A national conversation called "The Changing World of Work - What Should We Ask of Higher Education?" will be launched on Wednesday, January 21st, at the National Press Club in an event from 9 am to 12 pm. It will be live streamed.

The conversation is organized by Augsburg College, host of the American Commonwealth Partnership, the Kettering Foundation, and the National Issues Forum. It is supported by groups as diverse as Campus Compact, the American Library Association's Center for Civic Life, and the Service Employees International Union.

Option two in the issue guide to be used as a resource for the conversation proposes that colleges should prepare students to become agents of change: "effective citizen leaders who can promote the kind of individual and societal changes that will bring greater opportunities for all people." Scott London, author of the guide, adds that "This will improve their own career prospects while at the same time changing jobs for the better."

Put differently, this option sees citizenship as more than voting or volunteering. Citizenship is expressed through work that is bigger, more public, more interactive, collaborative, visible, and filled with purpose.

London cites survey data showing that more than 90% of American believe colleges should offer young people opportunities to be involved in work for social change. But work of citizen leaders also goes up against today's trends in work and workplaces. Writing in the New York Times, Tony Schwartz and Christine Porath note that "just 30 percent of employees in America feel engaged at work."

Colleges can help change the dynamic of disengagement, and the issue guide gives examples. The forthcoming edited collection, Democracy's Education: Citizenship, Public Work, and the Future of Colleges and Universities, adds many others and can be seen as a companion volume. It is full of case studies of innovative partnerships among colleges, employers, and communities that generate fulfilling jobs that "pay and matter," as Julie Ellison, one of the contributors, puts it.

Working people themselves are the main drivers of change. In Democracy's Education, Lisa Clarke, one of the nation's outstanding teachers, argues that teachers "have the power to remodel our profession and to transform our public education systems." She proposes that this requires organizing for voice - a seat at the table when decisions are being made - and recognition.

How does that happen?

On Martin Luther King Day there are lessons from the freedom movement.

The Freedom Spirit, Then and Now

Often forgotten in the attention given to events like the March on Washington or Selma is that fact that the workers' struggle for voice and work that matters was at the movement's heart. Such struggles were the book ends of Martin Luther King's public career - the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955, when thousands of domestic workers walked to their jobs rather than endure humiliations of riding in the back of the bus; the Memphis garbage strike with its unforgettable sign held up by workers, "I Am a Man."

Work with public purpose was also the invisible foundation of the movement - generations of citizen preachers and citizen teachers had shaped the freedom struggle. Miles Horton, founder of Highlander Folk School which trained hundreds of activists (including Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King) told me that black beauticians and their workplaces across the south were crucial if invisible leaders. I quoted him in my first book, The Backyard Revolution. "We ran special workshops for black beauticians," Horton said. "We used the shops all over the south as a center for literature and discussions because the beauticians didn't care what white people thought about them."

My father, Harry George Boyte, was on the executive committee of King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), for which I worked off and on as a field secretary (the picture accompanying this blog, taken by dad when my mother, Janet, were at King's birthday party, is in the Duke Boyte archives).

My most formative experience, however, was with the maids and janitors at Duke.

One chill morning about 50 years ago, in 1965, when I was an undergraduate at Duke, a friend and I made our way across campus in order to find Oliver Harvey, a janitor on the night shift. Harvey, long involved in the black freedom movement, described why maids and janitors needed a union. I didn't need convincing - the maid who cleaned my room was paid something like 50 cents an hour, and I fumed at the slights she suffered from affluent college students on my hall.

Harvey asked us if students from our Duke chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality would organize students to back the workers' effort to affiliate with Local 77 of the American Association of State, County, and Municipal Employees. We did.

Over the next several years, more and more students became active in the support campaign. And organizing generated a myriad of free spaces, highly charged discussions and debates about nonacademic employees and the union, filling classrooms and spilling out of them, into dorms, the student union, the campus quad. The year after my wife and I left for Chicago, more than 1,000 students sat in on the president's lawn to support the union. The trustees chose a new president, Terry Sanford, who recognized Local 77.

I don't think there were longitudinal studies but I am certain that the organizing profoundly shaped the education experiences of my generation of students at Duke. Indeed, Oliver Harvey, invisible according to the customary academic criteria of educator, was my great civic teacher. He told me about union organizing among white and black tobacco and textile workers in Durham in the 1930s, about a campaign in Texas he had been involved in against the poll tax used to keep poor whites as well as blacks off the voting rolls, and about the blues tradition in Durham.

A movement for the public work of democracy and its education is needed, and could again shape generations of young people in the 21st century.

Harry Boyte edits Democracy's Education and coordinated the design team for "The Changing World of Work."

Real populism does not mean simply railing against banks, as liberals pining for an Elizabeth Warren presidential bid assume. Genuine populism is a vision of democratic renaissance based on cross-partisan civic empowerment.

Real populism does not mean simply railing against banks, as liberals pining for an Elizabeth Warren presidential bid assume. Genuine populism is a vision of democratic renaissance based on cross-partisan civic empowerment.

What kind of populist politics do we need in 2015 and beyond?

Real populism does not mean simply railing against banks, as liberals pining for an Elizabeth Warren presidential bid assume. Genuine populism is a vision of democratic renaissance based on cross-partisan civic empowerment. It addresses the challenges of concentrated power specific to each age.

We need populism for the age of the smart machine. People's capacities for self-directed effort are eroded not only by concentrated economic power and economic inequality but also by what the South African intellectual Xolela Mangcu calls "technocratic creep." Technocratic creep erodes both individual agency and also the independent centers of popular power, self-organization, and civic learning which are the foundation for broad, democratizing movements.

For such populism, higher education is a crucial site for making change.

In periods of populist upsurge, people empower themselves -- they are not empowered by politicians or government. But political leaders and government policies play crucial partnering and context-setting roles.

There is a rich tradition in this vein, as diverse as the 1862 legislation which established land grant colleges, "people's colleges" and "democracy colleges," Franklin Roosevelt's Wagner Act which sped the growth of unions in the 1930s, "maximum feasible participation" provisions of Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty and the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act which facilitated community organizations, and civic environmental initiatives of the Clinton years. Civic environmentalism shifts from top-down regulation to the setting of broad goals on air quality and other measures and providing resources for communities to work out strategies themselves.

Revival of such democratizing politics is now visible in cities. As Harold Myerson described in "Revolt of the Cities," a new group of progressive populist mayors in New York, Pittsburg, Boston, Minneapolis, Santa Fe and elsewhere are addressing problems of growing inequality while championing measures which facilitate worker and community self-organization. Benjamin Barber, in his recent book, If Mayors Ruled the World, shows that the movement of cities as "laboratories for democracy" is global. Such examples of government as empowering partner are important to build on.

We also need populist politics that reverses technocratic creep.

In the United States, a civic infrastructure of mediating institutions of many kinds -- parties, unions, locally rooted businesses, schools, congregations, colleges, ethnic groups, libraries, settlements, county extension offices, and others -- once connected people's lives with the larger world. Despite prejudices and parochialism, they also often had public qualities which created what Sara Evans and I have called free spaces, spaces for self-organizing, democratic intellectual life, and development of political capacities for work across partisan and other differences, to address problems and negotiate a common way of life. These were the foundations for movements such as civil rights, the women's movement, labor organizing, and farmers cooperatives, changing the whole society in periods like the New Deal and the 1960s.

Free spaces and mediating institutions were also under threat. As early as 1902 the visionary settlement house leader in Chicago, Jane Addams issued a prophetic warning. In Democracy and Social Ethics, she contrasted the corrupt ward bosses in the Chicago political machine whom she long battled with "the reformer who believes that the people must be made over by 'good citizens' and governed by 'experts'?" Because they were involved in the life of the people, ward bosses, "at least are engaged in that great moral effort of getting the mass to express itself, and of adding this energy and wisdom to the community as a whole."

Over the 20th century, higher education fed the growth of expert power and eroding popular power through the spread of a theory of knowledge, positivism, which holds that outside, "objective" experts are the only source of sound knowledge. Faculty research cultures became increasingly detached from interaction with problems of communities and democracy, as shown in American Academic Cultures in Transformation, edited by Thomas Bender and Carl Schorske. Professionals were socialized as "disciplinary" experts, in the phrase of Bender, losing the "civic professional" identities which had rooted their work in local civic life.

Such developments in higher education contributed to transformation of mediating institutions into service operations where lay citizens are redefined as needy clients and customers.

This dynamic threatens to intensify in the age of the smart machine, as conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks describes ("Our Machine Masters," October 30, 2014). Artificial intelligence means that "Engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices."

Progressives need to take learn from these insights and deepen their democratic strategies.

Higher education, contributing to technocratic creep, will be central to democratic change. Colleges and universities are upstream settings which shape the identities, practices, and frameworks of leaders across the whole of contemporary societies. They sustain values and practices such as independent inquiry, free exchange of ideas, the importance of evidence, and the commonwealth of knowledge which are indispensable counterweights to domination by outside experts. And they have a rich narrative of "democracy's education" which shows signs of revival.

This democracy story is evident in the forthcoming collection, Democracy's Education. In the book, Martha Kanter, undersecretary of education for higher education in the first years of the Obama administration, outlines government policies which she helped to create in the tradition of government as empowering partner, facilitating revitalization of civic learning and democratic engagement in higher education.

The democratic narrative is visible in a new national conversation called "The Changing World of Work -- What Should We Ask of Higher Education?" aimed at bringing the larger citizenry into decisions about the economy and work we need, to be launched at the National Press Club, January 21, sponsored by the Kettering Foundation, the National Issues Forums, Augsburg College, Campus Compact, American Democracy Project, Imagining America,-the-American-Library-Association's-Center-for-Civic-Life and others.

Finally, the democracy story of higher education is evident in civic science, a framework for understanding science in society which emphasizes science as a set of democratic practices contributing to human empowerment and scientists as citizens who develop the political skills of work with their fellow citizens to negotiate a shared way of life.

All are resources for democratizing politics in the age of the smart machine.

Harry Boyte edits Democracy's Education, forthcoming from Vanderbilt University Press February 1st.

Milan Kundera begins his masterful novel, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, by describing a photograph from 21 February 1948, where Vladimir Clementis, long time activist, stands next to Klement Gottwald, chair of the communist party, on the podium at the pivotal moment when Gottwald announces changes which would usher in the socialist government in Czechoslovakia . Two years later Clementis was charged with treason because he opposed Stalinist demands. His image was erased from all photographs, including school text books, by the state propaganda office. Kundera observes, "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

In today's individualist, consumerist, technocratic societies, many more forces than state officialdom erode memory. And, as I have described in earlier blogs, forgetfulness is especially apparent in higher education. Its once vibrant public purposes have been largely forgotten.

There is an overlooked resource for helping to reverse amnesia: part-time or adjunct faculty who make up more than one half of all teachers in America's public and private colleges and universities.

Over the holidays in South Africa, I was fascinated to learn how experiences of my brother-in-law, Stephen Dugmore, as a part-time faculty member resemble those of adjunct faculty in the US.

Stephen is one of South Africa's most talented architects. One of three finalists for the design of the famous Robben Island Centre commemorating the jail experiences of Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners of the anti-apartheid struggle, he and his team were recently awarded the contract for designing the icon at the southern-most tip of the continent.

Stephen loves to teach. But after eight years of teaching at the School of Architecture at the University of Cape Town, he is calling it quits.

Like adjunct faculty in the US, his remuneration bore little relation to the hours he put in teaching. The deepest frustration was the sharp separation between the tenured faculty, focused on what is called "research," and part-time faculty, whose own work is devalued and largely invisible in the mainstream academic culture. "I felt I simply wasn't able to build a long term relationship to the school," he explained.

Stephen's experience is common in South African universities, and it reflects forgetfulness about what makes for vital faculty work. As described in books like Glenn Moss's The New Radicals, and Billy Kenniston's Choosing to Be Free, faculty and students were often on the front lines of the struggle against apartheid. This meant involvement with communities in a myriad of ways, enlivening scholarship and teaching.

I thought about parallels in America. My friends among adjunct faculty in the Twin Cities include community organizers, historians, scientists, artists, writers, business leaders. Many are outstanding public intellectuals, as well as wonderful teachers. But their talents and experiences are largely invisible, in ways which contribute to the radically shrunken sense of the purposes and meanings of higher education in our society.

In 1947 the Commission on Higher Education established by President Truman declared that "the first and most essential charge upon higher education is that at all levels and in all its fields of specialization, it shall be the carrier of democratic values, ideals, and process." This sounds today like a dusty museum piece. For all the service-learning projects, community research and other important engagement efforts connecting higher education to communities and the society in recent years, the democracy history and public purposes of higher education are largely forgotten.

We discovered such amnesia in discussions with thousands of citizens in an earlier conversation, "Shaping Our Future," and listening sessions leading up to the launch on Jan. 21 of the national conversation, "The Changing World of Work -- What Should We Ask of Higher Education?" Both conversations grow out of the American Commonwealth Partnership, dedicated to higher education's public purposes, which I coordinated on invitation of the White House, and the National Issues Forums Institute.

Many dynamics contribute to amnesia, including the ways colleges market themselves simply as tickets to individual success and rankings which put a premium on detached research. But changes in faculty cultures also play a role.

As Thomas Bender put it in the introduction to American Academic Cultures in Transformation, a study by leaders in four fields (Economics, English, Philosophy, and Political Science):

"The disciplines were redefined over the course of the half century following the [second world] war; from the means to an end they increasingly became an end in themselves, the possession of the scholars who constituted them...Academics sought some distance from civics."

Edwin Fogelman, then chair of the political science department at the University of Minnesota and I heard many examples of the consequences of this distancing when we interviewed dozens of senior faculty at UMN in 1997 and 1998. Many noted the erosion of community connections and public purposes. The interviews are described in Public Engagement in a Civic Mission, on the web.

As Charles Backstrom put it, "When I came to the University of Minnesota in 1959, the Political Science department gave students credit for working in the community and on political campaigns. I thought of my job description as including work with communities [and] worked with the extensive service in a rural public leadership program. I had examples of rising starts like John Bochert in Geography, who went on to become world-famous. John was working with communities to think through what factors make a small community grow and flourish or fail."

Backstrom also experienced "a war of cultures at the university," which made his public engagements suspect. Despite a distinguished career, including a stint as pollster for Hubert Humphrey's presidential campaign in 1968, when I interviewed him after his retirement party in 1998, he worried that his career had been "a failure" because it violated dominant norms of detached scholarship.

Today, as described recently in an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the Service Employees International Union and others are seeking to organize adjunct faculty to improve their working conditions and to gain voice in addressing the changes transforming higher education. The campaign aims at organizing faculty in multiple institutions in metropolitan areas such as Boston, New York, Washington, Philadelphia, and the Twin Cities.

These goals are about basic justice. Organizing also has potential to generate larger change, based on recognizing the roles which adjunct faculty often play as connectors between education and the larger society.

Such rootedness was the wellspring of the democratic story of higher education. Recognizing its importance will require adjuncts, as well as institutions, to name and claim the nature and importance of their work in new ways.

This process may reverse amnesia about what it means to be a faculty member with public goals and civic identity. It could also help lead to a broader democratic awakening.

There is an overlooked resource for helping to reverse amnesia: part-time or adjunct faculty who make up more than one half of all teachers in America's public and private colleges and universities.

There is an overlooked resource for helping to reverse amnesia: part-time or adjunct faculty who make up more than one half of all teachers in America's public and private colleges and universities.

There needs to be much wider knowledge about the "democracy's college" tradition, its public work approach to creating change, and its differences with the politics of protest.