Higher Education and the Commonwealth Harry C, Boyte, Institute for Public Life and Work Keynote Address Civic Learning Symposium Ball State University, Muncie, IN, September 28, 2024 Good afternoon. It’s an honor and a pleasure to do this address to the Civic Learning Symposium. I want to thank David Roof and others involved. I first wondered if it was by accident that David Roof asked two old veterans of the movement to give keynote addresses. But I realized this wasn’t a coincidence. Dr. Freeman Hbrabowski last night and I both draw the civil rights movement’s leadership in awakening America to its democratic promise. The movement was infused with education for a dynamic, bold, inclusive citizenship and a vision of democracy as a commonwealth. My theme this afternoon is how can we remember and spread that spirit. The culture of individual achievement which Freeman Hrabowski fostered so well at the University of Maryland Baltimore County also has a civic dimension, what I call a commonwealth consciousness. Today I recall the idea of commonwealth from America’s higher education and democratic history as a profound resource for our addressing our challenges. Let me read from Langston Hughes’ poem, Let America Be America Again. O, let America be America again— The land that never has been yet— And yet must be—the land where every man is free. Hughes challenged all of us to be citizens of a nation that does not yet exist but must exist. As Freedom and I discussed at the end of his talk, UMBC not only has graduated more STEM black Ph.Ds than any other college in the nation. The university and its Center for Democracy and Civic Life, the Student Government and others have been national leaders in student empowerment for public purposes. They have been exemplary models for civic as well as individual achievement. They aim at a land where everyone is free. Freeman gave a moving account of his experiences as a young black boy in Birmingham in 1963 who decided to join the Children’s Crusade marches in Birmingham. In those days, Martin Luther King was writing his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” in jail. Let me read an excerpt: I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by our founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Today, I tell about encountering this democratic awakening of the movement. Some of you may have heard of Bayard Rustin especially after the Netflix movie on Rustin [ask for show hands]. Rustin was a tireless nonviolent educator and Martin Luther King’s mentor. He was organizer of the 1963 March on Washington. He was also gay and kept out of sight. The film seeks to make his contributions visible with the movie. In the trailer, former president Barack Obama says the film “is not only about Rustin. It’s about the thousands of ordinary folks from all walks who showed the world what America looks like at our best.” The film highlights a little-noted aspect of the March: it made the citizenship of the movement visible. Not legalistic citizenship but aspirational citizenship, dynamic, open, inclusive. The marchers were dignified, disciplined, and nonviolent, interracial role models who inspired the nation. I was at the March. My father, who had directed the Atlanta Red Cross, had become active active in desegregation of schools. He joined the staff of Martin Luther King’s organization and told me I should come to the March, when I was hitchhiking around the country. His hotel room was next to Dr. King’s. I heard King practicing, with his booming voice. I Have a Dream! The speech was inspiring, and I was equally impressed by the marchers – students, truck drivers, sharecroppers, maids, preachers, teachers and many others. The Program Notes conveyed the message that they wanted to send to the nation: “The Washington March is a living petition of the scores of thousands of citizens of both races. It will be orderly but not subservient… proud, but not arrogant…nonviolent but not timid.” The marchers showed the difference between mobs and publics. Publics, explains the philosopher Margaret Canovan, show political sobriety: “an exceptional degree of political realism and common sense, together with a remarkable capacity to exercise self-restraint and put shared long-term interests above private interests and short-term impulses.” The marchers made up a public. As the notes put it: “In a neighborhood dispute there may be stunts, rough words and even hot insults; but when a whole people speaks to its government, the dialogue and the action must be on a level reflecting the worth of that people and the responsibility of that government.” Such citizen sobriety was years in the making. It grew in part from a little-known source, in addition to black churches and other settings. These were thousands of “Rosenwald” schools and libraries built by black communities during the era of Jim Crow, closely tied to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). Harry Boyte, “The Philosophy of Black Education and the Promise of Democratic Organizing,” Freedom Schools Vol 1, 2024. Freeman told me many members of his family had gone to Rosenwald schools. Rosenwald schools were catalyzed by a fund at Tuskegee College in Alabama established by Booker T. Washington and the head of the of retail marketing giant Sears Roebuck, Julius Rosenwald. The Fund provided one third the cost of building the schools and libraries. In the early decades of the 20th century. Black communities built more than 5,000 Rosenwald schools and thousands of libraries. The schools and libraries became community commons, centers of community life, power, pride, and civic leadership development. Freeman’s family and also John Lewis, Coretta Scott King, Maya Angelou, Medgar Evans and thousands of local leaders were schooled by the Rosenwald movement. A network of Black teachers called “Jeanes teachers,” educated at HBCUs, organized communities to get the seed money from the Rosenwald Fund and helped to sustain them. As I have studied this history I found the Jeanes Teachers developed a set of democratic and nonviolent political practices like those codified in Martin Luther King’s famous “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” Jeanes teachers were citizen professionals who worked within institutions and community life – not as outside critics or protesters. They developed young people’s leadership, agency, and skills to negotiate the tumultuous conflicts of white supremacy with the goal of ending segregation, building thriving communities, and creating a more inclusive democracy. This history has everything to do with the the Civic Learning Symposium? Today I call for the higher education engagement movement to take leadership in revitalizing and promoting the commonwealth. Commonwealth means government of the people, by the people, for the people, and much more. It is a civic way of thinking and acting on the whole system of colleges – buildings, facilities, fields, museums and also students, teachers, staff, and community partners. It is also about the larger public world in which colleges and universities are embedded and for which we need to learn to be stewards. Question: What is a common public resource in which you take pride and pleasure, in your community? Tell your neighbor about it. Brief discussion. We face dramatic erosion of our public commons outside of the commons of colleges and universities. It is crucial that we lift our sites to the public commons, not only our private pursuits in colleges and in the world. My argument today is that as we do the work of building the commons, we also become a commonwealth of citizens, public-spirited architects and agents of the public. Ball State’s mission points toward this work: We engage students in educational, research, and creative endeavors that empower our graduates to have fulfilling careers and meaningful lives enriched by lifelong learning and service, while we enhance the economic, environmental, and social vitality of our community, our state, and our world. BSU’s annual Civic Learning Symposium with its partners and sponsors has become a major forum for addressing the question, what does it mean to teach and learn citizenship and rebuild our commons in this polarized, privatized world? Finally Indiana itself has a rich commonwealth history that needs remembering. See Mrs. Edward Frankling (Emma) Smith, “The Commonwealth of Indiana: Its History, Literature, Progress, Administration, and Products,” An Address before the Federation of Clubs, Indianapolis, IN 1928. Today I will describe the threats we face and recall meanings of commonwealth in American history and higher education. Then I will recount innovations in the theory and practice of the commons associated with the field of Civic Studies. I conclude with examples of commonwealth in higher education which build the commons and help to create a commonwealth of citizens. Destruction of the commons and eclipse of the citizen Today, despite all the creative work in service-oriented student learning, community engagement, and public scholarship, public support for colleges and universities is eroding dramatically. Many reasons are advanced for this loss of support but I want to suggest an unconventional explanation: public support has declined because a good deal of higher education has lost its public purpose. The Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel, in his book, The Tyranny of Merit, elaborates. Elite schools like the Ivys have many outstanding contributions to make in terms of teaching and scholarship, but meritocracy, according to Sandel, has turned education into a vast sorting machine which separates out “winners” from “losers,” “smart” from “stupid,” successful from those left behind, correlating strongly with partisan politics. As he describes about the election in 2016: “The Democratic Party once stood for farmers and working people against the privileged. Now, in a meritocratic age, its defeated standard bearer boasted that the prosperous, enlightened parts of the country voted for her.” There are far-ranging consequences. “Insisting that a college degree is the primary route to a respectable job and a decent life creates a credentialist prejudice that undermines the dignity of work and demeans whose who have not been to college.” Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? (London: Allen Lane, 2020), p. 27, p. 73 The recent polling by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation shows what results: “Confidence has dropped among all key subgroups in the U.S. population over the past two decades, but more so among Republicans. Confidence in higher education among Republicans today is nearly a mirror image of what it was nine years ago. In 2015, 56% of Republicans had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence, and 11% had little or none. Now, 20% are confident and 50% have little or no confidence. Jeffrey Jones, “US Confidence in Higher Education Now Closely Divided,” July 8, 2024 https://news.gallup.com/poll/646880/confidence-higher-education-closely-divided.aspx Collapse of support for the commons extends far beyond higher education, because a market dynamic is at work across all of society, privatizing and commodifying public things. Focus on delivery of goods and services to a citizenry of customers has become the dominant paradigm of democracy itself. This demeans the citizen and shrinks the meaning of democracy. A former city manager, Frank Benest described what he saw as the consequences. He says government is now like a “vending machine” in which citizens put their votes and taxes and ask what they can get. As Benest puts it, the vending-machine model undermines people's confidence in and their allegiance to government. If customers don’t like what comes out they kick the machine. The vending machine seeks to meet needs and demands, not asking what people they can contribute. It rests on a diminished view of citizens. As Benest puts it, “By providing services, government tries to fix people. When teenagers run away from home, for example, government tries to fix them or their parents by providing shelter or family counseling. If a neighborhood complains of graffiti or gangs, local government responds to this deficit with more police. Frank Benest, “Serving Customers or Engaging Citizens: What Is the Future of Local Government?” https://www.citizenshandbook.org/benest.html The disappearance of the theme of citizenship is illustrated in this year’s election. In the 2000 election George Walker Bush campaigned on a call for civic values. In his convention speech, George Bush argued that “who we are is more important than what we have.” Convention speech, quoted in “Bush Outlines His Goals.” After the election, Bush said in his Inaugural Address, “I ask you to be citizens, not spectators, to serve your nation, beginning with your neighborhood.” Bush quoted in Michael Schudson, “How People Learn to be Civic,” in E.J. Dionne, Jr., Kayla Meltzer Drogosz, and Robert E. Litan, eds., United We Serve: National Service and the Future of Citizenship (Washington, DC: The Brookings Institution, 2003), 270. Barack Obama also ran his 2008 campaign on a message of citizenship. Announcing his campaign in Springfield, Ill., on Feb. 10, 2007, he said, “This campaign has to be about reclaiming the meaning of citizenship, restoring our sense of common purpose.”   Throughout the campaign he said the nation’s problems require broad civic action. “The fact is, the challenges we face today…are simply too big for government to solve alone…We need all-hands-on-deck,” he said, in July 2008. Quoted from Dennis Ross and Harry Boyte, “America Needs a Revival of Citizenship,” The Tennessean October 9, 2020. This is an honest statement. The problems of the country, at any level, are far too numerous for government to fix. This at the Democratic National Convention last summer, speakers switched the 2008 campaign slogan from “yes we can” to “yes she can.” Obama himself said democracy has to prove it can deliver the goods. The marketization of democracy and our public life means growing detachment of the people from any sense that or higher education or government or even local institutions are “us.” The Pew Center found public trust in the federal government near an all-time low. Today, 35% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents say they trust the federal government just about always or most of the time, compared with 11% of Republicans and Republican leaners. Pew Center, “Public Trust in Government 1958-2024,” June 24, 2024. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/2 4/public-trust-in-government-1958-2024/ Gallup polling has also found that public confidence is dropping toward local schools, religious congregations, newspapers and television news, and others. A majority expresses confidence only in the military and small businesses. Jeffrey M. Jones, “Conference in US Institutions Down, Average a New Low,” Gallup, July 5, 2022. We urgently need to revitalize the commonwealth. Commonwealth traditions Question: how vivid is the concept of commonwealth to you before today? Is it something you’ve thought about or a new idea? Commonwealth had several meanings in America. Harry Boyte, Commonwealth: A Return to Citizen Politics (New York, New York: Free Press, 1989); and Everyday Politics: Reconnecting Citizens and Public Life (Philadelphia: PennPress, 2004).. One was government of the people, by the people, and for the people. This descended from the English Civil War of the 17th century when Parliamentary forces overthrew the king in 1649 and established a Commonwealth. John Adams argued that every state should be called commonwealth." Adams, John, and Charles Francis Adams. The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States (1850 - 56: Charles C. Little and James Brown, vol. 5), p. 454. Four states (Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky) took his advice and officially became commonwealths. Commonwealth also had other meanings. For instance, the idea that property has a public and social dimension was widespread, drawing from Catholic social thought and native Americans view of the world. It shaped a legal theory called commonwealth law. Commonwealth is like the term common good, but more concrete and locally rooted. It is the civic infrastructure we depend on. For many immigrants America represented a chance to recreate commons that had been destroyed or privatized by elites in European societies. The labors of settlers who cleared lands, built villages, schools, libraries, meeting halls, roads, and local government itself, generated what the historian Robert Wiebe has called a portable democracy. Citizen labors that produced commons created the “we the people” language of the Preamble to the Constitution. As the historians Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin observed, “For the farmers and seamen, for the fishermen, artisans and new merchants, commonwealth repeated the lessons they knew from the organization of churches and towns . . . the value of common action.” Oscar ad Mary Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, 1774-1861 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 30. As the country grew it became a theater for self-organizing civic efforts. David Mathews described such work in the creation of public schools. “Nineteenth-century self-rule . . . was a sweaty, hands-on, problem-solving politics,” Mathews writes. ““The democracy of self-rule was rooted in collective decision making and acting—especially acting. Settlers on the frontier had to be producers, not just consumers. They had to join forces to build forts, roads, and libraries. They formed associations to combat alcoholism and care for the poor as well as to elect representatives. They also established the first public schools. Their efforts were examples of ‘public work,’ meaning work done by not just for the public.” David Mathews, Reclaiming Public Education by Reclaiming Our Democracy (Dayton: Kettering Foundation Press, 2006), p. vii. In Minnesota where I live, the commonwealth built through citizen labors and commonwealth-minded citizens continued as a public idea through the mid-20th century. It was a concept that crossed economic divisions of rich and poor. “The Cooperative Commonwealth Program” of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1934 helped elect candidates for governor, the state legislature, Congress and many local offices. https://www.mnopedia.org/minnesota-farmer-labor-party-1924-1944 It represented a landmark in civic economic vision and program, growing out of populist farmer, labor and cooperative movements that differed from state socialism and unbridled capitalism alike by a focus on building up small business, cooperatives, and family farms. Eric Foner, “Why Is There No Socialism in America?” History Workshop, 17 (Spring, 1984), p. 63 Commonwealth was also a term used by many civic and business leaders. Minnesota’s early European-American settlers came from New England Yankee backgrounds, and ideas such as civic stewardship of a commonwealth were central to what they understood leadership to mean. “Second Generation Devoted to Pursuits of Culture,” wrote Bertha Heilbom of the Minnesota Historical Society in the seventy-fifth issue of the St. Paul Pioneer Press commemorating statehood. “Those who grew up in Minnesota during the period immediately after the Civil War saw Minnesota emerge from a frontier state and grow into a modern commonwealth.” Leading citizens helped to build libraries and schools, colleges and universities, orchestras, art galleries, and theaters that complemented the growth of business and industry. Until the 1960s, the norm among businesses was to give back 5% of their profit for civic improvement projects. Embodying these traditions and meanings, Lotus Coffman, the University of Minnesota’s President from 1920 to 1938, entitled his inaugural address, “The University and the Commonwealth.” A commonwealth of colleges Coffman was a leader in a higher education movement that saw citizenship grounded in the life of communities and focused on developing the capacities of individuals and communities for collective action. The tradition rested on deep respect for the buried talents of everyday people. Alfred Arnold, an extension leader at the University of North Dakota, founded “the Little Country Theater Movement” which seeded theaters in hundreds of small towns through the Midwest. He put the rationale this way: There are literally millions of people in country communities today whose abilities along various lines have been hidden, simply because they have never had an opportunity to give expression to their talents. In many respects this lack of self-expression has been due to the narrow minded attitude of society toward those who till the soil, and the absence of those forces which seek to arouse the creative instincts and stimulate that imagination and initiative in country people which mean leadership. Scott Peters, a historian of this tradition, found that regional public universities like Ball State, land grant colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and locally rooted colleges affiliated with religious denominations all fostered an institutional identity as democracy schools. As R. A. Hodges and S. Dubb described the expert service tradition in The Road Less Travelled, “cooperative extension has been a program that supports a system of information transmission from state land-grant colleges and universities to the populace.” Hodges and Dubb and Berry quoted from Scott J Peters,” Recovering a Forgotten Lineage of Democratic Engagement,” Scott Peters, in Timothy Eatman et. al, Eds., Oxford Handbook on Service Learning (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 72, 74. In this vein, Liberty Hyde Bailey, dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, argued that every aspect of higher education must be infused with the commonwealth spirit. Bailey was one of the world’s leading horticulturalists and developed many scientific specialties at Cornell. But he believed these would erode the vitality of rural life unless they were understood in a larger context, as part of “a great public work” grounded in respect for the farmers and undertaken ways that increased rural communities’ collective agency. “The farmer,” argued Bailey in 1904, “is a citizen, a member of the commonwealth.” Bailey saw the most important focus of university extension work—a field he helped to pioneer—as increasing citizen capacities for self-directed action. Civic Studies In academia, new resources for building the commonwealth and educating a commonwealth of citizen-builders are appearing. One example is Civic Studies. Civic Studies was launched in 2007 as a transdisciplinary field, in part to challenge the notion that academics and professionals are outside observers rather than participants in it. As field co-founder Peter Levine puts it, “Scholars [are] citizens, engaged with others in creating [our] worlds . . . accountable for the actual results of their thoughts and not just the ideas themselves.” Peter Levine, “The Case for Civic Studies,” in Levine and Soltan, Civic Studies, 7. Let me note two resources out of Civic Studies. The first is the research and theory of the late Elinor Ostrom. Her pathbreaking work with colleagues challenged the fatalistic assumption, dominant in academic literature before their work, that the “commons,” symbolic and material foundations for a shared life, were destined for “tragedy.” Garret Hardin, “Tragedy of the Commons,” Science 162 (1968): 1243-1248, at 1244. Ostrom and her colleagues looked at actual cases of commons, including forest management, irrigation, inshore fisheries, and more recently the Internet. They found that that decentralized governance with high civic participation has advantages over both centralized and unregulated approaches in terms of efficiency, sustainability, and equity. Ostrom argued for a mix of decentralized and centralized governance, “where citizens are able to organize not just one but multiple governing authorities at different scales.” Such mixed systems may be messy, but in studies of local economies, they “significantly outperformed metropolitan areas served by a limited number of large-scale, unified governments.” Elinor Ostrom, “Polycentricity, Complexity, and the Commons,” The Good Society 9, No. 2 (1999): 37-41, at 39, 40. In 2009 Ostrom won the Nobel Prize in Economics. Two years before, in 2007, she co-founded Civic Studies. The field joined governance of the commons with the concept of citizenship as work with public purposes. The founding of Civic Studies occasioned many conversations with Ostrom about how public work adds another dimension to governance of the commons: democracy is a work in process, built by the efforts of ordinary people in a myriad of everyday settings. Peter Levine, “Collective Action, Civic Engagement, and the Knowledge Commons,” in Charlotte Hess and Elinor Ostrom, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), pp. 247-276. As we worked together to co-found Civic Studies, Ostrom repeatedly expressed her enthusiasm for the link of her governance focus with public work and was delighted to hear about the immense diversity of terms for public work in cultures across the world. Public work adds a sense of collective ownership in the public world. Higher education and educational efforts broadly are rich with examples. Commonwealth-building Among the cases of civic action that help to rebuild a commonwealth of citizens are civic efforts to cross the highly and bitterly polarized divides of our time. I want to stress how urgent is this task: polarization is tearing apart a sense of common life and citizenship upon which our society and the depends. Braver Angels (BA), a successful effort to address the problem of deepening polarization, was founded after the 2017 election with a citizen-centered approach. BA has developed a variety of methods that effectively overcome what is called “affective polarization,” hatred of those with other views. Its workshops have proven highly successful in helping individuals learn to respect others with different views and overcome their own stereotypes and misconceptions. In its convention in the summer of 2024, BA described itself as part of a larger movement for civic renewal and democracy as a way of life, not simply government and elections. Its youth partner, BridgeUSA, is a student-led movement with 63 campus chapters, describing itself as a “youth movement to bring the country together.” www.bridgeusa.org Its bridge building contrasts with student of activism based on a mobilizing, us against them model. I highlight three initiatives, all tied to education and higher education, all combining civic action with practices that uplift and transform the people involved. As people create the commonwealth they become a commonwealth of citizens. First initiative: The Black Freedom Struggle and nonviolent politics Memory of the Rosenwald Schools and Jeanes teachers are coming back in an alliance of Texas HBCUs called Democracy Schools. Mentored by Professor Robert Ceresa, director of the Politics Lab at the Janes Farmer House, Black students at Huston-Tillotson University in Austin have taken important leadership in bringing together all nine HBCUs across the state. The alliance is working with the cross-partisan community organizing group the Industrial Areas Foundation, that teaches students how to cross political divides. Students learn organizing skills to address campus issues like housing and transportation. They reflect on how they might integrate organizing into their careers like the Jeanes teachers did. The Austin Public Libraries have created a partnership to help make this history visible and to shape libraries as vital civic commons. The democracy schools alliance defines democracy and citizenship as “We the People.” As they put it: “[Democracy] is the uniquely American story, practice, and ideal of democracy as the work of everyone, not simply politicians and government.” At the third annual Democracy Schools conference meeting at St. Philips College in San Antonio, state legislators announced an HBCU legislative caucus. Second initiative I am delighted to be giving this address at Ball State University, a leader in the highly innovative course called Third Way Civics. As Trygve Throntveit puts it in his essay for this conference, “From Representation to Agency,” Third Way Civics “seeks to immerse students in a reflective and collaborative experience that does not provide answers to major public questions but builds their individual and collective capacities to pose their own questions, formulate their own answers, and act – boldly yet humbly on the latter.” In 3WC, students learn to contend with, learn from, and integrate on their own terms many difference voices: “To think for themselves but not by themselves.” Third Way Civics (3WC) has taken roots at Ball State University and elsewhere since 2021-22, beginning as pilot courses. It was created by a national team led by Trygve Throntveit and including Anand Marri and David Roof of Ball State University. Thronveit notes several intellectual roots including public work. As he puts it in, public work’s “theoretical core is a historically informed and contextually adaptable concept of democracy as an everyday, collaborative practice through which citizens build and sustain a commonwealth…. Ibid. 3WC puts students as co-creators of their knowledge. Tryg described it his session right before this one. I interviewed Landis Parham, an active African American student, about her experience. She said the class worked for her because it began with relationships, getting to know each other’s backgrounds and stories. She found that the responsibility given to students to help create the knowledge of the course was a large change but one she liked.. She learned the importance of hearing different points of view: “Like Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and Frederick Douglass’s speech on July 5, 1852, challenging American hypocrisy, “What to a Slave Is Your Fourth of July?” “It was interesting to see both a white man and a black man’s perspectives,” Landis reflected. “We learn people have different opinions and that’s okay.” Landis Parham generalized to a more dynamic view of the American story. “I learned that we have control over history and how we want to communicate it. We can rewrite history,” she said. Parham interview. Evaluations across participating schools coordinated by David Root have found that the course has positive civic impacts on student growth and development. These include improvement in student understanding of American history and its relevance; higher involvement in community or campus causes; a sense of being part of something bigger and effecting change; significant rise in civic activities such as voting and taking related courses; and increased confidence in government and public institutions. Third initiative: Shared stewardship of the commonwealth A third commonwealth initiative is in the health field, where a new and empowering civic framework called Vital Conditions builds on and expands a rich history of public policy supporting capacity building among “we the people.” Bobby Milstein, a long time leader in health policy and practice with the group ReThink Health led a large collaboration of community, civic, and health groups during the first year of COVID which produced a landmark report, Thriving Together Springboard. The report highlights “belonging and civic muscle” as centrally important to community well-being and argues that “stewards in the Thriving together movement go beyond the limits of a service marketplace…expanding the belonging and civic muscle we need to shape a more vibrant, thriving commonwealth.” Thriving Together, p. 4 Springboard generated wide ferment across scores of federal agencies and policies concerned with community well-being. In this approach, government shifts from savior or enemy to partner and resource in creating communities where all can thrive. As Rachel Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health, put it in her keynote address to the American Public Health Association annual meeting last November: “The vital conditions framework identifies the core elements needed to create a thriving community rather than…descriptions of vulnerabilities or negative determinants in a community. This work asks us to make philosophical shifts in how we work and what we are trying to realize…” Levine proposes that the new interagency government initiative, People and Places Thriving, “provides shared concepts and language through which the federal government can better engage civil society.” Beyond government, the Thriving Together movement is gaining substantial traction in communities across the country. At the heart of the movement are ideas and practices of “stewards” and “shared stewardship” based on mutual responsibility and care for the whole. Stewardship is a “systems” approach. In contrast to narrower forms of leadership which emphasize advancing the interests of a particular group, “stewards…look for common interests, mutual benefits, and opportunities to connect across boundaries. Instead of striving for small victories…they join with others to transform the system itself.” Erickson, Jane, Bobby Milstein, Christopher Kelleher, Tina Anderston Smith, Cierra Bryan, “Action Learning Synthesis of ReThink Health’s Amplifying Stewardship Together Project (Boston: Rethink Health, 2023), p. 13. Stewardship has come to be “paired effectively with a set of interdependent vital conditions that are the focus of a growing consensus about what produces equitable well-being over time.” Their vision is to “grow a well-being economy with incentives for just purpose and profit that focus on the value of expanding vital conditions to unlock everyone’s full potential.” ReThink Health’s research has identified many examples of practices that involve long-term thinking, interdependence, and concern for mutual well-being. “This mode of thinking and working emphasizes public good, justice, and shared purpose,” all essential conditions for movement toward a world where everyone can thrive. Their goal is “to establish stewardship as a nationwide norm to expand vital conditions and grow the Thriving Together movement.” Many believe in these ideas but they have a hard time believing change is possible. The challenge is not only spreading the idea but also developing capacities to make change. Ibid. p. 17. Conclusion Shared stewardship overlaps with stories like the students at UMBC, the Texas HBCUs and in 3WC courses. In all these students are developing capacities for making change for public, commonwealth ends. A challenge in higher education is to spread this kind of education for change making broadly across the landscape of higher education. Chapter in Freeman’s book, The Empowered University, and Chapters 8 and 9 in my book, Awakening Democracy, both available at the Symposium, describe examples and practices that are resources. They also point to a politics that is far more than partisan politics, in which citizens become “publics,” not mobs or consumers. Young people will be at the leading edge of a commonwealth movement. As we have seen, Ball State and the partners in this Civic Learning Symposium have a great many resources to build on. How can we take this work to another level? The need is urgent and this symposium is timely. 10