Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission?
training programs from the onslaught of the supposedly ignorant
public and to prevent the creation of an overly educated workforce,
administrators at elite institutions like Columbia and the University
of Chicago proposed the creation of two-year colleges offering the
public vocational training. While these “junior” colleges would offer
a college-prep option, two-thirds
to three-quarters of junior college
“The ideal of objectivity
increasingly eclipsed
the civic value of public
engagement on which the
American Social Science
movement was built. In
short, academic social
science scholarship lost
sight of its original
civic purposes.”
(“The Civic Roots of
Academic Social Science
Scholarship in America,”
HEX, 2000.)
students were expected to track
into terminal vocational programs.
Interestingly, citizens did not
want vocational education; they
wanted a traditional liberal arts
education, and so people refused
to enroll in the vocational tract. In
fact, until the 1970s, only 25 to 30
percent of students ever opted for
vocational training. Junior colleges
appealed to the public only as stepping
stones toward traditional fouryear
institutions. Consequently,
out of an elitist attempt to insulate
higher education from the public
came the proliferation of two-year
liberal arts colleges—the birth of
the community college movement,
a version of the people’s college. And in the tradition of the
land-grant institutions, these new community colleges sought to
expand access to higher education, nurture the capacity for reflection
through a traditional liberal arts curriculum, and prepare
students to engage in public work—this time in cities as well as
in small communities.
Democratization during the Cold War
Changes in American politics and public life that occurred
after World War II directly affected the evolution of the modernist research
university. It was during this period that liberal individualism
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