Democratic Engagement White Paper

On February 26-27, 2008, a colloquium of 33 academic leaders came together at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, for the purpose of critically examining the state of civic engagement in higher education. The primary goal of the meeting was to provide a forum in which a group of leaders in civic engagement and higher education could identify problems and issues associated with reforming higher education for community engagement and democratic citizenship. Dovetailing with this objective, another goal was to determine how best to strategically promote democratic citizenship as a key institutional priority for American colleges and universities. Organized by the Kettering Foundation and the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE), the meeting was oriented specifically around the democratic purposes of higher education, consistent with the belief that, as Frank Newman wrote in 1985, "the most critical demand is to restore to higher education its original purpose of preparing graduates for a life of involved and committed citizenship."

Dialogue at the colloquium was guided in part through discussion of the 2007 book by Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, Dewey's Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform, as well as publications by the Kettering Foundation, including Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey and Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education. Dewey's Dream acted as an inspirational catalyst for the meeting, with university-assisted community schools serving as a model for democratic civic engagement. What Dewey and university-assisted community schools emphasize is the meaning of democracy within an educational setting - not that it is merely the university's aspirational role to prepare students for civic responsibility after they graduate, but that through their educational experience students experiment with and practice democracy through their community-based educational experiences. The common thread running through the resources shared at the meeting is the importance of answering the question, "Higher education for what?" The premise of these books is that higher education in America has a fundamental democratic purpose - both educating for democracy and creating educational institutions that foster the revitalization of democratic society. This understanding of and commitment to the core democratic purpose of higher education framed the meeting dialogue.

A central framing question guided the Kettering colloquium: Why has the civic engagement movement in higher education stalled and what are the strategies needed to further advance institutional transformation aimed at generating democratic, community-based knowledge and action? The resulting conversation yielded an array of perspectives on the nature of the movement, the impetus for advancing a civic agenda in higher education, and how and in what domains (and even to what extent) change is required. Although there were many important insights shared at the meeting, the authors focus on a few themes which appeared to attract broad consensus.