The Engaged University

How can the university become more relevant to the rest of society? Many institutions look to higher education’s traditional mission of community service.

By Elizabeth L. Hollander and John Saltmarsh

—Fourth of July Declaration on the Civic Responsibility of Higher Education

More than three hundred college and university presidents signed the Fourth of July Declaration, drafted at a 1999 leadership colloquium sponsored by Campus Compact, a coalition of presidents committed to helping students develop the values and skills of citizenship through participation in public and community service. The declaration grows out of a movement in higher education organized in recent years around the question of civic responsibility. Why has there been a rediscovery of the public purposes of higher education and what might it mean for campus life if colleges and universities devote themselves to such purposes?

Interest in the civic responsibility of higher education has converged with a critique—pedagogical, epistemological, institutional, and political—of institutions of higher education. Many people now view higher education as disconnected from social concerns and unresponsive to public needs. In 1998 the National Commission on Civic Renewal issued a report on civic disengagement. Chaired by a former U.S. senator and a former U.S. secretary of education, the commission found that "too many of us lack confidence in our capacity to make basic moral and civic judgments, to join with our neighbors to do the work of community. . . . In a time that cries out for civic action, we are in danger of becoming a nation of spectators." Although the commission saw a role for individuals, families, neighborhoods, secondary schools, and the media in meeting the challenges of civic renewal, it offered no role for higher education in helping to rebuild the civic life of the country.

New Problems

Two of the major problems facing us now are civic disengagement and the growing and persistent gap between the rich and the poor. Studies have shown that Americans give less and less time to the civic activities—such as serving on the PTA or helping to get out the vote—that have been hallmarks of our American democracy. And voting participation has dropped dramatically over the past three decades. Many leaders in higher education look with special concern on the disengagement of college students from democratic participation. Only 32 percent of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds voted in the 1996 presidential election, and a turnout as low as 20 percent has been predicted for the 2000 election. Studies of first-year students at the University of California, Los Angeles, report that only 25 percent think that keeping up with the news and voting are important (compared with 66 percent in the 1960s). They express a profound lack of trust in the political process, even in the face of a dramatic increase of volunteerism among college students.

John Dewey said that "democracy needs to be reborn in each generation and education is its midwife." According to the National Center for Education Statistics, nearly 70 percent of high school graduates go on to some kind of college. Higher education therefore has a particular opportunity to educate students in their democratic rights and responsibilities. The presidential declaration makes it clear that such education does not mean teaching students to be a part of some nostalgic notion of America’s democratic past. Instead, students need to learn to participate in the diverse democracy of the future; they must fully understand how democracy has been deficient in its inclusiveness and what it takes to make democracy work in a multicultural world.

These college presidents also worry about the persistence of poverty in many American communities, often in those where campuses are located. In an era in which many voters reject "big government," all sectors, including higher education, are being called on to help address this concern. Altruism drives campuses to improve community conditions, but self-interest also motivates many. Some institutions sit in neighborhoods whose high crime rates scare potential students and make it hard to house faculty nearby.

All campuses need to be concerned that the proportion of college-goers who come from the top 25 percent of the income pyramid as compared with the bottom 25 percent has grown from 4 to 1 in 1979 to 11 to 1 in 1999. Issues of equity and access foretell not only who gets to participate in higher education but also how diverse the campus community will be. Ultimately, we have an obligation to connect values of citizenship with the widening inequality of wealth and the erosion of civic life that accompanies it.

New Solutions

How can higher education address today’s concerns? Our ideas about fostering civic life on campus have evolved over the past twenty years. In the early 1980s, both students and administrators embraced community service as a rebuttal to the characterization of students as part of the "me generation." Students created the Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL) in 1984, and college and university presidents established Campus Compact the following year to provide what many students wanted: opportunities for altruistic, socially responsible activity, that is, community service. University presidents Donald Kennedy (Stanford), Timothy Healy (Georgetown), and Howard Swearer (Brown) joined Frank Newman, president of the Education Commission of the States, to found Campus Compact. At the time, these leaders saw student volunteerism as the best way to nurture the "skills and habits of citizenship," and they set out to gather presidential support for refocusing higher education on civic purposes and helping campuses find ways to carry out projects.

By the late 1980s, however, it had become clear that volunteerism was not enough. Institutional leaders concluded that to have a deep impact on students’ cognitive and civic development, they would need to link service to the central enterprise of higher education: discipline-based academic study. Making this link would encourage faculty to embrace the academic legitimacy of this form of experiential education. Tying student experience in the community to academic course work allowed a pedagogy called service learning to take hold.

Chemistry students engaged in service learning might, for example, study instrumentation by taking lead paint samples in older urban neighborhoods. At the same time that they learn how to take these measures, they develop information useful to those interested in reducing lead-paint risk in homes. They also learn about the connection between science and societal improvement. In other examples of service learning, composition students hone their writing skills by producing newsletters for nonprofit neighborhood organizations, or psychology students help residents in a home for the mentally ill as part of a course on mental disability.

With service learning, as distinguished from community service, students engage in an organized activity that meets identified community needs and participate in structured reflection on the activity in a way that furthers understanding of the course content, a broader appreciation of a discipline (or disciplines), and an enhanced sense of civic responsibility.

Service learning is not a recent phenomenon or an educational fad; it has a rich history rooted in the transformative educational and social ideals of people like John Dewey and Jane Addams, the cofounder of the Hull House settlement in Chicago. Like other forms of experiential education, service learning allows students to test skills and facts learned in the classroom, sharpen problem-solving abilities, and work collaboratively with diverse groups of people.

During the early 1990s, service learning started to spread across college campuses nationwide, and it has continued to expand ever since. Studies by Campus Compact documented a 17 percent growth in faculty interest in service learning between 1998 and 1999. This increased interest has converged with a mounting concern over steady pressure from outside the university to accommodate corporate and market forces in higher education. Those pushing for such accommodation treat education as a commodity that produces credentials, not as a process to effect the intellectual and moral development of students.

Another pressure that has added to interest in community-based education comes from increasing disciplinary specialization, fragmentation of knowledge, and narrowly defined notions of faculty scholarship. These problems led Ernest Boyer, in his influential 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered, to call for a reconceptualization of how scholarship is defined and rewarded. Boyer, the late head of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argued that universities can find a way back to their civic mission through engaged scholarship that addresses the pressing public problems of the day, makes connections across disciplines, and places special ties in larger contexts.

The growth of Campus Compact’s membership, from 113 institutions in 1986, to 235 in 1990, to a total of 670 today re-flects the rise of interest in both service and service learning. As this interest has continued to grow, the number of faculty and students engaged in the community has also expanded, resulting in new ways of thinking about the academy. Faculty are seeking reward systems that recognize the legitimacy of the scholarship of engagement and the time and talent required for effective integration of community experience into course work. Institutions are considering how they can improve community conditions, recognizing that doing so demands reciprocal, effective community partnerships that build the capacity of the community and the academy and use the wisdom of each.

Engaged Institutions

The staff of the project take on much of the responsibility for service placements and for monitoring and evaluating students’ activity in the community, allowing faculty members to incorporate service learning into their courses without assuming on their own the administrative and coordinating tasks that accompany a commitment to a local community. In addition, project staff assist faculty in the classroom and provide support for training, debriefing, and reflection. A structure of this kind allows for effective, long-term partnerships in the community and promotes service learning as a legitimate academic enterprise. A unique feature of the project is that employees at USC can support it by donating to a special United Way fund.

At Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, student opportunities for community service and service learning have developed within the context of a deeper institutional commitment. Trinity College president Evan S. Dobelle delivered a speech in February 1999 in which he asserted that "higher education must put its house in order, but it cannot do so by turning inward and ignoring the outside world. Those of us who lead institutions in cities, particularly those of us whose institutions hold sizeable endowments, have a particular obligation to invest in building community and rebuilding cities."

Under Dobelle’s leadership, Trinity has invested $6 million of its endowment as part of a $200 million neighborhood revitalization effort designed to create educational, health, and economic opportunities throughout the West Hartford area. The centerpiece of this plan is the Learning Corridor, a sixteen-acre area immediately surrounding the campus. In September 2000 the area will house a Montessori elementary school; a middle school; a resource center for high school science, mathematics, and technology; a theater arts building; and a Boys’ and Girls’ Club staffed with college students. According to Elinor Jacobson, coordinator of the initiative, one benefit of the Learning Corridor is that it will bring public school students into contact with six to seven hundred student volunteers from Trinity.

Judith Ramaley, president of the University of Vermont and a leader among land-grant campuses supporting community engagement, has suggested that the traditional categories of teaching, research, and service need to be reformulated into categories of learning, discovery, and engagement. These new terms capture the results that can flow from the engaged academy. Learning means that students are not simply taught; they become active learners of both course content and their own civic role. Discovery embraces community-based scholarship and honors the new knowledge that can come from community collaborations. Engagement focuses not just on faculty service to the campus, but also on the broader idea of serving the community.

As institutions of higher education reshape themselves to meet the needs of civic renewal, they often return to their founding mission: serving democracy by educating students for productive citizenship. As presidents embrace that challenge, they must consult closely with their faculty, staff, students, and community partners. The entire campus has to talk about what citizenship means and what skills and abilities students need to develop. The conversation itself can be a model for democratic decision making. It is only by acting together that we can add the civic dimension to the educational enterprise in ways that will, in the words of Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, "educate students not just to make a living, but to make a life."

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