Democracy Speak in Higher Education: Linking Civic Authenticity and Accountability in an Era of Crisis

• In Event: 033 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. Political Discourse

Abstract

Colleges and universities face a legitimacy crisis related to soaring student debt and limited evidence of long-term educational outcomes. Those across the political spectrum have demanded that higher education leaders prove the value of the academy to the larger society in practical and populist terms. At the same time, colleges and universities have been essential to the participatory renaissance of the last two decades, providing scholarship on democratic innovations, enabling community empowerment, and catalyzing students’ civic participation. While some have hailed these efforts as a return to higher education’s larger democratic purpose, a closer examination of burgeoning top-down initiatives to infuse engagement into higher education reveals that they are intimately tied to contemporary anxieties about assessment in a time of neoliberal crisis. Performance-based critiques are central to testing today’s engagement reforms in higher education against past failures, producing a new popular mission that blends non-instrumental ideals of civic authenticity with the moral rigor of market logics. Building on research on higher education organizations’ role in American politics, I place this hybrid form of democratic accountability in context as the latest innovation in a dynamic sequence of non-profit educational missions characterized by concerns about market and state failures.

Author

• Caroline W. Lee, Lafayette College