Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Engaged University
thanks to several energetic new advocacy organizations: the Campus
Opportunity Outreach League, or COOL (founded in 1984), Campus
Compact (1985), and Youth Service America (1986). The federal government
assisted by creating the Points of Light Foundation, passing
the National and Community Service Act of 1990, and launching the
Corporation for National Service in 1993.
In colleges and universities, service learning is now very common
and various. In my view, the best examples are true collaborations
among students, professors, and community members; they have a
political dimension (that is, they organize people to tackle fundamental
problems collectively); they combine deliberation with concrete action;
and they are connected to “teaching and learning, research, and the
dissemination of knowledge”—the goals that, as Deborah Hirsch
wrote in HEX, “drive the university.” 15 Good service learning gives
students the authority to choose their own problems and responses.
The professor’s stance is open-ended. Much service learning fails to
meet these criteria, but the movement is full of energy and innovation.
A second example of the new public work was concrete experimentation
with deliberation, as exemplified by National Issues Forums,
Study Circles, Deliberative Polls, and Citizens’ Juries. Some of these
experiments originated in universities. For instance, the Center for
Deliberative Polling at the University of Texas organized and studied
deliberative exercises. In other cases, independent groups, such as
the National Issues Forums network and the Study Circles Resource
Center, led the experiments, but their reflective practitioners engaged
in dialogues with academics. And sometimes, higher education was
the site or the topic of public deliberation. HEX articles described
forums and other deliberative exercises conducted at Virginia Tech,
Texas A&M, and Franklin Pierce University. 16 In the 1998 edition,
15 Deborah Hirsch, “An Agenda for Involving Faculty in Service,” Higher Education
Exchange (1997): 35.
16 D. Conor Seyle, “NIF at A&M,” Higher Education Exchange (2000): 52-58; Douglas
Challenger, “The College as Citizen: One College Evolves through the Work of Public
Deliberation,” Higher Education Exchange (2000): 68-81; Anne Wolford, Larkin Dudley,
and Diane Zahm, “Supporting the Mission of a Land Grant University and Cooperate
Extension,” Higher Education Exchange (2002): 72-80.
21