Dewey, Implementation, and Creating a Democratic Civic University

Abstract

democracy, as we all know, is seriously threatened throughout the world (Fisher). In the United States, the chasm-like inequities laid bare by COVID-19, the ongoing killing of black Americans, the violent insurrection at the Capitol, and the continuing attempt to subvert the electoral process are powerful indicators of a system under severe strain (Guardian Staff; Rubin). These developments are also a sign of deep and chronic problems, including the following: Increasing economic, political, social, educational, and health inequalitiesIncreasing racism, anti-Semitism, and xenophobiaIncreasing attacks on science, knowledge, and democracy itselfDeclining trust in nearly all major institutionsMany things, obviously, contribute to the present situation. Among them is the failure of universities to successfully do what they are supposed to do: educate students to be ethical, empathetic, engaged, democratic citizens, and advance knowledge for the continuous betterment of the human condition (Benson et al., Knowledge). To use a Marxian framework, but to reject its economic determinism, universities, in my judgment, are not a part of society's superstructure. They are, to the contrary, a core component of its base (Marx, “Preface”). What they do matters enormously, significantly determining the kind of society we have now and will have in the future.Universities, as former Harvard president Derek Bok and others have emphasized, have become the central societal institutions in the world (Bok, Universities and the Future 3). Research universities, in my judgment, are the most central. They develop new ideas and technologies, incubate businesses, serve as cultural and artistic centers, and are engines of local, national, and global economies. As anchor institutions, they often engage in partnerships with government, the private sector, and community-based organizations to revitalize local neighborhoods and schools (“Anchor Institutions Task Force”). It is the university's role as an educational institution, however, that is most important.The schooling system increasingly functions as the core subsystem—the strategic subsystem—of modern information societies. Schooling, more than any other subsystem, as John Dewey claimed, influences the functioning of the societal system as a whole. Viewed systemically, it has on balance the greatest “multiplier” effects, direct and indirect, short-term and long-term. Restating these points somewhat differently, I strongly agree with the Chilean sociologist Eugenio Tironi that the answer to the question “What kind of education do we need?” is to be found in the answer to the question “What kind of society do we want?” (Tironi). Education and society are dynamically interactive and interdependent. If human beings hope to maintain and develop a particular type of society, they must develop and maintain the particular type of education system conducive to it. As Dewey in effect argued: No effective democratic schooling system, no democratic society.1For William Rainey Harper, who, as the first president of the University of Chicago, brought Dewey to Chicago, universities are the primary shapers of the American schooling system. In an 1899 speech at the University of California, he perceptively observed that “[t]he school system, the character of which, in spite of itself, the university determines and in a large measure controls. . . . [T]hrough the school system every family in this entire broad land of ours is brought into touch with the university; for from it proceed the teachers or the teachers’ teachers” (Harper 25). Agreeing with Harper, I contend that higher education institutions powerfully shape the learning, values, and aspirations of students from kindergarten through graduate school.Given the university's societal role and influence, creating and sustaining an inclusive, just democratic society requires a radical, indeed revolutionary, change in higher education. To return to a pre-pandemic status quo is not an option.In the early 1990s, I wrote that a higher education institution “can no longer try to remain an oasis of affluence in a desert of urban despair” (Benson and Harkavy 14). The impacts of COVID-19 and the powerful lessons of Black Lives Matter, among other things, make this statement seem even more true today.2Pre-pandemic conditions for black, Latinx, and Native Americans, including lower income and wealth levels, greater food and housing insecurity, and higher unemployment, left these communities more vulnerable to the economic shocks of COVID-19 (Hardy and Logan 2; Weeks). The health impacts of the pandemic are particularly unsettling: life expectancy fell in 2020 by nearly three years for black Americans and three years for Latinxs (compared to one-and-two-tenths years for white Americans) (Leonhardt). According to the Indian Health Service, “American Indians and Alaska Natives have infection rates over three-and-one-half times higher than non-Hispanic whites, are over four times more likely to be hospitalized as a result of COVID-19, and have higher rates of mortality at younger ages than non-Hispanic whites” (“Coronavirus [COVID-19]”). The risk of being orphaned due to COVID-related deaths of primary caregivers is also significantly higher for children of racial and ethnic minority groups than for white children (Hillis et al. 5–6). There should be no “return to normal” when normal means unremitting poverty and such radically different life prospects for different communities.Unfortunately, normal also means a higher education system that too often fosters and exacerbates inequality. A 2017 New York Times study, for example, revealed that at least thirty-eight elite universities in the United States, including Penn and four other Ivy League institutions, enrolled more students from the top 1% of the income scale than from the entire bottom 60% (Aisch et al.). Penn, as well as other institutions, have certainly made progress over the last five years, but it remains insufficient. Analysis by The New York Times also revealed that, at the top one hundred US colleges and universities, black and Hispanic students are even more under-represented now than they were in 1980 (Ashkenas et al.).For higher education institutions to make the contributions that they could and should, they must recognize that, as they now function, they—particularly research universities—are, today, more part of the problem than part of the solution. And in so doing, they also need to move beyond, indeed reject, the neoliberal model that I believe significantly defines the pre-pandemic and the current pandemic-impacted university.Since the 1980s, the neoliberal university has gained increasing currency and power throughout the world, contributing to increasingly savage inequalities and a diminished sense of public purpose. Education for profit, not virtue; students as consumers, not producers of knowledge; academics as individual entrepreneurial superstars, not members of a community of scholars—all these developments reflect the commercialization of higher education, which contributes to an overemphasis on institutional competition for wealth and status, and has a devastating impact on the values and ambitions of students (Bok, Universities in the Marketplace 3).3When institutions openly pursue commercialization, their behavior legitimizes and reinforces the pursuit of economic self-interest by students and amplifies the widespread sense that they are in college or university exclusively to gain career-related skills and credentials. Student idealism and civic engagement are strongly diminished when students see their universities abandon academic values and scholarly pursuits to function as competitive, profit-making corporations. Commercialism and the neoliberal university not only foster an environment in which higher education is seen as a private benefit rather than a public good, but they also simultaneously contribute to rising economic disparities both on and off campus and the overall underfunding of higher education (Bessner; Mintz 84).Returning to a traditional liberal arts/college model, in which the institution is detached from society, would fail to counter the neoliberal university. On the contrary, its disciplinary focus and emphasis on elite and elitist education similarly work against core democratic goals such as diversity, inclusion, and equity. What is needed instead is a liberal arts in line with Dewey's call for an engaged, problem-solving approach to scholarship and learning. As he wrote in Reconstruction in Philosophy: “The social philosopher, dwelling in the region of his concepts, ‘solves’ problems by showing the relationship of ideas, instead of helping men solve problems in the concrete by supplying them hypotheses to be used and tested in projects of reform” (Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy 189–90). Putting Dewey's call into action would be at the heart of a democratic civic university.There has certainly been an increase in university engagement since the early 1990s. Many colleges and universities, including my own, have programs that focus on educating students for democratic citizenship and improving schooling and the quality of life in partnership with the communities in which they reside. Service learning, engaged scholarship, community-based participatory research, volunteer projects, and neighborhood economic development initiatives are some of the means employed. No higher education institution, as far as I can tell, however, has the depth and breadth of engagement needed at this time. The post-pandemic (or more accurately, the pandemic-impacted) university needs to be radically different from what now exists. Its primary mission should be advancing democracy democratically on campus, in the community and across the wider society.Colleagues and I have labeled this new kind of higher education institution a “democratic civic university” (Harkavy et al., “Universities Must Help” 23) that would involve significant and ongoing engagement of an institution's comprehensive assets (academic, human, cultural, and economic) in partnership with community members to produce knowledge and educate ethical students with the ability to help create and maintain just, anti-racist, democratic societies. Importantly, a democratic civic university would infuse democracy across all aspects of the institution. Participatory democracy and a culture of democracy, not just democracy as defined by voting or a system of government, would be central goals. It would work to realize in practice Dewey's vision of democracy as “a way of life” (Dewey, “Creative Democracy” 341) in which all members of the community (on and off campus) actively participate in the communal, societal, educational, and institutional decisions that significantly shape their lives.Henry Louis Taylor, professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Buffalo, added to our understanding of the concept by emphasizing that anti-racism would be a core component of a democratic civic university: “To realize in practice their aspiration of being democratic civic universities dedicated to producing knowledge and educating ethical, empathetic students for just and sustainable democratic societies, they must be ‘anti-racist’ and produce knowledge for racial and social change. It is not enough,” Taylor continued, “to simply produce knowledge; they must produce knowledge for ‘social change’ that can inform the creation and development of the ‘neighborly community’” (Taylor 42).Calling for a democratic civic university and describing what it should do are, of course, relatively easy. It is much harder to figure out what specifically needs to change. It is even harder to identify how to bring about the desired change. I now turn to these difficult implementation questions. Let me admit upfront that my responses, alas, are much too general and lack a satisfying “here to there” (from the neoliberal to the democratic civic university) strategy. But here they are, nonetheless.In 1995, the philosopher and organizational theorist Donald Schön wrote an influential essay, “Knowing-in-Action: The New Scholarship Requires a New Epistemology,” which built on Ernest Boyer's expansion of the definition of scholarship to include teaching, application (later termed engagement), and integration, as well as the dominant mode of discovery or basic research. Just as the title of the article says, Schön called for employing a new action-based epistemology that “will conflict with the norms of technical rationality—the prevailing epistemology built into the research universities” (Schön 27). For Schön, “knowing in action” entails making room for the practitioner and “the practitioner's reflection in and on action” (34). He argues for going beyond “creating plans” to “enacting them” (31) and having higher education institutions legitimize “reflective action research” (34).My argument, like Schön's, has its roots in the writings of Dewey and the social psychologist Kurt Lewin and their focus on learning through resolving real-world dilemmas, implementation, and ongoing reflection. Also, with Schön, I am advocating for a form of action research—in my case, participatory action research as advanced by two distinguished Cornell faculty members, sociologist William Foote Whyte and anthropologist Davydd Greenwood, with its emphasis on democratic process.4 My goal, however, is less the changing of higher education institutions to accept practitioner knowledge, and more the creation of inclusive, democratic partnerships with those outside the university to create knowledge for social change, including the radical change of research universities (as well as higher education in general).I am, in effect, calling for a democratic implementation revolution, which requires breaking down idealist categories that separate theory and application, scholars and practitioners, and academics and community members. Useful perspectives and knowledge exist in many places and domains, not just in the university. The difficult question is how to bring multiple perspectives and various kinds of knowledge together to solve, not merely identify and address, the major problems facing our communities, society, and world. My answer to that question proposes that faculty do three interrelated things: focus on place-based local partnerships, develop an inclusive approach involving a “community of experts,” and make democratic implementation the process and goal of research.51. Focus on place-based local work in the university's geographic community. Dewey famously wrote: “Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the neighborly community” (Public and Its Problems 368). Democracy, he emphasized, has to be built on face-to-face interactions in which human beings work together cooperatively to solve the ongoing problems of life. I am updating Dewey and advocating the following proposition: Democracy must begin at home, and its home is the engaged neighborly college or university and its local community partners.The benefits of a local community focus are manifold. Ongoing, continuous interaction is facilitated through work in an easily accessible location. Relationships of trust, so essential for effective partnerships and effective learning, are also built through day-to-day work on problems and issues of mutual concern. In addition, the local community provides a convenient setting in which service learning courses, community-based research courses, and related courses in different disciplines can work together on a complex problem to produce substantive results. Work in a university's local community, since it facilitates interaction across schools and disciplines, can also create interdisciplinary learning opportunities. Finally, the local community is a democratic real-world learning site in which community members and academics can pragmatically determine whether the work is making a real difference and whether both the neighborhood and the institution are better as a result of common efforts.For Dewey, knowledge and learning are most effectively advanced when human beings work collaboratively to solve specific, important real-world problems in “a forked road situation, a situation that is ambiguous, that presents a dilemma, which poses alternatives” (Dewey, Public and Its Problems 122). Focusing on universal problems—such as poor schooling, eroding environments, inadequate health care, poverty, and high levels of economic inequality—that are manifested locally is, in my judgment, the best way to apply Dewey's brilliant proposition.2. Develop an inclusive approach that involves knowledge possessed “on the ground” by community members. This approach expands the definition of expertise and knowing to include other voices—those not necessarily steeped in professional credentials or academic knowledge, but in lived experience of the conditions and actualities under examination. What is needed is a movement away from a narrow definition of an “expert” to a “community of experts”—a broadening of context to include indigenous place-based knowledge, which is essential for solving locally manifested universal problems (Cantor and Englot 121). Community members with that knowledge must also be actively involved when the problem is defined, and remain involved through the development and implementation of solutions (Whyte et al.).3. Make democratic implementation the process and goal of the research. In their 1998 essay, the philosopher and systems scientist C. West Churchman and the organizational theorist Ian Mitroff in effect call for an implementation revolution in which implementation is the “top priority” of research. For them, “‘[t]ruth’ is the result/outcome of knowledge that is gained through the ‘successful’ implementation of a proposed, ethical solution to a significant world problem” (Churchman and Mitroff 117). As I have indicated, work with partners in a university's local community is perhaps the best way to develop an ethical implementable solution to a significant world problem. I would term this approach democratic implementation research, which involves the continuous integration of theory and practice in the course of place-based problem solving (Harkavy; National Science Foundation; “Committee on Equal Opportunities in Science and Engineering”).6 This approach assumes that human beings learn effectively (perhaps best) from and through ongoing implementation and reflection.7 It also assumes that research designed to realize large societal goals through developing and implementing programs on the ground with community partners, refining these programs, and engaging in an iterative process leads to significant learning, high-level theoretical advances, and improved practice. The core rationale for democratic implementation research is perhaps best expressed in a well-known maxim attributed to Kurt Lewin: “If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.”To briefly state my argument for a democratic implementation revolution somewhat differently: Locally manifested universal problems cannot be solved without the inclusion and active involvement of community members residing in the locality that is the focus of engagement and study.The inclusion and active engagement of community members will result in better, more innovative and transformative research, as well as better, more decent, and just universities, communities, and societies.Democratic, place-based implementation research projects that are carried out with community members and focus on locally manifested universal problems form a promising strategy to help transform research universities, increasing their contribution to knowledge and the continuous improvement of the human condition.8Having claimed that a new epistemology based on democratic place-based implementation research with community partners is needed for a democratic civic university, I should now provide an illustration of a university where that theory of knowledge and approach is being put into practice by a critical mass of faculty members, having truly transformational results. Unfortunately, I am unable to do that since I cannot find an example of that occurring.9 I can, however, do two things that might be useful: place my argument into historical context and describe the case I know best that roughly approximates the approach I described. That case is not an entire university, but that of the Netter Center's thirty-year effort to develop democratic partnerships between Penn and its local geographic community of West Philadelphia.First, I turn to a historical overview written in the spirit of Dewey's statement in Democracy and Education that “[t]he true starting point of history is always some present situation with its problems” (222).The critical past and current roles of historically black colleges and universities, other minority-serving institutions, community colleges, and state comprehensive institutions in educating a majority of undergraduate students (particularly minority populations) and serving their communities cannot be overemphasized. My focus, however, is on research universities. This is not only because I work at one but also because research universities, as previously discussed, are extraordinarily influential, significantly shaping how the rest of the higher education system functions (Benson et al., Dewey's Dream).The primary founding purpose of every colonial college—except for the University of Pennsylvania—was to educate ministers and religiously orthodox men capable of creating good communities built on religious denominational principles, whereas Benjamin Franklin founded the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) as a secular institution to educate students in a variety of fields.10 In 1749, envisioning the institution that would become the University of Pennsylvania, he wrote of developing in students “an Inclination join'd with an Ability to serve Mankind, one's Country, Friends and Family; which Ability . . . should indeed be the great Aim and End of all Learning” (Franklin 150; emphasis in original).Franklin's call to service is echoed in the founding documents of hundreds of private colleges established after the American Revolution, as well as in the speeches of many college presidents. A similar blend of pragmatism and idealism found expression in the subsequent century in the Morrill Act of 1862, which established land-grant colleges and universities whose purpose was to advance the mechanical and agricultural sciences, expand access to higher education, and cultivate citizenship. The University of Wisconsin's “Wisconsin Idea” later broadened the purpose to include developing institutions to solve significant, practical problems—making “the boundaries of the university . . . the boundaries of the state” (Stark 101–02; Benson et al., Knowledge 71).The land-grant institutions eventually came to adopt a three-part mission that included research, teaching, and extension for the public good. Granted, this history is hardly all about progress and democracy. Land acknowledgments recognizing the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and slavery projects by universities (including my own) have helped to connect past policies and practices to the racism and inequities we see today (Lee and Ahtone; “Penn and Slavery Project”).The history of US colleges and universities, nonetheless, strongly supports the claim that the public—indeed, democratic—mission is and should be the primary mission for higher education. As political scientist Charles Anderson observed: With deliberate defiance, those who created the American university (particularly the public university, though the commitment soon spread throughout the system) simply stood this [essentially aristocratic] idea of reason on its head. Now it was assumed that the widespread exercise of self-conscious, critical reason was essential to democracy. The truly remarkable belief arose that this system of government would flourish best if citizens would generally adopt the habits of thought hitherto supposed appropriate mainly for scholars and scientists. We vastly expanded access to higher education. We presumed it a general good, like transport, or power, part of the infrastructure of the civilization. (Anderson 8)In summary, strengthening democracy at the expense of old social hierarchies served as the central mission for the development of the US research university, including both land-grant institutions and urban universities. In 1876, Daniel Coit Gilman, in his inaugural address as the first president of Johns Hopkins, the first modern research university in the United States, expressed the hope that universities would “make for less misery among the poor, less ignorance in the schools, less bigotry in the temple, less suffering in the hospital, less fraud in business, less folly in politics” (qtd. in Long 184). Belief in the democratic purposes of the research university echoed throughout higher education at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1908, Harvard's President Charles Eliot wrote: “At bottom most of the American institutions of higher education are filled with the democratic spirit of serviceableness. Teachers and students alike are profoundly moved by the desire to serve the democratic community. This is a thoroughly democratic conception of their function” (qtd. in Veysey 119).Urban university presidents of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries worked to develop major national institutions capable of meeting the needs of a rapidly changing and increasingly complex society. Imbued with boundless optimism and a belief that knowledge could change the world for the better, Seth Low at Columbia and Harper at Chicago (Bender 279–84; Benson et al., Knowledge 32–47), among others, envisioned universities as leading the way toward a more effective, humane, and democratic society for all, particularly for residents of the city. Academics at this time also viewed the city as their arena for study and action. They seized the opportunity to advance knowledge, teaching, and learning by working to improve the quality of life in cities that were experiencing the traumatic effects of industrialization, immigration, and large-scale urbanization (Diner).Few Progressive Era (1890–1920) university presidents and academics, however, viewed local communities as reciprocal partners from whom they and their students could learn through identifying and solving strategic community problems. University–community engagement was essentially a one-way enterprise characterized by elitism and noblesse oblige. University “experts” armed with scientific knowledge would identify community problems and authoritatively prescribe solutions, not work collaboratively with community members in a mutual relationship from which both groups might benefit and to which both groups would contribute knowledge, ideas, and insights. The expert's role was to study and assist, not to learn from and with, the community (Hackney 145).In 1899, W. E. B. Du Bois, in his classic study The Philadelphia Negro, written while he was an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, succinctly captured the purpose of Progressive Era research “as the scientific basis of further study, and of practical reform” (4). Yet scholarship focused on producing direct and positive change had largely vanished from universities after 1918. The First World War was the catalyst for a full-scale retreat (Harkavy and Puckett 306). The brutality and horror of that conflict ended the buoyant optimism and faith in human progress and societal improvement that had marked much of the so-called Progressive Era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Ross).As Penn colleague Lee Benson observed: In the decades after World Wars I and II, American higher education . . . increasingly concentrated on essentially scholastic, inside-the-Academy problems and conflicts rather than on the very hard, very complex problems involved in helping American society realize the democratic promise of American life for all Americans.As a result, they increasingly abandoned the public mission and societal engagement that had powerfully, productively inspired and energized them during their pre-World War I formative period of great intellectual growth and development. (Benson qtd. in Harkavy, “School-Community-University Partnerships” 14)Since the end of the Cold War and a turn from competition and conflict among great powers abroad to domestic crises such as the so-called “urban crisis,”11 there has been a substantive and public re-emergence of what might be termed “community engaged scholarship” designed to contribute to democracy.12 The academic benefits of community engagement have also been illustrated in practice—and the intellectual case for engagement increasingly made.13 That case, simply stated, is that higher education institutions would better fulfill their core academic functions, including advancing knowledge, teaching, and learning, if they focused on improving conditions in their societies, including their local communities. More broadly, a burgeoning democratic civic and community engagement movement has developed across higher education in the United States to better educate students for democratic citizenship and to improve schooling and the quality of life (Benson et al., Knowledge 68–84). Granting that progress, engagement has been, in my judgment, inadequate to the task at hand.For a case study of progress as well as the need to do much, much more, I turn to a brief discussion of Penn's Netter Center for Community Partnerships.The Netter Center's work was particularly inspired by Benjamin Franklin's founding vision for Penn, which was rooted in the Enlightenment idea, powerfully