At Syracuse University, there is a focused effort to embody democratic education through teaching, research, and engaged praxis. The rhetoric of publicly engaged scholarship is communicated through our vision, Scholarship in Action, and we purposefully enact the civic mission of higher education through hiring and admission practices, funded initiatives and within the scope of graduate education and research. Graduate education is an important site for the articulation and development of higher education’s role in participatory democracy because graduate students are the next generation of university professorate, administrators, and community partners.

Last October, The Chronicle of Higher Education published an article, titled Syracuse’s Slide, where, among other things, Syracuse University’s commitment to publicly engaged scholarship was criticized as playing a role in lowering standards and reducing the national prestige of our university. This article mobilized graduate students from across campus, galvanizing us to speak back, across disciplinary boundaries, to the unfair depiction of our commitment to the university as a public good. The article deepened our level of solidarity as graduate students, stimulating an urgency about declaring the value of publicly engaged scholarship. Far from a slide, partnering with community stakeholders for the robust and dynamic production of knowledge is indicative of Syracuse’s Rise.

In my role as director for Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life’s Central New York Publicly Active Graduate Education (PAGE), I e-mailed a copy of the article to PAGE members and suggested we write a collective letter to the editor. The response was overwhelming. Eighty-seven people identifying as “Syracuse’s Engaged Grads” answered the call offering to either help draft or sign the letter. The most remarkable feature of this response was the refusal of members of the Syracuse University graduate community to allow our University’s leadership in the new epistemology of reciprocal knowledge making to be mislabeled as anything but the most rigorous of scholarship. Using our own democratic practices as the foundation of our letter, we argued that:

• The building of knowledge is inseparable from practice;
• The inclusion of traditionally underrepresented students generates increased scholarly rigor by expanding perspectives;
• The dichotomous thinking that separates university and community knowledge is anachronistic;
• Community members are our partners and lived space is our laboratory; and
• Engaged practice informs collective understandings and helps to create coalitions for civic action.

I am only one of the people who contributed to Syracuse’s Rise; it was a truly organic collaborative response to a gross mischaracterization facilitated by a far-reaching vehicle. I am proud to be a graduate student at an institution where our leadership, our professorate, and our student body are working to expand the paradigm of knowledge making to center the public good. When we consider our democracy in the United States today, there is no space for arguing if the University should engage with the public; the time has passed for this question. Rather, it is for us, graduate students, to explore and develop new ways that our learning can cross disciplines and, quite literally, cross the street to respond to the problems and questions of the communities we rise up in. We believe that the strongest, richest, and most impactful knowledge making requires an honored place along the continuum of scholarship for the acknowledgement of diverse scholarly forms and deep engagement.

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A. Wendy Nastasi is a third year doctoral student in the Cultural Foundations of Education Department in the School of Education at Syracuse University. Wendy is director of Imagining America’s CNY PAGE program, and a member of IA’s Publicly Engaged Scholars study research team. As an instructor for SU’s Intergroup Dialogue Program, Wendy co-facilitates SOC/WGS 230: Intergroup Dialogue on Race and Ethnicity. Wendy’s research engages youth participatory action research (YPAR) as a praxis for mobilizing urban high school students’ civic agency while centering youth’s voices and epistemic contributions. You can contact Wendy at either awnastas@syr.edu or at cnypage@listserv.syr.edu.

There’s quite a lot of activity happening within the Imagining America network. To help keep it all straight, here’s a summary of all the opportunities we’ve recently disseminated.

Request for Proposals – Building the Architecture of Inclusion Through Higher Education: Sustaining and Scaling Full Participation at the Intersection of Public Engagement and Diversity

A joint venture between Imagining America and Columbia Law School’s Center for Institutional and Social Change, this project is an attempt to build capacity for linking diversity and public engagement at IA partner institutions across the nation. There will be day-and-a-half long workshop sessions held in New York City (April 26-27, 2012), Los Angeles (September 13-14, 2012), and Michigan (November 2012, dates TBA).  The aims are to help participating institutions realize the goal of integrating engaged scholarship through building inclusive institutions of higher education and to enable IA to advance these goals on a national level, through its work with member institutions, its 2012 conference, and its participation in national policy discussions and publications. The deadline for applications is March 4, 2012. For more information, including application details, CLICK HERE.

Pre-Conference Presidential Roundtable

Syracuse University’s Chancellor Nancy Cantor will be hosting a pre-conference presidential roundtable for presidents and chancellors of Imagining America member campuses on October 4th, 2012, the day before the 2012 IA National Conference in New York City begins. (The Call for Proposals for the national conference will be published in the next couple weeks.) The meeting will focus on expanding public scholarship and research within the context of the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), a yearlong initiative promoting higher education as an agent of democracy and a public good. For more information, CLICK HERE.

The Joy of Giving Something Photo Student Scholarships

Imagining America and the Joy of Giving Something is again offering a total of ten scholarships of $2,500 each to publicly engaged students of photography/media/visual arts selected from IA member institutions. All nominated students must be facilitating a free community-based photo or media arts workshop with people unlikely to otherwise have access to art-making. The deadline for nominations is March 1, 2012. For more information, CLICK HERE.

Central New York PAGE Fellowship & Annual Conference

Imagining America is pleased to announce our Central New York PAGE Fellowship. Publicly Active Graduate Education, PAGE, is IA’s graduate initiative founded in 2003. With the success of PAGE and a commitment to graduate education in Central New York, IA founded a regional PAGE initiative, CNY PAGE, in Fall 2010. Imagining America is now offering a fellowship to one student from each of our regional consortium members. CNY PAGE fellows will receive registration, travel and meal compensation for participating in the 5th annual Engaged Graduate Education conference at Syracuse University on April 20, 2012. Our theme this year is: Engagement Across the Disciplines. For more information about CNY PAGE, the Fellowship, and the Annual Conference this April, CLICK HERE.

So, that’s what’s happening here. For the most up-to-date information about IA events and opportunities, follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Thanks!

UW Leads in Connecting Scholarship with Community

By Molly McElroy, News and Information, University of Washington

As just about any academic will tell you, the further you go in your career, the more specific your research expertise becomes. Often, after a time, that narrowing can make the research obscure and relevant only to a subset of academics.

First, we congratulate Alexander Olson, IA PAGE Fellow, and one of eight recipients of the AAC&U’s 2012 K. Patricia Cross Future Leaders Award! We are currently featuring an interview with Alex on the IA Blog: http://imaginingamerica.org/?p=6985.

For those attending this week’s AAC&U annual meeting, here are some sessions that include IA themes and leaders.

Wed. Jan. 25

• 11am-12pm, “Civic Inquiry and Problem Solving Across General Education and the Major,” with Amy Koritz, Paul Schadewald, et al.
• 11am-12pm, “Defining the Public Purposes of Faculty Scholarship and Teaching,” with Julie Ellison, IA Director Emerita and Co-Principal Investigator of IA’s Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship, et al.

Thurs. Jan. 26

• 8:45-10:15am, the 2012 Cross Award recipients will be acknowledged, including Alex Olson, IA PAGE Fellow. David Scobey, 2011 IA keynote speaker, is one of the featured speakers in “Opening a Democratic Front: Confronting Disparate Conceptions of What Matters in College.”
• 10:30-11:45am, “Cultivating Transformative Leadership for Institutional Citizenship,” with SU’s President Nancy Cantor, Susan Sturm, and George Sanchez, who are all leading IA’s collaborative Linking Diversity and Engagement initiative.
• 10:30-11:45am, “Faculty of the Future: Voices from the Next Generation,” with Alex Olson, IA PAGE Fellow, et al.
• 4:15-5:30pm, “Civic Professionalism and Institutional Change: The Imagining America Engaged Undergraduate Education Collaboratory,” with Amy Koritz, Paul Schadewald, Brigitta Brunner, Darby Ray, and Robin Bachin.

Fri. Jan. 27

• 10:30-11:45am, “Creating A Culture of Democratic Engagement,” with John Saltmarsh, IA Board Member, et al.
• 2:45-4pm, “The American Commonwealth Project: Organizing Around the 150th Anniversary of The Morrill Act,” with Julie Ellison, Cecilia M. Orphan, IA PAGE Fellow, et al.
• 4:15-5:30pm, “Reclaiming A Democratic Vision For College Learning: Why Now?,” with George Sanchez, John Saltmarsh, et al.

Enjoy the annual meeting!

Next week, Alex and the other Cross Scholars will be acknowledged at the Opening Plenary at the AAC&U’s 2012 Annual Meeting, and will be discussants in the session, “Faculty of the Future: Voices from the Next Generation.”

IA interviewed Alex via e-mail.

IA: Tell us about your interest in non-traditional classroom spaces, your dissertation topic. What sparked it? Would you like to see non-traditional classrooms expand, and if so, where would you like to see them take root, with what populations, and supported by what infrastructures?

Alex Olson: I’ve been interested in non-traditional classroom spaces ever since my undergraduate years at Stanford, which strongly emphasized residential education. I spent all four years in the same residence—Ujamaa House—and I remember being struck by the critical role of this particular space in fostering conversations and experiences that often seemed far more relevant to our lives than what was happening in our classes. At the same time I was learning about environmental history with my thesis advisor Richard White and had access for the first time to new ways of conceptualizing place and space. So there was a synergy that I found very exciting.

At my home institution of the University of Michigan, the Residential College is a great example of a program that integrates curriculum, student life, and public engagement. But I also think we need more radical innovations in response to the fact that, as David Scobey noted in his 2011 IA keynote address in Minneapolis, four-year, full-time, in-residence education is increasingly becoming a luxury good that few can afford. At U-M the percentage of first-year students coming from families making $200,000 or more per year has increased from 14.8% in 1997 to 27.6% in 2010. Until state funding priorities move back in the direction of supporting higher education (and I think advocating for this shift needs to be a major priority), the student loan burden is only going to increase, disproportionately impacting students of color and those who are the first in their families to attend college. In this context, I think non-traditional classrooms can make an important contribution to addressing issues of access. On the other hand, the proliferation of for-profit online institutions with abysmal graduation rates should raise red flags about seeing non-traditional classrooms as a panacea.

In my class on “Making a Difference: The History of Public Scholarship,” I assigned readings on the Freedom School organized by students during the walkout from Detroit’s Northern High School in 1966. The Mosaic Youth Theatre in Detroit staged a play about this in collaboration with U-M’s Stephen Ward—I think it is a great example of students taking control of their own education despite social injustice in traditional classrooms. Today we can look to the Freedom University in Georgia, which was formed as a response to the decision of the University System of Georgia Board of Regents in 2010 to ban undocumented students from selective state colleges and universities. Other examples include the Free University of San Francisco and College Unbound in Providence.

IA: As the recipient of an award for future leadership, in what arenas would you like to play such a role?

Alex: First and foremost, I want to use my research and teaching as a historian to better understand how people create, inhabit, and transform the spaces and places around them. I very much see myself as a public historian and have been mulling over approaching my next project as not only an academic monograph (although that too) but also something wholly different in form and authorship—perhaps a collaborative public history website along the lines of the Seattle Civil Rights & Labor History Project at the University of Washington.

I am currently working with Julie Ellison on a project called Citizen Alum, which, as part of the American Commonwealth Partnership, is building a network of institutions committed to alumni civic engagement. We are seeking to counter the “vision of alumni as ‘donors’ with one conceiving of them as ‘do-ers,’” as Sarah Robbins of TCU so nicely put it. The project is now in a listening phase to learn more about how various institutions are already engaging with publicly active alumni, but I am excited to see how this network develops over the next several years.

IA: What is your response to the devaluing of the humanities in recent years? What do you see as strategies to reverse it?

Alex: One major blow to the humanities over the past several decades has been the reconceptualization of higher education in terms of individual utility rather than public good. If the worth of a college degree is measured by earning potential, the public disinvestment in higher education and the shifting of financial responsibility to the student would seem to be wholly justified, particularly in the humanities, which are rarely cited along with science and math as urgent public priorities. I believe IA and the public humanities can play a critical role in reversing this trend. The values and skills fostered by the humanities—creativity; critical thinking; effective communication; interrogation of power; supporting arguments with well-chosen sources; the awareness of diverse people, cultures, languages, and ideas—are precisely those that can help students approach their careers as civic professionals acting in the public good as members of communities. In the long run, this work can change the conversation to emphasize the social value of the humanities, and thus increase the range of people who see higher education as a worthwhile public investment.

IA: In what direction(s) would you like to see IA grow?

Alex: I found David Scobey’s IA keynote address to be a sobering reminder of how the current economic crisis is transforming many of the things we take for granted in higher education: the academic calendar, tenure, credit hours, departments, and more. On the other hand, I am heartened by the work of the Tenure Team Initiative on Public Scholarship to bring the protections and responsibilities of tenure to publicly engaged scholars despite the broad structural changes facing the academy. John Dewey recognized, rightly, that academic freedom and economic security go hand in hand, so if David Scobey is correct that tenure is increasingly a thing of the past, I would like to see IA find ways of reaching out to adjuncts and other non-tenured educators without adding to their already excessive workloads.  Also, as my PAGE colleague Alexandrina Agloro has noted, IA has much room to grow in terms of bringing the community into its meetings and having a deeper conversation about what and who counts as “the community.” I think PAGE itself is a great example of IA’s potential to foster new and exciting networks while preserving the agency of participants—in this case graduate students.

Thank you to everyone from Imagining America who attended or watched the live stream of yesterday’s White House event, “For Democracy’s Future: Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission.”

Here is the event program, as well as the discussion guide prepared for virtual participants.

The event marked the public launch of the American Commonwealth Partnership, which aims to bring together thousands of universities, colleges, community colleges, schools, and other civic partners to promote civic education, civic mission, and civic identity throughout all of education in the U.S.

The AAC&U released a major report on civic learning and democratic engagement, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future.” Additionally, the U.S. Department of Education released a “Road Map” outlining the nine next steps it will take to advance citizenship education for all Americans across the country. In related news, last October, the Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools released a report for K-12 schools.

The Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement Action Network and The American Commonwealth Partnership collected civic commitments from more than 70 national organizations, local organizations, higher education institutions, scholars, practitioners, and philanthropists, including Imagining America and Syracuse University.

Here are videos of the event.

We invite you to share your reflections in the form of a blog post. We are especially curious to hear how the event resonated for you in the context of animating and strengthening the public and civic purposes of humanities, arts, and design (Imagining America’s mission). Blog posts will appear here and on  DemocracyU’s blog. Contact me at jmhaft@syr.edu. Thank you.

Chancellor Cantor to moderate Jan. 10 White House panel on public scholarship

Syracuse University will join with the White House Office of Public Engagement, the U.S. Department of Education and other civic and educational groups tomorrow, Jan. 10, for a White House event to publicly launch the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), a yearlong initiative to promote higher education as an agent of democracy and a force for public good. As part of the launch event, SU Chancellor and President Nancy Cantor will moderate a panel discussion about promoting and facilitating public scholarship.

The ACP initiative coincides with the 150^th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges and universities throughout the United States to promote access to higher education across social classes and equip students with the relevant skills and knowledge to address the important needs of the day.

A broad alliance of educational, civic, philanthropic and business groups, the ACP includes, among others, Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium based at SU and dedicated to advancing public scholarship through the humanities, arts and design; the Association of American Colleges and Universities; the American Democracy Project; Campus Compact; and other K-12 schools, colleges and universities. Director for the initiative is Harry Boyte, director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and senior fellow at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute, who provided the initial concept for the ACP. Chancellor Cantor serves as co-chair of the ACP’s Presidential Council.

“The American Commonwealth Partnership embraces a wide range of commitments by colleges and universities—public and private—focused on their shared public mission to spur innovation and create opportunity,” says Cantor. “These commitments grow out of our fundamentally shared identity as place-based, anchor institutions positioned to catalyze cross-sector collaboration for the public good that strengthens our communities and simultaneously strengthens democracy.”

The ACP, which evolved out of a planning meeting of higher education and government leaders hosted by Chancellor Cantor in New York City last September, embraces three overarching goals: to build a stronger democracy and healthy civic life; to prepare more college graduates for civic work and 21^st century prosperity; and to expand capacity to create solutions across differences. Within those larger goals, the initiative will focus on five thrusts of activity: strengthening community-campus connections; expanding public scholarship and research; advancing civic learning and democratic engagement; deepening civic identity, values and vision; and assessing achievement levels of civic learning outcomes.

“The American Commonwealth Partnership builds on multiplying efforts across higher education to reclaim education’s public purposes,” says Timothy K. Eatman, an assistant professor in SU’s School of Education, director of research for Imagining America and senior research adviser for the ACP initiative. “It also recognizes that tackling the nation’s complex challenges in an interconnected global environment requires that creative minds and different kinds of knowledge come together from schools, businesses, nonprofits, neighborhoods and government as well as higher education. This means valuing knowledge produced not only for specialized academic audiences, but also knowledge-making, which addresses pressing public problems. It also means moving beyond the ‘expert-knows-best’ syndrome, developing deep collaborative partnerships that value different kinds of knowledge.”

In the spirit of the land-grant colleges created by  the Morrill Act that went on to become known as “democracy colleges,” the theme of the ACP’s yearlong slate of activities is “For Democracy’s Future: Education Reclaims Our Civic Mission.” Over the next 12 months, the ACP aims to build on the Morrill Act’s legacy and spark a resurgence of civic learning and democratic engagement throughout higher education.

“If America is to regain control of our collective future, we need to reinvent citizenship for the 21st century, and higher education has a critical role to play in that process,” says Boyte. “The next stage of civic engagement is moving from a focus on developing activities to developing civic identity.”

ACP activities will include hosting national deliberative dialogues; conducting an extensive social media campaign under the banner “DemocracyU,” which includes blogs, stories and videos showcasing civic initiatives; and developing curricular and co-curricular reform that combines civic education, the humanities, science, technology, engineering and mathematics scholarship. In addition, Cantor will host a meeting about the ACP with senior administrators at colleges and universities across the country as part of Imagining America’s Oct. 5-7 conference in New York City.

The Jan. 10 White House launch activities will be streamed live at www.whitehouse.gov/live, and during breakout sessions online participants will have the opportunity to host their own discussions.

For more information about the ACP or to get involved, contact Jamie Haft, communications manager for Imagining America, at 315-443-8765 or jmhaft@syr.edu.

This story and other news about Syracuse University can be found on the Syracuse University News website (http://sunews.syr.edu).

On Tuesday, January 10, from 2-6 p.m. EST, Imagining America and Syracuse University will be part of a White House event to launch the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), a yearlong initiative to promote higher education as an agent of democracy and a force for public good. The ACP coincides with the 150^th anniversary of the Morrill Act, which established land-grant colleges and universities throughout the U.S. to promote access to higher education across social classes and equip students with the relevant skills and knowledge to address the important needs of the day. For more information about the ACP, see IA Research Director Timothy Eatman’s post on the Imagining America Blog.

The event will be streamed live on the internet on Tuesday, January 10, from 2-6 p.m. EST: http://www.whitehouse.gov/live.

The ACP also has an active social media campaign, DemocracyU. All are invited to contribute to their blog (http://democracyu.wordpress.com/), and to interact on Facebook (www.facebook.com/democracyu) and Twitter (@democracyu).

We hope you will consider tuning into this important event. We are honored to be participating in this national effort to promote higher education’s civic mission.

Looking ahead to 2012, IA’s Public Humanities Institutes and Centers Working Group will hold focused discussions and conduct continued inquiry into questions such as:

• How do various public humanities institutes and centers define “public” and how does this definition shape their work?
• How can public humanities institutes and centers better communicate their work to the public, within the humanities disciplines, and to the wider university?
• How can centers and institutes develop and share effective evaluation methods, especially those using qualitative and narrative tools?
• What creative alliances might be forged between college and university centers and institutes and public cultural organizations such as state humanities councils and museums?

Historical Context

In the past decade, the number of humanities centers and institutes at universities across the United States has multiplied exponentially. In the U.S. alone, the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes currently lists 119 members, and these include only those organizations that have elected to join the consortium; it is likely that the number of existing centers is significantly larger. Taking their cue from the success of much respected institutions like the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey (founded in 1930), the National Humanities Center in the Research Triangle of North Carolina (founded in 1978), the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College (now the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, founded in 1978), and the Stanford Center for the Humanities (founded in 1980), university administrators or members of university faculties have directed resources toward creating showcases for humanities research with the hope that these centers will enhance their institutional profile. Nonetheless, these recently formed organizations often have more diffuse or broader missions than their predecessors; must meet greater demands on the part of their constituents, who are themselves facing difficult circumstances in their individual disciplines; and confront much less secure financial backing and funding prospects in launching their programs than established centers and institutes.

Based upon the precedent established by traditional humanities centers, most of the newer initiatives were started with an intended audience of faculty and students at their own university and peer institutions. Only a small number of humanities centers envisioned a larger community component to their programming. However, the creation of Imagining America in 1999 brought increased attention to the necessity of public-directed and -generated activities of humanities centers and institutes.

Group History

In September 2009, a group of leaders from four newly created (or re-envisioned) humanities centers came together to discuss the challenges of meeting the demands of running a fledgling humanities center and the ways in which these institutions might better meet the challenges of serving a university community, engaging public audiences, and acting as a bridge to connect diverse audiences. That group included Gregg Lambert from Syracuse University, Barb Bondy from Auburn University, Bonnie Effros from the University of Florida, and Carla Kaplan from Northeastern University. After receiving an IA Critical Exchange grant, the group met in April 2010 at Syracuse University and presented their findings at IA’s 2010 conference in Seattle. At this meeting, it was suggested that the group might allow for expanded participation while taking on the more formal role of a collaboratory (later working group) in order to: continue to foster cooperation amongst very disparate centers and institutions; raise renewed attention at IA to the challenges being faced by the “traditional” humanities during the current economic downturn; and share best practices in the public humanities. Currently, the working group members are holding monthly conference calls and committing to specific areas of inquiry.

To Get Involved

For a complete list of the Working Group’s inquiry questions, please see here. In the interest of welcoming contributions from outside the group, we encourage practitioners from other public humanities institutes and centers to contact us around these areas of interest. Please e-mail us at anne_valk@brown.edu and teresa-mangum@uiowa.edu, or post comments here on the blog.

My experience each year at IA’s national conference leaves me pondering many of the questions with which we here in the national office are engaged throughout the year. Following the recent Twin Cities conference, my thoughts had primarily to do with what it means to assert an organizational identity that in addition to the longstanding emphasis on research and professional development now includes “organizing” around public scholarship and civic engagement. What does it mean to be a consortium of colleges and universities that takes seriously the need to include voices and perspectives from beyond higher education in our thoughts and actions? Among other things, I was particularly struck by my conversations with IA’s first cohort of undergraduate fellows, who so strongly resonated with IA’s work.

Planning and preparation for the 2012 national conference in New York City is already in full swing. Over the next several months, I’ll use this blog space to share some brief reflections about the Twin Cities event and prime the pump for NYC 2012.

First up: organizing.

In response to the idea, first expressed at the opening morning business meeting (click here for the notes from that meeting), that IA is part of a civic engagement “movement” within higher education, I heard (or overheard) things like, Is this really a movement? Is there anyone besides the people at this conference who think of what we’re doing as a movement, or is it more likely people think of this as a passing fad?

At Imagining America, our response is of course, “yes.” It is a movement, albeit one relatively small within the great landscape of higher education. And although the idea of education serving an important function in a healthy democracy has been part of American rhetoric since colonial days, what many now think of as a “movement” to reclaim the civic and democratic purposes of higher ed. is also relatively young. Depending on which lineage one traces, we can find advances and new forms of an “engaged” scholarship springing up in the United States for at least 150 years: with the passing of the Morrill Acts in 1862 and 1890; during the 1960s, a period that saw the expansion of both whom entered the university, and who and what was studied in it; and from the 1980s through the present, when in addition to IA organizations like the AAC&U, Campus Compact, Community-Campus Partnerships for Health, Project Pericles, and the Bonner Foundation continue to push for richer, more critical, and more ethical praxes to address real-world issues.

(It may go without saying but is worth noting that many within the consortium also identify with artistic, cultural, and humanistic movements to expand democratic engagement that are wholly separate from higher education. Much of IA’s focus for the past several years has sought to bring those many strands of knowledge together – but that’s for another blog!)

So this movement is afoot – of indeterminate size and maturity –and it aims to transform higher education in such a way that it expands our notions of a college or university’s role in democratic society. It is a collaborative movement that includes many other prominent national higher education, policy, government, community-based, and funding agencies.

Yet, no movement can reach its potential without an organizing strategy to connect a large and overarching vision and values to the day-to-day concerns of the movement’s stakeholders (us). With that in mind, here are some questions exploring what it means to organize within Imagining America:

• What are strategies and tactics that will help connect IA’s Vision, Mission, Values, and Goals to the various kinds of work happening on our 90 member campuses and in partnership with communities?
• How can organizing help IA leverage the local knowledge that’s generated in campus-community partnerships to address real-world issues so it can serve to advance a broad, national, and perhaps international agenda?
• Does organizing suggest the development of one or more campaigns around particular issues so that we are not organizing for something so broad (“the transformation of higher education;” “civic engagement”) that our efforts gain no traction by dint of being disconnected from specific, concrete concerns?
• How can IA organize around particular issues in a way that is resonant with all members?
• How can IA forge greater alliances with higher education and community-based organizations who share similar values?
• Are there allies to the movement that IA inadvertently overlooks? Does the consortium use definitions of “civically engaged scholar/artist” that exclude those who might otherwise identify and support our broader aims? On the other hand, how can we listen to the perspectives of those who might oppose IA’s aims and see our work as intellectually or ideologically exclusive?

I am beginning to put together a consulting committee from among our members to help think through these questions in the context of the many different types of institutions that comprise our consortium, as well as their often very different aims. Some have backgrounds as organizers outside of higher education. Some simply have very specific ideas about how their particular kind of institutions (i.e., small community college; sprawling research institution) could organize in a way that’s mutually productive.

If you’d like to be part of these ongoing conversations, please be in touch with me (kbott@syr.edu). Otherwise, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the reflections and questions I’ve posed here.