American higher education has always articulated a civic mission as part of its purpose: colleges and universities educate students for life in a democratic society and provide that society with citizens who ensure that it thrives in turn. This essay maps the development of a national infrastructure for civic learning and engagement in American higher education, with a focus on the mid-1980s onward, when—after a period of relative eclipse—this work gained new coherence and momentum. Beginning with that moment of eclipse, when an intensified and professionalized research mission threatened to overshadow higher education’s civic commitments, we adumbrate briefly the countermovements that allowed the civic mission of colleges and universities to reassert itself. We then discuss the civic engagement networks that have emerged over the past three decades, and more recent partnerships and projects that have expanded understanding of higher education’s civic commitment in the 21st century.
Beckham E (1999) Civic learning and campus diversity: Bridging the language gap. Peer Review (Fall): 4–7.
2.
BenderT (1997) Politics, intellect, and the American university, 1945–1995. In: BenderTSchorskeCE (eds) American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 17–54.
3.
BoyerEL (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate, Princeton, NJ: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
4.
BoyerEL (1996) The scholarship of engagement. Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences49(7): 18–33.
Ellison J (2012) Lyric citizenship in post 9/11 performance: Sekou Sundiata’s the 51st (dream) state. In: Weinstein C and Looby C (eds) American Literature’s Aesthetic Dimensions. New York: Columbia University Press, pp.91–114.
8.
EllisonJ (2013) The new public humanists. PMLA128(2): 289–298.
9.
EllisonJEatmanT (2008) Scholarship in Public: Knowledge Creation and Tenure Policy in the Engaged University: A Resource on Promotion and Tenure in the Arts, Humanities, and Design. Imagining America Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, Syracuse, NY: Imagining America.
10.
Finley A (2011) Civic learning and democratic engagements: A review of the literature on civic engagement in post-secondary education. Association of American Colleges & Universities. Available at: http://www.aacu.org/civic_learning/crucible/documents/LiteratureReview.pdf (accessed 31 May 2014).
11.
GordonEBaldwin-PhilippiJ (2014) Playful civic learning: Enabling reflection and lateral trust in game-based public participation. International Journal of Communication8: 759–786.
12.
Gordon E and Manosevitch E (2011) Augmented deliberation: Merging physical and virtual interaction to engage communities in urban planning. New Media Society 13: 75. DOI: 10.1177/1461444810365315. Available at: http://nms.sagepub.com/content/13/1/75.full.pdf+html (accessed 20 April 2015).
13.
HallidayT (1992) Introduction: Sociology’s fragile professionalism. In: HallidayTJanowitzM (eds) Sociology and Its Publics: The Forms and Fates of Disciplinary Organization, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–42.
HuberMT (2015) Books worth reading: Higher education and society. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning47(1): 46–50.
16.
HuberMTHutchingsP (2010) Foreword. Civic learning: Intersections and interactions. In: SmithMBNowacekRSBernsteinJL (eds) Citizenship Across the Curriculum, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. ix–xiii.
17.
HutchingsPHuberMTCicconeA (2011) The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning Reconsidered: Institutional Integration and Impact, San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, Inc.
KeeneASColliganS (2004) Service learning and anthropology. Special issue of Michigan Journal of Community Service Learning10(3): 5–114.
20.
LangEM (1999) Distinctively American: The liberal arts college. Daedalus128(1): 133–150.
21.
MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Language and Literature (2014) Report of the MLA Task Force on Doctoral Study in Modern Language and Literature. Available at: http://www.mla.org/pdf/taskforcedocstudy2014.pdf (accessed 7 June 2014).
PetersSJEatmanT (2014) Afterword: Speaking and working in critically hopeful terms. In: CooperDD (ed.) Learning in the Plural: Essays on the Humanities and Public Life, East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, pp. 167–178.
SaltmarshJ (2005) The civic promise of service-learning. Liberal Education91(2): 50–55.
28.
Smith MB, Nowacek RS and Bernstein JL (eds) (2010) Citizenship Across the Curriculum. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
29.
Smith W and Bender T (eds) (2008) American Higher Education Transformed 1940–2005: Documenting the National Discourse. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
30.
SoltanKE (2014) The emerging field of a new civics. In: LevinePSoltanKE (eds) Civic Studies: Approaches to the Emerging Field, Washington, DC: Bringing Theory to Practice and the Association of American Colleges & Universities, pp. 9–19.
31.
Sundiata S (2004) Thinking out loud: Democracy, imagination, and peeps of color. In: Diversity Revisited/A Reflection: A Summary of Diversity Revisited/A Conversation on Diversity in the Arts. Report on Diversity Revisited Conference, 8–9 June 2004. Pittsburgh: African American Cultural Center of Greater Pittsburgh, pp.8–9.
32.
ThelinJR (2011) A History of American Higher Education, 2nd ed. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
33.
ThompsonRJ (2014) Beyond Reason and Tolerance: The Purpose and Practice of Higher Education, New York: Oxford University Press.
34.
Watson B (2010) Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy. New York: Viking/Penguin.
35.
WilderCS (2013) Ebony & Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities, New York: Bloomsbury Press.
36.
ZuichesJ. and the NC State Community-Engagement Taskforce (2008) Attaining Carnegie’s community-engagement classification. Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning40(1): 42–45.
