Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

A Portrait of a University
pacity is derived not from a progression of historical enigmas, but
from a purposeful recognition of the role of enlightenment in a
sustainable democracy. The university’s task is not to simplify
democratic engagement by turning it into an act of community
volunteerism or a democratic sound bite. The synthesis of discovery,
diffusion, and democratic practice, like an atom’s electrons, neutrons,
and positrons, interact. Eliminating any element—discovery, diffusion,
or democratic practice—alters the democratic chain reaction.
Public scholarship is neither an academic discipline, nor a
one-dimensional pedagogy, nor another word for service. It is an
idea. I said in a 2005 HEX interview that public scholarship ideas
are derivative, links in a chain of science, humanities, and art that
is hundreds of years old. I do not mean by that, however, that as a
set of ideas or practices public scholarship is not also new, or at least
a reimagination of education’s role in building democratic capacity.
Some, perhaps contributing to this volume and many at Penn
State, suggest that public scholarship is the revitalization of the landgrant
mission. Neither history nor practice support that notion fully.
The 1862 Morrill Act was pragmatic, instrumental, and fiscally farsighted.
Congress recognized the value generated by support for
and maintenance of at least one college in each state:
where the leading object shall be, without excluding
other scientific and classical studies and including military
tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are
related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such
manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively
prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and
practical education of the industrial classes on the several
pursuits and professions in life.
It is fragmentary, however, to rest on the land-grant mission alone
as the ethical, moral, legal, or normative rationale for Penn State’s
21st-century public scholarship forays. The land-grant service ethos
is only one tile within a finely detailed mosaic.
Beyond the Land-Grant: The Arts of Liberty
In fairness, it may be that the 1862 legislative intent Congress
had in mind in promoting the “liberal” education of the industrial
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