Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Why This Book?
The book is rooted in what these eight educators have written for
HEX over the years, and we have salted each chapter with quotes from
their prior contributions. We did not want, however, a stew of their
previous writings, but instead new pieces informed by their current
work and the conversations they shared at Kettering workshops over
the two years the book was in development. At the workshops, they
used a deliberative process, not for the sake of compromise or consensus
but knowing that together they could fashion a richer understanding
of what higher education can do to revitalize democratic practices.
Everyone understood that such an exchange helped curb any pretensions
that someone could somehow get things “right” before engaging
others in the ongoing narrative that developed. As veterans of the academic
scene, no one had any illusions that there would be agreement
and some were puzzled by being paired up in chapters, but we stuck
with it so that differing views coexist in the book, just as they did in
the workshop conversations they shared.
Chapter One—The Landscape of Higher Education
To start things off, we asked Peter Levine, research scholar and
director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning
and Engagement at the University of Maryland, to describe from
his vantage point what has been going on in higher education since
Kettering first published HEX, or what David Mathews referred to
as the “landscape.”
Of course, when any group of people views a landscape, each
person may see and remember different highlights. For Levine, what
first distinguished the HEX years was the engagement of what he calls
“Boomer faculty,” a generation shaped by the tumultuous 60s and
70s, with Generation X and their “rejection of formal politics.” The
engagement of these two generations turned them to various forms of
voluntary public work, which included service learning, deliberation,
public scholarship, and using diversity to “expand the cultural commons.”
Levine sees a greater interest in formal politics with the coming
of the Millennial Generation, shaped by the events of 9/11, but he notes
that these three intersecting generations are all committed to the “openendedness”
of “democratic participation, diversity, consensus building,
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