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