Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

A Portrait of a University
volunteerism. Contributing to democratic survival is more complicated
than being willing to serve.
Yet student service in the guise of volunteerism has taken on a
life of its own in education. The talismanic view of service as independently
capable of generating and sustaining democratic capacity is
at best a fond hope. The habits of citizenship and comprehension of the
political system to which we subscribe—like the curricula of language,
fine arts, math, science, and the professions—can be learned and
practiced in the academy. Higher education, at least in my view, is
failing to root democracy into the lives and expectations of citizens.
Young adults are learning to engage with their communities, if at all,
through occasional individual acts of charitable volunteerism rather
than through informed and sustained political practices of democracy.
Even with attention to public scholarship theory, however,
teaching democracy is difficult. Students in Penn State’s Foundations
of Civic and Community Engagement course labored a good portion
of a recent semester under the false impression that public was another
word for poor. The students lumped together public welfare,
public assistance, public housing, and public service and viewed
service as charitable work to help the less fortunate—that is, the
public. It required nuanced teaching far beyond the casual engagement
of emotional journal reflection, supported by carefully drawn readings
and explicit scholarship, to teach the class that in a democracy We the
People are the public. Penn State public scholarship is trying to avoid
the prospect of having students view democratic obligation as discrete,
one-time service opportunities. You serve and you’re done. We want
instead to instill an understanding of citizenship that integrates students’
use of their scholarship in all its disciplinary richness with a deep
awareness of democratic obligations to address public (that is to say,
common or shared) problems and to frame citizenship responsibilities
as ongoing. Citizenship is something you do every day.
Infrastructure and Institutional Support
We have developed a Penn State community called the Public
Scholarship Associates, which has grown from a literal handful
of colleagues to scores of faculty, professional staff, graduate, and
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