Hal Saunders died on March 6, after a struggle with cancer.

I first met Hal in 1989, when he asked me to participate in a third task force, on civil society, in the off-the-record, high-level Dartmouth Conference. Dartmouth was a dialogue between the Soviet Union and the United States which began in 1960. Again and again it brought leaders of the two countries back from the brink of disaster by creating a space where they could get a reality check. Hal once told me Dartmouth "was where the Soviets gave the speeches they had in their desks and believed in, but couldn't say in public."

For a decade Hal co-chaired a Task Force on Regional Conflicts, some of the time with Yevgeny Primakov, former head of the KGB and then Prime Minister of the Soviet Union. The task force addressed hot spots in the Middle East and elsewhere. In 1990 Hal went on staff of the Kettering Foundation, which sponsored the Dartmouth Conference, as director of the foundation's international programs. No one could possibly have been better.

He had a remarkable history. In 1961, Hal Saunders joined the staff of the National Security Council and served as Mideast expert for both the Johnson and Nixon administrations -- during the Six-Day War of June 1967, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Kissinger's "shuttle diplomacy." In 1978, President Carter appointed him Assistant Secretary in the State Department for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs. He helped set up the legendary Camp David meeting which brought Anwar Sadat, President of Egypt, together with Menachem Begin, Prime Minister of Israel and Jimmy Carter together for 12 days of secret talks. The Camp David talks laid the foundation for the historic Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty.

On November 4, 1979, in the early morning hours, he took a call from the American embassy in Iran and for two hours heard from frantic officials about the takeover of the embassy. For the next 444 days he worked to free the American hostages.

I worked with Hal as the Soviet Union underwent dramatic transformation. And I turned to him when we created the "Reinventing Citizenship" initiative with the Domestic Policy Council and Bill Galston, President Clinton's domestic policy advisor. Our aim was to develop strategies for overcoming the government-citizen gap. No one had more wisdom about how to get things accomplished in government bureaucracies. In 1994, at a Kettering international meeting in Puerto Rico, we discussed the effort and his own work.

Here is an excerpt from my travel log.

San Juan San Juan, Puerto Rico, January 31 10:06 am

Hal Saunders and I ate breakfast on the hotel terrace, surrounded by lush flowers, with the ocean sounding in the background. Small, graceful black birds lit all around us.

I gave an update on Reinventing Citizenship. Hal had many thoughts about how to connect key people in the foreign policy "democracy promotion" networks. Ramon Daubon, a terrific guy, once the Latin Ford Foundation director will be here. He now is at the Agency for International Development, trying to change US approaches to democracy aid in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Beyond foreign policy, Hal's counsel on our initiative was wise and to the point as always: keep it relatively loose and uninstitutionalized for as long as possible and in as many ways as possible. Look for ways to create relationships and energy around the key concepts.

Hal's own work is fascinating. He has grants for the conflict resolution project Kettering has undertaken in Tajikistan, where civil war in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse has left a seventh of the population as refugees. Working with the Institute for Oriental Studies in Russia, they've been able to create a vibrant forum bringing together the warring parties in the country around the tasks of ending the war and resettlement; and also "constitution-building," understood as a political process not simply writing a constitution. Hal gives little "sermonettes" in the middle of meetings -- drawing undoubtedly on his mystique as someone who helped bring Sadat and Begin together in Camp David, and his other many achievements. One sermonette was on the need to see constitutional reform as connected to creating a political dynamic across different factions and ethnic rivalries.

I remarked, it must be an amazing and immense gratifying thing to see possibilities for settlement, ending of war, and society-building in a society that is so wracked with suffering and violence.

Hal said simply, "yes."

I last saw Hal and Carol, his wife, at a Kettering international gathering last July. He wasn't well. But he was, as always, passionately curious about democracy developments, including in South Africa - Hal had long worked with the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). Idasa, until its recent end, was one of the great democracy promoting organizations in the world. My wife, Marie Ström, directed their democracy education work for nearly twenty years, and I worked with it on many projects.

Hal combined calm, strategic, big picture thinking with a wonderfully generous, relational approach. He also had a passionate commitment to dialogue as a way to humanize and work through even the most intractable conflicts. This commitment came from his experiences.

Hal was a great theorist and practitioner of deliberation in our time. He created the Sustained Dialogue Institute which involves college students across America in working through conflicts.

I have tremendous admiration for Hal and his legacy, in the trenches of democracy across the world.

David Mathews, president of the Kettering Foundation, once wrote a book with the evocative title, "Is There a Public for Public Schools?"

In my blog conversation with Deborah Meier on Education Week, Meier's question last week, "what defines a public school?" reminds me of the book.

Not only what is a public school but who gets to define it?

This turns out to be intensely political at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, where I gave a talk last week, "Public Universities and the Future of Democracy."

College and universities' connections to larger publics - and their power to shape that destinies, in a time of enormous change - has been greatly weakened. There are a lot of forces at work, such as the detachment of research cultures. But one that is not often discussed is the way colleges and universities define their purposes.

Today college is mainly perceived as a ticket to individual success. This purpose is linked to the way colleges and universities typically separate, even oppose, "liberal arts" and "education for careers."

If we reframe the goal as education for "citizen professionals" it changes the discussion. This means preparing students who understand and engage the real world of today's jobs and are also prepared to be constructive agents of change, helping to create the jobs we need as a society -- more democratic and humane jobs and institutions in schools, businesses, government, health care and elsewhere.

To return public purpose to careers requires integrating liberal learning and skills of democratic action with career preparation: the "heart" and "hand" with "head."

At Illinois questions of educating for jobs are front and center - the university is experiencing huge pressures to cut back on liberal arts and focus instead on job skills. But the focus from the politicians is on "today's jobs," not the jobs we will need as a society. Based on experiences, I'm convinced that if the larger citizenry comes into the conversation it can shift this narrow focus.

In the late 1990s, our Center for Democracy and Citizenship (then at the University of Minnesota) worked with the provost, Bob Bruininks, to create a task force on civic engagement. Its charge was to develop strategies for strengthening the university's public mission, called the "land grant mission." From 2000 to 2002, during the task force work, we had many conversations about how to strengthen the public dimensions of teaching, research and engagement with communities - how to make work "more public," as we put it. The history is described on the University of Minnesota web site.

I was impressed with the depth and seriousness of discussions in Minnesota among many groups, business leaders, small and large, to African American community leaders, school teachers, nonprofit organizations. All sorts of people felt they had a stake in defining the university's public purposes and its future. State legislators described how the university had lost public relationships as it became more like an "Ivory Tower." This loss weakened it politically.

So I took these experiences to the American Commonwealth Partnership, a coalition on the public purposes of higher education which Jon Carson, director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, invited me to organize for the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act in 2012.

One product was two national discussions on the purposes of higher education, Shaping Our Future -- How Can Higher Education Help Us Create the Future We Want? and The Changing World of Work. We worked on both with the Kettering Foundation and the National Issue Forums, and launched them at press conferences at the National Press club with leaders like Martha Kanter, Obama's Undersecretary for Post Secondary Education, David Mathews, Nancy Cantor, Muriel Howard, Scott Peters and others. The first is described in a Youtube video.

There were forums in every region of the country. They surfaced much richer and more multidimensional public sentiments than the narrow ways policy about higher education is now debated, "education for jobs," cutting costs, and the like. Jean Johnson from the Public Agenda group did a great job summing up what we found on the first in a report, Divided We Fail - Are Citizens and Leaders Talking Past Each Other?

The trip to the University of Illinois brought home for me how much the people's voice is needed today in the public debate about policy.

How can we bring the people back in?

Citizen professional schooling requires equipping students and educators with capacities to create empowering schools and businesses, congregations and clinics, nonprofits and public agencies -- foundations for democracy as a way of life not simply a trip to the ballot box.

Citizen professional schooling requires equipping students and educators with capacities to create empowering schools and businesses, congregations and clinics, nonprofits and public agencies -- foundations for democracy as a way of life not simply a trip to the ballot box.