Social Contracts and University Public Service

Abstract

Public service programs define one set of terms by which universities negotiate -- and must continue to negotiate -- their social and political contracts with the public. Over the past several decades, these contracts have been challenged by ongoing social and technological change [28, 45], by internal changes in the structure of the university [10, 28, 44], and by the need to assimilate new generations of students and faculty members into campus cultures and the academic marketplace. Other challenges to these contracts include the increasing specialization of academic research and the increasingly diverse and complex publics that request university services. As one example of the latter, the growth of professional associations and other organizations of practitioners, producers, and consumers has created competition for university service between non-place networks of individuals with shared interests and more traditional communities tied to neighborhood, geographic locale, and region [26]. General features of these challenges were noted by Clark Kerr in the early 1960s and constitute a key theme of his enduring treatise, The Uses of the University [28]. However, during the past ten years, concern about the social responsibility of colleges and universities has increased. Within this renewed climate of concern, colleges and universities have been criticized for a lack of sensitivity to considerations in general (including, most recently, considerations regarding the appropriate use of extramural funds), inattention to problems of the larger society, and a lack of commitment to serving the public of under-graduate students [4, 7, 43, 47]. These criticisms have stimulated countervailing pressures within universities to resist external definitions of their purpose, value, effectiveness, and quality. These opposing concerns have increasingly destabilized social and political contracts between research universities and their publics and made the design, administration, and assessment of service programs both more problematic and more important. In this article I examine these larger issues by looking closely at the efforts of one research university to renew its social contract by replicating within the field of education a service program of long-standing vitality and effectiveness in agriculture. A case study of these efforts provides a point of departure for critically examining this kind of replication as an institutional strategy for achieving enhanced service goals. It also illustrates neglected complexities within the more general process by which research universities negotiate social and political contracts with their publics. Clearly, negotiations between universities and their publics involve much more than the design and administration of service programs, and replication represents only one of several strategies within the latter by which universities can try to increase their contributions to society. However, proposals to replicate existing service programs have a special attraction for university administrators, political leaders, and the public. extensions of university research have contributed so much in medicine or engineering, why can't they also improve urban life? Or, as the question was framed at the university examined in this article, If university research has done so much to improve agriculture, then why not schooling? This common sense approach to renewing social contracts between research universities and their publics has a lot to recommend it. Common formulations are grounded in the kind of shared ideology that makes collective efforts possible [20]. As such, they are useful in mobilizing institutional or societal resources necessary to support largescale projects. But the vision of translating service programs from one domain to another also ignores key features of universities and the social and political environments in which they are situated. …