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From The Editor
Ellen Schrecker
Our campuses have always served the common good. Besides the benefits that flow from academe's laboratories and agricultural testing stations, it's easy to view higher education as a form of community service. Now, however, we're being asked to expand our civic obligations. At a time when ordinary Americans are disengaging from public life, many leaders both on and off the campus are asking universities to be more active in their communities. Not only must we inculcate our students with democratic values and a sense of civic responsibility, but we must work directly with our neighbors as well.
After several members of the AAUP's staff attended a conference on the civic engagement of the university, Academe decided to look at the current movement to revitalize higher education's public mission. It's a diverse movement that ranges from lofty declarations of principles by college and university presidents to the local projects that faculty activists and their students have worked on for years.
Only a grouch could question the value of such an endeavor. Nonetheless, a bit of skepticism may be in order before classicists rush into social work and chemistry professors clean up toxic dumps. It's not clear that higher education either can or should solve the nation's social problems. We may not have the resources. Nor, despite the idealism of the movement's advocates, are universities necessarily more sensitive to the community than other institutions-like local governments, for example. Can the academy, Johnnella Butler asks, really promote equity and social justice?
It's also unclear how community-based projects will advance the educational mission of the university. While service education has a long history, expanding its scope, as Elizabeth Hollander and John Saltmarsh among others note, may require new forms of teaching and research. Harry Boyte argues for a more communal mode of scholarship, while Gregory Jay describes his school's attempt to insert civic engagement into its undergraduate core curriculum.
Another obstacle that these programs encounter is the difficulty of persuading tenure committees that community service projects constitute genuine scholarship. Cathy Burack and her colleagues are addressing part of this problem by creating a network of experienced academics who can assess the intellectual value of these kinds of activities. Nonetheless, as Barry Checkoway points out, if the university seriously commits itself to public service, it will have to revamp its traditional reward structure.
It may also have to rethink its relationships with the community. After all, civic engagement may bring some sticky real-world problems into the ivory tower. How, for example, might an institution respond to a "living wage" campaign on behalf of its own service and clerical workers that was organized by the local activists in one of the college's community service projects? And what might happen if an urban studies class began to work with a group of local residents who were opposing the university's physical expansion because it was gentrifying the neighborhood and decreasing the supply of affordable housing?
Finally, there is the issue of professional autonomy. Will faculty members have to participate in programs they did not design? Though, as Wendi Maloney shows, individual professors do initiate some exciting projects and all sides insist on faculty input, much of the impetus for civic education comes from above-from foundations, university presidents, and national organizations like the American Association for Higher Education. Moreover, since some of the signatories of the movement's key document have shown little respect for shared governance in their own institutions, the provenance of this otherwise well-meaning campaign gives cause for concern. As more and more administrators decide to make their schools "agents of democracy," perhaps they should be reminded that democracy begins at home.
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