, encouraging structural changes in higher education to support knowledge creation through civic engagement, and forging comprehensive alliances to build the movement for transforming colleges and universities into centers of democratic renewal. We believe that democracy is dynamic, not fixed, and that a thriving democracy is marked by active, inclusive citizen participation in which individuals act not only in their own self-interest but collectively toward the common good of their community. History Imagining America was launched at a 1999 White House Conference initiated by the White House Millennium Council, the University of Michigan, and the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation. The conference brought together government officials, scholars, artists, university presidents, foundation executives, and nonprofit leaders to describe, debate, and look for new opportunities for civic engagement in higher education. Participants reached a consensus about what was needed for public scholarship and practice to flourish: a national network, legitimization, and financial support. After the conference, twenty-one participating college and university presidents agreed to build a national network with the formation of the Presidents Council. This council became the basis for what would become Imagining America’s consortium of colleges and universities. (To this day, a college or university president or chancellor must sign the Imagining America membership agreement.) Confident in the civic engagement leadership of two of its humanities professors, the University of Michigan agreed to be the initial host campus for the consortium. Julie Ellison, who was then working in the University’s Office of theVice President, and David Scobey, who was launching the University’s new Arts of Citizenship program...

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