Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Agent of Democracy
a conversation with the mainstream that explores the credibility of
their own ideological claims regarding the political economy unless
mainstream institutions support that conversation and their wellmeaning
elders and leaders are willing to join it for the long haul.
Clearly national security and war have become the big issues
of our time. Nonetheless the practices and assumptions that support
neoliberal globalization as a natural process continue apace and are
for the most part, not explored through a critical lens or from theoretical
positions outside liberalism. There are many conversations in
both the United States and throughout the world about neoliberalism,
its linkages to imperialism or in-the-world economic practices
that challenge it. Surely university and college presidents can charge
their institutions and faculties to go ever deeper into the conundrums,
contradictions, and tensions globalization brings to all institutional
sectors, including their own. They can invite, even urge, faculty to
share their practice, research, and intellectual analysis with the
public. They can ask again and again how globalization does or
doesn’t advance democracy, create the conditions for work worth
doing, and provide structural support for human flourishing in the
United States and elsewhere, even as they know that their institutional
survival may be at risk should they ask too much or do too
little to meet market demands.
This may not be such a risk.
There are examples in the world of academic leadership that
suggest that a subtle macroconversation is taking place. I do not
mean at the insider disciplinary level at which it is hardly subtle.
There neoliberalism and globalization are concepts and practices to
be embraced or challenged theoretically, methodologically, and with
disciplinary focus. I mean at the level of an institution’s conversation
with the public at all levels—local, national, and international. I am
certainly not alone in arguing that such a subtle conversation is
being conducted creatively within higher education particularly in
the humanities and around diversity. 13 But I want it loud and proud.
44
13 Veninga and McAfee, Standing with the Public: The Humanities and Democratic
Practice.