Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Limits of Public Work
paid work to public work. From the production of widgets to the
coproduction of public goods. 8
Further, in the name of narrative thickness (all citizens have a
story to tell), it avoids the use of concepts that seem initially unrelated
to citizens’ concrete lives.
One person’s contemporary hymn
to a vital civil society, could be
another’s updated version of old
anarchist dreams. But anarchists
told their story in the context of a
multiplicity of political theoretical
frameworks within and outside
liberalism, including socialism.
The civic conversation must have
been decidedly more edgy in
Jane Addam’s Hull House!
Deliberative democracy,
civic engagement and renewal,
and finally your university situated
in the commons as against
constituting its own separate
ivory commonwealth, and you’ve
“In the effort to professionalize
the mind and
certify knowledge, faculty
in higher education may
have inadvertently undermined
the very idea of
education as a transcendent
public value, a good in
itself broadly valued and
needed in a democracy.”
(“Proles, Entrepreneurs,
or Public Scholars?,”
HEX, 1998.)
got a type of work that conceivably supports human dignity and
democracy. But I ask whose work? And why the shift from the
more traditional meanings of academic work to those that seem
to jump on board the democracy train? And is this approach to
academic practice and public work sufficient to derail or even
slow down that other train? A neoliberal train, which seems to be
gathering on board the whole of humanity, forcing its passengers
to rush ever faster to a temporal and spatial world that just might
destroy our capacity for community, muting our ability to ask
whether such a world is generative of a life worth living and if so,
for whom?
8 Sirianni and Friedland, The Civic Renewal Movement, 135.
39