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Higher Education Engagement News is a periodic news briefing that responds to the request from many people for continuing updates and information about initiatives and groups associated with the American Commonwealth Partnership in 2012. It is edited by Harry Boyte.

This issue features my reflections, published as a blog in the Huffington Post, on lessons from the March on Washington and the South African Congress of the People movement, the foundation of the modern anti-apartheid struggle. These seem relevant to the challenges of making change in higher education today on a number of grounds that range from the specific – both movements were centrally concerned with democratic changes in education and higher education – to the broadly strategic. Both movements had a citizen-centered practical, majoritarian quality that grounded their moral visions and sought to “win over the large majority,” an approach brilliantly articulated by Bayard Rustin, organizer of the March.

Rustin is at last gaining much deserved visibility, during the 50th anniversary of the March and after President Obama awarded him the Presidential Freedom medal this month, posthumously.

Next issue will contain a shortened version of the National Issues Forums report, “Divided We Fail,” on the Shaping Our Futures deliberations about the purposes of higher education. The report, distilling the voices of more than 120 forums, shows a worrisome disconnect between the ways the general citizenry sees higher education and the ways in which policy makers see needed changes, a disconnect which threatens the “top down” approach described in the blog. Here is the link to the full report.
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