Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

A Portrait of a University
If public scholarship, like service learning and land-grant outreach,
is about the service of the academy to others, then precisely because it
is located within the university it is also about the purposeful conservation
of knowledge and the diffusion of knowledge toward
democratic ends. The public scholarship sprouts fertilized by Penn
State’s rich land-grant service roots did not germinate in the 1862
Land Grant Act or the 1985 insight of Stanford president Don Kennedy,
Brown president Howard Swearer, and Georgetown president
Timothy Healy, that led to the invention of Campus Compact and
the fertilization of the university service ethos. Penn State’s public
scholarship germinated in the framers’ faith in the promise of sustainable
liberty based on public sovereignty and on public sovereignty
that is nourished by education as well as by experience. Service
learning and land-grant policy nourish a university’s best instincts.
Democratic principle—a constitutional obligation in the United
States—provides a foundation deep enough to move discovery,
diffusion, and democratic practice from charitable good will to
political obligation.
The comments that follow consider three formative elements
of our public scholarship work: the distinction between learning
about democracy and learning democratic sovereignty; the importance
of viewing service and service learning as elements of a larger
endeavor in which service is only one component; and the value
of a grassroots infrastructure when institutional support is lacking.
They are neither fully inclusive nor complete. I’ve borrowed, begged,
and reported ideas without proper citation and credit from several
colleagues, including Carol Colbeck, Rosa Eberly, Connie Flanagan,
Patty Wharton Michael, David Riley, Emily Janke, Tina Brazil, and
Lakshman Yapa, among others. My translations may not represent
their views faithfully, let alone the views of my institution. These
are my interpretations as an academic administrator, schooled in
literature and creative writing during a time of political unrest at
San Francisco State, and in First Amendment and behavioral communication
scholarship at the University of Washington at the end
of a cycle of constitutional rights expansion.
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