Introduction Disciplining

Political Roots

The logic of disciplining democracy was rooted in the ideological tensions of the post–World War II university. When a new generation of college students enrolled in American universities in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they entered institutions that were far different from what previous generations experienced on campus. On one level, American institutions of higher education were just bigger—more students, larger buildings, and campuses that stretched for miles. But on another level, the place of the American university in political life was also bigger. The political crises of the mid-twentieth century—from the Great Depression to World War II—expanded the academic-federal partnership. Policy makers turned toward the university for technical research to support new domestic and foreign policy initiatives designed to address the political crises. They also turned to the university for education and training purposes, especially in preparation for World War II. In exchange, academic institutions received federal financial support that not only stabilized the American higher education system but enabled universities to expand their intellectual and educational footprint in social and political life.

The scale of the post–World War II expansion of the federal-academic partnership presented a distinct institutional challenge. Academic leaders had to develop a new social mission that accommodated competing impulses—the university had to be directly engaged in contemporary political questions through public research and education while remaining institutionally neutral on those very questions. To address this challenge, policy makers, academic leaders, and intellectuals across the American higher education landscape developed a model of general education that promoted a particular idea of citizenship associated with the disciplinary characteristics of the modern university.13 First, they emphasized the intellectual traits associated with a value-neutral science, believing that objectivity and disinterested judgment were the requisite attributes that would prepare modern citizens for the needs of the American nation. Second, they eschewed normative arguments for democracy—arguments explaining what it could or should be in America—and hewed instead to naturalizing assertions that the political structures and institutions of democracy represented the model of democracy itself.14 The combination enabled academic leaders to describe the university as a neutral party that promoted independent inquiry among its students while maintaining its role as a mediating institution of state, federal, and market policy.

The institutional mission and pedagogical vision of modern citizenship that triumphed on American college campuses proved difficult to maintain in the context of the various social movements that arose in the 1960s, most prominently the classical phase of the civil rights movement, anti-colonial movements around the world, and the anti–Vietnam War movement. Shaped by the social urgency of these political struggles as well what they learned through their direct involvement, students confronted what they saw as a fundamental contradiction at the heart of their educational pursuits. Expanded federal funding to the university enabled increasing numbers of students of diverse backgrounds to attend higher education institutions, where they were exposed to new political, cultural, and social ideas. Yet, students often found their colleges and universities frustratingly aloof to the political concerns off campus. They were also troubled by claims of neutrality when the university was deeply engaged in the political world through federal grants and research. How could the university, many asked, be an engine of democracy if it remained neutral on the pressing issues of the time?

The most famous student analysis of this question was the Port Huron Statement. When student activists met in Port Huron, Michigan, to articulate a vision for the nascent progressive student movements of the 1960s, a primary focus of their discussion—indeed, a primary focus of what became the Port Huron Statement—was the university’s approach to civic education. “The university,” wrote Tom Hayden, the main author of the statement, “‘prepares’ students for ‘citizenship’ through perpetual rehearsals.” As Hayden explained, “That which is studied, the social reality, is ‘objectified’ to sterility, dividing the student from life—just as he is restrained in active involvement by the deans controlling student government.” The result was an apathetic student body, he argued, who did not value political activity as a citizen. Yet, even as Hayden critiqued the staid curriculum of the university, he also believed that the other attributes of the university—including “social relevance, the accessibility to knowledge, and internal openness”—when combined together with political action, would “make the university a potential base and agency in a movement of social change.”15

Hayden’s critique of the modern university resurrected a progressive tradition of education more closely associated with the core ideas of John Dewey. As the historian Robert B. Westbrook noted in his biography of Dewey, “Perhaps nowhere did Dewey’s ideas echo more resoundingly than in the ‘Port Huron Statement.’”16 The differences between the student movements and university leaders in the 1960s reflected a tension at the heart of the American progressive tradition—one that had direct implications for the modern American university. The debate operated between technocratic and reconstructive progressivism. Academic leaders adopted one strain of American progressivism—what the historian Ethan Schrum identifies as technocratic progressivism—to define the university’s role as an instrument of economic and state policy making. Student activists sought to resurrect reconstructive progressivism—a political and educational tradition that promoted broad active participation in the public sphere not only as discrete learning situations but as incubators of new knowledge.

What was the model for a reconstructive progressive educational philosophy? Hayden believed that the modes of study emerging from the student movements provided a new model of civic education. The student movements—from the civil rights movement to what Hayden defined as the “student peace corps movement”—shared a commitment to “action.” He saw in both a shared set of values that contained the seeds of a new civic and educational outlook, including the simplicity of volunteer living, the commitment to serve marginalized populations, and the participatory nature of the community development process.17 What thus united both movements was a belief that learning was a collective endeavor situated in community involvement and deliberation. Hayden emphasized that action was more than just a political commitment; it was an expression of a nascent educational worldview. Students understood action as a distinct form of civic education, one that took its cue from the broader political appeal of the 1960s. If the goal of the student movements in the 1960s was to realize a participatory democracy, what was needed was a participatory mode of civic education.

The differences between students’ visions of university leaders and those of student leaders did not fall neatly along a dividing line between reconstructive and technocratic progressivism. In drawing inspiration from the Peace Corps, Hayden and others embraced elements of technocratic progressivism in their pedagogical visions of action education. Community development efforts within the Peace Corps were linked to national projects, both for the United States and the host country. This link constrained the type of politics volunteers could engage in as part of community development. Just as significantly, community development in the Peace Corps was also intertwined with modernization theory—a prominent postwar academic theory that shaped ideas of service in the federal-academic partnership. Key modernization theorists argued that what they defined as undeveloped or traditional societies were economically stagnated because they lacked the West’s—in particular, America’s—technical knowledge and modern political system. This academic theory was central to the modern American university’s technocratic model of service, one that taught students that the problem of poverty was the lack of American technology and knowledge, not political and economic power.18

The theoretical framing in the Port Huron Statement thus simultaneously challenged and reinforced the university’s role in educating citizens for a democracy. The modes of action education that emerged from the student movements accommodated competing impulses that, depending on the context of their activism, shifted between critiquing the university and desiring to belong in the university. Moreover, the student appeal to action also shifted between providing service and engaging in acts of civil disobedience. Hayden’s analytical innovation—to relate the appeals of the civil rights struggle to the volunteer programs like the Peace Corps and thus to define the new left broadly—also made the demand for action education susceptible to more narrow interpretations within the university.19 On campus, then, the broader appeal of action education was pedagogically flexible, and this flexibility is key to understanding the ways action education was translated into the modern American university.

In the first four chapters, I examine the pedagogical flexibility of the students’ political critiques of the modern university at four different institutions: Howard University, Michigan State University, San Francisco State College and Harvard-Radcliffe. All the institutions established new volunteer centers that promoted iterations of service learning, a reflection of the emergence of disciplining democracy as a broad political development across the higher education system. In focusing on a diverse set of institutions, I also reveal the particular formulation of disciplining democracy as shaped by the particular culture of each institution and the character of students’ political demands.

The book begins with Howard University. How should a historically Black, elite institution like Howard University support the Black Freedom Struggle? This question took on profound significance at Howard during the classical phase of the civil rights era in the 1960s. Many key faculty members and university leaders took an active role in supporting student activists in the civil rights struggle. But student activists and Howard officials took different stances on the appropriate role of the university. The differences provoked wide-ranging debates on ideas of service and justice at Howard—debates that culminated in the Toward a Black University Conference and subsequent campus strike in 1968 and 1969. What emerged from both the conference and strike was an extensive set of action programs in the professional fields that, on paper, linked the institution to civil rights and the pursuit of justice. However, in examining how the university responded to a student-run initiative, this chapter makes clear that even at a historically Black college like Howard, the prevailing institutional ideologies of national service set limits on the ideas of social action. The institution’s links to—and dependency upon—federal funding meant that the types of university programs that received funds were those promoting national service. The limits were not just a reflection of the institution’s federal dependency. Howard University’s historical development and promotion as an elite Black institution also constrained programmatic efforts. The university was to cultivate elite Black leadership. Service learning programs better fit that mode than forms of activism that sought to transform this institutional culture.

Chapter 2 focuses on Michigan State University (MSU), with a particular emphasis on the ways that student activists challenged the prevailing institutional idea of service. Both MSU presidents in the 1960s and 1970s—John Hannah and Clifton Wharton—agreed with students that the university should be involved in the social world. They disagreed on the type of involvement—in particular, the type of service to the public. The campus civic movement at MSU led to the establishment of the Office of Service Learning. The creation of an institutional home for civic engagement demonstrated the university’s commitment to students’ demands for a more socially relevant education. However, the new home for service learning marginalized other efforts on campus, including programs that linked the university more closely to the civil rights struggle. It also had the effect of deflecting students’ efforts that challenged the university’s research ties to the Vietnam War. What emerged at MSU was a particular cultural logic associated with disciplining democracy. In establishing the Office of Service Learning, MSU leaders employed a rhetorical strategy that contrasted what they defined as the constructive activism of students associated with service learning programs with the destructive forms of activism associated with civil rights and the anti-war movement. Promoted across American higher education by the Nixon administration, the Office of Service Learning at MSU became the model for other universities when responding to campus activism.

Chapter 3 turns to another state university: San Francisco State College (SFSC). The campus movement at SFSC is best remembered for the Third World Strike in the 1960s. Led by a broad and diverse coalition of students, the Third World Strike helped establish the School of Ethnic Studies. The demand for ethnic studies included a demand for “action education.” The appeal to action education, however, was not shared by all activists. Some worried that university-sponsored programs would limit the political possibilities of student activism. Just as importantly, action was much more narrowly defined by academic leaders and faculty members in the new School of Ethnic Studies. In the extracurriculum, academic leaders established a volunteer bureau that promoted action in the form of community service, while faculty members in the School of Ethnic Studies developed a model more akin to fieldwork in which action became primarily a mode of inquiry. With the volunteer bureau in student affairs, the process of disciplining democracy at SFSC thus took on characteristics of both Howard University and MSU. SFSC also had an added component; it represented an expansive example of a more traditional form of disciplining—the use of both the administrative and police apparatus of the state to punish student efforts.

Chapter 4 examines action education at another elite university, although one that was historically White. What is the place of service in the elite curriculum at Radcliffe and Harvard? For many faculty and academic leaders at these institutions, service to community was an expression of elite leadership and a key mechanism to enhance student learning. Thus, when student activists demanded new modes of education linked to the civil rights struggle at home and international volunteerism abroad, academic leaders provided institutional support. Harvard and Radcliffe rose to national prominence in the 1960s for their unique action program—Education for Action (E4A)—which was embedded in the general education. The program linked traditional coursework to Peace Corps international service and Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). However, when students attempted to expand the definition of action beyond domestic and international service, academic leaders worried this would politicize the curriculum. In response, they moved E4A out of the regular curriculum into student affairs. What emerged was an activist clearinghouse disconnected from the central educational mission of the university. In contrast to other institutions, Harvard and Radcliffe’s mode of disciplining was strictly administrative. The autonomy of the university as a private institution enabled academic leaders to provide a campus home for students’ political efforts. But, in moving E4A to student affairs, they made clear that activism was separate from one’s intellectual pursuits.

Political Recycling

The next set of case studies transitions to the mid-1970s and 1980s. I examine how academic leaders recycled the logic of disciplining democracy and its programmatic component in the context of anti-apartheid activism on American college campuses. The political era from the mid-1970s to the 1980s was characterized by a set of higher education policy shifts associated with the rise of a market ethos within the university. With the economic downturn of the 1970s, federal policy makers in both the Ford and Carter administrations justified continued support for higher education by promoting the university’s distinct role in preparing young people with skills for professional success.20 This policy emphasis persisted even as direct federal support to higher education was cut in half by the Reagan administration. The funding cuts were justified by the 1980 Bayh-Dole Act, which enabled universities to profit from institutional research funded by the federal government.

The technocratic tendency within the university remained, but with a stronger focus on market investment and return. Indeed, the policy shift and market emphasis transformed every part of the institution. University leaders increasingly turned to corporations and foundations to make up for the budget gaps and identify areas of profit on new research developments. The Bayh-Dole Act shifted the research mission from a broad commitment to knowledge production in service to the nation to one that focused on the most profitable research proposals. The emphasis on financial return also transformed the purpose of education, with many academic leaders promoting the university’s role in preparing students for success in the marketplace.21 Although university leaders continued to utilize the rhetoric of citizenship, with the older emphasis on objectivity and disinterested judgement, they increasingly prioritized the development of marketable skills as the primary goal of education.

The American university’s focus on education as a financial investment was directly challenged by the campus anti-apartheid movement. Over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, the African National Congress and the American Committee on Africa helped develop a broad campus network in the United States that called on American policy makers to shift the country’s economic relationship with South Africa. A key tool of the anti-apartheid movement was institutional divestment from corporations operating in South Africa. When calling on the university to also divest, student activists in the 1980s raised larger questions about the university as a moral actor. Recycling activists’ claims from the 1960s, students argued that if the university’s role is to educate students as moral and ethical citizens in the marketplace, it should also act in a morally and ethically consistent way. How students and academic leaders sought to address the role of the university pivoted on different historical interpretations of the mass student movements of the 1960s and their institutional legacies, both of which informed what they believed the university could do.

Indeed, what emerged on campus in the late 1970s and 1980s was a politics of institutional memory. Student leaders in the anti-apartheid movement understood the call for divestment as carrying on the legacy of the mass student politics from the 1960s. They also turned to existing institutional programs that emerged in the aftermath of the 1960s. In linking the call for divestment to existing institutional programs, student leaders sought to resurrect their lost visions—connecting the programs of action to the university’s actions as an institution. In response to calls to divest, university leaders supported the Sullivan principles, which required companies working in South Africa to hire Black workers and pay a minimum wage. But, over the course of the 1970s and 1980s, university leaders increasingly acknowledged that the principles did little to challenge apartheid.22 They thus agreed with students that the university needed to do more. Echoing academic leaders from the 1960s, they focused on expanding volunteer and public service programs—forms of action that fit within institutional culture—while deflecting the demands to redefine the university’s role in American political life.

The resurgence of service learning programs in this era demonstrates the persistence of disciplining democracy, albeit in the ways the institutional logic was adapted to the political economy of the 1980s. Here, I examine Stanford University, Brown University, and Georgetown University. I focus on these institutions for three reasons. First, all three institutions had existing service learning programs, many of which were initially established in the late 1960s. Second, the academic leaders of these institutions played a key role in forming the Campus Compact, a top-down public service initiative that led to a proliferation of service learning programs now common across American higher education. Third, all three institutions emerged as “elite”—as defined by the newly established U.S. News college rankings in the early 1980s—due to their increased endowment from market investments. These institutional case studies provide different sets of analytical lenses on the political logic and reuse of disciplining democracy: the role of research in education at Stanford University, the application of ideas in the liberal arts tradition at Brown University, and the characteristics of moral commitment within the Jesuit tradition at Georgetown University. As such, these chapters are not an exhaustive history of the divestment movement. Rather, the primary focus is on the larger arguments that students and academic leaders made about the political role of students and the modern university itself.

Chapter 5 examines the anti-apartheid movement at Stanford University in conjunction with President Donald Kennedy’s promotion of public and community service. Kennedy’s efforts took two forms. The first was the more traditional model, one associated with volunteer and charity work. The other was an internship or research model. The latter reflected Kennedy’s efforts to update service learning for the professional development of students. Both models came under fire by student activists at Stanford for the ways they seemed to redirect anti-apartheid efforts that challenged the university’s investments in South Africa. Yet, many of the key student leaders at Stanford also drew upon the institutional programs to support their political efforts. Students saw their anti-apartheid activism—especially the research they conducted to provide an empirical basis for their critiques of university investments—as an expression of Stanford’s research mission. However, university administrators largely ignored the knowledge developed within anti-apartheid activism for findings that supported Stanford’s existing investments. Kennedy recycled disciplining democracy as an epistemological force by dismissing the experiential and research knowledge developed by student activists in the anti-apartheid movement.

Chapter 6 considers the modern philosophy of the liberal arts at Brown University. Howard Swearer, the university president, was a strong supporter of public service. In the 1980s, he turned to the ideas of the Peace Corps in the 1960s as a way to expand and update the liberal arts tradition at Brown. Student activists supported these efforts. In the context of anti-apartheid activism, students also demanded that Swearer and the university administration do more. In the same way Swearer turned to the Peace Corps in the 1960s as inspiration, he also turned to that time period to defend an orthodox conception of institutional neutrality. He believed that the university could not commit to divestment because doing so would run counter to its mission as a neutral institution for public debate. Drawing on this idea, Swearer believed that student activists failed to commit to civil responsibility. He thus maintained a commitment to institutional neutrality while also promoting action in the form of public service. The Brown University case study demonstrates the ways that university leaders in the 1980s recycled disciplining democracy as an ideological force that treated student efforts as counter to “good” citizenship on and off campus.

Chapter 7 examines the politics of religious morality at Georgetown University in the 1980s. A commitment to service was central to the mission of Georgetown. Since the 1960s, the university had established and supported a range of programs that enabled students to participate in community service. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, many student activists—a number of whom participated in these service programs—believed that Georgetown University failed in its commitment to Jesuit values because of its investments in companies that worked in South Africa. Albeit more slowly than students, university leaders agreed. In 1987, Georgetown University divested from its holdings in companies working in South Africa. But the political alignment obscured the ways that Georgetown leaders, including President Timothy S. Healy, utilized the logic of disciplining democracy to define what were appropriate actions of student activists within the Jesuit tradition of service. Indeed, Healy promoted the university’s commitment to service by creating a service program for Georgetown students to teach in South Africa while arresting those who participated in campus activism. The logic of Georgetown’s action rested upon a particular historical interpretation of the service programs on campus. Ignoring the ways they emerged from mass student politics, university leaders framed those programs as deeply rooted in the Jesuit tradition. In making this interpretive claim, they dismissed political activism as a component of Jesuit service and education. The Georgetown case study illuminates the ways that institutions that publicly promoted a strong value commitment were still shaped by the political logic of disciplining.

The series of institutional case studies from the 1960s to the 1980s reveals both the emergence and reuse of an institutional political logic that has mediated student politics throughout the modern era. The conclusion links the case studies by analyzing the federal and foundational higher education reports that reproduced and normalized disciplining democracy as the prevailing form of the university’s civic mission. I focus on the “Atlanta Service-Learning Conference Report” in 1969; the Nixon administration’s Report of the President’s Commission on Campus Unrest in 1970; and the series of Newman reports in the 1970s that culminated in the 1985 Campus Compact. In the conclusion, I also explore the emergence of a subset of scholarship that has begun to respond to the institutional logic underlying prevailing service learning and civic engagement programs that now dominant American higher education. This scholarship provides a helpful framework for considering the tensions within and legacy of service learning for American higher education and political life. But I hope that in reading this book, you see that the tensions within—and ultimately the political limitations of—contemporary civic engagement programs in American higher education are not something new. Rather, they are rooted in the logic of disciplining democracy. Excavating the political roots and recycling of this logic is one of the central goals of this book, but it is not my only one. I also hope that the lost visions of the university as a civic actor that emerged from student movements can inspire new thinking on the form and nature of the modern university in the United States.