Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
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undergraduate students. I wrote to the Vice President for Undergraduate
Education in 1999: “Public scholarship, sometimes referred to
as service learning, involves the development of regular opportunities
for students to apply their coursework and research to community
issues of consequence.” Since then, we’ve spent a fair amount of
time thinking about why public scholarship is not service learning
(although service learning pedagogies may be useful and effective
components of a public scholarship curriculum). That is a narrative
for another time.
Today I believe that public scholarship is a useful educational
dialog in which the notion of the public refers to notions of public good,
public ownership of discovery, and public obligations to democracy
—all elements of democratic capacity and democratic sovereignty.
Within this public scholarship explication, scholars and their institutions
are members of the public. In the International Encyclopedia of
Youth Activism, I wrote: “Public scholarship is the conduct of scholarly
and creative work, including teaching, research, artistic performance,
and service, in ways that contribute to informed engagement
in the democratic process.” The statement is purposefully broad—it
explicates without forever defining—and it is not limited to public
service. Rosa Eberly and I continued the explication in a visioning
essay for the 20th anniversary of Campus Compact in 2006: “Rather
than a prescriptive methodology, public scholarship is an educational
philosophy in which the mission or desired university outcome is
democratic capacity-building among students and contribution
to democratic sovereignty by faculty, students, and staff. Public
scholarship carries an explicit appreciation of education’s special
obligations and the value of fully integrating scholarship with democratic
practice.” We suggested that public scholarship universities
should subscribe to three corollaries:
• Students must receive effective instruction in the theory and
practice of democratic citizenship that includes appropriately
focused scholarship as well as field practice.
• The public has a right to benefit not only from the infusion into
the polity of citizens with democratic capacity nurtured by
scholarship and instruction in democratic principle and practice,
but also from the university’s discovery and diffusion of