(Page 3 of 34) - Universities and Education for Democratic Citizenship: Global Developments authored by Harkavy, Ira.

general proposition, and apply it to institutions of higher learning, poses two basic problems:

What is the Good Society and what is the primary agency which can bring it into existence?

To help solve those problems, I follow leads provided by John Dewey and the first president

of the University of Chicago, William Rainey Harper.

In 1888, directly challenging the antidemocratic political philosophy expounded in

“Sir Henry Maine’s remarkable book on Popular Government,” Dewey claimed that:

In conception, at least, democracy approaches most nearly the ideal of all
social organization, that in which the individual and society are organic to each
other. For this reason democracy, so far as it is really democracy, is the most
stable, not the most insecure of governments. In every other form of government there
are individuals who are not organs of the common will, who are outside of the

political

society in which they live, and are in effect, aliens to that which should betheir

own

commonwealth. Not participating in the formation or expression of the common will,
they do not embody it in themselves. Having no share in society, society has none in
them.

A decade after Dewey identified participatory democracy as the Good Society,

William Rainey Harper passionately identified the new urban university as the strategic

agency to bring it about.

The university, I contend, is this prophet of democracy - - the agency
established by heaven itself to proclaim the principles of democracy
[emphasis added]. It is in the university that the best opportunity is
afforded to investigate the movements of the past and to present the
facts and principles involved before the public. It is the university that,
as the center of thought, is to maintain for democracy the unity so
essential for its success. The university is the prophetic school out
of which come the teachers who are to lead democracy in the true path
[emphasis added]. It is the university that must guide democracy into
the new fields of arts and literature and science. It is the university
that fights the battles of democracy, its war-cry being: “Come, let us
reason together.” It is the university that, in these latter days, goes forth
with buoyant spirit to comfort and give help to those who are downcast,

taking up its dwelling in the very midst of squalor and distress
[emphasis added]. It is the university that, with impartial judgment,
condemns in democracy the spirit of corruption, which now and again lifts
up its head, and brings scandal upon democracy’s fair name . . . .
The university, I maintain, is the prophetic interpreter of democracy;
the prophet of her past, in all its vicissitudes; the prophet of her present,