JAMES DUBINSKY 12. WHEN THE GLOBAL IS LOCAL Building a Local, Global Community through Partnership and Pedagogy INTRODUCTION In one of his last essays, Ernest Boyer (1996), one of most prominent U.S. scholars of higher education and public policy, outlined a “growing feeling … that higher education is … part of the problem rather than the solution. … [that] it’s become a private benefit, not a public good” (p. 11). To counter that perception and focus on what he called higher education’s “historic commitment” to the “larger purposes of American society,” he outlined a need for those in higher education to revive “the scholarship of engagement” (p. 11). For him such scholarship meant “connecting the rich resources of the university to our most pressing social, civic, and ethical problems, to our children, to our schools … and to our cities” (p. 21). Boyer’s idea is not new; educators have been arguing for such civic goals for millennia. In ancient China, Emperor Wu Wang established schools to train students to become administrators and officers (Wallenfelt, 1986). In Athens and Rome, the general belief was that “knowledge, laws, and institutions should serve the interests of the people” (Wallenfelt, 1986, p. 72). In the United States, many scholars and educators have argued for advancing the idea of a deliberative democracy and for inculcating an ideal of civic engagement (Barber, 1984; Battistoni, 1996; Hauser, 1999; Putnam, 2000). Those arguments have resulted in 542 university and college presidents signing the Presidents’ Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education (Erlich et al., 2000), which outlines the fundamental task of renewing higher education’s responsibility to function as an agent of democracy. These senior officials and others in positions of power in higher education, including Carol Schneider (2003), a recent president of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, believe that civic engagement is “an organizing principle in today’s discussions of higher-learning.” They challenge those involved in higher education “to re-examine its public purposes and commitments to the democratic ideal. … to become engaged, through actions and teaching, with its communities” (Ehrlich et al., 2000, p. 3). At my institution—Virginia Tech, a land-grant, comprehensive, research- oriented university—the focus on civic engagement has become explicit in the past six years, appearing in foundational documents such as strategic plans. For example, in his letter to the university community regarding Virginia Tech’s Strategic Plan (2001), President Charles Steger argues “Our obligation is to educate the whole student, to instill a set of ethics and values that establishes a context for the application of discipline-based and professional knowledge for productive citizens of our democratic society.” President Steger’s assertion and the D. Starke-Meyerring and M. Wilson (eds.), Designing Globally Networked Learning Environments, 170–184. © 2008 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved.