#and i think that foucault played a MAJOR role in shaping this interest lol

[whentherewerebicycles]

From Publicly Engaged Scholars: Next Generation Engagement and the Future of Higher Education: 

“The individuals and institutions that shaped the civic engagement movement were working within a larger history and sought to redefine colleges and universities as social, political, economic, and moral institutions. Cold War science and the infusion of federal funding that fueled the military, industrial, and university complex fundamentally shaped higher education in the United States. Vannevar Bush’s (1945) Science, the Endless Frontier framed [a case for] both the primacy of pure science as the standard for research and for basic research to reside at the top of a hierarchy of knowledge production and dissemination, with applied research and knowledge then flowing from the university outward to the society (Stokes, 1997). Science, the Endless Frontier laid the groundwork for creation of the National Science Foundation (NSF), and postwar appropriations for the NSF began to reshape research universities -- a trend propelled by Sputnik and a deepening national crisis defined by the Cold War and fought with scientific advances.

In short, the civic engagement movement inherited what Schon (1995) referred to as an institutional epistemology of ‘technical rationality’ that privileged basic research and an epistemological architecture that fragmented knowledge into increasingly narrow specializations. This fragmentation was mirrored institutionally in siloed departments, a splintering that began at the turn of the twentieth century with the rise of academic disciplines. Increased fragmentation and academic work that privileged interests of disciplinary knowledge over knowledge to serve the public good gave rise to a growing chorus of critiques about the university as out of touch, unable to address pressing social issues whose complexity required transdisciplinary approaches.”