Harry C. Boyte, Editor, Democracy’s Education: A Symposium on Public
Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Higher Education (Vanderbilt, 2014)
Today, Americans feel powerless to address mounting problems, from climate change to growing inequality and school
reform. This sense of powerlessness is acute in higher education, where educators face what Paul Markham, in these
pages, describes as an “avalanche” of cost cutting, profit-making colleges, distance learning, and demands that higher
education be narrowly geared to the needs of today’s workplace. The Democracy’s Education symposium begins with
an essay by Harry C. Boyte, “Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work,” which challenges educators to claim and exercise
their often unacknowledged power in the face of such changes, helping to lead in the rethinking of education, the
meaning of citizenship, the shape of work in the 21st century, and the challenges of addressing public problems.
Building on the activities of the American Commonwealth Partnership, a coalition he coordinated of several hundred
colleges and universities to strengthen higher education as a public good, organized on the invitation of the White
House Office of Public Engagement to mark the 150th anniversary of land grant colleges and universities, Boyte argues
that higher education is the anchoring institution of citizenship. It shapes the civic identities and career plans of students
and influences the practices and frameworks of a myriad of professions. In recent decades conventional views and
practices in higher education have come to take work off the map, locating citizenship largely in voting and in off-hours
voluntarism and service projects. As citizen teachers, civic business owners, citizen clergy, citizen librarians, citizen
nurses, even “civil” servants have been replaced by service providers, Americans have become a nation of consumers
not producers of democracy. Boyte proposes that higher education, an upstream institution in society, needs to reinvent
citizenship as public work, work with public qualities, and educate our students for citizen careers, for our own sake and
for the sake of the larger democracy. His essay includes case studies on what this looks like.
As a mix of educators and civic leaders respond to the argument and advance their own views and experiences in
making change, a powerful story of productive citizenship and educational innovation emerges.
Presidents and public officials describe their roles as public philosophers and architects of far ranging policy changes.
Faculty, staff, and students tell of reworking curricula, student life, and alumni relations, opening space and creating
opportunities for students to develop civic agency and concern for a commonwealth which they are helping to create,
building new connections with “Citizen Alum.” Students recount their discoveries and experiences of becoming “real”
and powerful agents of change, and describe their plans for careers filled with public purpose. Organizers and civic
leaders from outside higher education weigh in with useful suggestions. . Internationally renowned scholars from South
Africa and Japan contribute insights about the civic challenges and opportunities their societies are facing. Leading
political and social theorists analyze the roots of academic detachment and political dysfunction and describe new
frameworks of making democratic change such as “civic science” and “civic studies,” embodied in concepts like “a
craftsperson ethos” from Northern Arizona University, which may help to generate citizen faculty. And Lisa Clarke, one
of the nation’s outstanding high school social studies teachers, calls for a movement of “teacher citizens” to be
architects of empowering education, as relevant to colleges and universities as to K-12 schools
Democracy’s Education shows the possibilities for democratic change and revitalization in the society as a whole, if
colleges and universities reclaim their soul through a renewed relationship with the citizenry, in the phrase of Kettering
Foundation president David Mathews.
Democracy’s Education, Table of Contents as of January 1, 2014

Harry Boyte, “Reinventing Citizenship as Public Work”

Democratic narratives:
o David Mathews (President, Kettering Foundation), “Har Megiddo: A Battle for the Soul of Higher
Education”
o Scott Peters (Co-director, Imagining America), “Unearthing and Rebuilding a Democracy’s College
Tradition in American Higher Education”
o Albert Dzur (Bowling Green), “The Democratic Roots of Academic Professionalism”

Presidents and policy makers as architects of change:
o Martha Kanter, Under Secretary, US Department of Education 2009-2013, “For Democracy’s Future –
The role of the federal government in promoting US civic learning in the 21st Century”
o Nancy Cantor and Peter Englot (Syracuse), “Reinventing Scholar-Educators as Citizen-Scholars and Public
Workers”
o Robert Bruininks, et. al. (University of Minnesota), “The University of Minnesota Journey”
o Judith Ramaley (Portland State and Winona State), “Education for a Rapidly Changing World”
o Adam Weinberg (Denison), “Preparing Students for Work as Citizens”

The faculty experience and faculty as agents of change:
o Rom Coles/Blase Scarnati (NAU), “Transformational Ecotones”
o KerryAnn O'Meara (Maryland), “The Change We Need to Support Public Scholarship”
o Maria Avila (Occidental, National University of Ireland), “Can a New Culture Flourish?”
o Tim Eatman (Co-director, Imagining America, Syracuse), “The Emerging Citizenry of Academe”

From Citizen Student to Citizen Alum: Students and alumni as agents of change:
o Jamie Haft (NYU, Syracuse), “A Civic Actor Prepares”
o Cecilia Orphan (UPenn), “What’s Doctoral Education Have to Do With It?”
o David Hoffman (UMBC), “Fostering Civic Agency”
o Julie Ellison (Founding Director, Imagining America), “Citizen Alum”

Community organizers consider the challenges:
o Robert Woodson (Founder, National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise), “On Tap, Not on Top”
o Sam Daley-Harris (Founder, RESULTS), “How Can Higher Education Reclaim Its Power?”
o Gerald Taylor, SE Director, Industrial Areas Foundation, “A Community Organizer Perspective”

Possible Futures:
o Benjamin Barber (Founder, Interdependence Day), “Illiberal Education”
o Peter Levine (Director CIRCLE), “Jobs, Jobs, Jobs – The Economic Impact of Public Work”
o John Spencer (Founding Director, Delta Center, U Iowa), “Reflections of a Civic Scientist”
o Shigeo Kodama (Co-Founder, Japan Citizenship Education Forum, University of Tokyo), “Higher
Education and Political Citizenship: The Japanese Case”
o Xolela Mangcu (University of Cape Town, W.E.B. Du Bois Visiting Fellow, Harvard), “The Promise of Black
Consciousness for a Romantic Renaissance”
o Lisa Clarke (Social Studies Teacher, Kent Meridian High School), “Teaching as Public Work”
Summing up, reflections on the collection as a whole–


Paul Markham, “Avalanches, Ecotones, and 800-Pound Gorillas: Organizing Higher Education Between the
Times”
Harry Boyte, “The Soul of Higher Education – And the Productive Power of Citizens”