Universities and Education for Democratic Citizenship:
Global Developments
Ira Harkavy
University of Pennsylvania
Paper presented to session on Education for Democratic Citizenship:
Responsibilities and impact of Colleges and Universities
Annual Meeting of American Political Science Association
3 September 2005
It is not possible to run a course aright when the goal itself
is not rightly placed.
Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620)
The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in
various ways; the point is to change it.
Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (1845-1846)
In conception, at least, democracy approaches most nearly the
ideal of all social organization; that in which the individual and
the society are organic to each other.
John Dewey, The Ethics of Democracy (1888)
Democracy has been given a mission to the world, and it is
of no uncertain character. I wish to show that the
university is the prophet of this democracy, as well as its
priest and its philosopher; that in other words, the
university is the Messiah of the democracy, its to-be-