Higher Education Engagement News is a periodic newsletter edited by Harry C. Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy at Augsburg College, which responds to requests for updates and information about initiatives associated with the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP). ACP was a coalition to strengthen the public purposes of higher education organized for the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in 2012, on invitation by the White House Office of Public Engagement.
This issue discusses the new climate encyclical by Pope Francis, Laudato Si as a resource for the democracy movement in higher education.
Laudato Si
Pope Francis’ contributions to higher education
Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, Laudato Si, is a challenge to business as usual. “It is time to acknowledge that light-hearted superficiality has done no good,” Francis wrote. “We must regain the conviction that we need one another, that we have a shared responsibility for others and the world, and that being good and decent are worth it.”
But one might not automatically think of the pope’s encyclical as a resource for the democracy movement in higher education. In fact it provides two enormously important resources.
The first is its challenge to detachment. In 1997 the Kellogg Foundation asked the Center for Democracy and Citizenship, which I founded at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, to assess whether the public service mission of higher education could be revived. We knew from Cornell professor Scott Peters that the university had a rich history of reciprocal involvement with the state as part of its “land grant mission.” Lotus Coffman, president in the 1920s and 1930s, expressed these in his inaugural address, pledging to resist any who would locate the university on “some Mount Olympus above the world.” He described the school as “social in origin and in nature, not the product of any individual nor of any special group of individuals.”
When Ed Fogelman, chair of the political science department and I interviewed dozens of senior faculty, many at the UMN for decades, I heard again and again how much these connections had weakened. In 2000-01 a Task Force created by provost Bob Bruininks to address the problem heard the same thing from people outside. Senator Steve Kelley, a Democrat chairing the Higher Education Budget Committee, said, “There is an important difference between marketing what the university is doing, and changing the culture so that people at the University listen better to the citizens outside.” Peggy Leppik, a Republican, believed the University had “a real problem with perceived arrogance.”
Studies such as American Academic Culture in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and Karl Schorske, and Academically Adrift, by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, help to explain what’s been going on. Bender and Schorske show how academic incentive structures like promotion based on peer-reviewed articles make research cultures more self-referential. Rankings like U.S. News and World Report create an idea of “excellence” based on individual achievement. Bender describes a “weakening of the informal compact between the university and society.”
Changing ideas of research, especially in the sciences, also have had impact, feeding into a technocratic paradigm in which scientists – and then more broadly scientifically trained experts of all kinds – came to view civic life and other citizens from the outside. “The scientists who powerfully shaped the national discourse on science in the middle years of the twentieth century drew a sharp line between science and society,” writes Harvard historian Andrew Jewett in his recent study, Science, Democracy, and the American University. “They portrayed science as utterly deaf to human concerns.” Jewett argues that this view reversed a once robust movement of “scientific democrats” who saw science not as “value free” but rather as practices and values such as cooperative inquiry and testing of ideas in real life, which all citizens of a democratic society needed to learn.
In his opinion column on the encyclical, Joseph Heath, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto writing in the New York Times misses the way Pope Francis challenge the common culture of detachment — in government and professional systems as well as higher education. He argues that Pope Francis “wants an economic system that satisfies not whatever desires people happen to have but the desires that they should have — a system that promotes the common good, according to the church’s specification of what that good is,” but “appeals to a conception of the common good that is specifically Christian.”
Heath proposes “that we cannot wait around for people to come to some kind of spiritual agreement” and called for a “liberal” solution, carbon credits, “so that all businesses and consumers are held accountable and charged for the environmental consequences of their actions.”
Heath, like many progressives, envisions solutions enacted by governments and guided by scientifically-trained experts. While Francis shares with progressives in higher education concerns about unregulated capitalism he especially takes aim not at particular policies but at the deeper pattern of detachment which have roots in changing views of science. “The basic problem goes even deeper” than concentrated economic power, he argues. “It is the way that humanity has taken up… an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm [that] exalts the concept of a subject, who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.” He adds: “The technocratic paradigm also tends to dominant economic and political life.”
The second contribution Pope Francis makes – and Heath misses – is the call for a different kind of politics based on relationships and the dignity of each person. “What is needed is a politics which is far-sighted and capable of a new, integral, and interdisciplinary approach,” Francis proposes. “A strategy for real change calls for rethinking processes in their entirety.”
Pope Francis is calling for a politics attentive to the overall ecology — what I would call a politics of democracy, not only politics about issues in democracy. This is like “the politics of a common life” which theologian and political theorist Luke Bretherton describes in broad-based community organizing in his new book, Resurrecting Democracy: Faith, Citizenship, and the Politics of a Common Life.
Such politics does not begin with a “common good” determined by Christians or anyone else. Rather it develops a sense of multiple and overarching “commons” in the process of collaborative work, negotiation, and dialogue over time.
This politics is richly conveyed by Bretherton’s account of London Citizens. The group, among other accomplishments, brought “the Corporation,” at the center of global finance, out of the shadows and won anti-usury measures which for the first time regulate its powers.
Democratizing politics like this opens space for immense diversity. In London Citizens, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims join with secular organizations to create “a realm in which those of different faiths and identities forge a common life,” a space where “religious beliefs and practices co-construct and are interwoven with other patterns of belief and practices.”
Laudito Si envisions expanding such politics vastly in scope to the narrative we have about our common world. Along the way, while the encyclical evaluates policies like the carbon tax from a Catholic vantage, it doesn’t prescribe. “There are no uniform recipes,” Francis argues. “He’s not saying what the solutions are,” said Cardinal Donald Wuerl of the Washington diocese to Judy Woodruff on the NewsHour. “He’s not saying to politicians here’s what you must do. He is saying ‘I’m calling everyone to look at the problems and begin to come up with the solutions. We have to work together.'”
Like broad-based community organizing, Pope Francis also pays special attention to action which develops the power and capacities of everyday citizens and communities, including the most vulnerable. “While the existing world order proves powerless to assume its responsibilities, local individuals and groups can make a real difference.” Francis says. “A healthy politics is sorely needed capable of reforming and coordinating institutions… and overcoming undue pressure and bureaucratic inertia.”
This politics is also what we need in changing higher education, informed by the revival of our democratic narrative. We need, in particular, to acquaint the rising generation of student activists with such politics, far more effective than the politics of protest and Manichean divisions of the world into “oppressed” and “oppressors” which tend to predominate.
In 1947, President Truman’s Commission on Higher Education declared that “the first and most essential charge upon higher education is that … it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals and processes.” Such a vision was the genius of American higher education, expressed in a diverse ecology of institutions, based on what I call “cooperative excellence,” not simply meritocracy.
Cooperative excellence is the principle that a mix of people from varied backgrounds can achieve remarkable intellectual, social, political, and spiritual growth with the right resources, challenges, and culture of public purpose. Such a spirit infused land grant schools like Minnesota. City College of New York, once the nation’s intellectual powerhouse, admitted all students from New York high schools — and graduated 11 future Nobel Prize winners.
This tradition of democratic excellence is vital to revive. Obstacles are formidable. But incentives to rebuild connections with the people and recover our democratic public purposes are growing, as colleges and universities come under siege.
And we have a new resource in the encyclical.
For more on the encyclical and the democracy movement in higher education, see Harry Boyte at Academia.edu https://augsburg.academia.edu/HarryBoyte