Syllabus for What Do Colleges and
Universities Owe Democracy?
Midcoast Senior College First Spring
Term 2022
Thursdays, March 10-April 14
via Zoom
Copyright © 2022
Bruce W. Hauptli
Ronald Daniels’
account of liberal education points to a “vital tension” in liberal democracies
arising as they work to bind “… the notion of a government responsive to popular
will to the imperative to protect individual rights and preserve rule of law.”
As President of Johns Hopkins, he contends universities
must provide students with a civic
education which prepares them for the responsibilities of democratic
citizenship, and maintains universities fail to recognize let alone meet this
responsibility. Daniels discusses
historical attempts to address this and offers his own proposals.
In this course we will critically study his analysis and proposals.
Text:
Ronald J. Daniels, What Universities Owe
Democracy (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins U.P., 2021)
Class Forum [click
on this link to enter the Discussion Forum for the class where postings,
comments, and discussions are welcome]
First Week March 10: Introduction
Readings for First
Class:
begin reading Daniels (hopefully
complete your reading by the third Class)
from my website read:
My View of the Nature of a Liberal Arts Education and
Education, Indoctrination and Academic Freedom
In this first
class we will consider and discuss the following questions/topics:
What are Universities/Colleges?
“Essences”
vs. “family resemblances.”
Discussion of Types, Purposes/Goals,
History, etc. of universities/colleges--are there any types where civic
education might work against institutional missions?
Jefferson and the University of
Virginia.
“Historical Tidbits about universities
and colleges over time.
What should colleges and universities
do? Teaching, research,
cultural/artistic performance and preservation, service (to...).
Teaching
vs. Indoctrination.
What Daniels says:
“everything that universities embody is inimical to the autocrat’s interest in
the untrammeled exercise of arbitrary public power.
They are institutions committed to freedom of inquiry, to the
contestation of ideas through conversation and debate, to the formation of
communities that gather and celebrate a diverse array of experiences and
thought, and to individual flourishing achieved through diligent study.
They rest upon a foundation of reliable knowledge and facts, which are
antidotes to the uncertainty and dissimulation peddled by authoritarian regimes.
They are, to quote William Rainey Harper, the first president of the
University of Chicago, an “institution born of the democratic spirit.”
pp. 8-9
My
Supplement for the First Class.
Second Week March 17: How Do
Universities Change, Liberal/Civil Education, and What is Democracy?
In this class
we will consider and discuss the following questions/topics:
How & Why do universities/colleges
change?
Who decides on such changes?
What is “Liberal Education?”
Is it the same thing as "Civic Education?"
What Is Democracy?
Who are "the people?
What is necessary for it?
How important are:
written constitutions,
rule of law,
separation of powers,
an independent judiciary,
consent and the freedom and integrity
of voting,
an independent press,
freedom of assembly and speech (and can
it allow for restrictions on hate speech),
freedom from unwarranted governmental
deprivation of the right to life and liberty,
minority rights….
Third Week March 24: Overview of
Daniels’ book and argument, and Into the text: Universities and Access,
Mobility, and Fairness:
A. Overview of
Daniels:
B. Daniels’
Chapter One: Universities and Access, Mobility, and Fairness:
Fourth Week March 31:
Educating Democratic Citizens:
A.
Critical Question: could one contend that mandatory civic education might
be “indoctrination?”
B. Summary from Chapter 1: American Dreams Access,
Mobility, Fairness:
pp. 84-85 I began this chapter by
arguing for the essential role social mobility plays in the liberal democratic
project and how vital the collective belief in the prospect of mobility is to
sustaining it. Democracies
draw their credibility and their resilience from an implicit covenant that
anyone with enough grit and talent can move beyond the confines of the
circumstances into which they were born.
As income inequality and stratification have grown more acute and
intergenerational mobility has stalled, this central tenet of the American Dream
has become increasingly fragile…[and] universities cannot truly stand for equal
opportunity until they muster the courage to eliminate the most conspicuous
vestiges of caste that still cling to them.
Only then can they lay claim to their heritage as carriers of the
American Dream….
C: Educating Democratic Citizens:
Chapter Summary: p. 128 building
a new requirement into the curriculum—especially one that has the potential to
be as controversial as a democracy requirement—is no mean task.
The curriculum at any college or university lies at the intersection of a
great many stakeholders—including faculty, students, and administrators—with a
lot of divergent interests. The
coursework students take must be responsive to students’ needs and trajectories,
accommodate the disciplinary expertise of faculty, and adhere to the broader
aims of the administration as well as the structural and historical legacies of
the institution. Even the best-laid
plans for curricular reform can fall apart.
Meaningful and enduring reforms demand the sustained commitment of
leadership and engagement at multiple levels of the institution.
D. The Example of
Another University’s Approach:
Amy Guttmann is one of the nations most respected and
highly influential political theorists of democracy.
From 2001-2004 she was Provost of Princeton and from 2004-2022 she was
President of the University of Pennsylvania.
She is currently the US Ambassador to Germany.
Her Democratic Education
(Princeton: Princeton UP., 1987 and 1999) and
Why Deliberative Democracy?
coauthored with Dennis Thompson (Princeton UP., 2004) are important works and
their conception of “deliberative democracy” is highly influential.
During her Presidency she led Pen to commit to commit to a vision that
its “highest institutional priority is to prepare promising students of all
races, religions, and backgrounds to become the leaders and innovators of the
future.” In many ways she appears
to have committed the University to many of the goals Daniels champions and the
Penn Compact
2020 codifies many of these initiatives.
Amongst her initiatives was the establishment of
The
Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement which is
founded on the principle that a democratic, open, secure, tolerant, and
interconnected world benefits all Americans. One
of its initiatives is
The
Democracy Project which aims to reverse what it believes is a crisis
of confidence: “even as Americans remain committed to the ideals of democracy, a
majority see democracy in the United States as weak and getting weaker,
according to a national survey jointly commissioned by Freedom House, the George
W. Bush Institute, and the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global
Engagement.
One example of both the potential and the challenges
confronting “civic education” is an “undergraduate student’s paper: Patel, Amit
B.,
“Democratic Political Socialization on University Campuses” 08 April
2011. CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of
Pennsylvania.
Fifth Week April 7: Creating Knowledge,
Checking Power, and Purposeful Pluralism:
A. Discussion:
I have extensively
revised my Supplement on Deliberative Democracy and would like you to look at
the new version:
An Introduction to "Deliberative Democracy" and Democratic Education
especially the new discussion on Democratic Education and the difficulties in
implementing it as well as links at the end regarding
“civics education” in primary and
secondary schools.
B. Summary from Chapters Three and Four
Creating Knowledge, Checking Power,
and Purposeful Pluralism:
pp. 23-24 Chapter Three
“considers universities as fact-producing and fact-checking institutions.
Liberal democracies need reliable knowledge and a shared sense of truth
for citizens to make informed decisions as voters and community members, for
legislators to develop rational public policy, and for holding institutions
like the free press, leaders, and governments to account.
With the founding of our first research universities in the 1870s,
American higher education has been among
the most important institutions for credentialing expertise; for conducting
advanced research; and for unearthing, preserving, and disseminating facts.
In time, democratic societies came to embrace universities as beacons of
factual truth, and government support of research across the natural sciences,
social sciences, and humanities has unleashed countless discoveries and
strengthened the university’s role as an anchor for democratic life.
Yet this relationship has frayed in recent years, as questions from
within and without the university have accumulated about the objectivity,
legitimacy, and accuracy of the academy as a locus of truth and facts.
Creating
Knowledge and Checking Power:
pp. 143-184
a historical discussion of how colleges and universities “create knowledge” and
“check power.”
pp. 185-188 His conclusion of all
of this is that “What is needed is openness with guardrails.”
Purposeful
Pluralism:
Chapter Four addresses [p. 24]
“…the question of diversity and speech on campus.
Colleges and universities are microcosms of pluralistic, multiethnic
democracy that have the capacity to model for students how to interact with one
another across a vast spectrum of experiences to forge democratic compromise,
consensus, and will. Our campuses
today are far more diverse than in past eras, yet we do not fully or adequately
encourage the interactions and exchanges across differences that are
foundational to a healthy democracy.
In a multitude of ways, universities have essentially given students a
pass to opt out of encounters with people dissimilar from themselves.
Higher education has rightly focused on promoting diversity in
admissions, but it has neglected to foster pluralism once students arrive, which
has given rise to an undercurrent of silencing and a dearth of substantive
debate. The answer to this dilemma,
I argue, lies in a move toward a more
purposeful pluralism on our campuses, undergirded by policies that drive
students to have more encounters with those unlike themselves, and that then
help deepen and enrich these interactions.”
pp. 187-218 as was the case in
all the other chapters, there is an initial discussion of the importance of
diversity for democracies, and a discussion of factors which encourage and
broaden it a well as those which diminish it (187-193).
It is followed by a long historical discussion of how college and
universities initially provided students the opportunity to leave their local
communities and meet others from: other communities, religions classes, races,
genders, and nations pp. 193-217).
He notes that p. 195 “unlike the previous chapters of this book, which have
focused on admissions, curricula, and research, this one turns to the less
formal social interactions of campus life, to those moments of contact—sometimes
spontaneous and serendipitous, sometimes structured and deliberate—across the
unfamiliar that have occurred on campuses for two centuries.”
This leads him to the section on
“Purposeful Pluralism:”
pp. 232-233 “diversity
is being invited to the party.
Inclusion is being asked to dance,”
writes social commentator Vernā Myers.
Universities have been so focused on the invitations that they have
allowed themselves to be blinded to the dance.
They have devoted far more attention to creating a diverse class of
students and minimizing the tensions that inevitably emerge (sometimes at the
risk of infantilizing students who are in fact young adults) than promoting
substantive exchanges across that diversity once they arrive on campus or
modeling how to engage perspectives or statements that are unfamiliar or
uncomfortable.
He quickly discusses efforts by
universities to study their physical and residential spaces, roommate selection
procedure, and first year courses so as to promote opportunities to interact,
connect, and x connect students across difference.”
Then he claims [p. 238]: “Our
universities should be at the forefront of modeling a healthy, multiethnic
democracy.”
But so many colleges and
universities have a mission of educating students in the theology of a religion,
the intricacies of a profession, the preservation of culture....
In conclusion he says: p. 241
“throughout this book, I have sought to develop a holistic mapping of the
role that the university plays in liberal democracy by focusing on four key
functions: promoting social mobility, educating for citizenship, checking power
with facts and knowledge, and modeling and promoting pluralism. In each of these
functional areas, I showed how universities in the United States evolved to take
on these responsibilities and how well (or poorly) they are requiting them
today.” He then summarizes his proposals on pp. 241-244:
ending legacy admissions
institute a democracy requirement
for graduation to better educate citizens,
embrace “open science” with
guardrails
reimaging student encounters on
campus
I am concerned about how Hate
Speech may interfere with democracy and, thus, may require legal penalties.
Please look at my
Hate Speech and Democratic Responsibility:
Rights, Civility,
and
Dignity.
Comments and Questions for Final Class:
Doug Bates:
After much pondering and reviewing the materials shared with us, I am most
motivated to focus on the issue of democracy and the timing of when this should
begin.
I need to read more about and by Amy Gutmann and plan to do this in the months
ahead.
I
agree that not all universities or colleges such as specialty schools, religious
institutions, trade schools, and numerous others are of interest to some people
because they focus on specific areas of study which may not be studies in
democracy. If
universities/colleges do engage in the study/actions of democracy, then it
should he a planned part of their agenda.
Democracy
for me does not fit conveniently within the first amendment, although certainly
many other limitations and requirements that we accept in our society that does
not change our perception of democracy.
The second point that influences me is Martha Nussbaum, and her issues of
timing: “one thing that a society based upon equal respect needs to do urgently
is to teach young citizens that their society contains many religions and
ethnicities and that we are all committed to the fair treatment of all of
them.”
I
think I recall in grammar school that we had to recite the pledge of allegiance
to the flag every morning in our home room.
This
is an ideal time to incorporate simple ideas in the form of storytelling to your
students and follow up each year with additional information suitable to the
grades in which the students are studying.
I
think personally waiting until the college or university level to inculcate
discussions about democracy is too late.
One
simple way to help college students with democratic ideas is the require essays
for most exams. Learning
good writing skills leading to improved communication (and selling) skills is
important. I
am impressed by Nussbaum’s thoughts and will need to look up suggested
books/essays to read to broaden my horizons.
I have enjoyed thinking about democracy and its application to our futures.
Having
been fascinating by the global financial world throughout my career, I have
watched with considerable interest how different societies were adjusting to the
new global digital (and nuclear) world.
It
became evident to me that democracy was merely one idea to consider or confront
in the economic world. Concern
for global geopolitics has been brought front and center in the modern world,
evolving over the past 50 years.
The
Wild West ways of the 1970’s and 1980’s in the economic and investment world
unfolded with much enthusiasm and little apparent concern for how to manage the
global expansion of opportunity.
The rusting concepts of economic comparative advantage of different economies
were changing rapidly in the explosion of technological evolution.
Michael Wormser:
Leadership in a Democracy:
Daniels and the other writers cited have focused on better educating American
students and the public generally. They
do not discuss at length leadership in a democracy and the responsibilities of
opinion leaders and elected officials to promote and protect the tenants of our
democratic system that we have emphasized: mutual respect, tolerance in various
forms, civility, civic learning, compromise, the common good, pluralism, etc.
Should
leadership be part of the discussion or is it a dead end, the quality of
democratic leadership being no better or worse than that of the population at
large and is dependent on the same American education?
Can the public demand more of its
leaders, a degree of competency in understanding and practicing these tenants?
How can politicians for elective office
be encouraged to set a better example of what self-government in a democracy
means? And is there anything that can be
done to reverse the increasing, if not almost total, negative campaigning?
We have
alluded to some negative restraints on lawmakers such as shame, which tends to
be after the fact. What about proactive
incentives to promote better opinion makers, particularly on social media, and
better legislators at all levels but particularly at the federal level?
At the
present time, the cards seem to be stacked against any meaningful improvement in
the quality of our leaders, and particularly in our elected leaders (I mean in
terms of the discussed essentials of democratic governance, not liberal or
conservative ideology).
A “Culture
of Democracy:” Schools can teach courses about civics, on how the U.S.
government and its three branches work and on the Constitution, but does this
impart an appreciation of what it means to live in a democracy?
Most democracies historically have
developed gradually, with trial and error part of their development but at the
same time providing a means of educating the population about democratic values.
Isn’t there a learning curve in this
process and training in how one participates in and contributes to a democratic
culture? It would appear that this form
of education, however derived, hardly exists in this country anymore.
Students and voters can learn about the
operations of our government but that alone doesn’t make them better democratic
citizens. It’s not formal knowledge of
the workings our government that’s most important, it seems to me, but the
informal customs, habits, mores, fair play, interactions of citizens in daily
life and how they treat each other that’s more fundamental.
How can the country acquire a higher
level of mutual respect, empathy for others, an attitude that no one person or
group has all the answers and that other people and groups have valid positions
and answers that contribute to better solutions?
Deliberate Media Misinformation for Public Consumption: To
put it bluntly, can democracy exist in this digital/social media age when
numerous groups, with access to social media outlets and unlimited money,
deliberately spread misinformation, lies, and half-truths?
Should the excuse of exercising one’s
First Amendment rights be used to insulate what often are conspiracies to
deliberately sow havoc, destabilize our society, divide citizens and groups,
mislead the public for selfish or undemocratic agendas, destroy people’s
reputations and flout all forms of basic decency and civility that any society
must have to survive and prosper?
What we have today are nothing less than efforts to destroy
American democracy by using the very democratic values and protections we
cherish. Laws on hate speech have been
mentioned. Shouldn’t these laws be
strengthened? Shouldn’t there be some
additional limits on free speech, as there are in other democracies?
The First Amendment should not be a
license to undermine the very foundations of our democracy.
It is not a sacrosanct right that
surpasses all other values and tenants of our Constitution.
Why should Fox News, for example, be allowed to air
deliberate lies, half-truths, character assassination or attempts to sow discord
and poison public discourse in this country and without any accountability?
One proposal is to revive the “Fairness
Doctrine” (1949) of the Federal Communications Act, requiring that different
points of view be aired. Indeed the Act
needs to go further: If Fox News attacks a person’s reputation or point of view
on a subject, it should be required to allow that person or group equal time for
rebuttal and for persons to defend themselves. Since
Fox News viewers or listens, I would venture, do not listen to other news
sources, this could make a major difference in a segment of the population’s
perceptions of politicians and personalities and policies that Fox News chooses
to smear or on the issues and policy positions it attacks.
Fox News might also become somewhat more
careful in the tactics it uses to malign people and the policies it opposes.
The equal time provision of the FCA relating to political
campaigning also needs to be resurrected and libel laws strengthened.
In addition, the criteria for granting broadcast and
television licenses under the original Communications Act needs to be
strengthened or at least more vigorously enforced to comply with the Act’s
intention to “operate in the public interest and afford reasonable opportunity
for the discussion of conflicting views on controversial issues of public
interest.” There are tools out there that
can force the media to become more accountable. They
need to be used forcefully and consistently.
Erv Snyder:
Shortly after we finished our most recent class the Senate voted to confirm K B
Jackson as our newest Supreme Court Justice. It
was somewhat disturbing that 3 Rep. Senators wouldn't even come into the chamber
to cast their votes. Yet more disturbing
was the haste with which the Rep. Senators exited the chamber after the vote was
announced. But of particular note to me
was that as the Rep. Senators exited they were immediately followed by the row
of young interns (some may have been young staffers) leaving the chamber while
the other side of the room continued to applaud and celebrate the momentous
event which had just occurred. My
question - even if colleges and universities have an obligation to teach our
youths about and promote our democratic experiment, in today's climate do they
even have time left to have a positive impact on our troubling trends?
Cletis Boyer:
This is a long piece that identifies one issue that I think Daniels’ position as
president of Johns Hopkins renders him simply incapable of seeing.
Indeed, there is a clear conflict of
interest between his role as social critic and his role as university president.
Daniels acknowledges the work of two “anti-meritocrats”,
Michael Sandel (The Tyranny Of Merit)
and Daniel Markovits (The Meritocracy Trap),
noting that….“they argue that the endless pursuit of merits and credentials has
become wrenching for the winners and humiliating for the losers.
In addition, they claim that the heavy
emphasis our society has placed on education damages the mental health of those
who go to college, and above all that the populist upheaval in democracies is
due in no small part to those who feel an education-based meritocracy has left
them behind.” (77)
Daniels accepts most of their assessment, yet he rejects a
call for overturning meritocracy:
“But where Sandel, Markovits, and others see despair in the
machinery of opportunity, I see hope…..Even if a college degree is a minority
status, a totem of privilege, it need not be for much longer….[if we] turn
toward education, not away from it; to recommit to the potential of a human
capital economy, not unravel it.” (78)
Daniels’ primary recommendation for increasing the
potential of a HUMAN CAPITAL ECONOMY [my capitalization] is to drop “legacy
admissions”. And Johns Hopkins has done
so. What changes does that make in the meritocracy?
JH remains one of the most selective colleges and
universities in the country. The 2408
students of the class of ‘26 were chosen from 37150 applicants from 7774 high
schools from around the world, a 6.5% acceptance rate (JHU website).
Yes, 20% of those are first-in-family to
go to college, so JH has “diversified” its student body, and widened the pool of
individuals who can meet their standards. But
those standards maintain JH’s standing as a “highly selective college”, and
thrust those “firsters” into the pipeline for possible admission to a highly
selective graduate program.
The meritocracy remains as is, the personality and
character shaping pressures remain in place, and if “upward mobility” continues
to, say, Yale Law School, a “firster” might become, as Daniel Markovits
chronicled in his commencement address to the 2015 LLM (a program of legal
specialization following the attainment of a JD and passing the bar exam)
graduates of Yale Law, “[Y]ou are sitting here today because you ranked among
the top 3/10ths of one percent of a massive meritocratic competition; and one on
which the competitors conspicuously agree about which is the biggest prize.”
(manuscript for commencement address “A
New Aristocracy”, hereafter ANA).
Markovits continued to remind the students that they were
right not to believe the “rat race ends here”: “[Y]ou don’t believe it.
More important, you don’t act as if you
believe it; you do almost whatever is necessary to learn, to produce, to
continue to distinguish yourselves. There’s
a sense in which you’re right – or at least reasonable – to stay in the
rat-race. You all know the list of plums
you’re competing for and you agree (astonishingly widely) which are sweetest.
This intensifies your ongoing
competition: the clerkships, executive-branch posts, public interest jobs, elite
law-firm partnerships, and professorships that you overwhelmingly most want all
have hundreds of aspirants for each opening.” (ANA)
A Marxist couldn’t have stated better how capitalism forms
our very subjectivities! And what of
“those plums”, what exactly does that entail? “[T]he
top one percent of earners, and indeed even the top 1/10th of one percent, today
owe fully 4/5ths of their total income to labor.
That is unprecedented in all of human history: American meritocracy has
created a state of affairs in which the richest person out of every thousand
overwhelmingly works for a living.” (ANA)
“This, then, is where things stand.
We have become a profession and a society
constituted by meritocracy. Massively
intensified and massively competitive elite training meets massively inflated
economic and social rewards to elite work. You,
in virtue of sitting here today, belong to the elite – to the new, superordinate
working class.” (ANA)
Now, Markovits (Yale Law), like Sandel (Harvard Law), are
themselves possessors of one of the plums, yet they see the dark side of
meritocracy, they see the formative processes of individual character traits,
and they see the catastrophe for our democracy of the rule by the meritocrats,
and the exclusion of the masses from having any influence whatsoever in shaping
the rules which govern their lives.
Markovits sees the social structure of our society clearly,
he knows his students want to be in this superordinate working class, but he
wants them to have more genuine fulfillment. “[W]hen
you find an opportunity to trade a little money or status for a lot of freedom,
you should take it….you should take it every time.
[But] the forces that brought you to this
point remain in place. Every incentive is wrong.” (ANA)
“The new aristocracy promotes human flourishing for no one:
certainly not for the excluded rest; nor even for the ensnared rich.
We are trained to think of economic
inequality as presenting a zero sum game: to suppose that redistribution to
benefit the bottom must burden the top. But
this is not such a case: reforms that democratize training and talent would
benefit everybody." (ANA).
“Such democratic reforms would restore the bulk of
Americans to full participation in an economic and social order from which they
have been, for several decades now, increasingly excluded.
And democratic reforms invite the elite –
you all – to accept an almost costless diminution in wealth and status in
exchange for a massive, precious increase in leisure and liberty, a reclaiming
of your authentic selves.” (ANA)
“The problem remains how to make the global trade, how to
reestablish a democratic social order. Again,
I don’t know. But I do know that a
winning trade – winning for everyone – exists. And
I also know that you – with your vast talents, enormous discipline, and immense
energy – are better-placed than anyone else to conceive and to broker the deal.
You should keep a reborn democratic
equality always in mind as you go forth, in your small decisions as well as your
large ones. You should support and
sustain one another whenever you choose equality and freedom over caste and
wealth. And you should demand that Yale
Law School loyally supports you as you make those choices.
The democratic project has no better
midwife; and so much turns on your efforts now; including, not least of all,
your own futures.” (ANA)
The last paragraph of Daniels’ book provides a roadmap to
identifying the most serious deficits of his analysis:
"The insurrection at the Capitol building may have failed,
but the forces that fueled it have not left us. We
cannot be blithe about democracy’s prospects. It is incumbent upon our fellow
citizens and our bulwark institutions to look unflinchingly and intensely at how
we came to this place where our democracy feels as if it is coming undone.
There is no better place to start this
conversation, this self-reflection, than the university.
Not only must this indispensable
institution seize this opportunity to understand what ails our liberal
democracy, but it must also go further in discerning its own role in fostering
liberal democracy, its contributions and its failures, and then must act with
fierce and unstinting resolve in remedying the places where it has stumbled.
It is hardly hyperbole to say that
nothing less than the protection of our basic liberties is at stake." (250-251)
I contend that Sandel and Markovits, not Daniels, have
identified an essential component of “the forces that fueled the insurrection”,
and that they, not Daniels, have looked “unflinchingly and intensely at how we
came to this place where our democracy feels as if it is coming undone.” Among
other things, it is meritocracy that “ails our liberal democracy”, and highly
selective colleges which play a key role in both valorizing and producing
meritocracy. Capitalism creates “winners” and “losers”, sets them in conflict
with one another, and creates ideologies to obscure the way the system works.
Meritocracy is just such an ideology, and it tells us, as did Margaret Thatcher,
TINA, “there is no alternative”.
Markovits, in a piece published in
The Hedgehog Review (Vol. 22, Issue 2), “Schooling in the Age of
Capital”, will have the last word: “[A]
social and economic hierarchy based on HUMAN CAPITAL (my emphasis) creates a
pitiless competition for access to the meritocratic education that builds human
capital….The only way out – for schools as well as for students – involves
structural reforms that extend well beyond education, to reach economic and
social inequalities writ large. But
although reforms cannot end with schools, colleges, and universities, they might
begin there. In particular, the familiar hope that making standardized tests
less biased and more accurate and making rankings more comprehensive – that is,
PERFECTING MERITOCRACY (my emphasis) – might effectively launder social and
economic inequalities without diminishing them is simply a fantasy.
Colleges and universities, in particular,
cannot redeem their educational souls while retaining their exclusivity.
Instead, elite schools must become, simply, less elite.”
I. In the above summation (from
p. 241) he says he focused the book on "a holistic mapping of the role that the
university plays in liberal democracy by focusing on four key functions:
promoting social mobility, educating for citizenship, checking power with facts
and knowledge, and modeling and promoting pluralism. He claims he has
shown "how universities in the United States evolved to take on these
responsibilities and how well (or poorly) they are requiting them
today.” Is there a missing step in his argument that Universities
owe democracy fulfillment of the roles? To see my point
consider the following argument: American Universities have evolved
into providers of highly treasured sporting events (e.g., NCAA football and
basketball). They currently do fairly good job of doing this, but things
could be much better. Therefore, they owe it to America to provide the
highest quality sporting events.
American colleges and universities do promote social mobility, educate
for citizenship, check power with facts and knowledge, and model pluralism, but
are they the sole agencies doing these things, and do they have an obligation to
do these things? Providing education is, clearly, a responsibility
for universities, but is providing a "civic education" a responsibility?
Providing an education provides for social mobility, but does that make social
mobility a responsibility for universities?
II. There is a wide diversity of types of institutions of higher education. Almost all should foster liberal education, most should foster narrative understanding, many could foster democratic citizenry and also pluralism. I believe their places on this spectrum should be the result of an institutional value arrived at through a long process of an academic community’s reflective deliberation aimed at refining their core missions—a process actually encouraged by the American accreditation and decadal reaccreditation process. Since such communities are composed of regularly changing groups of constituencies, their place on such a spectrum is likely to change over time. One might well identify types of colleges and universities whose core mission makes "democratic education" a low priority. Religious colleges, for example, could contend that their responsibility is to prepare their students to be members of a "religious community" rather than for democracy. Business might contend that their responsibility is to prepare their students to run businesses, and democratically-inclined individuals are not well-suited to the task. Music colleges might contend that they are concerned with training musicians, and that they have no responsibility to provide citizenship training whatsoever. One might even go on to claim that Daniels goal of "purposeful promotion of pluralism" requires the active acceptance and support of institutions which don 't have a focus on education for "democratic citizenship."
III. Rather than thinking that institutions have an obligation to have "a democracy requirement" for their students, I think it is more appropriate to encourage them to deliberately become (and deliberately remain) academic communities whose character instantiates deliberative democracy. Such an institution will best foster democratic citizenry within and outside its community. A community of deliberatively-democratic faculty, co-curricular professionals, staff, administrators, and trustees would do a superior job of fostering future democratically-inclined citizens!
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File revised on
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