kettering_colloquium

“Democracy and Higher Education: The Future of Engagement”

Invitational Colloquium

February 26-27, 2008

Kettering Foundation

Dayton, Ohio

At a time when there is a sense of drift and fragmentation in the movement for deeper community engagement as an institutional priority for American colleges and universities, the New England Resource Center for Higher Education (NERCHE) and the Kettering Foundation collaborated in late February to host an Invitational Colloquium of 33 academic and community leaders focused on the theme of Democracy and Higher Education: The Future of Engagement. The Colloquium took place at the Kettering Foundation in Dayton, Ohio.

The primary purpose of the Colloquium was to provide a forum in which a group of leaders in civic engagement and higher education could identify problems and issues associated with reforming higher education for community engagement and democratic citizenship and provide intellectual leadership for the next generation of engaged scholars in American higher education.

The dialogue was catalyzed in part through the discussion of recent research, including the 2007 book by Lee Benson, Ira Harkavy, and John Puckett, Dewey’s Dream: Universities and Democracies in an Age of Education Reform as well as forthcoming publications by the Kettering Foundation, including Agent of Democracy: Higher Education and the HEX Journey and Deliberation and the Work of Higher Education.

One outcome of the meeting will be a volume of essays solicited from participants at the Colloquium and edited by John Saltmarsh, Director of NERCHE, and Matthew Hartley, Assistant Professor of Education at the University of Pennsylvania, that will offer insights into the ways in which higher education can advance democracy in the 21st century.