Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

A Portrait of a University
the Philadelphia Convention,” Marshall said.
Nor do I find the wisdom, foresight and sense of justice
exhibited by the framers particularly profound. To the
contrary, the government they devised was defective from
the start, requiring several amendments, a civil war and
momentous social transformation to attain the system of
constitutional government, and its respect for the individual
freedoms and human rights we hold as fundamental
today.
For us, a transformative question has been: are the pedagogical and
policy tenets of service learning and land-grant service sufficient to
provide a democratic capacity keystone?
Madison’s emphasis on education as a means to build democratic
capacity, and Marshall’s acknowledgement of the American democracy’s
transformational needs are useful academy reminders. The
North American revolutionaries were willing to challenge the status
quo and to risk what early modern English writers, including advocates
of individual liberty, such as John Milton and John Locke, were
not: Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and others
did not fear We the People and hence did not fear the public sovereignty
of democracy. They were willing to experiment. They recognized that
only a delicate balance of structural government balanced by the
capacity of the public to govern held out the pragmatic promise of
sustainable liberty.
Some of the roots of Penn State’s take on public scholarship are
in the service ideals of the land-grant mission. The service-learning
movement has been an entry portal for others. But these gateways
are proving insufficient to sustain interests that go beyond direct social
service. The denial of tenure to junior faculty who have focused on
service and the common practice of rooting service learning in student
affairs rather than scholarly traditions have proven to be dysfunctional
conditions for scholars drawn to academic careers by the value—and
values of—scholarship itself. Where is the scholarship in service, they
ask? How can volunteerism replace the academic foundations of the
sciences, arts, and professions? Where is the purposeful democratic
learning in the land-grant? The lack of direct connection between
sustaining democratic ideals and the direct service of land-grant and
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