Editorials & Commentary:

• Robert C. Allen: Successful Corporations Turn to Higher Education for Models
• Lattie F. Coor: Universities of the Future Will Focus on Community Engagement
• Richard Guarasci: Democratic Education in an Age of Difference to Counter "Bowling Alone"

Robert C. Allen: Successful Corporations Turn to Higher Education for Models


Robert C. Allen, a professor of American Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, turned the tables on the frequent complaint, "Why can't higher education be more like a business?" in a July 21 opinion piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Citing a six-year Stanford University business study, Allen argued that exceptional corporations—Sony, Wal-Mart, and Walt Disney, to name a few—have in common core values and a sense of visionary purpose beyond making money giving them a reason for being that commands the dedication of their employees.

Moreover, such companies have found a way to encourage entrepreneurship, experimentation, risk-taking, and collaboration which Allen equates with the intellectual entrepreneurism and interdisciplinary collaboration that occurs in higher education when colleges and universities are at their best. Allen suggests that the collegial campus environment has a freeing effect that is difficult to come by in corporations where, typically, employees are used to command and control hierarchial relationships. Bottom line, according to Peter Drucker, the future belongs to "knowledge workers," overwhelmingly college graduates comfortable both with being directed and giving direction depending on the needs of the project in question.

Lattie F. Coor: Universities of the Future Will Focus on Community Engagement

In addressing the July NACUBO Conference in Chicago, Lattie F. Coor, President of Arizona State University, could have been an ANAC spokesman in calling for universities to engage their regional communities as a survival strategy for campus-based higher education. Coor argued that campus-based higher education is justified by a theory of place where human meaning is constructed, institutions integral to quality of life are located, and students experience applied learning critical to effective education. Recalling the land grant university tradition, Coor cited the recent Kellogg Commission on the Future of State Universities that recommends changing the university mission from "teaching, research, and service" to "learning, discovery, and engagement" as a way to redefine the university mission in the regional community in more active terms. According to Coor, "Engagement is essential and requires dogged commitment, but will become a vital feature of the campus of the future, if we are going to make place central and avoid the campus going the way of the dinosaur."

Richard Guarasci: Democratic Education in an Age of Difference to Counter "Bowling Alone"

The University of Hartford has been selected as one of three institutions nationally to participate in a pilot "Models of Democracy" project of the Society for Values in Higher Education (SVHE). Collaborating with SVHE, pilot campuses will develop and test models for civic education and community engagement through a grant from the Jessie Ball duPont Fund. The purpose of the grant is to use the "arts of democracy" such as dialogue, listening, and reflection to develop curricula and reciprocal community involvement. Richard Guarasci, a project advisor and author of Democratic Education in the Age of Difference: Redefining Citizenship in Higher Education, was a featured speaker at SVHE's annual Fellows Meeting in early August. Guarasci argued that the real significance behind declining voter participation and the dramatic drops in community volunteerism and service organization membership which Robert Putnam notes in Bowling Alone is that American society is becoming "more segregated by difference" than at the time of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1954. As a result, we become increasingly estranged from "the other," fundamental issues become reduced to "binary choices" and our society experiences a resurgence of single issue "tribalism," including groups who accentuate "difference for difference sake."

Guarasci's solution? A rededication to "intercultural democracy and community" in the collegiate experience in order that students may develop a recognition that our society is characterized by a "multiplicity of difference" that is a source of strength and meaningful quality of life. He praised curricula that combine dialogue, reflection, and collaborative decision-making, e.g., community-based learning, learning communities, service learning, and conflict resolution programs at their best. Guarasci advocates a civic learning in which students master the "arts of democracy"—self-expression, listening for meaning, critical judgment, inter-cultural understanding, interpersonal action, and reflective practice—as a basic for citizen responsibility and what William Sullivan in Work and Integrity calls civic professionalism.