Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Reconstructing a Democratic Tradition
as public work: work that Harry Boyte defines as “sustained effort
by a mix of people who solve public problems or create goods,
material or cultural, of general benefit.” 5
The academic revolution included the emergence of the research
university and the accompanying process of professionalizing
the academic calling. According to Richard Hofstadter, during the
academic revolution scholars began to overcome their “traditional
civic passivity and take an active part in the shaping of political
events.” Armed with “empirical specialized skills,” Hofstadter
writes, scholars had “not only prestige but some real marketable
advice to bring to public life.” For the first time, “the profession
developed the capacity both for large-scale innovative work in
scholarship and for social criticism and practical contribution to
the political dialogue of American society.” 6
In exercising the capacity to take up the academic profession’s
expert and social critic roles, scholars encountered an important
dilemma: how and for what purposes they should relate their
expertise to the process and work of democracy. While engaging
in democracy offered potential benefits, it also carried potential
risks. For example, if we take democracy to mean rule by the people,
or “self-rule,” as historian Robert Wiebe puts it, there was (and of
course still is) a risk of becoming engaged in it in technocratic ways
that disempower, sideline, or marginalize citizens. 7
The history of how scholars have perceived and worked
through the dilemma of the relation of expertise and democracy (or
failed to do so) is highly complex and many sided, conditioned
by situation, context, discipline, institutional type, and many other
matters. Despite this complexity, it is possible to identify three different
perspectives on the dilemma, tied to three positions in the
5 H. C. Boyte, Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia,
PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 5.
6 R. Hofstadter, “The Revolution in Higher Education,” in Paths of American Thought,
(eds.) A. M. Schlesinger, Jr. and M. White (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1963),
287-288.
7 See R. H. Wiebe, Self-Rule: A Cultural History of American Democracy (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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