Princeton historian Sean Wilentz prefaces his 2005 book The Rise of American Democracy with a timely and chilling reminder:

“Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power, and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible”

The Rise of American Democracy (xix)

Wilentz’s reminder is no less cogent when applied to the purposes and practices of higher education. As educators, we can contribute to democratic successes. We can help to ameliorate the violent potential of democratic reversals. We cannot, however, aid the reinvigoration of democratic institutions, principles, and practices unless we move beyond simple notions of community service and volunteerism. Contributing to democratic survival is more complicated than being willing to serve.

Yet student service in the guise of volunteerism has taken on a life of its own in education. The talismanic view of service as independently capable of generating and sustaining democratic capacity is at best a fond hope. At worst, like the facile ideology of “a thousand points of light,” it is a distraction that reduces education’s ability to contribute to sustainable democratic sovereignty. Service and scholarship are too often either divorced from one another or seen as one and the same. Separating service from scholarship prevents higher education from fulfilling its obligation to help build democratic capacity by preparing student-citizens for the habits and practices of public sovereignty. Conflating service with scholarship has equally negative consequences by fostering faculty who neither understand nor practice the inherent and inevitable connections between their research and teaching and their ongoing political responsibilities in a democracy.

We the People — along with civil institutions such as higher education, the information professions, and the agencies of government — form political alliances and coalitions that at their best span distinctions of wealth, power and interest. The three branches of government together constitute one crucial element in maintaining democratic public sovereignty. However, in democracies in which the people retain sovereignty, ordinary citizens of all stripes — including faculty, students, and both together — play an equally crucial role. The people, the rule of law embedded in their constitution, and the tripartite governance established by the people’s charter are each necessary in order to sustain a democracy’s structure of checks and balances and to sustain civil liberties.¹ With liberties come responsibilities.

We the People are constituted as responsible for our democratic sovereignty in the Constitution’s Preamble; the First Amendment and other Amendments act instrumentally to create explicit obligations.² The Constitution provides for the tripartite branches of government in Articles I, II, and III. The civil liberties find voice in the Bill of Rights. Continually reinvigorating democratic sovereignty requires education, whether through the formality of school and university scholarship or the library and laboratory of experience and self-disciplined engagement beyond the academy.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer draws the education-democracy connection succinctly in his 2005 tract Active Liberty. “The people, and their representatives,” Breyer wrote, “must have the capacity to exercise their democratic responsibilities. They should possess the tools, such as information and education, necessary to participate and to govern effectively” (16).

Breyer did not suggest that only those with an advanced education deserve or are capable of safeguarding the liberties associated with democracy. Still, policy and political decisions facing the American people are complex. Solutions may be non-intuitive and call for uncommon sensibilities. Surely, democratic successes require an active knowledge of our unvarnished history, of our democratic structure, and of conditions beyond our direct observation if we are to self-govern with more than raw emotion. Service — when practiced without scholarship — places democratic capacity at risk.

Institutional Foundations of Democratic Legitimation

Wilentz’s reminder that democracy is always at risk and Breyer’s insistence on the role of education in collective self-governance resonate deeply with Supreme Court decisions addressing the legitimacy of our democratic institutions. These decisions require our collective vigilance and our understanding of the issues that spawn them. Awareness of the conduct of government, and our active participation based on that knowledge, are the obligation of citizens collectively responsible for sustaining the legitimacy of their democracy.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens emphasized the legitimacy not only of the Constitution but also of the Supreme Court itself in a June 2006 decision that reinvigorated two fundamental principles of democratic governance: the separation of powers, in which the judicial, legislative, and executive branches each must play an affirmative role, and the rule of law, under which legal precedent and principle rather than brute force or the alleged benevolence of officials who place their own legitimacy above the law of the land, are central tenets of democratic governance.

“The executive is bound to comply with the rule of law that prevails,” Justice
Stevens wrote at the conclusion of his 73-page opinion in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld (2006, p. 72). The Court’s majority found that the executive branch’s creation of military tribunals violated the safeguards of the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions and exceeded the president’s authority. Under the rule of law, the executive cannot act independently outside of an explicit realm of granted authority. The Court ruled that the President and his administration must cease their extra-Constitutional actions.

The Court’s willingness to reinvigorate the principle which holds individuals and institutions to constitutional practice is nearly as old as the nation itself. This principle finds its judicial origins in Justice John Marshall’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, which itself re-legitimated Article III of the Constitution. In more recent reinvigorations of the separation of powers and the rule of law, the Court overruled Democratic President Harry S. Truman in 1952 when he exceeded his constitutional authority by attempting to seize the steel mills during the Korean War, and Republican President Richard M. Nixon in 1971 when he claimed a non-existent privilege to withhold incriminating Watergate tape recordings from federal prosecutors. Each of these was a political case: While the Supreme Court at its best is non-partisan, the Court is, nonetheless, always political — political in the sense that justices recognize not only the Constitution’s political compact among the tripartite branches of government but also the People’s liberty and responsibility to engage actively in democratic self-governance. The Supreme Court is obligated under the Constitution’s political structure to rule on the separation of powers and to enforce the rule of law. These obligations are elements of a political system that requires more than passive engagement not only from the judicial, legislative and executive branches of government but also from the People, who must not only comply with government when they see it as legitimate but also act as governors.³ Volunteer service is an inadequate model of practice for sustaining democratic sovereignty.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld is reassuring. The democratic keystones of rule of law and separation of powers, even during times of great national stress, emerged again as fundamental tenets worth fighting for, capable of standing against powerful anti-democratic challenges. Battles like this require citizens educated in the democratic principles, including those that legitimize both the citizen’s obligations and the tripartite duties of the equal branches of government.

Higher Education’s Role in Reinvigorating Democracy

Public attention to, and understanding of, the judiciary’s insistence that the executive and legislative branches of government adhere to the rule of law is a necessary vaccine against the loss of democratic sovereignty. Yet are we prepared as faculty, administrators and staff to hold higher education similarly responsible for contributing to and reinvigorating democratic capacity?

The habits of citizenship and comprehension of the political system to which we subscribe — like the curricula of language, fine arts, math, science, and the professions — can be learned and practiced in the academy. Effective education is no less important to the health of a democracy than are ethical officials and equitable laws. Higher education is too often failing, however, to root democracy into the lives and expectations of citizens. Thus is higher education too often failing to reinvigorate each generation’s sense of democratic capacity and public sovereignty. Decreasing democratic capacity is revealed not only through young adults’ recurring failure to vote. A lack of capacity is also exposed in an emerging sense among the young that politics is, if not shameful, then clearly futile. Youths and young adults have learned to engage with their communities, if at all, through occasional individual acts of volunteerism rather than through informed and sustained engagement with understanding the principles and reinvigorating the practices of democracy itself.

Acts of charity and selfless giving are marks of ethical commitment; they are to be applauded. They are — like the contributions of civic groups, congregations, and fraternal organizations — appropriate actions of student and other community members. Yet philanthropic and sweat-equity participation without deep knowledge and active engagement is not sufficient to fulfill the compact between higher education and democratic sovereignty. At a university fulfilling its democratic obligations, knowledge must, in addition to springing from experience and observation, include scholarship: the learned ability to bring the university’s full capacity — student and faculty, administration and staff — to bear on democratic sovereignty. While the call of service should be heard by all citizens and all institutions, education has a unique role to play.

Ashley came to the university with a record of community service and volunteerism. It was natural for her to enlist in THON, an annual, entirely student-run, volunteer effort culminating in a marathon of dancing through which several million dollars are raised each year for children’s cancer research. Students dance from Friday night through Sunday night. Faculty generally offer an informal moratorium on tests, quizzes, and even class attendance on the following Monday for those exhausted volunteers who participated. Fraternities, clubs, and others engage together with at least as much energy as they expend in the university’s pronounced commitment to athletic success. The university president has called THON the best thing we do as a university. Town support for Gown is high during THON. It is by any measure a source of university pride and a worthwhile and successful community-building experience for a particularly valuable cause. Although national service organizations such a Rotary and Elks are experiencing declining memberships, the THON service effort is growing. The local high school now holds its own scaled down version. Students are attracted to the service effort and are pleased to have contributed their time and energy to something valuable and tangible.

Ashley’s senior year with THON was in some respects her most rewarding — and most troubling. She had advanced through the ranks into a THON leadership position. The experience had, at least in part, motivated her active engagement with NGO programs. She volunteered in urban and rural, national and international arenas. As the year drew to a close Ashley’s questions were poignant: Why are we dancing for cancer and adding a drop in the bucket? Why do a bunch of students have to dance to get their country to see that health care and research to save children must be a priority, a shared responsibility? Why do so many of the corporate sponsors of THON manufacture products that emit carcinogens? Why didn’t the university help us learn how to change the system so that the government pays for needed research? What I did made me feel good, but what have we accomplished in the long term? I’m not sure my university time was well spent, she concluded.

The university met Ashley’s personal development needs, but missed the chance for purposeful teaching and collaborative learning about public sovereignty in a way that integrates democratic understanding, scholarship, and practice. Ashley found that while direct service is valuable, charitable service is an individual, privatizing effort: one individual aiding one or many individuals but rarely affecting root causes, service offered not as an element of political process and choice but from a sense of ethical or moral imperative. A good deal of university volunteerism teaches students the rewards of selfless giving. However, service too rarely addresses the brick and mortar of democratic sovereignty that create democratic keystones. Community-spirited volunteerism is not adequate to habituate democratic learning or teach public sovereignty. Those interested in effecting democracy itself — in building democratic capacity — must address public issues in addition to individual need. Those in higher education who want to help reinvigorate democratic institutions and practices must at the very least come to understand explicitly — through academic scholarship as well as their own experience — the relations between individual need and democratic obligation. Doing so requires more than social development. Universities and colleges are to be applauded for attending to the personal development that springs from direct service. Service does not in and of itself, however, replace higher education’s lynchpin democratic obligations.

Democratic Capacity: Reinvigoration through Transformation

The need for increased democratic capacity increases as the legitimacy of democratic institutions recedes from public memory or otherwise comes into crisis. Among the contributions of higher education to democratic capacity and sustainability is an interdisciplinary understanding of politics not as something shameful or dirty but as a set of practices — discursive and material — necessary to self-governance.

The function of our scholarship — that is, of our teaching and research broadly and coherently conceived — is not to enlist partisans. An instrumental function of democracy education must be to instill in youth an understanding of, and an ability to contribute to, the political compact inherent in the public’s constitutionally structured democratic sovereignty. As with the Supreme Court’s consideration of executive privilege and the separation of powers that reaches from Marbury v. Madison to Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, education is always political — political in that educators must recognize and teach the Constitution’s political compact among the tripartite branches and the people if we are to have any hope of reinvigorating active democratic engagement. Justices come to understand the need for a continually active citizenry not by some moment of divine inspiration but by studying the cases and controversies that have arisen from the Constitution. Students learn to become active citizens and to develop the skills needed to contribute to the democracy not from divine inspiration or charitable public service alone but from formative educational programs of scholarship and practice. The question is not whether or not we will continue traditions of public service at the university. We are confronted instead with a challenge to re-imagine our current practices or risk contributing to the decline of democracy into empire, where students, faculty, staff and even administrators’ roles are limited to spectators and consumers rather than to citizen critics building democratic agency.⁴

Our democratic and educational successes are inseparably coupled. James Madison’s Enlightenment recognition of the direct link between education and the ability of individuals to grapple with and understand the complexities of self-governance is instructive. “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives,” he wrote (Vol. III, p. 276). Madison, an architect of the Constitution, recognized too the inherent danger in governments that are unaccountable to the scrutiny of an enlightened public. An educated citizenry, he said, provides the foundation of accountability. “Learned institutions ought to be favorite objects with every free people,” Madison said. “They throw that light over the public mind which is the best security against crafty and dangerous encroachments on the public liberty” (Vol. III, p. 277).

Public Scholarship: A Curriculum of Consequence

We ask service to accomplish a lot. We want the experiential learning implicit in service to sensitize students to other cultures, to introduce them to unfamiliar social and economic strata, to enable them to transfer knowledge across classroom/community boundaries, and to initiate them into full citizenship. When service is strategically combined with a larger curriculum of democratic education, there is reason to believe that some of these transformations are nurtured in a manner that may assist in the complex process of generating democratic capacity and contribution.

Unfortunately, equations and generalizations which suggest that — or academic programs that act as if — service unaccompanied by an explicit curriculum of public sovereignty corresponds implicitly with democratic, academic, or other predictable learning outcomes or behavior changes mirror the out-of-favor belief that lectures alone or classroom seat time in and of itself produce learning. In a Scientific American column entitled The Political Brain, journalist Michael Shermer focused recently on a phenomenon social scientists and brain researchers call confirmation bias. People are more emotional than intellectual. Confronted by evidence, individuals rarely alter their opinions or behaviors. People interpret the world about them in ways that confirm what they already believe to be true. The war in Iraq is good or it is bad, justified or reckless, dependent not on news, the weight of evidence, or open-minded observation and investigation but on an individual’s very stable system of long-held beliefs. Rarely is news coverage alone, nor service alone, powerful enough to alter preexisting attitudes and opinions, let alone generate new habits of principled democratic practice.

This does not mean that education does not work. It does mean that it is necessary to be realistic about how to achieve desired learning outcomes. Toward that end, the challenge is to begin by adding an explicit curriculum of democratic capacity-building to already active pursuits of public service. The immediate hurdle is to be absolutely clear about what we want.

Higher education must provide an explicit curriculum in which democratic capacity-building is valued and rewarded as a core element of scholarship and professionalism — and as a core element of higher education’s democratic mission.

Three corollaries capture the public nature of higher education’s democratic mission:

• Students must receive effective instruction in the theory and practice of democratic citizenship that includes appropriately focused scholarship as well as field practice. Challenge: Identifying and developing curricula necessary to build democratic capacity through the production and diffusion of knowledge and the explicit transmittal of democracy’s theory and practice to each generation; institutional recognition of higher education’s core obligation to generate democratic capacity among students.
• The public has a right to benefit not only from the infusion into the polity of citizens with democratic capacity nurtured by scholarship and instruction in democratic principle and practice, but also from the university’s discovery and diffusion of new knowledge and practice applied to public needs and issues of local and national concern. This includes the scholarship and artistic contributions of faculty as well as students. Challenge: Creating institutional recognition of the value of public scholarship, providing faculty reward for excellence in its practice, and developing protocols by which it may be assessed.
• The public’s institutions of higher education must serve as conservators of the experiences, discoveries, understandings, and skills that are the essence of human enterprise and knowledge and that provide the enlightenment necessary for wise governance. Challenge: Protecting the autonomy of scholarship while recognizing scholarship as a public resource.

The challenge to adopt these corollaries is not an easy one. Many people believe that in performing public service they are sufficiently engaged in a democratic curriculum and that in offering public service universities already are meeting their democratic capacity and contribution obligations. Some assume that public service and the preparation of students for engaged citizenship are add-ons, rather than elements of a core educational mission. Universities and colleges generally require teaching, research and service and demand a high level of engagement in each for purposes of faculty reward and recognition, but do not set an equally high bar for the university’s often explicitly stated mission of producing good citizens. Few universities develop a professional environment in which there is incentive to alter faculty pedagogy, curricula, or research protocols explicitly to address democratic capacity-building and contribution as obligations inherent in our Constitution. As a result, the service community often unintentionally excludes faculty.

An educational enterprise called public scholarship is emerging in the United States and internationally that addresses some of these challenges.⁵ It places the focus on the educational and scholarship elements of democratic capacity-building and contribution rather than on the service component, which students encounter elsewhere. “Public scholarship is the conduct of scholarly and creative work, including teaching, research, artistic performance, and service, in ways that contribute to informed engagement in the democratic process” (Cohen, 2005, pp. 506-507). Rather than a prescriptive methodology, public scholarship is an educational philosophy in which the mission or desired university outcome is democratic capacity-building among students and contribution to democratic sovereignty by faculty, students and staff. Public scholarship carries an explicit appreciation of education’s special obligations and the value of fully integrating scholarship with democratic practice. And public scholarship recognizes that, as with all learning, it is rarely appropriate to rely on a single method or to assume that all individuals will progress in the same manner. A challenge for the Campus Compact is to help identify and encourage the means to implement democratic capacity-building in higher education, means which recognize the complexities of democracy, scholarship, and individual practice and thus move beyond stand-alone service to fully engage the unique potential of university-based discovery and diffusion of knowledge, innovation, and transformation.

¹ For a discussion of the people’s ownership of the Constitution and the rights it bestows, see J. M. Burns, A people’s compact. back

² For a discussion of the instrumental view that the Constitution, particularly the First Amendment, creates an explicit obligation, see J. Cohen, “Shouting fire in a crowded classroom: From Holmes to homeroom.” back

³ For a discussion of the people as governors, see A. Meiklejohn, Political freedom: The constitutional powers of the people. back

⁴ For more on the history and potential of citizen critics, see New York Times Co. v. Sullivan (p. 282), R. Eberly Citizen Critics, and E. P. J. Corbett and R. Eberly, “Becoming a Citizen Critic.” back

⁵ See, for example, R. Eberly and J. Cohen (eds.), A laboratory for public scholarship and democracy. back

Works Cited

Breyer, S. (2005) Active liberty, Interpreting our democratic constitution. New York: Knopf.

Burns, J. M. (1994). A people’s charter. New York: Random House.

Cohen, J. (2005). “Public Scholarship.” In L. Sherrod, C. Flanagan, R. Kassimir, and A. Bertelsen (eds.), Youth Activism: An International Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.

Cohen, J. (2001). “Shouting fire in a crowded classroom: From Holmes to homeroom.” Campus Compact Reader, 1:3, 11-17.

The Constitution of the United States of America. Accessed July 20, 2006.

Corbett, E. P. J., and Eberly, R. (2000). “Becoming a Citizen Critic.” Elements of Reasoning, 2d. ed. New York: Allyn and Bacon.

Dewey, J. (1927). The public and its problems. Miami, OH: Swallow Press, rpt. 1980.

Eberly, R. (2000.) Citizen Critics: Literary Public Spheres. History of Communication Series. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Eberly, R., and Cohen, J. (eds.) (2006). A laboratory for public scholarship and democracy. New directions for teaching and learning, No. 105 . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Gusfeld, J. (1984). The culture of public problems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hamdan v. Rumsfeld. (2006). Accessed July 19, 2006.

Madison, J. (1865). Letters and other writings of James Madison. Published by order of congress. 4 vols. Ed. Philip R. Fendall. Philadelphia: Lippincott.

Marbury v. Madison. (1803.) Accessed July 20, 2006.

Meiklejohn, A. (1948). Political freedom: The constitutional powers of the people. New York: Oxford University Press.

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan. (1964). Accessed July 20, 2006.

Price, V. (1992). Public opinion. Communication concepts 4. Newbury Park, N. J.: Sage Publications.

Schermer, M. (2006, July.) “The political brain.” Scientific American, p. 36.

Wilentz, S. (2005). The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Dr. Jeremy Cohen is Associate Vice President and Senior Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, Professor of Communication, and Faculty Chair of the Bachelor of Philosophy Program at Penn State University.

Dr. Rosa Eberly is Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences and Associate Professor of English at Penn State University and a Fellow in the Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy.