Democracy as institutional logic?: University mission statements and social media activity in the age of democratic decline

• In Event: Power of Media: Representation, Literacy, and Democracy

Proposal

Since the early 2000s, the world has entered a stunning period of democratic decline, reversing a steady expansion of democracy around the world (Diamond, 2008, 2021). The conditions of democratic institutions (e.g., the rule of law, fair elections, human rights, and individual freedoms) have worsened years because of rising populism, illiberalism, and right-wing nationalism (Dillabough, 2021; Robertson, 2020), even in long-standing democratic countries such as the United States. According to Freedom House (2022), which monitors democratic health around the world, the United States lost 11 points between 2010 and 2020 on its freedom index, including six points lost during the presidency of Donald Trump (Repucci, 2022). Trump’s presidency was characterized by policies and rhetoric that expressed white nationalism, populism, and the erosion of democratic norms (Repucci & Slipowitz, 2021).

The decline of democratic values in the United States has had detrimental effects on U.S. higher education (HE hereafter), undercutting academic freedom and autonomy of universities (Scholars at Risk Network, 2020; Spannagel et al., 2020). Continuing the anti-immigrant and anti-science rhetoric of this Make American Great Campaign, President Trump threatened to pull funding from campuses “hostile to free speech” (Associated Press, 2019) and sought to force universities to reopen campuses during COVID-19 by abruptly changing visa rules for international students (O’Shea et al., 2022). In spite of such strong headwinds, universities embedded in the national higher education system (Douglass, 2021) continue to act as political institutions, maintaining public spaces for deliberation, and critiquing government policies (Novelli et al., 2014).

In this study, we aim to analyze how a democratic recession in the US affects the democratic discourses of higher education. For the purpose of comparison, we analyze, firstly how democratic values —if any — are expressed in the mission statements of U.S. colleges, and secondly how these values are expressed or enacted in real time.

We focus on liberal arts colleges for this analysis because of their historical contribution to the public good by serving civic engagement, democratic deliberation, and preparing students for critical citizenship (Mou, 2022; Nussbaum, 1998). From the list of approximately 220 liberal arts colleges in the United States, we focus on the 36 liberal arts colleges that have been placed on the Carnegie Classification for Community Engagement (Bard College, 2022; Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 2022). Our selection criteria are driven by the aim to specifically focus on colleges with “active citizenship” values that can serve as flag-bearers during democratic recession. We collect mission statements from college websites and then scrape tweets from official institutional Twitter handles. We coded, recorded, and undertook thematic analysis using NVivo for both mission statements and Tweets. (Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Morphew & Hartley, 2006). Then we cross-analyzed Tweets and mission statements to explore how and if colleges may express historically identified democratic values. Social media analysis allowed us to cover real-time responses and discourses of the colleges. That allowed us to observe if mission statements and current discourses of the colleges are coherently connected or reflect diffuse aims (Morphew & Hartley, 2006).

Our time frame of analysis is January 2020 to January 2022, a turbulent and polarizing period of transition between the Trump and Biden administration that included the COVID-19, the January 6 insurrection, and national reckoning over racial justice and police violence. While 2020 marked the peak of President Trump’s nationalist, populist, and authoritarian discourses and rhetoric, we also recognize that the reach of democratic decline extends beyond these dates.

We employ an institutional logic framework (Friedland & Alford, 1991), using democracy as a logic to understand what values are expressed in mission statements and how they are put into action through Tweets. Institutional logic as “a set of material practices and symbolic constructions which constitutes its organizing principles and which is available to organizations and individuals to elaborate” (Friedland & Alford, 1991, p. 248). Through his framework, we can try to understand how HE fulfills its social and political role through expressions of civic and democratic values.

Our initial findings show that, though democratic values and ideals are present in some mission statements, they are not explicit. This dimension is also missing from their daily activities and interaction with students and broader society, as revealed in our Twitter analysis. Very few colleges include the conceptual understanding of “democracy” in their mission statements and most continued the similar discourses during democratic recession, such as the importance of global citizenship, critical thinking, and global service. These are not necessarily democratic values but are interrelated ones; their presence in a liberal arts college mission statement is compatible with the literature on the role of liberal arts colleges. Even so, a large majority of the colleges refrain from mentioning any critical views of the government policies in their official institutional pages and handles — even if the government policies directly affected their operations. Furthermore, we found a clear distinction between the understanding of democracy as inward-looking (United States) and outward-looking (globe). While global democracy mostly meant reacting to political changes, like military coups, wars, refugee and immigrant crises in other countries, internal democracy addressed primarily social, racial, and gender justice issues in the United States. Finally, we found democracy was not the only logic at play. Religion, for example, was a logic at work at the significant number of schools in our sample with a religious (largely Christian) affiliation.

We may expect an intensification of anti-democratic discourse in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election which features a repeat of Trump’s candidacy along with rival, Ron DeSantis. As governor of Florida, the host state of our conference, his administration has continued much homophobic, xenophobic, and anti-democratic rhetoric of the former president Trump. These developments add further urgency to our research on how higher education may “protest” democratic declines by shoring up democratic values in political discourse and safeguarding democratic principles. (Daniels et al., 2021). As such our work which resonates with the conference theme of the “Power of Protest” and the sub-themes, “Curriculum and Protest” and “Pedagogies and Protest.”

Authors

• Michael O'Shea, O.I.S.E. University of Toronto

• Zahra Jafarova, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

• Lu Xu, University of Washington