Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
No wonder students are having a difficult time distinguishing
partisanship from the Constitution’s implicit political compact that
obligates citizens to be governors as well as the governed. Democratic
governance is rife with political questions. Does the president
have inherent authority to engage in what he refers to as a war
against terror in whatever ways he sees fit? May the right of habeas
corpus be eviscerated by administrative fiat or legislative action without
violating the Constitution? The Constitution and two centuries
of case law provide far more useful responses than the shriek of
radio commentary or the oppressive censorship of neutrality. Learning
to make sense of the political structure of a democratic system,
however, takes sustained work—more than volunteerism alone. Our
job as faculty is not to provide partisan responses, but it is to help
students understand that questions involving war, taxes, health care,
and civil rights are political questions and that the answers citizens
choose have consequence. Choosing responses to political questions
is part of learning to be a citizen in a democracy. Learning these democratic
skills requires explicit knowledge and guided practice—no
less so than learning math, language arts, or music. Somewhere,
we have failed as educators to fully grasp the fact that nothing about
democracy, not its theory and certainly not its practice, is hardwired
into anyone.
The founders studied the work of the French philosophes, who
studied not only the political sciences of the day but also the histories
of the Romans and the Greeks and other failed and successful
polities.
The separation of democratic learning from academic learning
is further complicated today by high-profile attacks on the perceived
politicization of the curriculum. When the Pennsylvania State Legislature
launched formal hearings in 2005 into the alleged partisanship of
faculty, Penn State conducted a study of the years 2000 to 2005. During
those 5 years, 177,457 class sections were offered. Students had filed a
total of 13 formal complaints about partisanship or other inappropriate
faculty classroom activities. The dearth of specific instances of
student complaints suggests strongly that there was neither partisan
smoke nor political classroom fires fanned by either the right or the
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