Democracy and Higher Education: Traditions and Stories of Civic Engagement

Foreword

xiii The report by President Harry Truman’s Commission on Higher Education with which Scott Peters frames this book defines democracy as the fundamental purpose of higher education. But the democratic dimensions of higher education have eroded sharply since World War II. Though there have been many civic engagement efforts in higher education in recent years, they have not made much of a dent in the forces that are turning higher education into a private good, a system with a few winners and many losers. The 2009 US News andWorld Report special issue on “Solving the College Crisis” defines our institutions as “like other industries” and students “as customers voting with their feet.” How many students are turned away—rejection rates—are a basic metric for the magazine’s rankings of “the best universities.”1 In a similar vein, when Minnesota Public Radio sponsored statewide discussions in 2001 on “the future of the University of Minnesota,” it called the series Access Versus Excellence. Higher education faces a critical moment. The challenge we face calls for civic boldness with parallels to other times when intellectuals helped to change the course of history. Just as intellectuals in the Eastern bloc in 1989 sounded the death knell of Communism, we need to help change the meritocratic culture of American society, which devalues the talents and intelligence of the great majority of people. Rather than objective observers, we need to become political in the older sense of the word, learning to work with people of diverse backgrounds and interests on the basis of equality and respect.2 Scott Peters’s Democracy and Higher Education responds to this challenge. He retrieves the political dimensions and democratic purposes of the work of faculty, showing the richness and continuing presence of the public work tradition in higher education. He presents complex and also wonderful stories of scholars who carry it on, who learn to respect and Foreword Harry C. Boyte xiv F O R E W O R D help to unleash the talents and agency of fellow citizens, and who deepen collective civic power in the process. In a time of enormous change, Democracy and Higher Education contributes to the realization that we in higher education can be agents of change, not objects of change. By renewing the democratic identity of our institutions, we can contribute to the future of our democracies. A Silent Civic Disease Major obstacles are in the way. “Politics,” in conventional use, is viewed as something that occurs “out there,” in elections and government, not in everyday lives and work. In the academy we lack even a language to use in thinking of ourselves as political actors—as relational, interactive, and productive citizens, involved in the messy, often uncomfortable work of solving problems, dealing with people who are different, and co-creating public things with citizens outside of our disciplines and subdisciplines. A political understanding of our work means learning new habits of thought as well as action. It involves coming to see each person in our institutions and beyond them as complex, dynamic, and unique, not mainly as a representative of the abstract categories that are the stock in trade of academic discourse. Most fundamentally, politics in a democratic sense requires learning respect for the intelligence and knowledge-making of all citizens, nonacademics as well as those in the academy. In this book, Peters recalls important histories to build on, such as the founding land-grant mission of public colleges and universities. Land-grants were established to educate rural, working-class, and low-income students. With a philosophy reaching back to ancient Athens, they held that excellence is the product of inclusive cultures of learning and knowledge-making—of access—not the opposite. But today this philosophy is deeply countercultural . As Josiah Ober observes in Democracy and Knowledge: Innovation and Learning in Classical Athens, Athens’s relative success was based in practices and methods of interaction between experts and amateurs that aggregated many kinds of knowledge making. In contrast, “Contemporary practice often treats free citizens as passive subjects by discounting the value of what they know. . . . Willful ignorance is practiced by the parties of the right and left alike.”3 We heard many faculty members express a sharp sense of loss resulting from the philosophy of detachment that has replaced a philosophy of relationship, when the Kellogg Foundation asked the Center for Democracy and Citizenship in 1997 to make a judgment about whether the land-grant mission of the University of...