The ideal of community engagement suggests that both a student's career and his college's mission are (or ought to be) inextricable from the community in which they are embedded. That students, faculty, and academic institutions should serve community purposes, actively engage in community affairs, and network themselves in real and virtual communities relevant to shared goals is taken to be an obvious point. It remains uncertain to what extent this alignment of objectives between institutions of higher learning, community organizations, employers, and government is directed by pedagogical principle and to what extent it serves the changing structural and financial needs of increasingly financially stressed colleges and universities. What is certain is that there is a growing resistance to the suggestion that the individual and social functions of education should remain separate. Rather, higher education is now often considered not merely an end in itself, nor primarily an enrichment of the student as an end in herself, but as a process of training and development in which the student is figured as the means of satisfying employers' demands, communities' needs, and the nation's political and economic aspirations. What the author finds remarkable is how profoundly this vision of education differs from that of the Ivory Tower, an emblem for elite learning environments where privileged students master abstruse topics of little discernible significance to daily life. In this article, the author argues that the aloofness, abstraction, and distance from reality that characterize the Ivory Tower serve as important correctives in teaching students to think beyond the demands of their own time and place. He discusses a critical approach to community engagement. (Contains 8 endnotes.)