Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission?
disconnected from its traditional civic mission. While a college education
was becoming widely available to members of the American
public, the content of that education had shifted. The curriculum
began to focus less and less on nurturing civic capacities and more
and more on serving the professional and vocational interests of individual
students. So while colleges and universities increasingly
focused on producing experts and professionals, they deemphasized
the historical goal of educating citizens to participate in democratic
self-government.
The reductionist push to turn colleges and universities into
credentialing services for individual students moved higher education
away from its traditional civic mission, yet the dominant
“economic model” did not end higher education’s long civic history.
Instead, a movement has developed within higher education that
seeks to revitalize and reconfigure its traditional civic mission.
This new trend began to develop during the 1960s. For example,
the (white) student movement focused much of its attention on
democratizing higher education in terms of access, content, and
control. That is, in 1961 Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), an
organization that wanted American democracy to become more
participatory, criticized universities for their lack of civic mission
and their service to the military-industrial complex. Bemoaning the
apathy of most college students, SDS argued that the mind-set of
their peers was produced in part by the type of education they received
at college: “Apathy is not simply an attitude; it is a product
of social institutions, and of the structure and organization of higher
education itself.” They specifically criticized the academy’s overemphasis
on objectivity and specialization and pointed out the ways
the university reflects the norms of the larger society, even as it
helps shape them.
In addition, the civil rights movement, including the black
student movement, also sought the democratization of higher education.
In 1962, James Meredith became the first African American
student to enroll in the University of Mississippi, protected by federal
marshals. In 1963, despite the efforts of George Wallace, Vivian
Malone and James Hood registered for classes at the University of
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