“Come, Let Us Reason Together”: New Research and the Public Good

Abstract

The university is the prophetic school out of which come the teachers who are to lead democracy in the true path. It is the university that must guide democracy into the new ields of arts and literature and science. It is the university that ights the battles of democracy, its warcry being: “Come, let us reason together.” (Harper 223)For our era, the ability to search and research—sorting, evaluating, verifying, analyzing, and synthesizing abundant information—is an incredibly valuable skill. With the advent of Twitter and fake news, as well as the digitization of vast archives made accessible for the irst time, these active learning skills should have a far larger role in higher education today. (Davidson 88)STUDENTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION SHOULD MASTER RESEARCH TO SOLVE THE GREAT SOCIETAL PROBLEMS OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. Research—as Cathy N. Davidson succinctly defines it above—is one of many crucial topics in her compelling new book The New Education. Looking at the literature and data on American universities Davidson describes in her study, I venture that new research could contribute to the public good as long as research universities continue to advance democracy. Theoretical and practical notions of democracy, of course, have evolved remarkably since America's founding, oscillating between the ideological poles of “liberalism” and “illiberalism,” as some pundits have recently put it (Deneen 155–59). For the sense of American democracy anchoring my essay, I have in mind a “deliberative form of politics” that calls on “the demos to reflect upon itself and judge [the efforts of] laws, institutions, and leaders” to maintain the equality of social rights and privileges (Urbinati 16). The democratic prosperity of American society requires an increasingly diverse range of students to conduct new research on behalf of the intellectual and scholarly contributions of universities to the public good.