Democratic Imagination in the University

With an eye on the context of the contemporary university, David Hansen attends in this article to the significance and cultivation of a democratic imagination. While the university is under pressure to put its long-standing educational purposes in service of the global economy and the state, faculty across the various disciplines enjoy considerable latitude to create classroom and other settings that can draw out students’ imaginative response to the world. To illuminate this prospect, Hansen engages the American poet Walt Whitman’s magisterial evocation of democracy, Song of Myself (first published in 1855). Whitman enacts three ‘offices’ of the poet which he shows are at the same time constituents of a democratic imagination: (1) to attend to potentially dynamic aspects of everyday life to which people are typically blind, (2) to project democratic arrangements that contrast with present practices, and (3) to provoke people to remember, which is to say make vivid once again, aims and ideals that have served people well but which are easy to let fall into the shadows in the face of pressure. Hansen suggests that university faculty retain the power to help activate in students, and in themselves, these imaginal proclivities. The results may not be overtly dramatic, but they constitute an ongoing ‘quiet’ revolution – a turning or ‘revolving’ toward genuine educational and democratic values.