Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
Boyte welcomed the opportunity for “updating and new
thoughts,” given the intellectual and experimental ground that he
had covered since David Brown’s HEX interview with him in 2000.
In tying the threads together, Boyte takes aim at “technocratic politics—domination
by experts removed from a common civic life—
[that] has spread throughout contemporary society like a silent
disease.” The Boyte “voice” on public work remains at the center
of what Kettering and HEX are about—democracy is a verb.
Chapter Four—Public Scholarship
We asked Scott Peters, associate professor of education at Cornell
University, who has been so prominent in HEX journals helping
to develop the perspective of “public scholarship,” to share his ongoing
research of the new connections that land-grant colleges and
universities have been forging with the public. Peters’ piece anchors
the chapter, which also includes Jeremy Cohen’s story of the public
scholarship of faculty and students at Penn State.
In his piece, Peters responds to a question posed by Noëlle
McAfee, another contributor to the book, “what kind of relationship
should there be between the academy and the public?” Looking
back, Peters sees the importance of the agriculture extension work
of the land-grant system. Looking ahead, however, he sees a “civic
conception of academic professionalism” more tenuous. After conducting
extensive interviews, both individual and focus group, with
current land-grant faculty engaged with the public, Peters found
that these “remarkably positive people” do not see their work
“valued, supported, or pursued by most of their academic peers.”
And so he concludes that such scholars face the task of reconstructing
the democratic tradition of public scholarship in the land-grant
system. Can they succeed?
Cohen, professor of communication and associate vice president
and senior associate dean for undergraduate education at Penn
State University, hardened by academic experience but with an infectious
idealism nonetheless, was the subject of a HEX interview in
2005 and told about the ongoing story of public scholarship at Penn
State. So we asked him to advance that narrative by contributing
6