Introduction: The Civic Reconstruction of Higher Education and the Future of the Good Society

Abstract

When I first took over editorship of The Good Society in 2016, I was excited to maintain the journal’s reputation as a forum for sophisticated political theory while also expanding its focus to include the major preoccupations of my own career. One of those preoccupations was with my professional location in the field of education, and higher education particularly, during a time of political, social, and cultural crisis. Another was my long-term interest in the complex history, contested consequences, and democratic resources of American social thought. The third and most recent of my guiding preoccupations was a still-emerging field of political theory and practice that put everyday citizens’ capacities and relationships at the center of politics, and which eventually gave the journal its subtitle: “A Journal of Civic Studies.”Six years later, I am both gratified and troubled by the contents of this issue. I’m gratified because its contributors have woven my aboriginal obsessions with educational systems, intellectual traditions, and the work of “We the People” into one highly textured tapestry, shot through with diverse theoretical strands—political, educational, even evolutionary. I’m troubled because the challenges we face as scholars, practitioners, and citizens in a society aspiring to democracy appear not less but rather more daunting than when I first took the editorial reins more than half a decade ago.In short, my preoccupations persist, not merely as worries but as strategies. In the midst of a historic, transnational, trans-ideological crisis of faith in democracy they do not just merit but rudely demand our practical attention. We who treasure the ideals and privileges of democracy must radically rethink and refashion many of our most important institutions, including the educational institutions that socialize the leaders of our other institutions. We must challenge historically contingent habits of thought and practice that have come to be regarded as logically or naturally determined, while excavating compelling and instructive stories of adaptation and transformation amid change. And among such stories of human agency, we must study and elevate those conveying the capacities of everyday citizens, including government officials and (yes!) scholars, to work productively, across differences, to build and sustain common goods—to do democracy.Beyond gratified and troubled, therefore, I am above all invigorated by this latest issue of The Good Society. Collectively, its contributors have enhanced my understanding of the democratic purposes and potential of higher education; the range of intellectual and cultural resources available to societies aspiring to democracy and its continual expansion; and the various ways and contexts in which democracy, as a cultural project, is impeded and advanced.The issue’s first section has been long in the making. Back in the late winter of 2018, The Good Society organized a conference on “The Civic Reconstruction of Higher Education.” Why focus on “Civic Reconstruction” in a sector more comfortable with “Civic Engagement” or “Public Outreach”? We reasoned that the latter terms, like the structure and practices of American higher education generally, tend to perpetuate a bifurcation of professional and civic life that renders the civic part secondary and, ultimately, discretionary. In most institutions of higher education (IHEs), faculty, administrators, and students have few options and weak incentives to weave civic purpose into their work and learning, or to frame their work and learning in ways that are informed by citizens outside their academic or professional communities.To foster awareness of and interest in this topic, we invited participants to draft, precirculate, and collectively scrutinize papers analyzing the civic problems and potential of IHEs at levels ranging from their own research and teaching to the whole higher education enterprise. Asserting that forces in higher education produce and reproduce a problematic bifurcation of professional and civic roles, work, identity, and life, we asked potential contributors to address one or more of the following questions: Why does this bifurcation exist?Why/how is it problematic, and what, by contrast, might be its justifications or positive effects?What might be gained by bridging it? What obstacles would have to be overcome in doing so?What historical and contemporary examples offer lessons and inspiration for those seeking to model, promote, and educate for citizen professionalism in higher education?What are some epistemological, structural, or other strategies for, or obstacles to, framing your research topics, course design and delivery, or institutional service in civic terms—that is, in ways that promise to advance democratic living in its local, national, or global settings? Regardless of the question(s) they identified and addressed, we encouraged authors to consider how their own teaching, research, discipline, professional network, or institution could, should, or would change in light of their answers. In other words, we asked them what they thought their most familiar fellow citizens—and above all, what they themselves—should do to improve the public life they share with one another, the nation, and the world.The results of their labors are yours to judge. Convinced, however, that they merit your careful consideration both individually and collectively, we have arranged them to approximate a dynamic but ultimately coherent conversation. David Sloan Wilson opens the symposium with a blueprint for higher education and societal reform based on evolutionary and complex systems theory—a blueprint drafted according to bedrock principles that nonetheless imply its eternal revisability. Wilson is followed by David Weerts, who examines the intellectual premises, practical development, and complicated legacy of a previous blueprint, the so-called Wisconsin Idea, and explores what a workable (and desirable) twenty-first-century version might look like.Next, we shift from a wide theoretical and historical lens to more granular studies of civic catalysis in higher education. Elaine Eschenbacher explains the potential of experiential education—“holistic learning that does not separate knowledge acquisition or knowledge use from its social, emotional, and historical context”—to alert students to the civic implications and opportunities of their working lives, illustrating the benefits and challenges of the experiential approach through the case of Augsburg University in Minneapolis. Next, Kelly Collins and Rashné Jehangir argue that to undermine rather than replicate civically corrosive structures of class and race inequality over the long term, IHEs must better support first-generation graduate students in their efforts to join the academic ranks. Collins and Jehangir then provide a roadmap for launching such work.The symposium’s next two contributions both focus on the civic promise of a field often caricatured (and sometimes promoted) as apolitical: engineering. Guru Madhavan makes a brief but provocative case for the adoption and promotion by the engineering elite of an ethos of “maintenance”: a commitment to (and pride in) the incremental improvements and stewardly, “caring” work that the vast majority of engineering work actually consists in. He argues that a maintenance ethos would not only make engineering a more civically constructive profession but also enrich civics with an appreciation for iterative, contextually informed, systems-conscious approaches to public problems. Erhardt Graeff and Alison Wood argue that undergraduate engineering education provides fertile ground for addressing the larger field’s “culture of disengagement.” Drawing on two case studies from the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, Graeff and Wood sketch out a working model for fostering a sense of “civic professionalism” among engineering students—and, by extension, others—helping them reconcile their personal, professional, and public commitments in ways that enrich their own lives and bolster democratic society.The theme of professional identity as a crucial lever of civic reconstruction is further explored by Scott Peters. Peters worries that academic professionals—himself included—face and often succumb to pressures that divorce their work as scholars and teachers from their work as citizens: as members of plural communities confronted with public, values-laden, and thereby political problems. One problem with such a “binary,” in Peters’s view, is that it flattens academic work—much of which has major implications for nonacademic publics—into mere technical work, insufficiently informed by or responsive to extramural knowledge and wisdom. Another problem is that it reifies a shrunken conception of politics that cedes the field entirely to politicians and the partisan special interests who influence their decision making. To suggest an alternative approach, Peters shares the story of Don Wyse, a self-described “weed scientist” at the University of Minnesota who has tried to balance the not antithetical but often conflicting values of nonpartisanship and political responsibility in his work. (Please also see John Forester’s informative and appreciative review of Peters’s latest book, coauthored with Daniel O’Connell, In the Struggle: Scholars and the Fight Against Industrial Agribusiness in California.) Complementing Peters’s contribution is a refreshingly personal essay by University of Minnesota sociologist Heidi Barajas, whose deft interweaving of personal and intellectual biography will challenge any reader who hopes to draw sharp lines between private, professional, and public life. If there was any justice in social media, moreover, her “grandmother test” for evaluating seemingly “professional” choices would break the internet (or at least academic Twitter).Barajas’s subtle, life-drawn understanding of the power to be found in ambiguous, permeable experience is exactly the kind of knowledge Harry Boyte, our final contributor, thinks higher education must better appreciate and more intentionally generate. Boyte argues that higher education, “the authoritative knowledge institution of the age,” too often exacerbates social and political divisions by promoting a narrow conception of power as control over intellectual, cultural, or physical spaces and processes—and over the people involved. Drawing on John Dewey as well as several examples of an alternative “public work” approach to higher education, Boyte argues that higher education can and must become a “commons,” in which people—students, faculty, staff, and neighbors—learn to exercise power together, as cocreators of knowledge, resources, solutions, and other shared goods.The rest of the issue returns to The Good Society’s roots as a venue for creative political theory in a rapidly changing world, in this case through a symposium on Sungmoon Kim’s Democracy After Virtue: Toward Pragmatic Confucian Democracy (2018). Kim’s aim is to develop a normative conception of democracy that reevaluates and redeploys the intellectual and practical resources of the Confucian tradition according to several epistemological and ethical principles drawn from American pragmatism. As Kim’s respondents make clear, his book, though concerned primarily with the political cultures and democratic potential of East Asian societies, has important implications for political theory and practice in any society whose people seek to promote both individual and collective flourishing in a context of increasing value pluralism—a pluralism including skepticism of value pluralism itself.The symposium on Kim’s fine book is introduced by Isak Tranvik, and thus also serves as readers’ introduction to The Good Society’s incoming associate editor. Isak’s training as a political theorist, interdisciplinary scholarship, and transdisciplinary professional experience make him an ideal contributor to our mission of advancing rigorous yet idiosyncratic inquiry into the conditions of human flourishing. The admixture of social conscience and epistemic humility he brings to his work—professional and public—will, I am confident, maintain The Good Society’s reputation as a proudly provocative but scrupulously cross-partisan venue for such inquiry.