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.

We may be in a "new wave of activism" for social change among young people, as Charles Blow argued in the New York Times. But many see colleges as irrelevant to change, at best. 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.

Higher education often communicates a narrow view of its role which contributes to amnesia about this tradition. Colleges market themselves as tickets to individual gain. And as I described in my recent blog, "Democracy and the Rankings," the variables used by US News and World Report disadvantage college engagement with local communities. Rankings also reward exclusivity -- the higher number of students colleges reject, the higher their rankings.

Meanwhile, many social change activists see education and higher education as bulwarks of the status quo. The model used to think about education and social transformation, developed by the late Brazilian educator- activist Paulo Freire, illustrates.

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, published in 1968, Freire argues that education uses a "banking" approach, assuming students are like empty bank accounts where teachers deposit knowledge. Such education dehumanizes all involved. It also reinforces oppression throughout society. In contrast, he calls for students to be "co-creators" of education, with liberation from oppression the goal. This requires that the oppressed reflect upon their oppression and fight against it."Freedom is acquired by conquest, not by gift (p. 47)," he says.

There are important insights in Freire, such as the idea that students should be active agents of their learning, not passive recipients. And Freire's approach has gained world-wide fame among change activists, including many in the US. A study in 2003 by David Steiner and Susan Rozen, examining curricula at leading schools of education found that Pedagogy of the Oppressed is a major text.

But Freire's popularity also shows weaknesses both in higher education and in conventional theories of change.

In the first instance, Freire's model rests on the assumption that consciousness raising is the wellspring of change. This feeds into faculty research cultures, which have become increasingly detached from public life and the lives of students. In such cultures, critique substitutes for cultivating capacities for action. In both my undergraduate and graduate courses, I have heard students say, again and again, that they hear far more about what's wrong than how to change it.

The stance of critique is reinforced by the dominant theory of power, the idea that power is zero-sum. Some have it and others don't. Change involves "overthrowing the powers," rather than democratizing power systems. In a forthcoming interview on higher education change in the Imagining American journal Public, Erica Kohl-Arenas, a teacher at the New School in New York describes strong anti-institutional attitudes among her students, grounded in skepticism about the possibility of making change. They love the idea of creating countercultural institutions, she says, because existing institutions "feel too big and massive to change."

The democracy college tradition is informed by approaches to popular education, change, and power, what can be called a public work approach, different than protest or the Freirian model. Public work has moments of struggle against clearly oppressive structures. But public work involves sustained work by a mix of people with different interests and views to solve problems, create common resources, and build a way of life together. It requires understanding power as the capacity to act, not simply the ability to impose one's will.

The difference between an oppression model and the public work approach is like the difference between the Exodus narrative and the Wilderness narrative in the Bible, which Marie-Louise Strӧm and I described in an earlier blog on climate change. The Exodus narrative involved a one-dimensional struggle against oppression.

The wilderness narrative is the story of the Jews' effort over 40 years to build a way of life in institutions, governance structures, and culture. It was productive, difficult, and messy. It included accepting the responsibility of one's agency, not looking to others for salvation, a hard task -- the Israelites often wanted to go back into Egypt.

A later biblical story in the same vein is the Nehemiah story of rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem. The people rebuilt themselves as they reconstructed the commonwealth.

There are many tributaries of popular education and change making with a public work character. Jane Addams, founder of the Hull House settlement for new immigrants and a major influence on John Dewey, argued that education needs to "free the powers" in each student, drawing on their cultural backgrounds and lived experiences.

Scandinavian folk school traditions, shaped by the Danish philosopher and theologian N.F.S. Gruntvig, had a similar approach. Folk schools, sometimes taking shape in colleges, were integral to farmer, labor, and free church movements among common people in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, France, and elsewhere. They contributed immensely to the creation of more democratic societies.

Folk school traditions also inspired popular education in America such as the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which played a crucial role in the civil rights movement. Highlander was original home to the citizenship education program of the movement which shaped me as a young man.

Older land grant colleges and historically black colleges and universities drew on folk school and settlement house traditions and had strong public work elements, as Scott Peters and Tim Eatman describe in the forthcoming volume, Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities.

So did liberal arts schools such as Augsburg College, our new institutional home, where the Center for Democracy and Citizenship is now part of the Sabo Center for Democracy and Citizenship.

Like land grants, HBCUs, and Highlander, Augsburg had a down-to-earth quality wedding liberal arts education to career training grounded in practical experience. Augsburg grew from the Norwegian Free Church movement, congregations independent of the state committed to autonomy and a concept of vocation contributing social improvement. "Keeping the vision of the democratic college, Georg Sverdrup, Augsburg's second president (1876-1907), required students to get pre-ministerial experience in city congregations," recounts the Augsburg website.

Public work is messy, hard, often slow and painstaking. But if our role in education is not simply to name problems but to help our students address them, it is vital to revive the public work approach, both to meet our challenges and to build a more democratic society.

In a national and international environment where the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, it is crucial to push back. We need to build the democracy movement in and around higher education. One task is to overturn the rankings, a new tyranny which holds us all in thrall.

In a national and international environment where the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, it is crucial to push back. We need to build the democracy movement in and around higher education. One task is to overturn the rankings, a new tyranny which holds us all in thrall.

Each year, the magazine U.S. News and World Report announces its rankings of colleges and universities. According to Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker, the U.S. News website had more than 10 million visitors in the month the rankings appeared.

Many raise criticisms about the rankings, which use a one-size-fits-all set of measures to evaluate the immensely diverse ecology of colleges and universities. In a New Yorker magazine profile of Bard College president Leon Botstein, Botstein lambasted the rankings as a con game. "It's one of the real black marks on the history of higher education that an entire industry that's supposedly populated by the best minds in the country - theoretical physicists, writers, critics - is bamboozled by a third-rate news magazine."

Frank Bruni, in an opinion piece, "Promiscuous College Come-ons," in the New York Times, described how the rankings contribute to "the glimmer of exclusivity" which is a powerful draw in our status-conscious society. Colleges seek to increase the numbers of students who apply so they can turn more of them away. Lowering the percentage of students who are admitted contributes to "student selectivity," a significant factor in the seven weighted variables which U.S. News uses to determine rankings.

Little noticed is the reality that rankings also weaken democracy. The controversies over the last several years over the rankings of Syracuse University illustrate.

In 2004, Nancy Cantor became Chancellor of Syracuse, after a distinguished career which included service as provost of the University of Michigan. At Michigan, she had been a key architect of the "Bollinger Brief," a framework which won over the swing vote of justice Sandra Day O'Connor in support of the law school's affirmative action plan.

Coming to Syracuse, Cantor made explicit her commitments to democracy, diversity, and community engagement. Cantor's vision statement included a commitment to "strengthen democratic institutions" and "educate fully informed and committed citizens."

Cantor pushed for changes in the tenure code to include emphasis on publicly engaged scholarship. She led in crafting new admissions policies which facilitated admission of students from the area, and backed these up with a coalition of local businesses which gave financial support that covered tuition of local students. She also helped to "bring the university down from the hill" above the city, creating a variety of partnerships with neighborhoods, businesses, schools and other colleges, cultural groups, and arts organizations.

The university "has helped refurbish parks, taken over an abandoned building where drug dealers once grew marijuana and turned an old furniture warehouse into a new home for academic programs in art, drama, and fashion design," wrote Robin Wilson in the Chronicle of Higher Education. "The university is encouraging professors to focus their research on the city, while giving free tuition to local high-school graduates." The percentage of minority students at Syracuse rose from 18.5 % when she started to nearly 32 % by 2011.

These changes also ran afoul of the rankings.

On October 2, 2011, Robin Wilson authored a front page story in the Chronicle with the title "Syracuse's Slide," referring to the drop in the university's U.S. News and World Report rankings. The article featured critics of Cantor. David Bennett, a history professor, feared that "the university is moving away from selective to inclusive." The editor of the student newspaper, The Orange, echoed his views, worrying that "rise in the acceptance rate could devalue the diploma."

More inclusive admissions policies do, indeed, disadvantage colleges in the rankings. They also feed a hyper-competitive individualist educational culture, focused on "meritocratic excellence" rather than the ethos of "cooperative excellence" once central to colleges with a strong democratic identity and purpose. Excessive emphasis on individualist achievement turns higher education into a sorting mechanism for choosing "winners." It contributes to growing inequality, as I argued in an earlier blog.

A focus on local engagement also disadvantages the "academic reputation" of colleges. Academic reputation makes up 22.5 percent of the total in the weighted variables of U.S. News. Every year the magazine surveys higher education leaders, asking them to grade schools.

"Reputational ratings are simply inferences from broad, readily observable features of an institution's identity," explains Gladwell, in his New Yorker piece fiercely critical of the rankings system. "They are prejudices."

These are prejudices which work against local connections. The more involved faculty members are in local affairs, in their research or professional activities, the less they travel in the national and international professional circles or publish in the disciplinary journals where visibility contributes to "reputation."

More than 100 faculty wrote to the Chronicle in support of Cantor's reforms. More than 80 graduate students wrote collectively "to share our stories of engaged research, teaching, learning, and civic life as citizens of Syracuse, N.Y. and students of the university. Far from experiencing or perceiving a decrease in the rigor of our education experience, we acknowledge what a privilege it is to grow in our disciplines through sharing and co-creating knowledge with diverse and valuable communities."

But in 2013, the chair of the Syracuse board of trustees appointed a commission to study "Syracuse's slide." Cantor, feeling she had done what she could over a decade as president and not wanting the measures she had championed to become overly personalized, announced her departure. The University of Rutgers at Newark, a highly diverse urban university, sought her out to become president and chancellor.

And what happened at Syracuse?

Syracuse.com, a local on-line paper, reported recently on developments. Kent Syverud, the new chancellor, rolled back many of the initiatives of the Cantor years. Four student protests erupted this fall in the space of two months, including a student sit-in. More than 8,000 signatures from students and alumni called for reinstatement of the Advocacy Center, a support center for victims of sexual assault. Students said that the decision to close the Advocacy Center illustrated a pattern of decision making excluding broad input. Among their other grievances were the administration's elimination of "community engagement" and "strengthening democratic institutions" as university goals.

The Syracuse story dramatizes how the rankings of U.S. News and World Report block the advance of democracy.

In a national and international environment where the fate of democracy hangs in the balance, it is crucial to push back. We need to build the democracy movement in and around higher education. One task is to overturn the rankings, a new tyranny which holds us all in thrall.

Harry Boyte is editor of the forthcoming Democracy's Education, a collection with many stories drawn from the democracy movement in and around higher education (Vanderbilt, 2015)

Wages have been stagnate for years. As Steven Baker put it in the New York Times, the recession, "devastating for working people everywhere in America," followed decades of largely flat wages.

Wages have been stagnate for years. As Steven Baker put it in the New York Times, the recession, "devastating for working people everywhere in America," followed decades of largely flat wages.

"The Changing World of Work -- What Do We Need of Higher Education?" On January 21, 2015 at the National Press Club in Washington, a group of civic, educational, business, labor and community groups will launch a national conversation on this question.

Nancy Cantor, Chancellor of Rutgers-Newark, David Mathews, President of the Kettering Foundation, Jamie Studley, Deputy Undersecretary of Education, Byron White, Vice President for Community Engagement at Cleveland State University and others will discuss the challenges facing the country because of technological change, globalization and the aftermath of the Great Recession. Bill Muse, president of the National Issues Forum and I, representing Augsburg College and coordinator of the design team for the conversation, will discuss the rationale.

Wages have been stagnate for years. As Steven Baker put it in the New York Times, the recession, "devastating for working people everywhere in America," followed decades of largely flat wages.

Moreover, the nature of work relations are changing dramatically. More and more employers depend on contingent workers -- freelancers, independent contractors, temporary employees. Contingent workers are about one-third of all US workers. The percentage is expected to rise overall to 40 percent by the year 2020. More than half the teachers in higher education are contract instructors, with little or no job security.

Changes in the world of work may be as sweeping as the Industrial Revolution. Most Americans are worried and feel powerless to do much about them. Today's policy discussions focus on how to prepare college students for the fast-changing workforce and related issues such as cost-cutting, student debt, STEM and distance learning.

But discussions over the last two years on the purpose of higher education which form a background of this national conversation have shown another dynamic.

There is a gap between today's policy debates and the deeper concerns of the citizenry. One woman in Kansas, quoted in Divided We Fail, Jean Johnson's report on an earlier nation-wide conversation, "Shaping Our Future," on the purposes of higher education, expressed the widespread view that higher education should get students out of their bubbles. "If you have a higher education...you've been exposed to different cultures, different lifestyles, different religions, different belief systems. You have a heart and mind that are both opened."

"Shaping Our Future" involved several thousand students, parents, professors, employers and others. The forums not only surfaced the ideal of an education which opens hearts and minds, but also worry about what's being lost. In Maryland, a senior citizen said that higher education "used to be the kind of thing that created our thinkers and our leaders...they would have that broad array of courses and ideas and cultures."

Others argued that the society has lost sight of education's true meaning. "When people are worried about going to school to get the job, to make money..education, in and of itself, is no longer sacred," said one man in Colorado.

I was reminded of the opening chapter in Betty Friedan's 1964 book, The Feminine Mystique, which helped to launch the modern women's movement.

The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years... It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction...There was no word of this yearning in the millions of words written about women, for women, in all the columns, books and articles by experts telling women their role.

Women felt isolated, thinking that everyone else was fulfilled.

Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night -- she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question: 'Is this all?'

Over the last year, we have heard many more examples of naming problems without names. Building on "Shaping Our Future," a design team with representatives of six colleges and universities in the Twin Cites -- Augsburg, Century College, Hamline University, Metropolitan State University, Minneapolis Community and Technical College and St. Paul College -- and Minnesota Campus Compact listened to concerns from more than a thousand people about the changing world of work and higher education. The conversations also acquainted people with the history and current examples of higher education's public and democratic contributions, largely unknown or forgotten in today's environment, when colleges usually bill themselves as a ticket to individual economic success and career advance.

Conversations surfaced the same unease about the individualist orientation of today's education which we had heard in "Shaping Our Future." People raised searching questions about the meaning of "success" and the American Dream, as well as today's reliance on electing leaders to solve our problems for us -- the very meaning of "democracy" in conventional discussion, which defines democracy as simply elections.

People generally begin feeling overwhelmed by the changes taking place. The first option in the forthcoming issue guide is that colleges should prepare students for jobs. This is the option most people have heard about and the only thing that seems possible and realistic.

But options two and three expand the conversation dramatically with many real world examples:

• Educate for leadership and change. It's higher education's duty to develop effective citizen leaders -- men and women who can create jobs, effect change and build a better society.

• Build robust communities. Colleges and universities are vital anchor institutions in their local communities. They need to harness that power to create social change and drive economic development.

These options help people to develop a public language for talking about their submerged worries and discontents. As people hear stories of a wider range of possibilities, the discussion generates a change in mood, a shift from "me" to "we."

By itself, the conversation on the changing world of work and higher education's role is not going to transform public policy. But it may help break a silence.

And if it catalyzes many more conversations and public work growing out of them, we could develop the public will to build the educational system which we need.