Democratizing Academic Professionalism Inside and Out

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.