What a college is for

I am posting this from Atlanta and the annual conference of the American Association of Colleges and Universities. AAC&U is a group of about 1300 colleges and universities committed to academic renewal, with a very strong bias toward community-engaged education and commitment to the idea that higher education has a responsibility to prepare students to be active citizens who employ the intellectual might they have acquired in college to address our country's most challenging problems.

As the Professor Civic Engagement at Wagner College and as the author of a blog called Democratic Engagement, I am, naturally, quite comfortable with this emphasis, but I also worry about setting up an uneasy dichotomy between education for thought and education for action. You can almost feel the tension between those who want a college that stresses reading, cognition, and basic research and those who want a college that embraces relationship building, problem solving, and applied inquiry. Somehow, I want to find a way to honor the world of ideas just as much as we commit to taking action for public good. But unlike, say, Stanley Fish, who is absolutely convinced that colleges have no business trying to do good, I can't conceive any longer of an institution of higher education that isn't constantly trying to make the connection between theoretical ideas and everyday problem solving, between think tanks and action tanks, between cogitating and agitating. We need our best and most fertile minds working on the problems that are the hardest to solve, that, in fact, don't have any clear-cut solutions. These are the problems that leadership guru Ron Heifetz has called "adaptive challenges." When scholarly experts eschew these challenges, they leave them to others, such as politicians, who too often lack the depth of knowledge and the passion for profound understanding that our best scholars pride themselves on. Of course, scholars alone can't make much headway on our most daunting challenges, but without a concerted contribution from them, we can never make the progress we so desperately need to improve life for everyone.