A Different Kind of Politics: Readings on the Role of Higher Education in Democracy (review)

“Every state is a community, . . . and every community is established with a view to some good. The . . . political community, which is the highest of all . . . aims at good in a greater degree than any other and at the highest good” (Aristotle, qtd. in McKeon, 1941, p. 1127). A Different Kind of Politics: Readings on the Role of Higher Education in Democracy questions the operative definition of “the good” in higher education and challenges the path that many institutions have taken that departs from their original purpose. “Until the development of the modern research university, education for citizenship was considered the mission of colleges and universities in the United States” (p. vii). A great deal has changed since research universities have become the normative institutions.

Barker and Brown question the public mission of 21st-century postsecondary education where civic engagement and politics have become more technocratic than organic. They describe technocratic politics as framing the public service role of the university (offering information and technical support for community problems to citizens who are recipients of the service). In this system, citizens are dependent on professionals who have greater power and more competence to solve community problems. Citizens are served but not empowered. “Rather than empowering communities to act on their own, institutional approaches treat communities as dependent clients or passive recipients of help from above” (v).

In contrast, the authors frame organic politics as a dialogic process among parties who all have an interest in a beneficial outcome. This approach requires a continuous balancing of power among dialogue participants in order to rectify an “imbalance between the organic and the institutional components of democracy” (v).

Barker and Brown conclude that the problem is systemic. Universities treat faculty and students as individuals whose most important work is done individually and for whom most rewards are based on individual achievement. Pedagogy tends to focus on impersonal, information transfer. The political elements of power relationships among scholars, between and among departments, and between faculty and students are invisible in this work and this is a significant oversight.

This organizational milieu undermines community, creates non-productive competition, and fosters distrust within the institution. It also leads to mistrust and suspicion between the elements of the institution that are endeavoring to provide service to communities and the communities themselves because of the technocratic mentality of unequal power.

Chapter 1 by Hollander and Hartley discusses deliberative pedagogy, a process by which students learn to converse about complex issues and to integrate empirical knowledge with moral perspectives. Deliberative and dialogic conversations provide essential elements in the re-creation of organic democracy. “This requires the development of civic skills, such as an ability to listen carefully to citizens as well as experts, to formulate and articulate a well-founded opinion or idea and to weigh various policy alternatives” (p. 11). Deliberation is a skill that requires a great deal of practice to use effectively.

Chapter 2 applies deliberative pedagogy to the mind-set of the millennial generation with very convincing results. The author asserts that millennial students are often overwhelmed by the amount of information available to them and are seeking ways to integrate personal experience, moral perspectives, and technical information. Deliberation teaches these students how to articulate their opinions, listen to the opinions of others, manage their emotions and apply proposed solutions to civic problems. This extremely complex process allows students to identify both subjective and objective considerations in systematic ways under circumstances where civility is required. It is clear from the behavior of citizens during the town hall meetings on health care in 2009 that deliberative skills are sorely needed at all levels of democratic discourse in the United States.

Chapter 3 focuses on the epistemological challenges that deliberation, moral perspective, and engagement pose to objectivist approaches to teaching and learning, thus ”transforming the role of academic expertise from the dominant paradigms...