In a coincidence of history, President Obama took the oath of office on the Martin Luther King Holiday, January 21, 2013. He sounded a call for collective action, with his hand on Martin Luther King's bible.

Like King a half century ago in his "I Have a Dream" speech, Obama employed a language of citizenship, declaring that all must work together as citizens to advance the founding creed of the nation and to meet challenges of today. Obama has immersed himself in study of the black church tradition of call and response, which King brilliantly embodied. And in the citizen response to Obama's call, we can use lessons from the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King is rightly remembered this anniversary year of his speech as a dreamer. But to see King only as a dreamer is to miss his greatness.

Stretched out on the floor in a sleeping bag in my father's hotel room, I heard King practice the speech in the early morning hours of August 28. My father had just gone on staff of King's organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the only white on the executive committee. Dad called me, hitch-hiking in California before college, and told me to come back. "We've planned a march to get the attention of the nation," he said.

In "I Have a Dream," King strikes a bold tone. "There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights," King said. King's Dream speech was also a call to citizenship, to act with concern for the whole society:

"In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

King lived what community organizers describe as the tension between the world as it is and the world as it should be. This is hard to do. The strong tendency is to split the two. On the one hand we have our ideals and those who embody them. On the other there is the vicious, violent world and of course the evil doers who are its agents.

King refused this Manichean division of the world. He rooted his dream in the soil of human fallibility. He was fully aware of the propensities toward pettiness, jealousy and meanness in everyone -- including himself. It was his ability to dream coupled with his rootedness in the human condition with its full complexity which made Martin Luther King great.

This rootedness of King is often missing in today's tributes. The current controversy over the King Memorial in Washington illustrates the pattern.

In 2011, the poet Maya Angelou told the Washington Post she was upset at the paraphrase of a quote on the Memorial. The quote, from a sermon King gave on March 4, 1968, read: "If you want to say that I was a drum major say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness." On the Memorial the inscription was shortened to read "I was a drum major for justice, peace, and righteousness."

Angelou said, "The quote makes Dr. Martin Luther King look like an arrogant twit. He never would have said that of himself. He said, 'you might say it.' It minimizes the man. It makes him seem less than the humanitarian he was." After a wave of such criticisms, the Park Service agreed to remove the inscription.

I have high regard for Maya Angelou and her writing. But she was wrong about King.

The sermon wasn't creating a hypothetical. King begins the sermon querying those who condemn James and John for their request, recounted in the 10th chapter of Mark, to sit at Jesus' left and right hands. King says:

Why would they make such a selfish request? Before we condemn them too quickly, let us look calmly and honestly at ourselves, and we will discover that we too have those same basic desires for recognition, for importance. There is deep down within all of us kind of a drum major instinct -- a desire to be out front, a desire to lead the parade, a desire to be first.

King continues that the problem is not the Drum Major Instinct. It's that the follow-up question, "for what?" is rarely asked. That's the meaning of the quote which was taken off the King Memorial.

King's "for what" drew deeply from conversations with co-workers in the movement. For instance, Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March on Washington and long-time adviser to King, was indispensable to creating the platform for "I Have a Dream." Rustin's question was always how to move from the world as it is to the world as it should be, or, put differently, how to put power behind vision.

By the mid-60s, Rustin had become alarmed about the growing tendency of young activists, both black and white, to substitute "posture and volume" for strategy and politics. In 1965 in an article in Commentary magazine, "From Protest to Politics," he challenged this tendency and proposed an alternative. "The civil rights movement must evolve from a protest movement into a full-fledged social movement -- an evolution calling its very name into question," he said. "It is now concerned not merely with removing the barriers to full opportunity but with achieving the fact of equality."

Rustin argued that the movement for equality will require institutional transformation, not simply moral exhortation. I see the civic transformations of colleges and universities, promoted by the American Commonwealth Partnership in partnership with the White House and the Department of Education, as examples .

Similarly, King also often visited the Dorchester Center in Georgia, where he heard stories and drew inspiration from those being trained by SCLC's Citizenship Education Program (CEP) to create citizenship schools. Septima Clark, an early teacher, developed CEP's vision statement: "to broaden the scope of democracy to include everyone and deepen the concept to include every relationship."

Such broadening involved transformation in identity from victim to agent of change, a story told vividly in the book by CEP director Dorothy Cotton, If Your Back's Not Bent: The Role of the Citizenship Education Program in the Civil Rights Movement<. I worked for CEP as a college student.

King is remembered in his last years for his fiery criticisms of the Vietnam War and poverty in America. But we need to recall that he was also a Drum Major -- and a co-worker -- in the movement for equality and for broadening the scope of democracy.

His marching orders have never been more relevant.

Harry C. Boyte, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs, was a Field Secretary for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a young man in the civil rights movement.

One key to "integrating the three C's" -- college, career and citizenship -- is recalling those who kept alive traditions of work-centered education and civic learning. Lois Olson, an active participant and leader in Internships and Cooperative Education with strong citizenship interests, is a case in point.

Cooperative education is a method of combining academic study and classroom learning with practical work experience, for which students often receive academic credit. Co-op education and Internships, resembling John Dewey's concept that education should be connected "with real things and materials... and the knowledge of their social necessities and uses," was created by Dewey's contemporary, the engineer, architect, and educator Herman Schneider (1872-1939) in the early 20th century.

Lois Olson, recently retired director of the Strommen Center for Meaningful Work at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, was hired in 1985 to help implement a Cooperative Education grant from the Department of Education. In those years the Department's Cooperative Education program supported curricular innovation tying work experiences to academic learning. Olson, hired by Dr. Garry Hesser, the faculty co-op ed director, now Augsburg's Sabo Professor of Citizenship and long-time leader in experiential education, wrote at her retirement, "No one has contributed more than Lois to the deepening of Augsburg's experiential education and career development."





Boyte: Lois, throughout your career, you've stressed citizenship aspects of work-based learning. Where did that come from?

Olson: I grew up on a farm in Southwestern Minnesota where politics was everywhere. My grandfather and dad were active in local government and especially the farmers union. My dad often took me to the local pool hall, where the farmers and townspeople -- store owners, the town doctor and lawyer, the owners of the grain elevator and the car dealerships gathered for coffee, Democrats and Republicans.

It was the civic site for the town. Even at a young age, I was fascinated how the conversations intertwined politics, religion and economics. Later, I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Minnesota's Department of Human Ecology, which was highly interdisciplinary. I remember taking a course in American Studies with David Noble, who described the populist movements of the 1930s, and railed against the growth of consumer culture. My graduate studies focused on leadership, experiential education and career development where I began to make meaning out of all this.

Boyte: How was Co-op Education set up at Augsburg?

Olson: We built upon the long tradition of Experiential Education begun in the 1960's, pioneered by sociology professor Joel Torstenson. We had a Faculty Advisory Council and an Employer Council. The faculty council had one representative -- often the department chair -- from every department. Their responsibility was to work with Garry and me to design learning outcomes and a reflection process related to their discipline. The student was responsible for negotiating learning goals and assessment plans. The Employer Council included businesses which hired students. My job was to connect students with departments and employers. I also helped students think broadly about their work. We gave them leads but they had to make the calls and set up interviews, preparing them for the "real" work world.

Boyte: After the Co-op Education grant ended you said you had some frustrations with the growing movement for service learning for not recognizing work as a civic site. Could you describe that?

Olson: I was a strong supporter of service-learning, but I thought something was missing. People said service learning was about citizenship, yet made a distinction between that and work experiences. I never agreed with the separation. When I talked with students I would ask, how can you be a citizen in your neighborhood, your family, your college, AND your workplace? How do these connect and intersect?

Boyte: You helped craft the "Augsburg Experience" for students at Augsburg focused on a required experiential education experience in the community, which included a "work connection" option. It included a question about the workplace as a "corporate citizen." Could you describe this?

Olson: I wanted to pull together elements that I believed students were compartmentalizing. They would take a course with a service learning component and then another focused on vocation. Many had work experience. Some were active in the community. However, the typical student seldom saw any connections. I wanted a reflection process that tied all these together -- academic, service, vocation, community and civic responsibility.

I worked one on one with students, asking them to think about their work experiences and also their community life and education. What are you learning about your strengths? How can you develop them? What else do you need to know? How are you going to learn what you know you don't know? One of the questions was about the job itself. I asked, "Do you or do you not believe that your organization is a good corporate citizen? Why or why not?" Students worked for businesses, schools, nonprofits, mom and pop stores, government... one of the best reflections I received was from a student working at a golf course.

I said, "Find out the mission, the vision, the goals, and practices of your organization. Describe the culture, policies, allocation of resources that might impact citizenship." Responses were very rich. Some said, 'I had no idea that my employer was doing all this.' Others said, 'I looked at the mission and realized it was mostly PR.' Some held discussions about this with their fellow workers.

"The struggle students had is how to act on what they learned. They said, 'What am I going to do about this?' By asking the question, they made a different meaning of their experience. My goal was to provide tools to make real and personal connections between their work life, their personal and public lives and their responsibility of being citizens who can make a difference."

Harry C. Boyte is 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.

Cooperative education is a method of combining academic study and classroom learning with practical work experience, for which students often receive academic credit. Lois Olson was hired in 1985 to help implement a Cooperative Education grant from the Department of Education.

Cooperative education is a method of combining academic study and classroom learning with practical work experience, for which students often receive academic credit. Lois Olson was hired in 1985 to help implement a Cooperative Education grant from the Department of Education.

In future blogs I will describe stories that "integrate the three C's" -- college, career, and citizenship -- as I recently proposed. But it's useful to begin by describing some of the blinders.

The western intellectual tradition conceives of public life as democratization of aristocratic leisure, contrasting civic activity with work. As Benjamin Barber, a leading participatory democracy theorist, puts it, "To the Greeks, labor by itself defined only mere animal existence, while leisure was the condition for freedom, politics, and truly 'human' forms of being."

In his book, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong, Barber translates the Greek view into modern times. Civil society, he argues, is the alternative to work. He sees the voluntary sector as home for democracy, unlike the constraints of work and the workplace. He advances community service with civic reflection as a way to cultivate the identity of citizen, as alternative to "producer" and "consumer."

Similarly, the great political theorist Hannah Arendt viewed work as had the Greeks, part of the apolitical world. While she valued "work" more than menial jobs, she believed that work did not belong in the public arena of "deeds and action," and specifically of politics. Producers remain private: "homo faber, the builder of the world and the producer of things, can find his proper relationship to other people only by exchanging his products with theirs because these products themselves are always produced in isolation."

Theorists of civil society join Arendt and Barber in separating work from public life. Thus in Civil Society and Political Theory, Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato revise the classical notion of civil society as it descended from Hegel and the Scottish Enlightenment, which had included large institutions and commerce. Cohen and Arato argue for "a reconstruction [of the concept] involving a three-part model distinguishing civil society from both state and economy." They see this definition as the way to "underwrite the dramatic oppositional role of this concept under authoritarian regimes and to renew its critical potential under liberal democracies."

For Cohen and Arato, civil society, the arena of citizenship, is "a sphere of social interaction between economy and state, composed above all of the intimate sphere (especially the family), the sphere of associations (especially voluntary associations), social movements, and forms of public communication."

Such ideas may seem academic. But in fact the idea of civil society illustrates the power of framing concepts to structure resources, define the meaning of citizenship, and organize education.

Major foundations allocate hundreds of millions of dollars to voluntarism. The congressionally mandated National Conference on Citizenship uses indicators from civil society to define America's "civic health," with nothing about work. Beyond civics courses, civic education largely emphasizes service and service-learning in both K-12 and higher education.

Bringing work back in

Yet work has a way of coming back in. In John Steinbeck's 1930s classic In Dubious Battle, a union organizer is asked what he gets from organizing farm laborers despite low pay and constant danger. "It's an important job," he replies. "The thing that takes the heart out of a man is work that doesn't lead any place."

In her book, Working Together: How Workplace Bonds Strengthen a Diverse Democracy, New York University law professor Cynthia Estlund shows that work and workplaces create opportunities to bridge differences and build civic ties often missing in community and associational life.

Estlund brings together theoretical perspectives, social science research, and examples from popular culture in order to remedy what she sees as the neglect of work and the workplace by civil society theorists. Estlund makes a compelling case that, despite continuing patterns of hierarchy and discrimination, workplaces are the only environments where most people are likely to have sustained encounters with people of differing racial, cultural, and ideological backgrounds. They engage in such experiences with relative civility, and around practical, goal-directed tasks, making them relatively conducive to sustained experiences of collaboration.

She shows that these features of work and workplaces enable people to develop respect for others, reduce prejudices and stereotypes, build trust, develop civic skills, and create cross-group networks. "It is not just the friendship potential of workplace relations that makes it a promising source of interracial contact," she argues. The work process itself "is generally cooperative and directed toward shared objectives; much of it is sustained, personal, informal, and one-to-one."

Workplaces further democratic equality by "convening strangers from diverse backgrounds and inducing them to work together toward shared objectives under the aegis of the societally imposed equality principle."

Estlund also shows how social movements such as union organizing efforts in the 1930s, the civil rights movement, and the feminist movement made the workplace more public. Thus, Section 7 of the Wagner Act, growing from New Deal organizing, created "a kind of rudimentary system of civil liberties within the workplace" which in turn allowed further action by workers. Though the effort is not completed, it advanced democratic purposes.

Focusing on the public possibilities of work generates hope for change. As the intellectual historian Thomas Bender has described in a recent study, "Historians in Public," we may be seeing the reemergence of locally grounded public intellectuals who act as citizens, joining with other citizens on matters of concern. "With the collapse of the mass communications model of the public sphere," writes Bender, "the historian who wishes to influence the public sphere need not long for acceptance on the op-ed page of the New York Times. She can go on the local radio station or contribute a column to the still remaining local papers or even start up a local web site."

New developments like the Scholars Strategy Network, encouraging scholars to use their knowledge in public, clearly point in this direction.

As George Mehaffy, vice president of leadership for the American Association of State Colleges and Universities puts it, "once you start looking at work with citizenship in mind, many things start becoming visible."

Harry Boyte is Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.

Such ideas may seem academic. But in fact the idea of civil society illustrates the power of framing concepts to structure resources, define the meaning of citizenship, and organize education.

Such ideas may seem academic. But in fact the idea of civil society illustrates the power of framing concepts to structure resources, define the meaning of citizenship, and organize education.

On November 27, in the midst of arguments about taxes and the debt, another debate took place in Washington. This one involved two political traditions eclipsed in recent years, now stirring again to life: civil society conservatism and progressively-inclined populism, which animated the New Deal, the black freedom movement, and community organizing.

The forum, billed as "Civil Society and the Future of Conservatism," included three Republicans who champion "mediating institutions" such as family, congregations, and businesses: Yuval Levin, recently tagged as a young, leading conservative intellectual by The New York Times columnist David Brooks; seasoned African-American activist Bob Woodson who works with gang members, ex-convicts, and public housing tenants; and Jimmy Kemp, president of the Jack Kemp Foundation.

It also included me, the only non-Republican in the group. Forum organizer William Schambra wanted another point of view. I was joined in advancing populism by Gerald Taylor in the audience, long-time community organizer and African-American populist intellectual.

The discussion highlighted connections and differences. "What was interesting was seeing conservatives reconnecting with their roots of family, work, and congregation," Taylor said later. "That may create some common space around a different role for government."

With the connections, there were also differences, having to do with how to understand citizens, the nature of mediating institutions, and the role of government.

During the election, Levin criticized both Republicans and Democrats for ignoring civil society, charging the debate turned into a fight between "simple-minded and selfish radical individualism," on the Republican side, and "a simple-minded and dangerous radical collectivism" on the Democratic side. Levin argued that "the premise of conservatism has always been, on the contrary, that what matters most about society happens in the space between the two, and that creating, sustaining, and protecting that space is a prime purpose of government."

He observed that "numerous speakers at this summer's Democratic Convention equated society and government, arguing, for instance that 'there are things that a civilized society needs that we can only do when we do them together, and when we do them together that's called government.'"

I agreed that institutions of faith, family, and locally grounded business are crucial to a decent society -- and argued that the list needs to include education in our knowledge society. Mediating institutions also need to be thought about as sites of power, not simply as schools of virtue. Taking off from Dorothy Cotton's new book, If Your Back's Not Bent, which describes how ordinary people changed from victims to active citizens in the citizenship schools of the civil rights movement, the issue is how citizens become foundational agents of democracy.

Obama believes in citizens as agents of change.

Yuval Levin criticized Obama for slighting civil society. But the roots of progressive neglect are much earlier, taking shape in "mass politics" over decades. Mass politics is organized around what Steven Fraser, in Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, calls "the concept of a new man -- existentially mobile, more oriented to consumption than production, familiar with the impersonal rights and responsibilities of industrial due process." As Michael Sandel describes in Democracy's Discontent, mass politics is "based on consumer identities."

As I have observed, President Obama has long been a critic of the "consumer advocacy style" of citizen action. Though four years in the center of mass politics showed its effects in the 2012 campaign -- the civic agency spirit of "yes we can" was less evident than in 2008 -- Obama stressed citizenship and the work of self-governance in both his acceptance speech and his victory speech.

Most to the point, Obama understands that presidents alone can't restore civil society. In the first term, his administration took important if fledgling steps to catalyze independent citizen initiative.

The late Monsignor Geno Baroni, champion of community organizing and a "new populism," helps to flesh out the alternative to mass politics and Burkean conservatives alike. Though Saul Alinsky often gets credit -- and blame -- for birthing community organizing and schooling Obama, Baroni was a more important figure.

"The organizer has to believe that ordinary people can build bridges across racial and ethnic lines," Baroni argued. "The organizer has to get ordinary people in touch with their roots, their heritage, their best. The organizer has to give ordinary people hope." Obama's speech on race during the 2008 raised the same themes.

Baroni-style populism develops powerful citizens, not only caring citizens, builders of democracy, not democracy's consumers. It renews mediating institutions as sites of democratic power. It sees government not only as protector of civil society, but as partner in citizen empowerment.

Baroni showed how such politics can be practiced anywhere and needs to be practiced everywhere. He organized not only in communities but also in the church as Catholic coordinator to the 1963 March on Washington and architect of the social justice funding group, the Campaign for Human Development. He organized among ethnics, founding the National Center for Urban Ethnic Affairs. He organized in government as Assistant Secretary for HUD under President Carter, creating the Office of Neighborhood Self-Help, championing Community Development Block Grants, changing categorical grant programs into resources for citizen initiative.

The Center for Democracy and Citizenship has long worked in the Baroni tradition to revitalize educational institutions like settlements, schools, and colleges as centers of civic life, with connected professions which are empowering .

From our vantage, the administration illustrated its interest in civic agency when Jon Carson, who directs the White House Office of Public Engagement, invited us to organize the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP), an educational alliance which works with the Department of Education to strengthen education as a public good. ACP promotes empowering civic education, colleges which are part of places, and citizen-centered democracy.

The civil society conservatism advanced in the Forum, far more attentive to racial and cultural diversity, local institutions and the poor than this year's Republican campaign, may grow. Paul Ryan gave one speech in the election channeling the views of Levin after hearing from community leaders brought together by Woodson. More meetings are planned across the country. Ryan's staff was there on Tuesday.

If there is expansion of government efforts during the Obama years to catalyze citizen agency, it will help to grow the information-age populism which is beginning to appear. Such populism finds common ground with conservatives who champion mediating institutions, recognizing their wisdom about the human person. Information-age populism also advances a broader agenda -- return of "we the people" to the center of democracy.

Harry C. Boyte is National Coordinator of the American Commonwealth Partnership, Director of the Center for Democracy and Citizenship at Augsburg College, and a Senior Fellow at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs.