Democracy and Higher Education: Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement

Conclusion

349 In the introduction, we pointed out that the issue of higher education’s public purposes and work is not a simple, settled, and empirically documented fact. Rather, it is a complex normative and political question about which there continues to be debate and disagreement . Most important for this book is the specific question of whether academic professionals should be engaged off their campuses in the public work of democracy, and if so, what public purposes they should pursue, what roles they should play, and what contributions they should make. As we demonstrated in chapter 1, there are four distinct normative traditions in the American academic profession that represent general answers to this question. But as we argued in chapters 2 and 3, we need more than general answers if we are to improve our understanding of higher education’s public purposes and work, in and for a democratic society. We need to question the four normative traditions we identified, and the practical theories upon which they are based. Just as importantly, we need to listen to and learn from richly drawn, first-person stories of what academic professionals have been doing and experiencing as they step off their campuses and become engaged in civic life. Such stories can provide us with answers to the public purposes and work question that are specific to the contingencies of context, and the values, interests, and ends academic professionals seek to stand for and pursue in their academic and public work. They can shift our attention from what could or should be to what already has been and is. In doing so, they can help us avoid two unproductive traps: becoming stuck in cycles of abstract theoretical and philosophical hairsplitting, and becoming polarized in contentious debates over which normative tradition is “correct,” and what—in general rather than context-specific terms—academic professionals should do as participants in civic life. Conclusion C O N C L U S I O N 350 Constructed from the transcripts of narrative interviews, the twelve practitioner profiles in part 2 of this book contain a wealth of first-person stories about the civic engagement work and experiences of faculty members from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. We drew a set of positive lessons from our own deliberately appreciative reading of these profiles in chapter 16. Our lessons challenge our presumptions about and enlarge our understanding of the public purposes and work of academic professionals in land-grant colleges of agriculture. There is more going on than we might presume in the stories these academic professionals tell of their “outreach” and “extension” work. While these stories show us that these academic professionals take up a responsive servant role in their civic engagement work—a role that is tied to their academic expertise and involves attempts to be neutral, unbiased, and objective—they also show us how and why many of them take up additional roles as proactive critics, leaders, and change agents that reflect their nonneutral political and cultural biases, interests, identities, and values. While the profiles in this book and the lessons we draw from them have a particular relevance in land-grant colleges of agriculture, they also apply across the whole of American higher education. Academic professionals in every institutional type—from community colleges to private research universities—can learn from provocative stories that illuminate how others have answered the public purposes and work question. The profiles also carry a specific kind of relevance that has to do with the ways people understand the meaning and significance of the “land-grant mission.” For example, the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) launched the American Democracy Project in 2003 as a means of strengthening the civic mission, work, and impacts of its 430 member institutions. While many AASCU members see their institutions as “stewards of place,” one president of an AASCU university has referred to AASCU institutions as “land-grants for the 21st century.” The profiles in this book and the lessons we draw from them can be used to influence how AASCU members understand the “land-grant” mission and how it connects with the “stewards of place” ethic. The prevailing view in academic literatures, official institutional rhetoric , and informal culture characterizes the land-grant mission (in both historical and contemporary contexts) as being about apolitical and responsive “public service,” the meaning and value of which is mainly if not entirely technical and economic rather than political and cultural in nature...