Democracy, Diversity, and Civic Engagement

Civic education won’t work without democratic practices. When universities reach out to their communities, they must do so with sensitivity to everyone in them.

By Johnnella  E. Butler

We have also concluded that teaching citizenship will demand radical change in higher education. But how do we begin to tackle the age-old problem of having the university connect intellectual pursuits, research, and discovery to teaching and addressing societal needs? How do we infuse our pedagogy, our curricula, and our research with values and behaviors that encourage in our students self-assertion informed by a shared sense of community and the common good?

Such questions about the relationship between social responsibility and institutional and academic missions undergirded the discussions at Wingspread. I found these exchanges instructively fraught with two overriding tensions: first, the pull between the professional role of faculty members and the public intellectual role each of us assumes to a varying degree and, second, the conflict between our national aspiration to be a democratic republic and the reality of our being a nation whose commitment to democracy is threatened by racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ageism, excessive materialism, and a peculiar numbness toward the suffering of others.

Whether we can help our students embrace civic engagement and social justice in a world giddy with the material promise of global growth and technology depends on whether individual faculty members and administrators can lead institutions to recognize and productively engage these tensions. For faculty members in particular, effective leadership means assuming in some fashion the role of the public intellectual in working with students and communities.

Public Intellectual

During the 1990s, an array of events raised the idea of the public intellectual in the nation’s consciousness. Scholars reached citizens in town meetings through "One America in the Twenty-first Century: The President’s Initiative on Race" and through the National Endowment for the Humanities’ project, "A National Conversation on American Pluralism and Identity." And of course television brought the many pundits debating affirmative action, abortion rights, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Waco disaster, and the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City to people’s living rooms.

Whether associated with higher education or not, the public intellectual traditionally speaks from an informed position on serious moral, social, cultural, or political issues, bringing the issues to the public with clarity, foresight, and honesty. In the broadest and most useful sense, the public intellectual is a scholar-activist. Yet many faculty members shy away from claiming this role. The reasons for their hesitancy lie in a certain cynicism about the promise of democracy coupled with the commercialization of discourse on talk shows, news roundtables, and the like. Demoralization resulting from the implicit challenge to academic freedom in the attacks on tenure and from the corporate redefinition of higher education only adds to professors’ reluctance to take on new roles.

To my mind, this holding back is a painful irony, because faculty members who can see themselves as public intellectuals can better help students become responsible citizens. The role of the faculty member as public intellectual supports a set of intricately related ideals and practices that can foster this central educational goal:

• Democracy and social justice, which cannot stand alone but are symbiotically related;
• Liberal education, which grounds the specialist in the cultural and social dimensions of human life;
• A quest for scholarly accuracy that encompasses the past, the present, and imagined futures as well as the emotional, subjective, and objective dimensions of our human existence; and
• A predisposition to hearing, connecting, and engaging the different voices and stories that shape humankind’s inequities and potential.

These ideals and practices coincide with the stated missions of most universities and colleges, and many of us as professors seek to nurture them as we serve as public intellectuals in our communities, our cities, and our university systems. They are ideals we hope our students will adopt.

But in his 1997 article, "The Decline and Fall of the Public Intellectual in America," British intellectual and writer Michael Ignatieff observed a gap between our aspirations for society and reality:

Where are the independent intellectuals now? Worthy professors, cultural bureaucrats, carnival barkers, and entertainers. The death of the intellectual has left a void in the centre of public life. In place of thought, we have opinion; in place of argument, we have journalism; in place of polemic we have personality profiles; in place of reputation, we have celebrity.

Filling the void Ignatieff identifies is our challenge. As faculty members, administrators, foundation officers, and leaders in higher education, we need to prepare students for life beyond college. How we perceive just what that preparation should entail depends on how we view and interpret values such as universality, cosmopolitanism, objectivity, subjectivity, the self, and the "other."

Framing Questions

At Wingspread, we discussed different dimensions of an overriding question: what is the civic mission of the research university in a diverse democratic society? We parsed it into further questions: what is the meaning of civic renewal for different groups with diverse histories and experiences? How can we, in higher education, identify civic competencies for active participation so that our students will use and critique our political system, guided by a shared sense of the common good? How can human dignity, equity, and social justice define the form and content of a program for civic engagement? How can these questions help us use technological advances to serve the common good, whether, for example, through distance education, community projects, or global economic alliances?

As might be expected, matters that have concerned academics over the past decade shaped our discussion. What, for example, are the functions of teaching, scholarship, analysis, and discovery, given the massive technological changes occurring alongside abject material and spiritual poverty? Can curriculum and pedagogy help students develop the skills and knowledge they need to survive financially while living human-centered lives? Can what we learn from studying history, literature, languages, and the arts affect social policy? Can analyses from the social sciences help us construct more effective ways to live with one another, ways to manage our drive for power for the benefit of all? Can scientists not only discover and invent, but also contribute to finding ethical ways to deal with the sweeping changes their work brings about?

Faculty members grapple with these questions daily if they try to combine their teaching, research, and writing with service and civic responsibility, effecting a two-way interaction between reflection and action. And no matter whether an institution is a large research university, a small liberal arts college, or a community college, such questions influence the articulation of the institution’s civic and public mission.

Those of us who aspire to achieve the democratic ideal, whether we are black, white, yellow, red, brown, gay, lesbian, heterosexual, old, young, disabled, a foreign resident, an immigrant, a woman, or a man, must reckon with our complex positions of privilege and nonprivilege in the many places of human action and interaction. We must continually interrogate our attitudes, analyses, and exhortations with a strict intellectual scrutiny analogous to that of the legal world’s judicial scrutiny.

Strict judicial scrutiny is invoked to determine whether the state, in a particular case, has presented an argument of compelling interest, that is, one that presents the best of all possible alternatives for its citizens. I imply this meaning as well in my analogy. Most cultural arguments that run counter to the dominant tradition are deemed not to be of compelling benefit to the common good. Yet they are very much in the interest of a common good, as long as we define it to include all members of society.

A scrutiny that examines our affective and cognitive behavior, our interactions with one another, and our agency as it relates to the agencies of others demands a freedom defined by community and sharing with others. Such an examination is part of a liberatory pedagogy that encourages students to develop a sense of themselves imbued with self-assertion and social responsibility. If institutions, administrators, and faculty members can encourage this kind of scrutiny, then the courage to clarify, expose, study, learn, and, most important, lead for the betterment of humankind has a good chance of becoming an accepted part of our academic and civic lives.

Our Threatened Democracy

Herman Blake, director of African American studies at Iowa State University, reminded us during one of our Wingspread meetings that we "can’t ride to freedom in Pharaoh’s chariot." Given the history of the United States, beginning with the colonization of Native Americans and continuing with the enslavement of Africans, the imposition of second-class status on white women, and the racialization of immigrant groups and people of color, we need self-reflection on many levels—the personal and individual, the public and group, and the social and cultural—to maintain the promise of social justice and equity embedded in the ideal of a democratic republic. At Wingspread we debated whether we can reclaim terms such as the "common good," the "commonwealth," or even the word "civic," but we all agreed that we have to help realize the promise of democracy, despite its tragically flawed history.

Ethnic studies is well situated to contribute to this task. It entered the academy as black studies, calling for recognition of the contributions of the racialized minority groups in the United States. In the 1970s, black studies, along with women’s studies, began a deeply rooted examination of academic content and values. Its catalyst was and remains the need to address the humanity of those seen as "minority."

Taken seriously, ethnic studies demands a recasting of the relationships between student and teacher, higher education and community, and pedagogy and content. Moreover, it demands reformulation of ideals such as "universalism" and rethinking of assumptions that inform the determination of who is human, who is part of our democracy, and who has potential to contribute to it. At the most basic level, our ideas about these issues pervade our psychology, our literary canons, and our public policy.

At a more removed level, ethnic studies raises questions we need to consider as we develop our ethics around human genome projects. For example, who benefits from biotechnology? Why and how should we maintain a focus on enhancing life for everyone and resist the temptations to define and seek a racist perfection?

Over the past thirty years, we have experienced many changes—growing racial, ethnic, and class diversity and increased recognition of issues related to sex, age, and physical ability. During this time, embedded folkways and attitudes toward diversity have been affected enormously by "legal ways." Arguably, the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education began a national shift in folkways. But institutional structures and stubborn folkways embedded in unequal economic and social patterns still reign and fuel a backlash against social justice.

That backlash is occurring in an anti-intellectual atmosphere and amid a rapid technological revolution that makes the past and its legacy look irrelevant to many. Some people seem to live only in the present, looking with amnesia to the future. Others ignore the present, reconstructing a mythical past. Many of those who approach life in these ways fail to acknowledge or understand their position of privilege and nonprivilege in society. The call for strict intellectual scrutiny demands that we not dissociate such scrutiny from our emotional, spiritual, class-based, gendered, or racialized lives. Yet some of the most important public discussions over the past twenty years have not even pretended to invoke personal or intellectual scrutiny.

For example, discussions of Saul Bellow’s latest novel, Ravelstein, have turned to the homosexuality of the late political philosopher Allan Bloom, the purported model for the character Ravelstein. Imagine, if Bloom, in The Closing of the American Mind, his profoundly influential defense of tradition, had included the cultural implications of homosexuality in his judgments about American culture. Might the so-called culture wars have been different?

Participants at Wingspread, with attempts at strict intellectual scrutiny, much good will, and reading lists focused on efforts to renew the university’s civic mission, almost immediately invoked the term "civic engagement." But some of us pointed out how in America the word "civic," which denotes citizenship and democracy, has resonated just as much with nativist intent, discriminatory Americanization, racism, and denial of full citizenship as it has with the promise of democracy and social justice.

Through our discussions, it became clear that we must transform our present system, which ignores the civic leadership of many segments of our national, regional, and local populations. Recent debates on campus about diversity have confirmed the need to increase civic participation and address issues of equity and social justice. An inclusive democratic practice can serve as a vehicle to renew democracy; it can expand on the legacy of the civil rights movement, which encompassed women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights, the right to free speech, and the rights of racialized minorities.

Direction from Here

In these times of virtual universities, radical scientific change, and rising specialization, fostering a diverse democracy is more important than ever. Such a democracy seeks social justice, equity, and a freedom defined by people’s connections to one another. James Baldwin came close to defining that freedom, when he argued that one person’s freedom ends where another’s begins. In other words, in a world rooted in an individuality shaped by social responsibility, freedom must be constantly examined and negotiated.

Our Wingspread deliberations led to planning for an annual Institute for Education for Democracy. The institute, with an overarching goal of developing genuinely democratic schooling from kindergarten through college, will serve as a place where students, teachers, community leaders, scholars, and other practitioners can come together to develop ideas about realizing the promise of a diverse, democratic republic. It will bring together policy studies, social and cultural studies, and community organizing focused on changing power relationships and facilitating citizen participation in defining a political agenda. The institute, an admittedly ambitious project, will also address the foundational importance of reconceptualizing United States history as part of its effort to help build a multicultural and multiracial society in our schools, neighborhoods, boardrooms, and governing bodies.

Preparing students for responsible citizenship in a diverse democracy is a huge task. It calls for a commitment among college and university professors and administrators as massive as the cultural and social changes we are experiencing. At Wingspread we ended our most recent discussions by raising the hope that our small effort will connect with others and spark a movement for shared civic responsibility in a truly democratic society.

Johnnella Butler is professor of American ethnic studies and associate dean of the Graduate School at the University of Washington.

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