The Civic University, the Engaged Scholar: Implications for Scholarly Work

Introduction

Bridger and Alter (2006) have argued that universities are facing unprecedented scrutiny and criticism. As they state, faculty are faulted “for conducting research that is disconnected from real world problems, and worrying more about personal advancement than service to community (p. 163).” Others have argued that the university has become part of the marketplace and that they differ from others in the market in name only (Bok, 2003). As Bridger and Alter continue, “criticisms are rooted in the perception that universities are out of touch and out of date, and that they are not addressing important societal issues (p. 163).” Castle (20014) argues we need to reclaim the civic university. But as he noted, to reclaim something means that it has changed in some fundamental way and we need to draw it back to what it once was. And while one might not disagree with Castle, there is a need to reclaim the civic university, and it must be viewed from an evolutionary perspective; the emerging university imagined will be very different than in the past, even if both visions of the university have a civic mission. And while the civic university of the past was in search of the “truth”, the one universal knowledge, the new civic university must recognize that there are multiple valid truths, more than one valid reality (Sinnott and Johnson, 1996). Dealing with multiple truths and realities, as Lauzon (1998) has noted, requires a more complex structure of consciousness. This is deserving of more discussion in order to establish the larger context for this chapter.

The historians Luckacs (2002) and Hobsbawm (1994) have argued that starting in the 1980s there began a fundamental transformation in the organization and structure of human societies with networks replacing the modern hierarchy. Many of these changes are captured by Castells (1996) in his book The Rise of the Network Society.Hawken (2007) writes that there is a proliferation of diverse networks today working on the behalf of others related to issues of social justice. As he further posits, networks consists of webs of relationship that link individual actions to “larger grids of knowledge and movement (p. 144)” and at the heart of these networks is not technology but relationships. Capra (1996) has suggested that sustainable human communities must take the form of networks. He further argues that networks, as a basic pattern of life, are nonlinear with multiple pathways for feedback making this form of organization both resilient but unpredictable. Harvey (1990) has argued that the human journey is characterized by the ongoing compression of time and space meaning that the rates of change we experience escalate. Networks are ideal forms of social organization as they can reconfigure themselves more quickly than hierarchical structures, and this means they are more resilient and better able to negotiate escalating rates of change. Networks are emerging as the dominant form of social organization replacing the modern hierarchy.