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"To Serve a Larger Purpose" calls for the reclamation of the original democratic purposes of civic engagement and examines the requisite transformation of higher education required to achieve it. The contributors to this timely and relevant volume effectively highlight the current practice of civic engagement and point to the institutional change needed to realize its democratic ideals.

Using multiple perspectives, "To Serve a Larger Purpose" explores the democratic processes and purposes that reorient civic engagement to what the editors call "democratic engagement." The norms of democratic engagement are determined by values such as inclusiveness, collaboration, participation, task sharing, and reciprocity in public problem solving and an equality of respect for the knowledge and experience that everyone contributes to education, knowledge generation, and community building. This book shrewdly rethinks the culture of higher education.

     How do the necessities of caring for others deter, benefit, or redefine
        research and teaching in higher education? What have universities done
        to recognize the difficulties facing academic parents, single mothers
        and fathers, graduate students, lesbian and gay couples? What pro-family
        policies can be enacted during institutional budget crises?
      At a time when the academy is an ever more demanding arbiter and shaper
        of the lives of those it employs, The Family Track: Keeping Your Faculties
        While You Mentor, Nurture, Teach, and Serve discusses the challenges
        and benefits of balancing a rewarding professional life with the competing
        needs to nurture children, care for aging parents, and engage in other
        personal relationships. Here academic women and men explore issues that
        include biological and tenure clocks, childcare and eldercare, surrogate
        parenting of students, and increasing job demands. In telling stories
        about the quality of their lives, they express their hopes, anxieties,
        difficulties, and personal strategies for maintaining a delicate but achievable
        balance.
      "Lively, well-written, useful, and persuasive … The Family
        Track reveals much on family roles within the academy and suggests
        many specific projects and guidelines for Institutional change."
        -- Judith Kegan Gardiner, editor of Provoking Agents: Gender and Agency
        in Theory and Practice