Where do we go from here? Next steps for higher education. Higher Education’s Democratic Imperative Nancy L. Thomas, Matthew Hartley Last summer, the Democracy Imperative and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, two national networks linking academics and deliberative democracy practitioners, hosted a national conference, No Better Time: Promising Opportunities in Deliberative Democracy for Educators and Prac- titioners (No Better Time, 2010). Over 250 civic leaders, community orga- nizers, faculty, academic leaders, foundation representatives, and students met at the University of New Hampshire (Durham, New Hampshire) to dis- cuss higher education’s role in strengthening democracy in the twenty-first century. The conference was designed to encourage an exchange of ideas among an almost even mix of academics and practitioners who co-created the agenda. Participants proposed and organized “learning exchanges,” two-and-a-half- hour sessions for democratic dialogue and action planning. The process pro- duced fifty learning exchanges on critical public issues (e.g., the economy, poverty); promising practices for effective deliberation (e.g., which delibera- tive approaches might be used in various settings, approaches to values inquiry); curriculum and program development; challenges and opportuni- ties in the field and on campus (e.g., the risk-averse culture of the academy, the emergence of e-democracy, integrating advocacy and deliberation, and the difficulty in finding language that adequately describes this work). After the conference, session leaders reflected on their experiences by completing worksheets and answering a survey. Drawing from these sources, the con- ference organizers identified priorities for the field and for higher education. Simply stated, higher education has a unique opportunity to establish and assert itself in the movement to strengthen twenty-first century democracy. Collectively, the authors in this book make compelling cases for specific actions, such as addressing the values tensions inherent in advocating for 99 12 NEW DIRECTIONS FOR HIGHER EDUCATION, no. 152, Winter 2010 © Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/he.418