Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

A Portrait of a University
new knowledge and practice applied to public needs and issues
of local and national concern. This includes the scholarship and
artistic contributions of faculty as well as students.
• The public’s institutions of higher education must serve as
conservators of the experiences, discoveries, understandings,
and skills that are the essence of human enterprise and knowledge
and that provide the enlightenment necessary for wise
governance.
Today at Penn State, at least two doctoral students are undertaking
dissertations about public scholarship. We offer a public scholarship
minor on five of our campuses. We work under an umbrella
called The Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy, which
includes a coordinator funded by the Office of Undergraduate Education.
The laboratory sponsors a student club whose purpose is to
increase awareness of, and participation in, issues of public importance.
Several faculty public scholarship research projects are underway,
and we are able to provide limited seed money for research,
courses, professional travel, and fieldwork. Some of the details are
available on our Web site (www.publicscholarship.psu.edu). These
initiatives and others are useful artifacts of our consideration of
what it means to develop democratic capacity. A recent volume deserves
particular attention in the attempt here to describe what we
are doing and why. A Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy,
edited by Eberly and me and published as a volume in the New Directions
in Teaching and Learning series, presents research from six
Penn State faculty and five graduate students and a concluding
chapter from higher education reformer Judith Ramaley. The scholarship
focuses on:
• the constitutional foundation of public scholarship
• the individual, organizational, and epistemological factors that
shape faculty public scholarship engagement
• the ancient and contemporary connections between common
space and public scholarship that cross disciplinary boundaries
• the developmental challenges and competencies of the early
adult years and the scholarly basis for believing that public
scholarship is an effective means of education for young adults
in a democracy
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