Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
heartland is the core of academic life and constituted by those domains
(frequently described as the disciplinary homes of faculty or
the liberal arts tradition) of practice still controlled by faculty and
ordered by a lingering commitment to truth through research, increasingly
refined methodologies and peer-reviewed scholarship.
“We are a university!” is not an uncommon response to one more
invitation to faculty, colleges, and universities to collaborate with
corporate interests, or other “peripheral” institutions, to commodify
academic labor or produce value-added knowledge products.
Work Worth Doing: HEX as a Site for Reimagining
the Work of the Mind as Public Work
The contributors to HEX are drawn I think to a vision of
democracy that redeems labor of all sorts. It is a vision grounded
in pragmatic, incremental social change within the many civic
workshops of civil society. It suggests that if your paid labor is a
source of angst, you can step into the public sphere or civil society,
engage in public work, and feel yourself stretched to your full
humanity.
But having given up, or set aside, an overt use of left or macroanalysis
like Noble’s, to illuminate the experiences of actual citizens
working for money under conditions of neoliberalism, HEX authors
have fallen back upon a pragmatic, at times anarchistic version of
American liberal democratic exceptionalism and avoid as does
Levine, socialist analysis, or newer theoretical approaches in the
humanities and social sciences. Its anarchistic affinity is revealed
in a public practice that does not easily embrace state power as a
way to balance the increasing power of global economic institutions
(understandable at a time when state power is ballooning in many
spheres in the name of “national security”) but rather discovers in
civic associations and civil society fertile ground for civic renewal
and creative collaborative problem solving. Whether “fessing up” to
its debt to Marxism or not, the vision behind the civic renewal movement
does reintroduce the ideal of an “association of producers.”
Producers who labor not in the neoliberal globalizing marketplace
but work together in civil society. Work worth doing moves from
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