Higher Education Engagement News is a periodic newsletter edited by Harry C. Boyte, Senior Scholar in Public Work Philosophy at Augsburg College, which responds to requests for updates and information about initiatives associated with the American Commonwealth Partnership (ACP). ACP was a coalition to strengthen the public purposes of higher education organized for the 150^th anniversary of the Morrill Act establishing land grant colleges in 2012, on invitation by the White House Office of Public Engagement.

(The following is from Harry C. Boyte.)

This issue announces the launch of Democracy's Education: Public Work, Citizenship, and the Future of Colleges and Universities (Vanderbilt University Press), one of the outgrowths of the American Commonwealth Partnership. I am pleased and honored to be associated with such a splendid collection, with contributions by leading policy-makers, presidents, tenure-track and adjunct faculty, staff, students, community and labor organizers and public intellectuals.

The book is available at Amazon.com.

Here's a blog for Huffington Post describing the book in more detail, up on Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu/10437140/Democracys_Education_--_Stirrings_of_change

The blog also honors the initial cover image for the book, drawn from a mural by Harlem Renaissance artist Hale Woodruff, “Settlement and Development,” part of the series commissioned by the Golden State Life Insurance Company, “The Negro in California.” The series is here.

Woodruff’s image remarkably conveys the interplay between themes of public work which builds the commonwealth, the right and struggle for education, and a vision of a more inclusive democracy at the heart of Democracy’s Education. Rights for use of the image with the book were purchased from the local copyright holder, but the image didn't pass a "pixel" test for printing quality. The mural itself, covered in the renovation of the museum where it is housed, could not be uncovered for photographing. I am attaching the image for the Higher Engagement Education News list.

Finally I also want to draw attention to the book described in the blog, Andrew Jewett's Science, Democracy, and the American University (Cambridge University Press, 2012), in my view a work of kindred spirit -- and a wonderful resource for the emerging democracy movement in and around higher education.