The editors of Higher Education for the Public Good locate the urgency for their work in what they argue is the dangerous drift in higher education away from its nineteenth-century social covenant to contribute to the public good and in the momentum created by initiatives to re-connect higher education to its society through civic engagement as a central concern of universities and colleges.  They suggest that the fourteen essays they have collected and framed by five of their own essays constitute something between a gathering of theorists and practitioners with a similar vision and a manifesto announcing the arrival of a new era in higher education.  The contributed essays cover a rich and compelling range of perspectives on the public good and contemporary higher education; the framing essays delineate the issues and values at stake in this volume and in the movement they identify.  For anyone interested in the emerging claims and the possible impact of service-learning, community-based research, and other aspects of civic engagement, this volume is a deep resource and a forum for developing ideas about these active pedagogies and community oriented research, teaching, and service.

In the first three chapters, the editors suggest that higher education has strayed from previous explicit and implicit commitments to improving its world, especially as it has sought alliances with business and industry in the face of declining public and private support.  What concerns the editors is what they see as the willingness of universities and colleges to accept direction about the ends and means of their work along with the support.  Higher Education for the Public Good does a service in giving a face and a voice to disparate efforts and initiatives to connect higher education missions to the needs and interests of constituent communities.  What had been a number of discrete active learning and outreach efforts takes shape here as a more coherent and focused drive toward greater civic engagement and more clearly articulated connections between higher education and society.

 The editors are certainly right about the economic pressures on higher education, but their case suffers when they find little value in the responses that some leaders in higher education have made and pay scant attention to how their movement will respond more effectively to current economic pressures.  Nor do they suggest how increased thrust toward civic engagement will address other pressures on universities and their target community partners -- the trend toward replacing retiring tenured faculty with full-time non-tenure tack appointments, ongoing reductions in operating funds from state legislatures, the reduced staffing and expertise available within potential public partners.  Furthermore, their framing discussions acknowledge but fail to take seriously the controversies surrounding the notion of "public good," which has been challenged by postmodernists (along with a raft of other Enlightenment ideas), as well as by the difficulty of carrying on conversations about what constitutes the public good in the divisive and uncivil climate that now characterizes contemporary political and social discourses.

The organization of the volume does a fine job of capturing the discussions central to making civic engagement initiatives important and central parts of higher education in the twenty-first century.  The editors must have been very clear with their contributors that essays were to stay on point, be based in current scholarly conversations about civic engagement, and strike a balance between theory or proposals and practical experiences and experiments, the results of which might offer detailed and specific paths for others to follow.  The four sections framed by the editors essays focus on (1) public policy and approaches to establishing connections with community partners, (2) issues and concerns within the world of higher education that all universities and colleges must address, (3) institutional leadership and governance, and (4) individual leadership qualities and approaches.  Within each section successful participants in the various aspects of the emerging civic engagement coalition use their experiences and expertise to sketch out how someone interested in these issues might get into the national conversation on civic engagement and move forward with one or another similar projects.

The authors of these essays include national leaders in higher education such as Carol Geary Schneider, Ed Zlotkowski, and Judith Ramaley as well as experts and leaders in specific areas such as Richard Novak, Ann Austin, and Barbara Holland.  Although there are no voices representing community partners, many of the writers have served in the public and private sector before entering academe.  The essays are very well written and documented, giving the volume a claim as a point of departure for future conversations about the connection between universities and the public good.   

Having announced in the closing chapters that the book has not finished a conversation, but merely begun one, the editors close the volume with a call for greater dialogue about the issues and values surrounding higher education's charter and its attendant responsibilities for changing the world.  They offer a series of steps for advancing that dialogue and for enabling institutional leaders to initiate the re-directions that will lead to a new social and civic charter for universities.  These final directions are general and inspirational rather than definitive and prescriptive.  They celebrate the forces and initiatives the editors see as the beginning of a powerful move toward a more effective and more powerful presence for universities and colleges and their communities.  Higher Education for the Public Good does a service to the profession in its incisive look at the emerging responses to the calls for more socially connected universities and colleges.  It has earned a prominent place in the new conversation about the social covenant between higher education and society that it anticipates.