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  • Curricular Commons
  • Jeremy Cohen

Democracy is General Education’s Animating Principle

A half century has passed since Clark Kerr, then chancellor of the University of California, coined a term yet to be surpassed as an accurate description of the modern research university. His trope applies equally well today to our comprehensives and liberal arts colleges. Welcome to the multiversity, Chancellor Kerr said.

“The multiversity is not one community but several,” Kerr wrote: “The community of the undergraduate and the community of the graduate; the community of the humanist, the community of the social scientist, and the community of the scientist; the communities of the professional schools; the community of all the non-academic personnel; the community of the administrators.” “A community, like the medieval communities of masters and students, should have common interests; in the multiversity, they are quite varied, even conflicting. A community should have a soul, a single animating principle; the multiversity has several,” Kerr said.

Is there an animating principle, a bright-line belief in an identifiable value capable of stimulating higher education communities to agree on what it is that binds us as students, staff, scholars, and teachers? This issue of the Journal of General Education: A Curricular Commons of the Humanities and Sciences continues the discussion begun in volume 62, number 4, that suggested that a primary obligation of higher education is to sustain democratic understanding and habit and that a general education curriculum rooted in the learning and the practice of democratic values can fulfill Kerr’s call for an academic “soul, a single animating principle.”

Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis wrote about the principle and practice of democratic values in his concurring opinion in Whitney v. California [End Page vii] (274 U.S. 357, 1927). Though it was primarily a case involving freedom of expression, his brief is a primer on the keystone role of education as a means to nurture democratic governance in which “the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary”:

Those who won our independence believed that the final end of the State was to make men free to develop their faculties, and that, in its government, the deliberative forces should prevail over the arbitrary. They valued liberty both as an end, and as a means. They believed liberty to be the secret of happiness, and courage to be the secret of liberty. They believed that freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth; . . . that the greatest menace to freedom is an inert people; that public discussion is a political duty, and that this should be a fundamental principle of the American government.

Brandeis viewed democracy as the animating principle that guided the Constitution’s writing and interpretation. He believed the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of speech to be an indispensable element. In Whitney he warned that “men feared witches and burned women. It is the function of speech to free men from the bondage of irrational fears.” It is, in the pragmatic terms that underlie Brandeis’s defense of freedom of expression, the function of education to foster in every student the ability to think and speak with disciplined enlightenment founded in knowledge and thought. We ignore the foundational importance of education to our ability to sustain democracy at our own peril. Historian Sean Wilentz places that peril into context in The Rise of American Democracy. “Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy,” Wilentz writes: “It must always be fought for by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power, and interest.”

Democratic successes require more than holding elections or pledging allegiance to the flag. The rule of law, the sovereignty of the people, due process and equal protection, equal rights, a separation of powers, and explicit limits on the power of government all come into play. These are not simple constructs. They are not hardwired or passed down through our dna. “Democracy succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible...

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