Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Engaged University
The shift that I am describing was ideological. Cooper, Royce,
and other contributors to HEX made points incompatible with
Marxist and postmodernist political theories. They were eager to
strengthen and enhance existing forms of democratic politics and recover
local traditions. They were also inclined to listen to what their
fellow citizens were saying, instead of suspecting that other people
had been manipulated by capitalism, advertising, or politicians to
adopt positions contrary to justice and their own interests. They
rejected the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” in Paul Ricoeur’s phrase.
When HEX was founded, less than one in five Americans
identified themselves as “liberals” in the National Election Studies
poll, compared to 35 to 40 percent who called themselves “conservatives.”
(That remained the ratio in 2004.) Therefore, academics who
held open-ended discussions with their fellow Americans had to
listen to a lot of arguments and
premises associated with the political
right. Professors who believed
in open-ended deliberation might
disagree with these conservative
opinions, but they couldn’t dismiss
them or bypass them. The fundamental
premise of deliberative
politics is that one ought to take
other people’s beliefs and opinions
seriously and treat them with
respect. If average Americans
deserved to be listened to, and if
a plurality voted for conservative
politicians and causes, then the ascendancy
of the right could not be
“I think it should
be pointed out that the
culture of American
universities is not
uniform; rather, it is
passionately contested.”
(“What Is ‘Public’ About
What Academics Do?:
An exchange with Robert
Kingston and Peter Levine,”
HEX, 2004.)
dismissed as the result of nefarious tactics by elites (e.g., campaign
donations, media manipulation, and the like.) It had to be treated as
a legitimate popular movement and the authentic point from which
many Americans entered conversations.
Nevertheless, the new civic politics was not itself right-ofcenter,
or moderate, or otherwise easy to categorize ideologically.
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