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American higher education is afflicted by a condition of successful failure. In terms of academic knowledge production, America's colleges and universities are success stories, yet there is a disturbing neglect of the civic life eroding all around Americans. At a time of widespread public distrust of politics, institutions, and officials, a time of wicked policy problems such as overincarceration, costly health care, ineffective kindergarten through twelfth-grade education, and environmental endangerment, colleges and universities offer complacent gestures such as service-learning and civic engagement courses. They have failed more fundamentally to align organizational resources to what must be the next great academic mission: restoring American democracy. In this chapter, the author prescribes a general course of treatment for the underlying disorder: the currently inadequate connection between the culture of academic professionalism and the culture of lay citizen participation. The author's diagnosis and treatment plan involve a complicated combination of greater self-consciousness and a more explicitly democratic commitment on and off campus. First, one needs to be sober about the hidden curriculum--the technocratic administrative cultures, ineffectual institutional governance habits, and social distance between faculty and students that prevent the university from modeling a democratic way of life. Second, one should advocate university-facilitated democratic work off campus that is non-condescending, politically efficacious, yet also congruent with the university's socially unique function as a place where traditions of inquiry and creative achievement are studied, revered, and challenged.

This article investigates the practical form of citizen engagement that occurs in collective problem-solving efforts such as civic enterprises, grassroots initiatives and self-help groups. Drawing on extensive empirical evidence from diverse policy fields, it articulates the distinct experimental and disruptive policy work that citizens enact in these citizens ' governance spaces and challenges dominant interpretations which view them as either (i) a testament to the capacity of citizens to effectively solve complex public problems or (ii) a symptom of advanced neoliberalism where states off-load complex problems onto citizens. The article moves beyond this dualism to consider the motivations, challenges, available resources and distinct democratic work enacted by citizens in these spaces of bottom-up governance. Citizens' governance spaces, the article concludes, offer important lessons – both in terms of potential benefits and risks – for the project of deepening the quality and reach of citizen participation in modern systems of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider one of the democratic puzzles of our era: At a time when citizen participation in criminal justice via the jury could scarcely be weaker--a time, moreover, in which the [...]

What does it mean, today, to extend university knowledge to the general public, to empower citizens and communities through higher education? Academics face daunting public skepticism about the overweening power of the educated professional. Conventional ideas of academic professionalism are rooted in a more trusting era in which a "social trustee" model achieved prominence in medicine, law, governance, and education. This way of being a professional embodies a commitment to public service, and it is not intended to disempower, yet it has unintentionally marginalized by furthering epistemic, legal, and normative distinctions between professional and lay citizen knowledge and capability. These distinctions are built into training, institutional practice, and professional self-understandings, all of which can foster social distance and lay skepticism. However, a different, "democratic professionalism," model is emerging in a number of fields to forge more horizontal linkages with lay people. Such linkages have historical precedent and were evident in nineteenth-century lyceum practices that illustrate the ways that knowledge can be co-produced rather than steered by academic institutions. To be a citizen-centric institution, the university must encourage the education of democratic professionals in a range of fields and use in-reach, action research, and other collaborative methods to involve lay citizens more substantively in knowledge production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article posits that some forms of popular participation offer important resources for democratic renewal. It develops a conceptual distinction between thin and thick varieties of populism. Thin populist movements mobilize popular support to replace elite leaders by undermining or corroding the deliberative and inclusionary principles of representative government. In contrast, thick populist movements seek to modify or alter the practices and conventions of representative government by offering democracy-enhancing and trust-building organizational forms and political practices. This distinction between thin and thick populism helps identify a swath of normative and practical common-ground occupied by populists and deliberative democratic reformers and innovators, who have also held deeply critical views of representative democracy. The article discusses four contemporary examples of democratic innovation (broadly understood) to illustrate how thick populism can take root in organizations, institutions, campaigns, and in the efforts of everyday citizens. Consideration is given to the lessons that contemporary forms of thick populism offer for advocates of participatory and deliberative democratic innovation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BUTTON, Mark. Contract, Culture, and Citizenship. University Park: Penn State University Press, 2008. 280 pp. Cloth, $55.00--Contract, Culture, and Citizenship revisits the well-worn texts of the social contract theorists Hobbes, [...]

Introduction to the interview: In an era when democracy is claimed to be in crisis, citizens are portrayed as increasingly distrustful of politicians and political institutions, and change, if any, is expected to be coming from extra-institutional spaces, Albert Dzur invites us to seek and find the seeds of democratic change within the existing institutions of representative democracy. Dzur's work captures the difference democratic professionals can make in these spaces and tells us about the fresh approach they bring to their everyday routines in schools, community centers, government agencies, and even prisons. What links democratic professionals in different institutions is their aspiration to create power-sharing arrangements and collaborative thinking skills in places that are usually characterized as hierarchical and non-participatory. Dzur explains how democratic professionals transform the way institutions function and find solutions to collective problems. Yet such transformative practices often elude the attention of democratic theorists as they fall outside of the established notions of democracy and democratic change. The following interview focuses on the relationship between democratic theory and practice, the difference between social movement actors and democratic professionals, and the challenges of bringing democratic change and sustaining it in existing institutions, organizations and work places. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]