Democracy's Education

Description

Today Americans feel powerless in the face of problems on every front. Such feelings are acute in higher education, where educators are experiencing an avalanche of changes: cost cutting, new technologies, and demands that higher education be narrowly geared to the needs of today's workplace. College graduates face mounting debt and uncertain job prospects, and worry about a coarsening of the mass culture and the erosion of authentic human relationships. Higher education is increasingly seen, and often portrays itself, as a ticket to individual success--a private good, not a public one.

Democracy's Education grows from the American Commonwealth Partnership, a year-long project to revitalize the democratic narrative of higher education that began with an invitation to Harry Boyte from the White House to put together a coalition aimed at strengthening higher education as a public good. The project was launched at the beginning of 2012 to mark the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which created land grant colleges.

Beginning with an essay by Harry C. Boyte, "Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work," which challenges educators and their partners to claim their power to shape the story of higher education and the civic careers of students, the collection brings world-famous scholars, senior government officials, and university presidents together with faculty, students, staff, community organizers, and intellectuals from across the United States and South Africa and Japan. Contributors describe many constructive responses to change already taking place in different kinds of institutions, and present cutting-edge ideas like "civic science," "civic studies," "citizen professionalism," and "citizen alumni." Authors detail practical approaches to making change, from new faculty and student roles to changes in curriculum and student life and strategies for everyday citizen empowerment. Overall, the work develops a democratic story of education urgently needed to address today's challenges, from climate change to growing inequality.

Sujets

• Public Policy
• Political Science
• Politics
• Education

Informations

• Publié par: Vanderbilt University Press
• Date de parution: 01 février 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9780826520371
• Langue: English

Extrait

DEMOCRACY’S EDUCATION
Democracy’s EDUCATION
PUBLIC WORK, CITIZENSHIP, & THE FUTURE of COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES
EDITED BY HARRY C. BOYTE
VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY PRESS
NASHVILLE
© 2015 by Vanderbilt University Press
Nashville, Tennessee 37235
All rights reserved
First printing 2014
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LC control number 2014015261
LC classification number LC173.B69 2014
Dewey class number 379.73—dc23
ISBN 978-0-8265-2035-7 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2036-4 (paperback)
ISBN 978-0-8265-2037-1 (ebook)
I dedicate Democracy’s Education to the team members, coaches, teachers, faculty, staff, principals, and other participants in Public Achievement, in every country where they are learning to do citizenship as public work and showing its possibilities. They are creating grounded hope for the future, and a new narrative of education.
—Harry C. Boyte
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work
Harry C. Boyte
PART I. Democratic Narratives
1. Har Megiddo: A Battle for the Soul of Higher Education
David Mathews
2. A Democracy’s College Tradition
Scott J. Peters
3. The Democratic Roots of Academic Professionalism
Albert W. Dzur
PART II. Policy Makers and Presidents as Architects of Change
4. Democracy’s Future—The Federal Perspective
Martha Kanter
5. Reinventing Scholar-Educators as Citizens and Public Workers
Nancy Cantor and Peter Englot
6. Institutionalizing Civic Engagement at the University of Minnesota
Robert Bruininks, Andy Furco, Robert Jones, Jayne K. Sommers, and Erin A. Konkle
7. Education for a Rapidly Changing World
Judith A. Ramaley
8. Preparing Students for Work as Citizens: Reflections of a New College President
Adam Weinberg
PART III. The Faculty Experience and Faculty as Agents of Change
9. Can a New Culture of Civic Professionalism Flourish?
Maria Avila
10. Transformational Ecotones: The Craftsperson Ethos and Higher Education
Romand Coles and Blase Scarnati
11. Dismantling Inequality Regarding Scholarship
KerryAnn O’Meara
12. The Emerging Citizenry of Academe
Timothy K. Eatman
PART IV. From Citizen-Student to Citizen-Alumni: Students and Alumni as Agents of Change
13. Becoming a Civic Artist
Jamie Haft
14. What’s Doctoral Education Got to Do with It?: Graduate School Socialization and the Essential Democratic Work of the Academy
Cecilia M. Orphan
15. Fostering Civic Agency by Making Education (and Ourselves) “Real”
David Hoffman
16. The Civic Creativity of Alumni
Julie Ellison
PART V. Community Organizers Consider the Challenges
17. Breaking the Civic Spirit: Experiences of Young Organizers
Jenny L. Whitcher
18. “On Tap,” Not “On Top”
Robert L. Woodson Sr .
19. How Can Higher Education Reclaim Its Power?
Sam Daley-Harris
PART VI. Possible Futures
20. Illiberal Education
Benjamin R. Barber
21. Jobs, Jobs, Jobs: The Economic Impact of Public Work
Peter Levine
22. Reflections of a Civic Scientist
John P. Spencer
23. Higher Education and Political Citizenship: The Japanese Case
Shigeo Kodama
24. The Promise of Black Consciousness
Xolela Mangcu
25. Teaching as Public Work
Lisa Clarke
PART VII. Summing Up
26. Organizing Higher Education between the Times
Paul N. Markham
27. The Soul of Higher Education: Concluding Reflections
Harry C. Boyte
Contributors
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Democracy’s Education grows from the work of the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), a year-long alliance of colleges and universities, other associations, and individuals launched at the White House on January 10, 2012, which worked with the administration to revitalize the democratic story of higher education in America, in danger of being replaced with the story that higher education is mainly a ticket to individual success and achievement. I thank Jon Carson, then director of the Office of Public Engagement, who invited me to develop an initiative in partnership with the administration in March 2011, and also Jonathan Greenblatt, and Victoria McCullough at the White House, for their collaboration. I also thank Martha Kanter, Eduardo Ochoa, Phil Martin, Taylor Spanek, Sam Ryan, and Julie Heinz at the Department of Education for being partners in ACP. All were a pleasure to work with as ACP took shape.
My first call after Carson’s invitation was to Nancy Cantor, who stands out among American higher education presidents as a bold and visionary architect of “democracy’s colleges,” to use a concept central to this symposium. Nancy helped put together the Presidents’ Advisory Council—Brian Murphy, M. Christopher Brown, Thomas Ehrlich, Freeman Hrabowski, David Mathews, Paul Pribbenow, and Judith Ramaley—and hosted the two planning meetings. I greatly appreciate the sage counsel of the presidents as the American Commonwealth Partnership took shape, and also the support of Paul Pribbenow, who offered to host ACP at Augsburg College.
I express appreciation to the leadership team of Timothy Eatman, Julie Ellison, David Hoffman, Kara Lindaman, Paul Markham, Cecilia Orphan, Scott Peters, Julie Plaut, Blase Scarnati, Lucille Shaw, Stephanie South, and J. Theis. They contributed zeal, intelligence, and strategic insight in helping to plan and organize ACP. I also convey many thanks to George Mehaffy and Jennifer Domagel-Goldman, for all the ways the American Democracy Project contributed; to Jamie Haft, Adam Bush, and Kevin Bott, as well as Tim Eatman and Scott Peters, for the extensive involvements of Imagining America; and to Julie Plaut for Minnesota Campus Compact’s contributions.
John Spencer and Karla McGregor at the University of Iowa’s Delta Center, Scott Peters of Imagining America and Cornell University, Gwen Ottinger of Drexel University, Sherburne Abbott of Syracuse University, and Nicholas Jordan of the University of Minnesota have been colleagues and collaborators in developing the civic science initiative, which is going strong with support from the National Science Foundation and plans to launch a movement reconceiving the role of science and scientists in society in democratic terms. Julie Ellison has provided outstanding leadership for Citizen Alum. Bill Muse, Jean Johnson, Derek Barker, and John Dedrick were partners in developing the Shaping Our Future national conversations on the public purposes of higher education. The partnership is in a second stage, preparing for a national conversation on what communities should expect from higher education in the context of a dramatically changing world of work, to be launched in 2015. Background meetings with hundreds of citizens across the country have demonstrated that the themes of Democracy’s Education are much on people’s minds.
For feedback on the framing essay as it first took shape in a working paper for the Kettering Foundation, many thanks to Peter Levine, Derek Barker, Luke Bretherton, Lisa Clarke, David Hoffman, David Brown, Lisa Clarke, Garry Hesser, Barbara Crosby, Barry Checkoway, Gerald Taylor, Cynthia Estlund, John Budd, and Doran Schranz.
Special thanks to John Dedrick for encouraging and facilitating this project from the initial Kettering Foundation study through the book. His insights and encouragements in this, as in other projects, are invaluable. I also want to thank my many other colleagues at the Kettering Foundation, over many years, who have created a remarkable intellectual community for exploring these ideas; and to Michael Ames, director of Vanderbilt University Press, for his help throughout the manuscript preparation—and his many years of support for public work.
Finally, I want to express my profound appreciation to Marie-Louise Ström for continuous conversations on all these themes, and for our life partnership in this work.
DEMOCRACY’S EDUCATION
REINVENTING CITIZENSHIP AS PUBLIC WORK
Harry C. Boyte
To broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship.
—Septima Clark, on the larger purposes of the civil rights movement, circa 1960
The Power of Ideas
The fate of higher education and the larger democracy itself is inextricably tied to the way those of us in higher education understand citizenship, practice civic education, and convey our purposes to the larger society. If we are to navigate successfully the tsunami of changes sweeping over our institutions and society and to claim our own story rather than having it defined by vested interests with more narrow ends in mind, we will have to revisit conventional ideas of citizenship and liberal education. We need to move beyond narrow views of citizenship as voting and voluntarism, and reinvent citizenship as public work , work that explicitly and intentionally prepares our students (and ourselves) to be builders of the democracy, not simply helpers, voters, analysts, informers, or critics of democracy.
This means putting education for work with public qualities at the center of teaching, learning, and research, for the sake of ourselves as educators, for our students, and for the democracy.
Such civic education and the faith in democratic possibility it embodies have been urged by leaders in higher education such as Martha Kanter, undersecretary of education from 2009 to 2013, who calls for educational experiences that “prepare young peop