Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
Susanna Finnell described a series of deliberations about the costs
and benefits of college education, organized by the National Collegiate
Honors Council. 17
At Wake Forest, the Democracy Fellows are students who
participate in and organize deliberations throughout their fouryear
undergraduate careers. A rigorous study with a control group
found that the Democracy Fellows gained sophistication about
politics, efficacy, and an interest in political participation in contrast
to standard volunteering. 18 Some institutions have experimented
with larger-scale deliberations that take advantage of their research
capacities and technical infrastructure, as well as their students’
service. For example, the University of California, San Diego, has
launched “San Diego Dialogue,” an elaborate public deliberation
about economic development, which includes citizens of both San
Diego and Tijuana and is regularly fed by timely academic research. 19
A simultaneous and related development was the growth of
practical public scholarship, the theme of the 1996 edition of HEX. It
was not a novel idea in the 1990s to conduct research in partnership
with lay people. To name one earlier example, Jane Addams
had written her enormously influential works of social analysis by
working with her own Chicago neighbors, whom she treated as peers
and fellow investigators. However, in his 1996 HEX article, William
Sullivan argued that a different conception of scholarship dominated
after the Second World War. This was the idea that experts “‘solved
problems’ by bringing the latest technical knowledge to bear on matters
which, it has been widely presumed, the public as a whole was
too limited to understand, much less address.” 20 After World War
22
17 Susanna Finnell, “Higher Education: Teaching and the Deliberative Process,”
Higher Education Exchange (1998): 46-53.
18 Katy J. Harriger and Jill J. McMillan, Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students
for Democratic Dialogue (Dayton, OH: Kettering Foundation Press, 2007).
19 Mathew Hartley and Elizabeth L. Hollander, “The Elusive Ideal: Civic Learning
and Higher Education,” in The Public Schools, eds. Susan Fuhrman and Marvin
Lazerson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 267.
20 William M. Sullivan, “The Public Intellectual as Transgressor,” Higher Education
Exchange (1996): 20.