Harry Boyte, from the University of Minnesota, shared with us the history of the Obama campaign phrase, “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” In a column for the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, he took Maureen Dowd to task for suggesting Maria Shriver was the source of the quote. Instead, Boyte recalls the phrase from a song composed by Dorothy Cotton–inspired, he said, by a line from June Jordan’s “Poem to South African Women”–and familiar from his days with the SCLC.
The campaign phrase reflected the surprising note of optimism in a session addressing how civic engagement had “stalled” in universities. While the Kettering Foundation staff remarked that the event is non-partisan, speaker after speaker either openly endorsed the changes coming with a successful Obama candidacy or commented warmly about the wave of optimism and political engagement on college campuses as a result of this historic election. Obama learned deeply, after all, about civic engagement as a community organizer working in Chicago. There was a palpable expectation that we may be on the brink of changes that will “fundamentally reposition higher education in the public world.” Ira Harkavy argued that the sense that civic engagement is stalling was related directly to the “political era now coming to an end.”
First, I thank Deborah Witte of the Kettering Foundation for inviting me to attend the Democracy and Higher Education plenary; it was a pleasure to sit in and listen to comments from those who have worked at, analyzed, supported, and expanded the place of civic engagement in the academy for many years. The seventy participants included the presidents of Bates, Spellman, and Tougaloo colleges as well as university vice presidents, program administrators, faculty, public scholars, and many others. Participants came from France, Spain, Brazil, Argentina, and other countries.
I want to highlight a few of the ideas that I carried away from this plenary session.
Civic engagement is “mutually transformative” and has the potential “to democratize both communities and universities.”
Three movements are intersecting on college campuses: understanding diversity, civic engagement, and global perspectives.
The civic engagement/service learning movement needs to “break the silence” in regards to language that disempowers, often with the best of intentions, ordinary people—this was in reference to the image of professionals and college students identifying and solving problems FOR others. This theme recurs throughout the civic engagement literature and it reminds me of the concept of “shared authority’ articulated by historian Michael Frisch in regards to oral history and that is applied to public history as well.
Addressing politics and issues of power must be central to civic engagement efforts aimed at providing opportunities for students to develop as citizens. Too often, service learning/civic engagement is detached from discussions of politics and advocacy. “The democratic agenda [small d for deliberative democracy] must be the goal of these efforts.”
Civic engagement, one speaker suggested, must address the local dimensions of wider, global issues: schooling, youth at risk, health care, workers’ rights, the environment, etc. Civic engagement is about linking the university to place, to local communities. Some cited recent NIH and NSF initiatives that call for partnerships between research institutions and local community organizations.
The scholarship of engagement is “a better form of scholarship” and peer review mechanisms for this area of scholarship are needed. Universities are designed to change slowly to protect against political winds and yet change is called for. Traditional disciplines and the promotion and tenure process have not yet been opened up sufficiently to value the scholarship of engagement. There is a much needed movement beginning at major research universities to change this dynamic and other universities may follow their lead in the current “competitive” environment. One speaker suggested that disciplinary power over faculty makes faculty loyal to their disciplines rather than to their institutions and this power is used to put intellectual thought above action. A number of speakers linked this trend to the German research model that “trumped” American models.
At four-year universities the focus is more on promotion and on funding, at community colleges the concern is much more about faculty having the time for civic engagement.
The civic engagement movement is international.
Rather than being “stalled,” Elizabeth Hollander said, civic engagement is growing in many places but “we have failed to pull together these diverse initiatives.” She identified competition, money (federal, state support, and private philanthropy), and the pressure to diversify faculty and student populations as “change levers” that may promote civic engagement.
Marshalita Peterson spoke about civic engagement at Spellman in moving terms. She said that they asked themselves, “when you say you are a Spellman student, who are you?” They concluded that leadership and civic engagement were crucial to the Spellman identity. She argued that colleges need a strategic plan to create, maintain, and enhance a culture of civic engagement.
Scott Peters gave the most interesting talk from my perspective. He has been part of an effort to conduct oral histories, “creating space for deep, rich storytelling” about faculty experiences with civic engagement. Peters speaks from the perspective of land grant institutions and their agricultural extension movements—familiar themes from my own research for Six Generations Here . . . A Wisconsin Farm Family Remembers. Peters said, in contrast to the title of an essay by R. Eugene Rice, Making a Place for the New American Scholar, his concern is with “keeping a place for the old American scholar” rooted in the civic engagement of land grant universities. Peters teaches a course on narrative inquiry; he spoke eloquently of the political engaged narratives and “the culture of discovery through telling stories.”
Walter Plater suggested that civic engagement should be the integrating force-connecting research, service, and scholarship.
David Mathews wrapped the session up reflecting that university professors do things for which they are rewarded both monetarily and in terms of the respect of their peers. Mathews echoed others in saying that faculty who are involved with efforts at civic engagement still “put their careers at risk” and yet they have pushed this movement forward. Mathews argued that university administrators must reach past the disciplinary obstacles to broaden definitions and to build a strong basis for civic engagement in their institutions. Mathews wondered if energy without was the crucial factor driving change in higher education: “do the citizens who are trying to get some control over their lives today see the university as a valid place to address their concerns?”
These notes reflect only my impressions; please look to the Kettering Foundation publications for a more detailed rendering of these ideas.
