Introducing Next Generation Engagement

Higher education today faces deep and wrenching struggles to retain social relevancy and public legitimacy in its efforts to sustain its academic and civic purpose. Shrinking public expenditures, unsustainable tuition prices, an efficiency-based consumer model, the demise of tenure and remaking of the professoriate, shifts to online delivery systems, and a declining focus on the outcomes of teaching and learning have marked the changing face of higher education in the twenty-first century. Likewise, today's undergraduate population represents widespread demographic shifts with increasing numbers of underserved students, challenging institutions of higher education to address diversity and inclusion in the substance of the organizational culture. Indicators of emergent next-generation democratic practices include five dimensions. First, there is a cadre of scholar-practitioners who span the boundaries between the academy and the community, often positioned as "community connectors," connected to the institutional structures of local colleges and universities while equally aligned with the problem-solving taking place in local and global communities.