CHAPTER 3: Higher Education and Civic Engagement in the United States: Budgetary, Disciplinary, and Spatial Borders

Higher education generally has assumed a role in what is termed “citizenship” education in both historical and contemporary eras. By citizenship, many meanings are evoked, from active leadership and service ethics to productive, law-abiding, tax-payers. This chapter focuses on the new mobilization of citizenship education, known under the broad rubric of civic engagement programming. Such programming is present in a quarter of U.S. higher education’s 4,000 institutions, including 2-year community colleges, undergraduate and graduate comprehensive research universities.

This chapter draws insights from organizational theory on higher education, utilizing ethnographic data and vantage points both from national networking “encounters” among civic engagement faculty and staff leaders and from the deep, thick knowledge that comes from participant observation in civic engagement leadership at a medium-sized, public comprehensive, doctoral granting university on the U.S.-Mexico border. Engagement programs facilitate many border “crossings,” but the focus herein is on budgetary, disciplinary, and spatial borders.