Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission?
to replace traditional religion and that colleges and universities
should play a key role in disseminating this new civil religion.
Jefferson wanted the secular government to organize a common
educational system, including public universities. Republican
government as the instrument of the public should support nonreligious
institutions of higher education with the civic mission
of educating both citizens and public leaders, all of whom would
play a role in the self-governing republic.
The changes inaugurated by the American Revolution led to
the creation of a new model of higher education more appropriate
for the new democratic republic: the people’s college. Examples include
Thomas Jefferson’s secular University of Virginia, women’s colleges,
land-grant universities, and historically black colleges. Because
the people’s colleges prepared students for participation in selfgovernment,
their public purposes constitute a civic mission, in
the full sense. The civic mission of the people’s colleges continued
to include the three public purposes traditionally embraced by the
congregational colleges—the production of public leaders, the dissemination
of important knowledge, and the development of the
type of normative, reflective thinking considered necessary for good
public decision making—however, they also added to the traditional
list. First, the people’s colleges increased public access to higher education
beyond an elite group of men, thus beginning to democratize
it. Second, rather than simply nurturing the reflective capacities
of students, the people’s colleges pioneered the idea of applying
knowledge to practical public problems, connecting higher education
to the collective work necessary to produce a commonwealth
or republic, which Harry Boyte has termed public work.
In 1819, Jefferson succeeded in founding the University of
Virginia, a state-sponsored university that did not have an official
religious affiliation. To fend off accusations of godlessness, Jefferson
invited particular denominations to set up divinity schools nearby,
so that students could get whichever sectarian viewpoint they
chose, while also receiving the benefits of a heterogeneous, civic
university. (The denominations did not take him up on his offer.)
Nevertheless, while the University of Virginia represents a new
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