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About the Author
Stan Katz teaches public and international affairs and directs the Center for Arts and Cultural Policy Studies at the Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School. He is a past president of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society for Legal History. He comments frequently on policy issues relating to higher education, particularly liberal education, and on the humanities and social sciences, philanthropy, scholarly relations with Cuba, and the interplay of civil society, constitutionalism, and democracy. And on his beloved Cubs.
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Reflective Engagement at Georgetown University
I spent yesterday evening and most of the day today at Georgetown University consulting with President Jack DeGioia, Law Center Dean Alex Aleinikoff, and a good many of their faculty colleagues about the plans for an institutional effort to support “public scholarship” (what DeGoia calls reflective engagement for the common good). Dean Aleinikoff has been leading the project to establish a Center for Public Scholarship. The idea is that the university should: support the efforts of its faculty and students to do research on subjects of importance to the general public as well as to public agencies; to promote the civic engagement of students and faculty through experiential learning projects; to communicate more effectively with the many publics outside the university; and more.
I was tremendously impressed both by the personal commitment of President DeGioia to this project (he was with us at a Monday dinner meeting and another meeting Tuesday from breakfast past lunch into a discussion with faculty at 3 p.m.), and by the obvious interest and commitment of a range of faculty in fields from law and medicine to communications and philosophy. One of the strong beliefs of the Georgetown planners of the Center is that they can and should create a space that extends across the entire campus (and that includes the Law Center, which is located in downtown Washington). They are aware that they must do more than appeal to those faculty, mostly social scientists, who are concerned with public policy in the course of their traditional disciplinary work. One of the major questions was how to attract and support those in the humanities and other fields who have skills and interests relevant to civic engagement, but who find it hard to act on their interests within their ordinary departmental confines. They are also struggling, as we all are, with the imperatives of globalization for American education.
The two other consultants were well-known and much admired experts in civic engagement programs — David Scobey (Harvard Center for Community Partnerships at Bates College in Maine) and Chancellor Nancy Cantor of Syracuse University, one of the outstanding university presidents committed to guiding their institutions in the direction of community responsibility. They were both keen to stress the opportunities for Georgetown to work in partnership with the communities in which it resides, and to restructure the university better to take advantage of its local opportunities. And, of course Georgetown is one of the leading universities in the nation’s capital, and I was impressed by the commitment of the faculty to try to find more and better ways for the University to be a better national citizen.
We discussed a great many problems in the way of such an initiative (the tenure system, disciplinary narrowness, vehicles for adequate communication, funding), and many of the exciting possibilities for new modalities of research, teaching and university public engagement. It will take some time for Georgetown to sort all of this out, but I was moved by the level of intelligent and searching discussion that I heard.
It is initiatives such as this that permit universities to publicly reflect on the breadth of their educational missions (and opportunities), and I feel pretty sure that Georgetown will act on its conclusions. At a time when much of what we hear in Washington about higher education suggests that our universities are good for little other than raising tuition and exploiting students and their parents, this was an exhilarating and hopeful experience.
Posted at 07:20:11 AM on January 30, 2008 | All postings by Stan KatzComments
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Hear hear! Now — if you can only get tenure credits for public outreach. Many universities in Europe (and ag schools in the US, via extension) give credit for it. So sad to see “brilliant” scholars turn from the op/ed pages and publish in journals that few people ever see. Even worse, as they grow into this system (and that direction begins in grad school), they move further from topics that interest the public and closer to esoteric studies that mean less and less to society. (I am an economist, PhD candidate having an “interesting” time on the job market…)
— David Zetland · Jan 31, 03:20 PM · #
Heroic university leaders who initiate things unsupported by tenure committee decisions are posturing. Leadership reduced to posturing bores me personally though given the rather nasty side-effects of most of the big “leadership” applications in history, boring leadership may be a lot safer than unboring leadership. Boyer said—service, knowledge discovery, knowledge filtering-evaluation-synthesis, knowledge application, knowledge transmission (though he called it four things not the five I just listed). He suggested all five count for tenure. You cannot have it both ways—lots of nice services things while selecting all your permanent staff on the basis of things other than that service. Leaders who play this game, who do not tinker with tenure, doom higher education in the US, though it will take a few more decades for that doom to come home to roost (a doom roost—expression so terrible it gives me shivers of negative appreciation). I watched leaders in industry look like whatever their primary stakeholder audiences wanted them to look like. Looking like service is easy, fast, convenient, popular, and worthless. Most societies accept as “a solution” only things guaranteed to perpetuate forever their deepest problems.
— Richard Tabor Greene · Feb 4, 09:48 AM · #
The Laboratory for Public Scholarship and Democracy has been active at Penn State for a number of years. The good people at Georgetown should talk with Jeremy Cohen and the other leaders of this initiative here, if they haven’t already.
— Sandy Thatcher · Feb 4, 01:25 PM · #