Put differently, it can be said that the democratic movement in higher education is inextricably linked to the future of democracy itself. At the center of this connection is the existence and rebirth of free spaces.

Put differently, it can be said that the democratic movement in higher education is inextricably linked to the future of democracy itself. At the center of this connection is the existence and rebirth of free spaces.

On both left and right today, there is renewed attention to what might be called "middle spaces," places between the individual and the impersonal structures of modern life. I've been thinking about such spaces and their little remarked connection to the movement for democratizing higher education.

The concept, as Sara Evans and I developed it in our book, Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Change in America, has overlap with progressive and conservative ideas. It also differs from both.

The concept conceives of middle spaces as full of dynamism and democratic energies, potentially sites of citizen power and a culture of freedom, as well as sites of continuity. Free spaces are seedbeds of movements for participatory democracy.

The politics of free spaces holds implications for concepts of the good society, for mainstream politics, and for policy change. Here, I focus on its implications for how we organize for educational reform.

In a recent blog post, "The Spirit of Revolution," Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard Colleges, draws on the late political theorist Arendt's concept of "spaces of freedom" to make a progressive argument about the civic movements around the world in recent years.

Arendt believed that the "revolutionary spirit" which infused movements like the American, French, and Russian revolutions (she also saw such freedom spirit in the civil rights movement, as did I and all who participated), involved not simply an effort to destroy oppressive structures. It also involved "the experience of being free...an exhilarating awareness of the human capacity of beginning." She called this "the revolutionary treasure." She argued that it involved "the desire to found stable structures," as well as to tear down old ones. These she conceived as "new yet lasting governmental institutions," as Berkowitz put it.

The problem, for Arendt, was that the republics generated by such revolutions "left no space for the very freedom that constituted part of the revolutionary treasure." In the United States, Arendt believed the mistake was that US revolutionaries had "failed to incorporate the township and the town-hall meeting into the Constitution," a tradition of localized spaces of freedom.

Berkowitz draws large implications from the Arendtian concept. From the Obama campaign of 2008 or the Arab Spring to the Scottish Independence movement which I described in my last blog, the freedom spirit is visible. And as he suggests, the question is how it can be sustained. "Around the globe revolutionaries are struggling with Arendt's question of how to find a spirit of freedom within a political order."

Seemingly a world apart, an aggressive new intellectual movement among conservatives, sometimes called "reformicons," is reasserting the importance of middle spaces, for different reasons. It has had remarkable success in beginning to shift the tone and policy agenda of Republicans. Reformicons, as Sam Tannenhaus described such intellectuals in a New York Times magazine article last summer, call for "jettisoning... orgiastic tax-cutting, the slashing of government programs, the championing of Wall Street -- and using an altogether different vocabulary, backed by specific proposals, that will reconnect the party to middle-class and low-income voters."

Tannenhaus featured Yuval Levin, the youthful editor of the magazine National Affairs, as a major architect of the new movement. I got to know his views not only from his writings but also from a debate we had on "Civil Society and the Future of Conservatism" at the Hudson Institute, shortly after the 2012 election.

A critic of Mitt Romney's focus on individual achievement and unbridled markets during the election, Levin is also a critic of what he sees as Democrats' focus on government as the solution to social problems. Yuval emphasizes middle spaces in contrast to both. As he put it in "The Real Debate," an essay in The Weekly Standard, the disagreement between conservatives and progressives is "about the nature of intermediate space and of the mediating institutions that occupy it: the family, civil society, and the private economy."

In Levin's view, as Tannenhaus describes, liberal government "is a 'technocratic' monolith, with a master class of experts who construct and administer large-scale programs that subordinate the needs and wishes of the public to the appetites of the policy makers."

Levin's policy agenda is not simply anti-government. He "would recast the federal government as the facilitator and supporter of local institutions." Like the older Mediating Structures Project of the American Enterprise Institute, he see local institutions as bulwarks of values of work, responsibility, loyalty, connection to place and love of country.

Missing from Levin's view is any mention of civic power or the spirit of freedom experienced in democratic movements.

In Free Spaces, Evans and I describe settings such as religious congregations, locally rooted unions and businesses, schools, fraternal and sisterly organizations, cultural groups, and other local face-to-face settings. These, we argue, have been seedbeds of democratic movements in American history

The concept of free spaces shares with conservatives emphasis on "intermediate space." Like conservatives, we emphasize the ways middle spaces have been eroded by the rise of technocracy. But the concept puts the question of power and freedom back on center stage. It shares with progressives a focus on struggle against oppressive conditions. It lifts up the rich tradition of government as an empowering partner with the people -- not as the center of the action -- and it points toward a different kind of politics, beyond partisan polarization.

For intermediate spaces to become free spaces requires ownership by participants, space for self-organizing. Free spaces also entail public qualities of diversity of belief and background, cultivating capacities to work and form relationships across partisan and other differences. Public qualities include public imagination, an awareness of the possibilities of broad democratic changes in the society. Free spaces are not "cultures of resistance," simply oppositional. Nor are they "safe spaces," as the idea is commonly used in today's therapeutic society.

Higher education plays crucial, if largely unnoticed, roles in the fate of free spaces. It socializes in professional identities, shaping students' plans for careers and lives. If it graduates students who see themselves as experts outside a common civic life who fix people and provide solutions, higher education erodes free spaces. If it prepares civic leaders who help to create work sites which develop civic agency and public confidence, colleges and universities can be catalysts for innumerable free spaces, unleashing immense democratic change.

In the forthcoming collection, Democracy's Education(Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), the political philosopher Albert Dzur, in "The Democratic Roots of Academic Professionalism," argues that the animating value for faculty members is freedom, the desire to control their work. This value is now under siege in many settings. It is in faculty members' self-interests to link their own freedom to a broader project of freedom.

Put differently, it can be said that the democratic movement in higher education is inextricably linked to the future of democracy itself. At the center of this connection is the existence and rebirth of free spaces.

Harry C. Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, is editor of Democracy's Education.

I've just returned from 10 days of travel with my family in Scotland. The "Yes" side in the battle over the referendum on Scottish independence, to be held September 19, is another example of aspirations for civic empowerment, especially among young people, appearing around the world.

I've just returned from 10 days of travel with my family in Scotland. The "Yes" side in the battle over the referendum on Scottish independence, to be held September 19, is another example of aspirations for civic empowerment, especially among young people, appearing around the world.

I've just returned from 10 days of travel with my family in Scotland. The "Yes" side in the battle over the referendum on Scottish independence, to be held September 19, is another example of aspirations for civic empowerment, especially among young people, appearing around the world. These aspirations suggest possibilities for the emergence of a movement for participatory democracy as a profoundly important alternative to extremist groups like ISIS in Syria and Iraq, or the Tea Party and right wing parties in Europe, recruiting young people desperate for some larger purpose in a world which seems increasingly crazy and dysfunctional.



I also came away convinced that more than elections will be necessary to birth a democratic movement with maturity and staying power.

The Yes Scotland campaign has similarities to the fight against a constitutional amendment which would have banned gay marriage in Minnesota in 2012, and also to the Obama race of 2008. In all three, the insurgent side -- Obama, Minnesotans United for All Families opposing the constitutional amendment, and the "Yes" campaign for Scottish independence -- had positive messages stressing civic empowerment.

The Minnesotans United for All Families campaign, described in an earlier blog coauthored with Hunter Gordon, "A New Minnesota Miracle," used a relational citizen politics which refused to demonize opponents, involved more than a million conversations, and stressed the message of people's right to control their lives, to marry whom they loved. "We learned that a politics of empowerment beats a politics of vilification," Richard Carlbom, campaign director, told my class at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs after the campaign.

Similarly, the Yes campaign's message is empowerment. "This is our moment, we can take matters into Scottish hands," said Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party, in the final televised debate with Alisdair Darling, spokesman for the vote no side on August 25. Sketching British government actions opposed by large majorities in Scotland, from moves to privatize the National Health Service to building the Trident nuclear submarine, Salmond called for self-determination. "No one will run the affairs of this country better than the people who live and work in Scotland."

The ground campaign of the Yes side also has similarities to the community organizing elements of the Obama campaign and the Minnesota United effort. "Both sides are trying to do social media," wrote Christopher Schuetze in the International New York Times August 22. "But the yes [pro-independence] side has been more successful."

Schuetze quoted a recent computer science graduate, Aiden Smeaton of Glasgow, who observed that "'A lot of it is very grassroots." Savvy social media efforts are complemented by local conversations, door to door efforts, cultural events and a variety of other community activities. Smeaton organized a debate at his house, with family, friends, and Facebook acquaintances. "People are talking about politics who wouldn't normally be talking about politics," said one analyst.

After the debate, Salmond stressed the yes campaign's "not-so-secret weapon," its community-based ground campaign. "We're fighting the most energising, electrifying, extraordinary campaign in Scottish political history," he told the BBC.

Everywhere we went people were eager to talk about the campaign. In Glasgow, I had a conversation with the clerk at our hotel. "The outcome depends on the 'missing millions,'" she said. "Working class people like myself, who don't often vote." She thinks it is very exciting, though she worries about the sharp divisions.

As we drove north through the Highlands, "Yes" and "No Thank You'" signs were all over -- and overwhelmingly on the yes side as we got further north. The hotel clerk had told me, "the Celts (Glasgowians historically made little distinction between Highland and Irish immigrants) are mostly for independence."

We also found thoughtful and worried "no" voters. In our bed and breakfast in a little Highland town, Granton on Spey, we talked with Gary and Sara, both recently retired from the Royal Navy after years of service, who were skeptical of the "yes" side. They argued that lowering of the voting age on the referendum to 16, was politically smart but a mistake, not acknowledging the naivety of 16-year-olds. Gary's personal story of his own changes from a wild kid who dropped out of school at 16 to a mature mechanical engineer gave substance to his argument.

In a hotel on Loch Lomand, the clerk told me she is a "no" voter -- her husband has been in the military for years. She worries about the effects on ship building of an independent Scotland, which could lose many contracts from England. "We need each other," she argued.

There were also signs of desire for civic empowerment across the divisions of the referendum. "There are such big problems," she continued, "like homelessness and the mess with the banks. How are we going to deal with those?"

I said the people will have to be involved in a deep way to address any of these questions -- or to build a real democracy -- regardless of how the vote in the referendum turns out. She readily agreed.

Overall participants on the Yes side seem upbeat. The clerk at an exquisite craft and wool shop in the village of Arrochar replied, when I asked her what she thinks will happen in the referendum, "I thought it was a sure no vote at the beginning, but the yes's have really been coming up. Now I think the Yes will win it." She was enthusiastic when I described parallels I saw with the Obama campaign, the message of civic empowerment and the enormous community ground game.

But past experience also shows the limits of electoral politics in generating lasting movements for empowering civic change and participatory democracy. Perhaps the most important question in the debate was asked by a young man in the audience. Remarking on the political interests of his friends and young people across the country, he asked how the political involvement seen in the campaign could continue.

Darling didn't seem to understand the question. Salmond pointed to the campaign itself

After 2008, despite impressive efforts of Organizing For Action, growing out of the campaign, around the Affordable Care Act -- a largely invisible but crucial factor in achieving the enrollment goals last spring -- the energies of the campaign mainly dissipated. In fact most Obama voters forgot his constantly repeated message that he would be able to do little, even as president, to change the course of the nation. Obama supporters soon began demanding he fix the nation's problems.

Aspirations for participatory democracy raise the question: How will civic empowerment find lasting foundations?

I take up this in my next blog on the crucial roles of free spaces in developing and sustaining empowering politics. Free spaces are middle spaces in community life, between large mass settings and private life, which people own and in which they can build relationships across differences. Free spaces create empowering cultures which develop public capacities and generate sustained hope for democratic change.

Harry C. Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School, was co-chair of the civic engagement committee of the Obama 2008 campaign.

The forthcoming collection Democracy's Education (Vanderbilt University Press, 2015), described in my recent blog on higher education and rising inequality, makes the case for a democratic narrative of education. Such a narrative is based on "cooperative excellence," the idea that a highly diverse mix of people, interacting in settings of high expectations and public purposes, can achieve far more both in terms of individual educational growth and social benefit than education based on "meritocratic excellence."

University of Michigan professor Scott Page's book, The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies (Princeton University Press, 2007), brings together a considerable body of evidence which also helps makes this case. Indeed, Chapter 13 alone includes fifty six notes with more than seventy sources which show the advantages of focusing on generating cooperative, diverse experiences and interactions over focusing on individual genius. As Nobel Prize winning economist Kenneth Arrow summarized in his book endorsement, "Page has brought to our attention a practically important proposition: diversity of viewpoints is of the greatest importance in solving the problems that face us individually and collectively. Diversity among a group of problem solvers is more important than individual excellence."

Today's dominant story of higher education is based on norms of hypercompetitive individual achievement in which admission to Ivy League schools is the ultimate mark of success. The costs to both individuals and society are high. As William Deresiewicz dramatically puts it in his recent New Republic essay, "Don't Send Your Kids to the Ivy League," "Our system of elite education manufactures young people who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose."

But there is evidence that students today, perhaps sensing the alternative narrative of cooperative excellence, are looking for something different than the elite-making system. Their aspirations could fire a movement for democratizing reform.

In my 2004 book, Everyday Politics, I recount New York Times research which led the paper to join with the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) in a new initiative called the American Democracy Project, aimed at strengthening the civic and public purposes of higher education. The American Democracy Project includes several hundred AASCU schools, regional colleges and universities called "American Dream" colleges since many of their students are the first in their families to go to college.

The Times' joined with AASCU based on unexpected discoveries about students' interests and aspirations.

The newspaper's trend analysis had shown that American culture is becoming more segmented into insulated subgroups of viewpoint, ideology, and culture. In contrast the Times depends on a readership that welcomes a diversity of viewpoints and vantages. The paper's marketing department found, to their surprise, that students may well be responsive to efforts to make real the "power of diversity."

The Times sponsored a competition among advertising and marketing students to develop a theme to attract more student readers. The majority of submissions focused on a common theme: students want to explore the world outside of their bubble, and they aspire to college experiences which stimulate, challenge, and explose them to different perspectives on the world. The campaign that most clearly captured this concept was developed by students at Indiana University-Bloomington. The team coined the phrase "Understand Why," and positioned the phrase against photographic images from the Times that illustrated compelling and often disturbing issues.

This finding was so much at odds with dominant college admission pitches which stress individual career advancement and competitive success that the paper conducted their own focus groups with students all across the country. Large schools and small, North, South, East, and West, the results were the same: students either failed to respond to or explicitly rejected the idea of "Advance your career! The New York Times helps you achieve professional success." Overwhelmingly they liked the theme, "Understand Why."

The good news was that students saw the Times as a potential resource to help them do this. The ad campaign ran and exceeded expectations in its successful recruitment of new college readers.

The bad news is that most college students do not have many experiences of deep engagement with diverse cultures, ways of thinking, and real world challenges in college education today. The newspaper's other finding was that if students do not escape their "bubbles" in college or shortly afterwards, they are likely to settle into patterns of relatively homogeneous social and friendship circles that will persist through their lifetimes.

Higher education's fledgling engagement movement over the last two decades can be seen as a response to this challenge, an effort to create more diverse, interactive, egalitarian learning cultures, across all institutions. The The Wingspread Declaration in 1999, which Elizabeth Hollander, then president of Campus Compact and I co-authored on behalf of a group of higher education leaders, called for revitalizing the civic mission of the American research university. A Crucible Moment in 2012, coordinated by Caryn McTighe Musil of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, called for extensive focus on civic learning and democratic engagement across every type of college and university.

A Crucible Moment was released at the White House event in 2012, "For Democracy's Future." The White House meeting also launched the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), a year-long initiative, invited by Jon Carson, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, to develop ways to revitalize higher education's democratic narrative. Democracy's Education grows from ACP.

Yet it would be naïve to ignore the ways in which such efforts cut against the grain of the dominant elite, individualist narrative of higher education. John Saltmarsh, director of the New England Resource Center for Higher Education, has argued that we need a new stage of the engagement movement which can effect institution-wide transformation. This new stage is essential if we are to develop a democratic narrative based on cooperative excellence capable of countering the elite educational narrative.

Democracy's Education, now available for preorder from Amazon.com, details many practical examples, some institution-wide in scale, which show that "yes we can," it can be done.

Harry C. Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey School of Public Affairs, directed the American Commonwealth Partnership and is editor of Democracy's Education.