Public Engagement

This is a guest blog by Harry Boyte, Senior Fellow at the Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs, Co-Director of its Center for Democracy and Citizenship, and a long-time leading figure in the public engagement movement.

I write here to suggest the need for lively debate about the intellectual and philosophical meanings of “public engagement” and to offer a framework informed by earlier experiences to help stimulate discussion and debate. The following begins with a short history of the linkage of intellectual work and engagement at the UMN. It enumerates a few lessons and integrates them with a chart.

A distinguishing mark of the University’s efforts in the civic engagement field nationally and internationally has been the ways in which we have taken “public engagement” to be a substantial, open, and evolving intellectual question. Susan Ostrander, a sociologist at Tufts who examined five major institutions that have undertaken public engagement efforts, noted this pattern as the UMN’s most important contribution several years ago, in comparing the University’s experiences with those of several other research institutions (UPenn, Brown, Tufts and others) that have taken up the theme of public engagement. In today’s environment, this intellectual process is rare. Dominant definitions of citizenship (e.g. voluntarism, service, outreach) often have a sentimental and hortatory flavor, stemming from versions of communitarian theory.

The intellectual dimensions of public engagement at the UMN have been enriched by scholars and public intellectuals from elsewhere (David Mathews, Julie Ellison, Tom Ehrlich, and others) as well as by conversations of UMN scholars such as Gail Dubrow, Tom Sullivan, Bill Doherty and others last fall in the forum on public engagement and strategic positioning. Intellectual efforts have also included writings about public scholarship, various forums, conferences, publications, a regular monthly intellectual newsletter, and other activities.

A part of the intellectual process has involved examination of the theoretical and practical lessons of engagement work. This is in keeping with the rich pragmatic philosophical traditions that have nourished the UMN history – the leading pragmatic philosopher, John Dewey, after all was once on the UMN faculty. Faculty members such as Jim Farr, Ed Fogelman, and former UMN professor Terry Ball are leading scholars of pragmatism.

As the Center for Democracy and Citizenship and our partners have begun planning for a sustained organizing process on civic engagement in the state (Minnesota Works Together), we have revisited such lessons from earlier experiences that connected the university with the larger society on civic questions. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the CDC worked with the Minnesota Extension Service on a “citizen politics” initiative across the state to strengthen MES’s capacities for civic engagement. It involved what we called an organizing approach. Organizing is different than informational, programmatic, or service delivery approaches. Organizing means sustained effort to build capacities for powerful, collective citizen action, especially at the local level. In the case of MES, it included training of extension agents and community residents in “everyday politics,” skills of relationship building, dealing with people of different views and interests, learning to understand local political cultures and the like. MES created a state-wide leadership team as well local leadership teams; changed supervisory patterns, and sought to change the culture of the extension service to become more responsive to local communities and more aware of citizen capacities and talents for problem solving and co-production of public outcomes.

Another effort called the New Citizenship built in part on this experience. From 1993-1995, the CDC coordinated a nonpartisan confederation of universities, foundations, and civic groups called the New Citizenship, that worked with the White House Domestic Policy Council in the first two years of the Clinton presidency. Our tag line in the New Citizenship was “to reinvent government requires reinventing citizenship.” The initiative had support from UMN President Nils Hasselmo and a good deal of involvement by UMN faculty and staff. On the basis of this work and the extension work, the Kellogg Foundation asked the CDC to assess the potential for “renewing the land grant mission” at the UMN in 1997. The planning year helped lead to the Provost’s Task Force on Civic Engagement and the subsequent Council on Public Engagement. Pat Borich, director of MES, was an extremely effective leader and visionary in this process. I remember his riveting descriptions, and the effects that they had on cabinet officers and White House senior staff, in a day-long meeting in the White House’s Roosevelt Room in 1994. The White House Domestic Policy Council sought a congressional appropriation (without ultimate success) for a national citizenship initiative through USDA and the extension service, building directly on the Minnesota experiences.

The centerpiece of the New Citizenship was the idea of the impact of government policies and practices on the civic life of communities: federal policies and practices can be assessed by their successes or failures in building civic capacities and productive citizen-government partnerships. Examining policies and practices through this prism sheds new light on fields of the environment, health, housing and urban development, K-12 schools, higher education, and government organization itself. The New Citizenship conducted hundreds of interviews in federal agencies, produced many working papers, and created the basis for a day long Camp David seminar on the future of citizenship with Clinton and administration leaders before the 1995 State of the Union (see the Civic Practices Network site, my Camp David log, and Benjamin Barber’s account of this experience, The Truth of Power).

From these experiences and others we learned several theoretical and practical lessons about civic engagement. All these lessons have applications to the University of Minnesota, as well as to government.

• Government is best conceived not as “the solution” or “the problem” but rather as a resource of the people in addressing our common problems and building a healthy, thriving society.
• Politicians can play useful roles in improving civic life. Indeed, the concept of “civic impact” illuminates a third column of “politics,” beyond the now dominant liberal (technocratic) and communitarian (morality focused) strands of politics that shape current debates. The civic impact of public policies needs to be considered from many directions including higher education. Other institutions can also be evaluated – and potentially held accountable -- for their civic impacts.
• “Civic life” is a concept with broad appeal to many different groups, a more communal concept than “citizen” by itself, more rooted and contextual than “public life,” and at the same time more public than “community” alone. Civic life suggests community with roots, public dimensions, and citizens doing the deliberation and public work needed to sustain it. Civic life integrates issue areas that are otherwise fragmented.
• Deliberative and public work practices function best when they are deeply contextual, cognizant of the unique identities, networks, histories, and features of particular places and communities – the opposite of the standardized “one size fits all” technocratic approaches that predominate when citizens are seen as clients and customers. These practices point to the need for reconfiguration of professional work as civic professional work, integrated into local civic cultures.

It is possible – and useful – to summarize these lessons and themes in a chart, of the sort social scientists often employ, contrasting archetypal “models” or underlying paradigms. Such a chart, of course, needs the cautionary note that such models are always open ended, with porous boundaries, enormous complexities, and many hybrids.

As the chart suggests, “public engagement” can mean very different things to different people, departments, and units, as well as to the institution as a whole. If we take seriously the University of Minnesota’s aspirations for world-class intellectual leadership, sustained attention to different models and the practices that flow from them is a central priority. The UMN has played a prominent role in the public engagement field because we have taken ideas and their implications seriously. We need many ways to examine rigorously every aspect of our work in terms of such underlying models.