Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
Democratic Studies or Democratic Capacity?
I’m not clear that there has ever been a golden age of democratic
learning—that is, of learning to be democratic. We are finding at Penn
State that the distinction is not trivial. With support from Kettering
Foundation, we hosted two dozen colleagues in November 2004 for
a National Public Scholarship Conversation. There was consensus
around the claim that democracy, social justice, community engagement,
and diversity should be part of the lexicon of public scholarship.
Yet explicating terms such as these, and focusing on how to
include them in the curriculum, was difficult.
A colleague, for example, wanted to follow up with a definition
of democracy and wrote to me shortly after the two-day gathering.
Professor Demos (yes, that’s a made-up name to protect friendship
and to focus on the point, not the individual) is a thoughtful and
deservedly respected scholar. Perhaps unintentionally, Professor
Demos’ gadfly definition has helped us at Penn State to identify a
public scholarship problem. Here is the relevant part of the note:
As for a definition of democracy, I was just concerned
in the beginning—but it did not prove especially crucial,
I think, the way discussion moved—that people
not take for granted that the best democracy is the one
with the most people participating or the most people
deliberating. My definition of democracy, like most, I
think, blends the features of widespread participation
with institutional mechanisms for keeping minorities
from being trampled on. So my definition is something
like —a system of political rule that rests on periodic
elections in a system of competing political parties
with guarantees of free speech and assembly in which
government decisions are confined by adherence to
the rule of law and a guarantee of individual rights
against the state, usually acknowledged in a written
constitution to which the government and the people
are responsible.
I love the energy and passion of the service learning/
public scholarship/civic engagement crowd. But—as
I am sure is true with you or anyone at a research university—I
am always engaged in an internal dialog in
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