The initiative we’re launching with this website is about democracy and higher education. Our focus on this theme stands in sharp contrast to the one thing most people tend to think of when they think about higher education’s public purposes and roles: namely, economics.

Administrators and elected officials often refer to institutions of higher education in the United States as “economic engines.” And for good reason. The nation’s 4,300 or so colleges and universities provide jobs for their local communities. They educate and train students for the workforce. They help solve technical problems, provide technical assistance, and produce, diffuse, and transfer innovations and technologies that advance economic productivity, growth, and competitiveness. They also provide a variety of forms of entertainment that attract people to their campuses and communities and provide much needed business for local shops, restaurants, and hotels.

You can run the numbers on all this and come up with some pretty impressive figures that show a good return on society’s investment in higher education. As economic engines, our nation’s colleges and universities are undoubtedly both important and appreciated—particularly in times of economic crisis. But however important and appreciated they are as economic engines, economics is not the only focus of their work. Nor is it or should it be the sole measure of their worth.

What else are colleges and universities good for? What else do they do and contribute? What other measures should we use to assess their worth?

Standard responses to these questions include the discovery and preservation of knowledge, the cultivation and appreciation of artistic expression and excellence, the provision of a liberal education, and environmental and social problem solving. The main focus and worth of these things are not economic in nature. They are cultural, ecological, ethical, and political.

Democracy and Higher Education

There is another response to questions about what colleges and universities are good for, what they do and contribute, and how we should assess their worth. It was powerfully expressed in 1948 by President Harry Truman’s Commission on Higher Education. “The first and most essential charge upon higher education,” the Commission wrote in its report to the President, “is that at all its levels and in all its fields of specialization it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals, and processes.” While many now see the economy as the central focus and measure of higher education’s work and worth, this line from the Truman Commission’s report invites us to consider democracy as the central focus and measure.

On July 4th, 1999, a group of 51 college and university presidents affiliated with Campus Compact offered a new articulation of the Truman Commission’s vision of the connections between democracy and higher education in a document entitled the “Presidents’ Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education.” “As presidents of colleges and universities, both private and public, large and small, two-year and four-year,” the group wrote, “we challenge higher education to re-examine its public purposes and its commitments to the democratic ideal. We also challenge higher education to become engaged, through actions and teaching, with its communities. We have a fundamental task to renew our role as agents of our democracy.” There is no nobler task, the group declared, “than committing ourselves to helping catalyze and lead a national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education. We believe that now and through the next century, our institutions must be vital agents and architects of a flourishing democracy.”

Instead of taking these high-minded claims and calls about the connections between democracy and higher education for granted, or dismissing them as meaningless rhetoric, we’ve decided to take them seriously. In collaboration with the Kettering Foundation, we’ve launched an action research initiative that is centered on the pursuit of two related aims: (1) improving our understanding of how higher education functions as a “carrier of democratic values, ideals, and processes” and a “vital agent and architect of a flourishing democracy,” and (2) developing and testing a strategy for strengthening and defending this function in a time of serious economic and civic crisis.

Our Approach

We’re taking a narrative approach in our pursuit of these aims. To put it more plainly, we’re pursuing them in and through the craft of storytelling. We’re inviting people to tell and make sense of richly drawn, first-person stories of public work projects and experiences that include significant levels of community-university engagement. We’re not looking for promotional stories about public service activities that describe all the good things that colleges and universities are doing for, in, and/or with their communities. Nor are we looking for muckraking exposés that claim or aim to show how oppressive and elitist higher education is or can be. Rather, the stories we’re hoping to hear, document, and learn from are those that communicate subjective truths about the promise and challenges of community-university engagement in the public work of democracy—truths that are grounded in the lived experience of those who are directly and actively engaged on the front lines of such work. We’re hoping to hear and learn from stories that give us pause as well as hope, that make us feel as well as think, that give us new insights and ideas as well as move us to act, that humanize and bring to life what is all too often narrowly cast with a public relations spin, or posed only as a theoretical possibility.

For details about the kinds of stories we’re seeking and what we plan to do with them, and for instructions about how you can submit your own story for our consideration, click here.