Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
Land-grant practices do address scholarship diffusion and service
but are far from central to a university’s undergraduate instructional
mission.
Democratic capacity requires
“Students are members
of our academic communities—or
at least, they
should be.”
(“Public Scholarship at
Penn State: An interview
with Jeremy Cohen,”
HEX, 2005.)
civic engagement founded not on
acts of charitable volunteerism, but
on an instrumental obligation to
bring discovery and diffusion—
education—to bear on issues of
public consequence. The acts of
charity and selfless giving that often
provide the motivation for service
learning are marks of ethical commitment;
they are to be applauded.
They are—like the contributions of
civic groups, congregations, and fraternal organizations—appropriate
actions of students and other community members. Yet philanthropic
and sweat-equity participation without deep knowledge and active
engagement is not sufficient to fulfill the compact between higher
education and democratic sovereignty. Charity begins with an individual
ethic to help another. But democratic engagement is not an
individual act of charity. It is a national (some would say international)
political obligation to participate actively in democratic sovereignty. Education
has a unique, value-added role to play.
Some of us—myself included—now believe that sustaining
(some would say recapturing) our democracy is a core element and
an obligation of our professional work. Explaining this requires
focusing on complex relations between democracy and the Constitution.
I have attempted to avoid unnecessary excursions into an
arcane scholarship of constitutional theory and law. Nonetheless, focusing
on public scholarship with no more than a passing reference
to the complexity of democracy and its constitutional origins would
be like discussing Joyce’s Ulysses without reference to The Dubliners
and Portrait of the Artist. One story goes that Joyce purposefully filled
Ulysses with enough enigmas to keep “the critics busy for the next 300
years.” Public scholarship rests on the notion that democratic ca-
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