Looking at seven different universities across two political eras, Busch unearths a common institutional trend: how student activists' demand for "action education" in the 1960s—a demand that many believed would reimagine the political role of the university—was reconstituted as university-sponsored volunteer programs by the 1980s. Disconnected from its political roots and visions, these programs became the source for the promotion of "service learning" as the primary model of the new civics in American higher education, and an integral part of institutional strategies for responding to student activism. Embraced by universities, small and big, private and public, the triumph of service learning as the new civics narrowed the political terrain of engaged citizenship and set limits on the modern American university's mission. In excavating the genealogy of the new civics and their institutional legacy, Disciplining Democracy offers a new way to understand the university as a political actor in American life.
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