MoMent

A Crucible Moment: College
Learning and Democracy’s
Future calls for investing
on a massive scale in higher
education’s capacity to renew
this nation’s social, intellectual,
and civic capital.
In response to these and other dangerous trends, A Crucible Moment:
College Learning and Democracy’s Future calls for investing on a massive scale
in higher education’s capacity to renew this nation’s social, intellectual, and
civic capital.
As a democracy, the United States depends on a knowledgeable, publicspirited,
and engaged population. Education plays a fundamental role in
building civic vitality, and in the twenty-first century, higher education has a
distinctive role to play in the renewal of US democracy. Although the Bennett-
Nunn commission overlooked higher education as a potential source of civic
renewal, this report argues that colleges and universities are among the nation’s
most valuable laboratories for civic learning and democratic engagement.
The beneficiaries of investing in such learning are not just students or
higher education itself; the more civic-oriented that colleges and universities
become, the greater their overall capacity to spur local and global economic
vitality, social and political well-being, and collective action to address public
problems. Today, however, a robust approach to civic learning is provided to
only a minority of students, limiting higher education’s potential civic impact.
Too few postsecondary institutions offer programs that prepare students to
engage the questions Americans face as a global democratic power.
A Crucible Moment calls on the higher education community—its
constituents and stakeholders—to embrace civic learning and democratic
engagement as an undisputed educational priority for all of higher education,
public and private, two-year and four-year. While all parts of the higher
education enterprise need to build civic capital for our society, the focus of
this report is on undergraduate education. Such engagement will require
constructing environments where education for democracy and civic
responsibility is pervasive, not partial; central, not peripheral.
David Mathews describes democracy as depending on an ecosystem,
not only of legislative bodies and executive agencies, but also of civic alliances,
social norms, and deliberative practices that empower people to work together
in what Elinor Ostrom calls the “coproduction” of public goods (London
2010, iv). Every sector and every person can contribute to this civic enterprise,
including the K–12 education sector, where education for democracy and civic
responsibility needs to be a bedrock expectation.
A Crucible Moment explores how higher education can serve—for this
generation of students and for the nation’s globally situated democracy—as
one of the defining sites for learning and practicing democratic and civic
responsibilities. Since it is now considered necessary preparation for today’s
economy, postsecondary education has a new and unparalleled opportunity
to engage the majority of Americans with the challenges we face as a diverse
democracy. Moreover, today’s US college campuses, physical and virtual,
bring together a wider range of students—across class and color, religion and
gender, nationality and age—than ever before in our history. As such, twoyear
and four-year colleges and universities offer an intellectual and public
commons where it is possible not only to theorize about what education for
democratic citizenship might require in a diverse society, but also to rehearse
that citizenship daily in the fertile, roiling context of pedagogic inquiry and
hands-on experiences.
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