vforum

“Democracy and Higher Education: The Future of Engagement”

Virtual Forum

Click here to learn how to access the Virtual Forum

At a time when there is a sense of drift and fragmentation in the movement to promote community engagement and the formation of democratic citizenship as key institutional priorities for American colleges and universities, the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) and the Kettering Foundation are sponsoring two forums to promote discussion about the challenges to and opportunities for advancing this important work.

One part of this project is an Invitational Colloquium involving a representative and diverse group of 33 academic and community leaders. This Colloquium -- “Democracy and Higher Education: The Future of Engagement” -- will take place at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio, February 26-27, 2008. The group will meet to identify problems and issues associated with reforming higher education for community engagement and democratic citizenship and to suggest ways for cultivating the next generation of engaged scholars in American higher education. The dialogue will be catalyzed in part through the discussion of recent research, including the 2007 book by Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform, as well as forthcoming publications by the Kettering Foundation, including Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey and Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education.

We also recognize that countless individuals have played leadership roles, both nationally and on their campuses, over the past two decades. We would like to invite this wider group to participate in a Virtual Forum which will be active from January 22 to
February 8.

Instructions for accessing the Virtual Forum can be found at:

http://nerche.org/kettering_colloquium/vforum/inst/inst.html.

You may join the conversation by responding to the framing questions below or by starting your own conversational thread.

The content of Virtual Forum will be compiled and synthesized and used to help inform the in-person meeting at the Kettering Foundation later in the month. The duration of the Virtual Forum after that time will be determined based on the interest of the participants.

Framing Question for the Virtual Forum

At the recent annual meeting of the Modern Language Association, there was a lively discussion about creating engaged students and campuses better connected to local communities. Yet engagement was predominantly defined as an expanded service role, to the point where one faulty member claimed that the “servicification of higher education” has the danger of belittling the “production of knowledge.” Service work, it was noted, is not acknowledged in institutional reward policies and is thus devalued.

This kind of discussion about engagement in higher education is indicative of a looming crisis in the engagement movement as it appears to have either been successfully resisted by the dominant cultures of the
academy, successfully accommodated by the dominant cultures of the academy so that it is acknowledged without transforming the institution, or it has – through a long difficult process – been institutionalized in a way that has initiated transformational change of the institution. It has echoes of the a 2004 Wingspread conference on the future of engagement in higher education which reached the conclusion that while the engagement movement has created some change, it has also plateaued and requires a more comprehensive effort to ensure lasting commitment and institutional capacity.

If engagement in higher education is to emerge more broadly as a core value of the University of the 21st century – as centrally important to the civic mission of higher education and to producing and transmitting new knowledge - what strategic directions are needed? How can scholarly practice help realize the democratic purpose of higher education? What are the institutional commitments that are needed to fostering a citizen politics among students and among academics?

Invitational Colloquium | Virtual Forum