Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
Second, I have a different take on the nature and meaning of
the relationship of public work and paid commodified knowledge
work. Levine describes HEX scholars as engaged in “civic work.”
His analysis of two generations of such inclined academics focuses
primarily on the “civic” dimension of civic work with a nod to the
transformations in paid academic labor over the same period. Those
transformations appear as backdrop to his story. I argue that they
should be center stage. I will argue that civic work, (aka “public
work”) is the default form of dignified human work inside and outside
the academy, as paid labor loses its remaining generative capacity
under conditions of neoliberal globalization. Here is where
abstract theory of a certain un-American sort is essential.
As presented by Levine, HEX authors and civically engaged
faculty are rooted in a bedrock commitment to democratic pluralism
and deliberative democracy and therefore critical of forms of
intellectual analysis that are too totalizing and hence violative of
openness. Or, it may seem too abstract and remote from the concrete
lives of American citizens.
I argue the contrary. HEX authors like all intellectuals, like all
people, use implied theories, bits of frameworks, heady ideas, thick
concepts as “objects to think with.” And, given the changes in theory
and practice brought to the table by scholars critical of the liberal
tradition (e.g., postcolonial theorists, radical feminists, queer theorists,
advocates of poststructuralism and postmodernism), there are a
lot more concepts out there. Why bolt from those scholars who frankly
offer to work with the public to put the theoretical pieces together in
public spaces in public? Not as part of an insider agenda to transform
the world but rather as in, “Wow! If you look at things from outside
the liberal frame, you might make slightly better sense of your experience
and understand what all that lefty stuff going on in Latin America
is all about. And maybe why so many throughout the world reflecting
on their experience, decide the United States is an imperialist nation.”
Given the historical moment we are in and the scale of American
action in the world, such fresh perspectives can certainly be useful.
The civic renewal movement is exactly such an effort to help
citizens theorize from their experience. But it refuses to take on
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