Playing with Words

A lot of people continue to be a bit disoriented by the language systems we adopt in academia. “Civic engagement” may be one of the worst examples of how we use language to distance ourselves from both meaning and other “out-of-the-know” people. Democratic engagement isn’t a whole lot better. Civic has always been a hard word to decipher, made more difficult by the fact that it sounds so much like civics, the worst high school class some of us older folks from the 1960s ever took.

Civic can refer to city, community, citizenship, or the public sphere. But as often as not, we link it to a town square or to a center, as in civic center, which connotes something about life near and around the downtown part of a city. The default meaning of civic for many people, then, is of and relating to a densely populated area. Which for many of us is not what we want to convey at all. Rather, the emphasis we want is on public, on that realm that takes us outside the private and the familial and into the company of strangers or at least non-intimates. Does it follow that our nomenclature should be adjusted so that civic engagement becomes public engagement? Some institutions have, in fact, opted for this very substitution.

And what of engagement? It is most commonly used as the noun indicating that two people have made a trial pledge to explore the prospect of spending their lives together. Engagement is different from marriage, however. Engagement suggests a strong connection, but not an inviolable bond. Engagement is a deep and sustained form of relating, but not something as sacred and eternal as marriage, at least not as we have traditionally used the word. In addition, we use engagement to mean a strong connection to a topic, a kind of attention and focus that are not easily interrupted. Engagement is more malleable and less intense than marriage or even commitment. It is rather the precursor to public commitment, which we hope will result from a series of engaging experiences. Commitment is too high an expectation for students who are still in the process of searching for their professional and civic vocation, for the thing that will ultimately call them to lifelong participation in public life.

Is “service” a concept worth returning to? It has become a highly contested word, primarily because it smacks too much of one person doing something to another, instead of two or more people doing something together. It lacks the emphasis on mutuality and reciprocity that engagement seems to imply. But in rejecting the concept of service, we may be losing its healthy focus on selfless activism and the willingness to do something for and with others without any expectation of any kind of material reward. Public service, as some have noted, is an important part of the work we hope our students will do. But its connotation of one-sidedness most likely makes it an unsustainable term.

Civic engagement and public engagement may be too distancing, but is public activism an improvement? It seems to lack the collaborative dimension of engagement, but activism has long been employed to suggest strong ties to community organizing and promoting community well being. Is this the meaning we want or is it too threatening to potential allies? Could it be that engagement’s very obscurity is its source of strength? That is, since no one quite knows what it means it can’t really offend anyone and is therefore the ideal word for this often controversial work?

In the end, I am not sure anything has been clarified. For reasons given in an earlier post, I think democratic is a better word than civic, because it suggests both the public sphere and a way of behaving in that sphere that honors listening, mutual respect, and shared decision making. In many ways, activism is a better word than engagement, which would result in the term Democratic Activism, but as already noted, that term is not only a bit threatening, it is also suggests a sophistication that probably mischaracterizes our students’ relatively limited experiences. I regret having to set aside Democratic Activism for now, but will reconsider it at some future time.  In the meantime, Democratic Engagement will just have to do as the term of the moment and the title for this blog.