"To Serve a Larger Purpose"

"To Serve a Larger Purpose" calls for the reclamation of the original democratic purposes of civic engagement and examines the requisite transformation of higher education required to achieve it. The contributors to this timely and relevant volume effectively highlight the current practice of civic engagement and point to the institutional change needed to realize its democratic ideals.

Using multiple perspectives, "To Serve a Larger Purpose" explores the democratic processes and purposes that reorient civic engagement to what the editors call "democratic engagement." The norms of democratic engagement are determined by values such as inclusiveness, collaboration, participation, task sharing, and reciprocity in public problem solving and an equality of respect for the knowledge and experience that everyone contributes to education, knowledge generation, and community building. This book shrewdly rethinks the culture of higher education.

Praise for "To Serve a Larger Purpose"
"‘To Serve a Larger Purpose’ is an extremely timely, important work that synthesizes a long history of the civic engagement movement in particular while providing numerous well-developed examples of both failure and success across a range of initiatives and ideas. By consciously linking the movement for civic education and engagement (for democracy) to the need to transform our educational institutions, this work articulates what many of us who work in higher education know, but can rarely summon the knowledge or time to understand. One finishes this powerful book much better informed about the state of both the civic engagement movement and the very significant problems confronting universities." —John Wooding, Professor and Former Provost, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

"‘To Serve a Larger Purpose’ offers a series of cogent arguments for using building democracy as the central purpose of institutional civic engagement. The contributors draw on a rich literature, and the chapters are cohesive, building on and sometimes challenging each other’s points; they read as a continuing conversation. The reader is left with an overview of what it means for an institution to be civically engaged, the knowledge that has accrued in the field up to this point, and what working within a democratic framework means within a contemporary context." —Cathy Burack, Senior Fellow for Higher Education at the Center for Youth and Communities in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management, Brandeis University

Publication Information
To Serve a Larger Purpose: Engagement for Democracy and the Transformation of Higher Education
Temple University Press, May 2011
ISBN: 1-4399-0506-1           ORDER
326 pages