May-June 2006

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Higher Education for the Public Good: Emerging Voices from a National Movement

What is the Good of Higher Education?

Reviewed by John Aubrey Douglass

Adrianna J. Kezar, Tony C. Chambers, John D. Burkhardt, and Associates.
Jossey-Bass, 2005.

The waywardness of the university, and the internal and external causes of that waywardness, are well-worn themes that have long generated insightful observations on higher education. In the late eighteenth century economist Adam Smith had harsh words for the invidious self-absorption of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge. A century later, Cardinal Newman offered a vision and critique sparked in part by what he viewed as a rising tide of utilitarianism.

Yet Smith, like Newman, and like later critics, claimed great purposes for higher education. Higher Education for the Public Good: Emerging Voices from a National Movement is a collection of essays that adds to this robust literary tradition, although with a modernist opinion starkly different from that of Newman. Building on the work of the National Forum (formerly the Kellogg Forum) on Higher Education, the authors lament a pattern of withdrawal by faculty, students, and universities from “addressing the important social issues and preparing students for the civic, economic, and cultural demands of this and future generations.”

There are myriad external and internal reasons why the academy is struggling to find its way in the modern, post-industrial world: declining public funding, predilections toward privatization, the encroachment of market mentality, the primacy of research over teaching, vocationalism, and the rising tide of for-profit ventures. These and other factors are causing universities to lose sight of their role in society, note the book’s contributing editors, Tony Chambers, a senior fellow at the National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good, and higher education professors Adrianna Kezar and John Burkhardt. “We believe that, for the most part,” write the editors, this role “is being lost as public policy and institutional decisions unintentionally focus on revenue generation and the individual benefits of higher education rather than on its broader social role and benefits.”

How to turn the tide? This book seeks to provide “needed guidance and advice” for those in the academy, for there are no easy answers. The hope is to help launch what Kezar calls a “metamovement” linking a variety of initiatives to a common set of values and a shared agenda, and, ultimately, asking how each policy decision by a university would relate to the public good.

The difficulty is, of course, in determining what it is exactly that universities should and should not do. The book has twenty-one contributors, including such well-known figures as David Longanecker (director of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education), Judith Ramaley (former president of the University of Vermont), David Mathews (president of the Kettering Foundation and former secretary of the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, now called the Department of Health and Human Services), Carol Geary Schneider (president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities), and Barbara Holland (director of the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse), who individually or in teams contribute nineteen chapters. So many contributors mean numerous viewpoints, and many of the chapters stand on their own as interesting essays.

While Longanecker and a few others provide general observations about the changing relationship of largely public universities to government, the thematic thread running through the book is the desire for universities to more fully integrate “engaged learning” into the undergraduate experience. Many of the authors are involved in developing and managing service-learning programs—programs that, in Schneider’s supportive words, “emphasize what students can do with their knowledge and that involves students, individually and collectively, in analyzing and working to solve significant problems in the larger world.” While there is much opportunity for faculty to engage and assist society through research, the contributors emphasize the student, through the faculty and their courses, as the relatively new agent of community and social progress.

Schneider notes, and Holland and others reiterate, that the method for creating a more engaged student and university is twofold. First, service learning must be fully integrated into the curricular mainstream—not simply offered as an add-on by nonacademic units or a few activist faculty, which, with only a few exceptions, is the norm currently. Second, students need to be convinced that civic participation is a significant part of their undergraduate experience and of their postgraduation lives.

What this requires, of course, is that faculty members take the lead. The book suggests that faculty should see the weight of the argument and take up the cause articulated by academic leaders, or be brought into the fold by incentives and even, perhaps, directives, including changes in academic personnel procedures in the spirit articulated in an earlier era by Ernest Boyer when he headed the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

The varied essays offered in this book articulate nicely, often with interesting nuances, the problems facing universities, but the solutions they offer are less clear. Service learning is an interesting reform movement in need of support, but arguably a relatively new initiative that will only partially reorient the university to a greater public purpose. It is also expensive and time consuming for faculty, who are being asked constantly to do more with less.

Another way to analyze the multiversity is to argue that America’s universities, and in particular its public institutions, which have broad legal and social mandates, are doing more than ever to meet the social and economic needs of society. The multiversity is ever increasing its services, its research productivity, and its links with industry and the community. Universities, as organization theorist Victor Baldridge once observed, are always ready to take on a new responsibility and, even during times of unusual fiscal constraints, reluctant to reduce existing or potential new activities.

Financial issues facing higher education and how they might influence strategies for promoting civic engagement are not discussed at length in any of the essays. The book also has virtually no discussion of the different roles of public versus private institutions, or of small colleges versus large public universities. Are there different responsibilities in the private and public sectors? My view is that there are a great many differences—and that observers of American higher education should bring this distinction into greater focus in order to help guide policy reforms.

John Aubrey Douglass is senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California Berkeley. He is the author of The California Idea and American Higher Education.