Higher Education's Third Revolution: The Emergence of the Democratic Cosmopolitan Civic University

In this article, the authors argue that American higher education is in the early stages of a third revolution that is leading to the emergence of the democratic cosmopolitan civic university. To help accelerate its development, the authors propose that each higher educational institution make its highest priority the radical integration and improvement of the overall schooling system in its "home" (local ecological) community. They recognize the difficulty of putting this strategy into practice, but Benson and Harkavy emphasize that a similar strategy to advance university and community development had been employed at the turn of the 20th century by William Rainey Harper and John Dewey at the University of Chicago. The authors highlight three of the many university-school partnerships (including one engaging their own institution, the University of Pennsylvania) that illustrate an accelerating university civic responsibility movement. The authors conclude by calling on American research universities to take the lead in revolutionizing the overall American schooling system and thereby realize in practice the Harper-Dewey prophetic vision and strategy. (authors)