Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
service-learning outreach are producing ferment. Faculty concern
over the disconnect between their work and the personal constructs
of professionalism that drew them to university careers have
seeded thoughtful, sometimes difficult conversations about the
scholar’s professional mission in
“The greatest threat
to our liberties and to our
national security may not
be from any number of
foreign individuals or
isms that select terror and
violence as their mode of
conquest. Our own failure
to adequately educate
young people in the public
duty of participation in
the public affairs of the
nation may be sufficient
to render the Founders
great experiment senile.”
(“Public Scholarship at
Penn State: An interview
with Jeremy Cohen,”
HEX, 2005.)
a democracy.
Students, like many other
Americans, also are increasingly
pessimistic about the legitimacy
of their government and about
their own ability to affect their
nation’s governance. This too is
sowing Penn State’s public scholarship
growth. Service draws
many students, perhaps as a way
to do something in what is otherwise
seen a disengaged political
environment. But other students
are quite purposefully seeking
something more than service opportunities
from the university.
They want to address the cause,
as well as the results, of social and
cultural impediments to human
rights.
The development of a public
scholarship community at Penn
State is a direct response from
faculty and students who believe
that the modern research university’s mission was not forever “fixed”
by the land-grant acts, the German university model that produced
great 20th-century research universities, or even the foresight of
John Dewey, Clark Kerr, or Ernest Boyer. Neither service learning,
nor fidelity to land-grant doctrine alone has been sufficient to address
the university’s obligation to generate democratic capacity.
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