Introducing the Democracy and Citizenship Blog

The Democracy and Citizenship Initiative is a continuing effort to foster active consideration by members of the Washington University (WU) community about the role of the university in a democratic society. We attempt to accomplish this in several ways: speaker series, conferences, small-group discussions. But because we are a university, and because it is a democratic society we are talking about, such conversation is ultimately meaningful only when it spreads from individuals, special events, and small groups into exchanges across a wider range of university citizens. This blog is intended as a venue for that broader conversation.

The blog can be read by anyone with web access. It is moderated; we welcome pertinent comments from outside the university. Our policy is to screen all posts for inappropriate or offensive content, but we fully expect to include a wide range of opinion, some of which might not reflect the policies or positions of Washington University, its College of Arts and Sciences, its program in American Culture Studies, or the management of this blog.

Why we should care; what we need to do
The university receives both financial and moral support from society. Society expects and deserves something in return, lest it withdraw that support. To put it another way: when social support is threatened from some quarters, we need to be able to explain cogently why we are deserving of its continuation. This would be true of any institution in any society, but it is especially acute for the university in a democratic society. A democratic society has special needs: to maintain self-government, to ascertain the objective requirements of good public policy, and to ascertain the needs and interests of all citizens.

The university’s role in a democratic society, we think, involves providing for these needs in ways to which the university is specially suited. We educate citizens and provide expertise, of course. More deeply we “create knowledge,” we influence opinion, we sometimes advocate policies and provoke controversy. Also, at least as long as we hold society’s respect, we can validate or certify knowledge, expertise, and opinions. We teach not just facts and theories but also values. Our ability to do any of this rests on maintaining excellence and making good arguments, and on maintaining the proper perspective on what society expects from us and what we are competent to provide.

Much of what we do, especially outside the narrow confines of our disciplinary work (and arguably there too), we do by routine, sometimes using unexamined assumptions. The point of the Democracy and Citizenship Initiative is to get us to articulate and discuss our assumptions about what we do, why we do it, and what we don’t and should or do but shouldn’t. It is to develop our thinking about principles of what we do, and about the health of the democratic society in which we operate. We in the university should have well formed opinions about how we contribute to democratic society in the United States, and to democratic societies in general.