Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Should Higher Education Have a Civic Mission?
finding their own solutions? And, can we impact public
policy that creates both economic and social opportunities
for people to improve the quality of life?
Responding to this challenge, a colloquium of university and
college presidents issued a “Declaration on the Civic Responsibility
of Higher Education” (1999). This document calls for the creation
of a “national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and
civic mission of higher education,” so that our colleges and universities
will once again become “vital agents and architects of a
flourishing democracy.” This declaration built directly on the very
similar “Wingspread Declaration on the Civic Responsibilities of
Research Universities,” which was issued the previous month by
Campus Compact, the American Council on Education, and a wide
variety of other organizations and individuals.
Since its founding, Campus Compact has developed into a “national
coalition of more than 950 college and university presidents—
representing some 5 million students—dedicated to promoting
community service, civic engagement, and service-learning in higher
education.” Subsequently, in 2004 the American Association of
State Colleges and Universities started the “American Democracy
Project,” focusing on institutions not affiliated with Campus Compact.
This project is “a multi-campus initiative that seeks to create an
intellectual and experiential understanding of civic engagement for
undergraduates” at member institutions and “produce graduates
who understand and are committed to engaging in meaningful
actions as citizens in a democracy.”
The burgeoning movement towards resuscitating and reconfiguring
the civic mission of higher education relates to a number
of changes in public life. First, during the last decades of the 20th
century, politics became a battlefield. The so-called “consensus” of
the 1950s broke apart during the 1960s, as the nation found itself
torn over questions of race and gender, war and peace, sexual liberation
and traditional morality. The politics of divisiveness gained
steam during the 1970s, when evangelical Christians entered politics
en masse in opposition to many of the changes spearheaded
by new social movements of the 1960s, including the Equal Rights
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