ENGAGED GRADUATE EDUCATION: SEEING WITH NEW EYES
by James L. Applegate

CREATING A DISCIPLINARY VISION
As senior scholars embracing a new twenty-first century vision of research and teaching scholarship, we must articulate areas where our disciplines, given their specific expertise, can best engage society's problems. We must articulate an engaged public vision of our work. As president of the National Communication Association, I had the privilege of helping develop such an engaged vision for the communication discipline. As we considered communication's unique opportunities to address pressing problems facing society, we began to articulate a national agenda for our engaged research. The agenda is organized around three “divides” that threaten the health of our society: the racial divide, the civic divide, and the digital divide.

W.E. Dubois said, at the start of the twentieth century that race was the great question facing America. As we begin the twenty-first century, his comment is no less true for America and the world. Race and ethnicity are a challenge and an opportunity as the shrinking globe and legacies of ethnic hatred threaten our vision of a civil and open society. Surely since September 11, 2001, when blind group-hate tore at the fabric of humanity, we understand even more clearly our responsibility to help society find ways to prevent such horrific acts and formulate long-term solutions that do not destroy our humanity in the interest of preserving it.

In our role as public intellectuals, we have an important contribution to make in understanding the dynamics of intercultural and international communication and in improving the practice of communication in the interest of a successful and diverse society. The Communicating Common Ground project mentioned earlier is one example of a number of projects the communication discipline has initiated that begin to integrate research and practice around the issue of the racial divide.

We also believe that the communication discipline has an important contribution to make in helping this country bridge the civic divide that Robert Putnam documented in his book, Bowling Alone (2001). While scholars like Todd Gitlin and others have ably critiqued Putnam's work, I remain convinced our democracy has a problem: that this country's social capital is in worse shape than its economic capital. Given the resurgence of patriotic rhetoric since September 11, I wonder if this will produce a sustained commitment to civic engagement after the initial shock wears off. How will we promote civic engagement that extends across time and national boundaries? To put it simply, attaching flags to our cars and windows is a long way from committing to being informed participants in political discourse within a global society.

Putnam keynoted an NCA conference on political communication and documented the long-term generational decline in engagement of Americans in all forms of civic life. Reversing the trend will require sustained effort on multiple fronts. One part of the solution is improving the quality of political communication and the structure of politics to help citizens reengage in public discourse. Working with individuals to improve their communication skills so that they can constructively engage in conflict is another part of that solution. We are focusing scholarly energy on understanding the dynamics of the civic divide and developing communication solutions to bridge that divide.

The last part of our engaged vision for the communication discipline addresses what has come to be known as the digital divide. Some policy makers in Washington are suggesting that the digital divide is no longer a serious issue for America. However, scholarship across disciplines indicates that the digital divide is still very much with us and is taking new forms. The May 2001 issue of Education Week focuses on the digital divides that plague our educational system. We should be very concerned about our inability as a society to provide equal opportunity to all students, rich and poor, to gain the knowledge needed to use these amazing new technologies to improve their lives.

Today, the digital divide is primarily about systematic differences in what people know—or do not know—about using new technologies. This makes our role as scholars, in both the research and teaching arenas, all the more crucial in addressing the problems this divide creates. The NCA has created a digital divide task force that is multidisciplinary and involves the private and non-profit sectors in efforts to reduce the digital divide.

These initiatives begin our efforts to create an engaged communication discipline. I hope that every discipline and every university faculty member will articulate a vision for an engaged model of teaching and research that makes best use of their particular expertise to serve as public intellectuals contributing to the common good.