Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Reconstructing a Democratic Tradition
One point needs to be stressed with regard to this first recurring
pattern in our interview data. We see it in the following comments
made in an interview with another professor in a natural science
discipline. This scholar said that for her, the “land-grant mission has
to do with sustaining communities, making sure knowledge that
gets generated builds and strengthens communities and doesn’t
jeopardize them.” But she was quick to add the following: “This
view of the land-grant mission is a minority view in my department.
The majority view is that we’re here to advance knowledge, we’re
here to advance our discipline, we’re here to educate students.” Not
only this scholar, but many of the scholars we interviewed who
articulated highly interactive views of the land-grant mission that
attend to civic as well as technical problems and issues also claimed
that such a view is not the norm in their academic departments and
institutions. What we should learn from this is that scholars who
hold highly interactive views of the land-grant mission are not only
up against the prevailing apolitical public service view of that
mission, but also the research university norm of civic detachment.
When these are combined, as I think they often are, it places public
scholars in an exceedingly difficult position. Efforts to reconstruct a
democratic tradition of public scholarship in land-grant colleges must
take this situation into account.
Working for the Public Good from the “Middle”
In a focus group interview that I conducted with a diverse
group of 15 faculty members from a variety of disciplines, I asked
them who they think they work for. Here is how a professor in the
natural science discipline of entomology answered my question:
I’ve started thinking recently, who are my clients? We
have an onion industry in [this state] that’s worth about
$50 million or so, and these people, I don’t know if it’s
the sulfur in the onions or what, but they have told faculty
members, “You work for us. You work for the
onion industry.” A number of different commodities
somewhat have that attitude. But when I think about
who I work for—and I think this is part of how I started
to feel comfortable with the land-grant mission—I
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