Disciplining Democracy: How the Modern American University Transformed Student Activism

Disciplining Democracy reveals the political consequences for the triumph of "service learning" as the dominant pedagogical model of civic engagement in the modern American university. Volunteer-based civic engagement programs in higher education are popularly understood as curricular opportunities that enable young people to engage as citizens in campus and public life. But, as David S. Busch argues, these civic programs are also emblematic of a new political tradition in American higher education—a culture of "disciplining democracy"—that polices the boundaries of appropriate forms of citizenship both for the student and for the university itself.

Looking at seven different universities across two political eras, Busch unearths a common institutional trend: that student activists' demand for "action education" in the 1960s—a demand that many believed would reimagine the political role of the university—was reconstituted as university-sponsored volunteer programs by the 1980s. Disconnected from their political roots and visions, these programs became the source for the promotion of service learning as the primary model of the new civics in American higher education and an integral part of institutional strategies for responding to student activism. Embraced by universities big and small, private and public, the triumph of service learning as the new civics narrowed the political terrain of engaged citizenship and set limits on the modern American university's mission. In excavating the genealogy of the new civics and its institutional legacy, Disciplining Democracy offers a new way to understand the university as a political actor in American life.

© 2025 Cornell University Press (Ebook): 9781501780127

Release date

Ebook: 15 March 2025