Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

The Limits of Public Work
that freshens the mind and expands the soul as against being a
modestly cynical exercise in credentialing. Deep frameworks do
change and consciousness of their existence in our own souls, helps
change them.
But beyond the assertion that citizens and faculty are complex
beings capable of thinking the world anew, there are brute facts as
well. Sweet as the HEX vision may be, we know that outside those
free spaces, factories close, industries move, communities crash, governments
fall, power corrupts, war happens, resources are allocated,
laws are changed, and people’s lives are improved or shattered by
those changes.
HEX scholars and practitioners seem to harbor the hope that
if they help create a democratic commons, a vital and pluralistic
civil society, everyone will come and recognizing each other’s
humanity beneath the diversity, together begin the long march to
recapture many institutional sectors, transforming seemingly
rigid structures into polities alive with democracy. If they lose
the sense of governance and control in their own institutions of
higher education as market pressures and norms reshape those
institutions, they can look fondly at civil society hoping that the
democratic values nurtured in its cultivation can bleed back into
both market and state, transforming them and ultimately higher
education as well.
If once in those free spaces, they have to bite their tongue so
the plumber can speak, so be it. But maybe the plumber can tell the
story that opens up the broader conversation about political economy
and the nature of work in our times. Maybe then the scholar
will share with the plumber what she knows about the history of
labor, about Eugene Debs and Emma Goldman, about the way in
which our contemporary world-spanning, neoliberal political economy
so vast and seemingly uncontrollable, is a human creation, was
once otherwise and could be different. Perhaps the plumber already
knows this.
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