My university is now considering a proposal to make “public service” and “civic engagement” part of the tenure consideration process. I have written about the civic engagement crusade on several occasions (see here, here, here, and here). In particular, I have pointed out how making participating in the civic engagement program a job expectation for a university professor promotes intellectual conformity. I have also written an article on this movement, which should be forthcoming in the journal Society in the spring. What follows are excerpts from that article. I hope those interested will read it in its entirety and also become aware of this journal, which is exceptional for its commitment to intellectual openness.
In January 2012, the National Task Force on Civic Learning and National Engagement of the Association of American Universities and Colleges released its report, A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future. The report called for a program of civic learning and of training in civic engagement that would pervade every aspect of higher education. This program would be linked to similar efforts at all other levels of schooling. In the words of the report, "[t]he central work of advancing civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education must, of course, be done by faculty members across disciplines, by student affairs professionals across divisions, and by administrators in every school and at every level. The fourth prominent group of actors are the students themselves [bold in the original]. The collective work of these groups should be guided by a shared sense that civic knowledge and democratic engagement, in concert with others and in the face of contestation, are absolutely vital to the quality of intellectual inquiry itself, to this nation’s future, and to preparation for life in a diverse world" (p. 2). It called for fostering "a civic ethos across all parts of campus and educational culture" (p. 31) …
A Crucible Moment builds on the belief that education offers the means of meeting the individual needs of all Americans and reconstructing American society. It cites a breathtaking array of “pressing issues,” including “growing global economic inequalities, climate change and environmental degradation, lack of access to quality health care, economic volatility, and more.” The answer to all of these problems lies in “expanding students’ capacities to be civic problem-solvers.” The report does not go into detail about how the professors and teachers, who do not necessarily possess such great social problem solving skills, will produce this generation of superbeings, but it does recommend that institutions foster what is variously called a “democratic ethos” and a “civic ethos” on every campus through “service learning” and “community engagement.” Whatever its limitations, this federally sponsored report certainly does not fall short in its belief that through education all things are possible…
Calls for service and engagement draw heavily on popular versions of social capital theory. This theoretical perspective most often argues that social ties are investments that people make in each other that help them achieve individual and collective goals. The most influential social capital argument during the 1990s shared the general anxiety over the state of American civic health. This was the “bowling alone” argument of political scientist Robert Putnam, who maintained that the participation of Americans in communal activities, such as bowling leagues, parent-teacher organizations, and clubs had declined and that this decline was indicative of a loss of national social capital. Readers of Alexis de Tocqueville may recognize this as an updated version of Tocqueville’s identification of voluntary associations as the foundation of American democracy.…
When Alexis de Tocqueville described voluntary associations as a basis for American democracy, he was referring to associations that the people themselves had formed of their own will, not public commitments decided upon and directed by the collaboration of governmental and educational bureaucracies. While different people and different political philosophies use the word “democracy” in a variety of ways, the term most commonly refers to a system of government in which people either make political decisions for themselves (direct democracy) or elect representatives to make political decisions (representative democracy). In the former, there is no question of anyone “re-making” the people, since the people think for themselves and have the freedom to be what they are. In the latter, also, the goal of re-shaping a society along democratic lines is a contradiction because a representative government represents its public as it is; the government does not try to re-make its constituents…
At the level of higher education, a crusade to build social capital poses special kinds of problems. Social capital refers to networks of social relations that promote efficacious action through the control and direction of network participants. I have found in my own work on ethnic networks as forms of social capital that the same tight community connections that promote the upward mobility and academic achievement of young people also penalize nonconformity. In other words, social capital is a mechanism for mobilization and social control. Communities that can mobilize and control their members can indeed engage in many constructive activities, but they also tend toward conformity in expression and behavior. We probably want high levels of social capital and high levels of conformity in some of our institutions, such as the military. Within families and many types of associations, limitations on individual freedom are often desirable. If a university is to be a forum for the open and free exchange of ideas, though, it must be a low social capital institution. Individuals in a university may be highly committed to their ideas and goals, but these must be their ideas and goals, not those approved and promoted by the institution. From the perspective of a traditional liberal education, colleges and universities are exactly where we should not be making blueprints for building social capital.
For a university or college to become a community of faith, as it must if it is to adopt promulgating civic engagement as its mission, it has to set up tenets of orthodoxy. Someone has to decide what constitutes appropriate “engagement.” The institution may be relatively lenient in enforcement of doctrine and reluctantly tolerate heretics, but it cannot fulfill its mission without trying to get students and faculty to fall into line and march in the right direction. It is entirely appropriate for a religious organization to call its adherents to become soldiers of the faith. But few things are more inconsistent with the intellectual freedom essential to a university than the expectation that its students and faculty will become social missionaries. A regime of social commitment discourages intellectual diversity, even if it does not openly forbid it…
Universities and colleges can make available to students advanced intellectual skills, in abstract reasoning and analysis. They can provide access to practical skills and to the cultural heritage of humanity. They can furnish forums for sharing ideas from all perspectives. But we put the things these institutions can do at risk if we make education a vehicle for a committee’s vision of social reconstruction. The incorporation of a mandated social creed into the “mission statements” of institutions limits the operation of reason. Directing all courses of study along lines that an administration or a task force have decided serve the mission of social reconstruction subordinate the teaching of practical skills and the humanities to ideological direction. Most importantly, perhaps, civic action that derives from an institutional program, rather than from undirected individual decision, contradicts not only the principle of intellectual freedom, but the essential character of liberal democracy.
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