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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 [...]