It’s the first day of AAC&U’s Annual Meeting and I’m already bleary-eyed. Yesterday afternoon I flew into Washington from Utah, registered for the conference, and crashed in my room. It wasn’t so much the travel that has caused me to be so tired this morning, but the “goodie” I received in my registration packet. I’m referring to A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future, by the National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement. This call to action kept me up half the night reading and thinking about its message. And now that I just finished attending the opening plenary session, I want to get my thoughts down before they dissipate with the activities of the day ahead.

There is simply no better time than the present for a national call for elementary, secondary, and higher educators to work together to renew our commitment to democratic engagement. As Carol Geary Schneider, president of AAC&U, mentioned in her opening remarks, the scope and severity of the challenges the United States and the global community face are truly daunting. If I may elaborate just on the American situation: our over-leveraged economy seems incapable of returning to the levels of growth and employment we have come to expect in the post-World War II era; we appear to be running up against resource scarcities and environmental challenges at every turn; economic inequality has reached a level of toxicity not seen in the United States since before the Great Depression; our fellow Americans seem more enthused by their roles as consumers than their responsibilities as citizens; we have engaged in an extremely unilateral and militarized foreign policy that magnifies rather than diminishes national security problems; and our national institutions are held in varying degrees of disregard by the people they purport to serve.

I welcome AAC&U’s work with a variety of stakeholders and interested groups to produce the Crucible Moment report. It calls, in the words of Schneider, for educators to “vigorously, actively, and noisily reclaim our civic missions” in higher education. Institutions of higher learning can and should help to build democratic capital and encourage our students to engage in civic learning, practice the kinds of vigorous yet respectful dialogue so vital to democracy, and work to address the needs of the local, national, and global communities to which they belong. Indeed, as the list of concurrent sessions for this conference shows, many colleges and universities are already engaged in this vital work.

A Crucible Moment resonates with me as a classroom teacher. Over the years, some students in my courses have worked on political campaigns, advocated for a diverse range of interest groups, and served in humanitarian organizations to build houses, stock food pantries, and help refugees. They have written about how their work ties to the broad principles and concepts I introduce in my politics courses. At my institution, I have worked to promote service-learning and civic engagement in our mission, our learning outcomes, and our practices. In other words, I’m on board with the National Task Force’s call to action, as are most of my colleagues on the faculty and staff of Salt Lake Community College.

And yet (oh no, here it comes), I can’t help thinking that we are missing a vital piece of the picture—namely, the structures in which we and our students operate. If we don’t address the anti-democratic organization of—and practices within—our political, educational, and economic institutions, our work is incomplete. I think of this as analogous to A Crucible Moment’s recommendation for higher education to move from partial to pervasive integration of civic learning and democratic engagement. Graduating classes of students who are civically engaged is only a partial success, in my opinion, and will not be complete until those very students work with us to transform the institutions that produce the social and economic ills that plague us.

Let’s start with our own institutions. Are they as democratic as they could be? My son, who is fourteen, attends a school where new teachers go through a probationary period after which the students are given a great deal of influence on whether or not the new teacher is permitted to remain on the staff. The students also handle all disciplinary problems via a deliberative body. What happens in the future when he attends my own institution, where faculty and (especially) students have limited power? What happens when he becomes employed in one of the vast majority of corporations where distant CEOs and shareholders make all the important decisions? Despite what he might learn about democracy from a truly liberal education, I fear that the real lesson he will learn over time is that democracy is an “ideal form” that isn’t actually practiced in the settings that matter.

Let’s look also at our broader political and economic systems. The economic troubles we are currently facing were by and large not caused by a lack of civic engagement. Plenty of individuals and organized groups mobilized over the years to oppose the deregulation of the financial industry, to challenge the war-making, to rebut the alleged need to reduce taxes on the wealthy. All of those efforts were for naught, however, because the institutional structures and processes in place in our republic are geared to discount the collective voices of ordinary people in favor of large economic interests.

Our graduates should understand and be engaged to remedy the institutions and practices that produce the social ills that we are currently asking them to address in their service-learning experiences. I’m saying that poverty, injustice, environmental damage, and poor health are directly related to—among other sources—the way we finance our elections, the way that our news organizations are owned and operated, the way that our legal system treats corporations as people with nearly all the rights and few of the responsibilities of actual people, the way the US Senate remains an incredibly un-democratic legislative body, the way we treat healthcare as a product to be purchased on the open market rather than a right. The list could go on.

In short, we want our students to be civically minded, to be practiced in the art of working collaboratively and constructively with a diverse set of colleagues, and to be innovative as they tackle social problems. The Task Force’s call to action does that, and I am so grateful for it. But don’t we also want our students to get to the roots of those social problems? If not, we risk training them to be permanent medics, patching wounds in a war that never ends.

The demonstrations in the Middle East and in Wisconsin also, however, raise many questions about the role of education in advancing participatory democracy.  These issues, too, are being debated throughout the higher education and policy communities.   How many Wisconsin residents know their state’s history in terms of unions, collective bargaining rights, and educational opportunity?  How many know how the salaries and benefits of public school teachers actually compare to those individuals working in the private sector with similar credentials and degrees?  Readers of this blog will certainly know that AAC&U has called for all college students to have access to an engaged and practical liberal education—one that prepares them for informed and responsible citizenship as well as for work.  College students need and deserve the knowledge, skills, and capacities that prepare them to debate these kinds of issues in productive ways.

Many readers of this blog will also know about AAC&U’s involvement with a Department of Education initiative on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement.  This initiative builds on AAC&U’s prior work on these issues (e.g. in our American Commitments and Core Commitments initiatives) and will result in a proposed national action plan on civic learning to be released later this year.

I also am interested, however, in a current debate that has emerged in Maryland concerning that state’s recent decision to cancel its annual high school assessment test in government.  This decision was also made explicitly to help the state balance its budget.  As Jay Mathews writes in the Washington Post, his mailbox has been flooded with Maryland teachers’ e-mails about how valuable the test is–contrary to what you might expect to hear from teachers about yet another state-mandated testing requirement.  Mathews quotes one teacher who wrote that this decision “says to me that there are powerful political and bureaucratic forces that do not want our citizens educated enough to threaten their personal power.”  Another teacher noted that “civic education…offers a base from which our children will learn the elements of democracy.”  These and many other teachers fear that without the requirement that students pass the test, there will be a decreased emphasis on studying government and civics in Maryland schools.

I certainly believe civic education involves far more than just knowledge of American history and government.  However, I also am pretty sure that today’s high school students—(not to mention college students and most adults)—could certainly stand to learn more about how government was designed to work and how it currently does or doesn’t work for all citizens.

In higher education, too, we must make good on our promise to prepare students both for success in the workplace and for exercising their rights and responsibilities as citizens of a democracy and as more informed members of an interconnected global community.  As we put it in our 2007 LEAP report, College Learning for the New Global Century (pdf), “in a democracy that is diverse, globally engaged, and dependent on citizen responsibility, all students need an informed concern for the larger good because nothing less will renew our fractured and diminished commons.”  At home and abroad, we all must seek a more integrated, democratic, and vibrant commons—a commons in which all peoples’ voices can be heard and in which wise public policies can be forged.

As we watch events unfold in our own “fractured and diminished commons,” I, for one, am standing with both the teachers in Wisconsin and those in Maryland—who are fighting to keep access to quality education for all citizens somewhere near the top of our priority lists even as we work to balance our budgets in tough times.

While it is worthwhile to recognize the schools that best match their rhetorical commitment to sustainability with campus practice, the sustainability categories that make up the grade remain incomplete. Institutions are graded in the following areas: administration; climate change and energy; food and recycling; green building; student involvement; transportation; endowment transparency; investment priorities; and shareholder engagement. What they are not yet judged on is the very heart of the higher education enterprise—teaching and learning.

We learned from a 2009 survey of AAC&U members that, of those institutions that have a set of common learning goals for all students, twenty-four percent report that their goals address sustainability. At AAC&U’s Shared Futures Global Learning Forum last March, participants shared strategies for translating such goals into curricular practice. Participants noted the difficulty of bridging the gap between campus efforts to make the university a more sustainable endeavor and the task of educating students for an interconnected world. While they agreed that the “greening” of the university (as a business) is an important endeavor, they argued that its impact is limited if it isn’t accompanied by the creation of curricula that engage students with questions of sustainability and interconnection.

Here are a few strategies that came out of that Global Learning Forum and are posted on the Shared Futures social network:

1. Ask the question: What are we trying to sustain? Look at the economic, cultural, and community implications of sustainability and acknowledge that the array of skills needed for this task is too large for a single approach. Only an interconnected solution exists to a problem that is itself so thoroughly interconnected.

2. Choose a gateway by which to enter sustainability: environment, people, or economics. Every field should be able to have a serious conversation about sustainability, and any topic has an element of interconnectedness that can be explored.

3. Use place-based learning to drive the connections home. This can take the form of experiential learning in the community, or it can mean redefining the scope of the “community” itself to varying degrees of locality: the classroom or building itself can be defined as the system to be studied.

Such efforts to translate sustainability into the curriculum often incorporate other outcome areas central to liberal education and familiar from AAC&U’s LEAP initiative and the Essential Learning Outcomes it addresses. Education for sustainability requires that students gain “knowledge focused by engagement with big questions; skills practiced extensively. . . in the context of progressively more challenging problems, projects, and standards for performance; personal and social responsibility anchored through active involvement with diverse communities and real-world challenges; and integrative learning demonstrated through the application of knowledge, skills, and responsibilities to new settings and complex problems.”

Many institutions find sustainability a useful common ground for developing interdisciplinary approaches to general education. I recently learned that Furman College has introduced a new requirement that all students take at least one course addressing “humans and the natural environment.” Curriculum development for such courses is coordinated by Furman’s new David E. Shi Center for Sustainability.   Is your campus doing something similar?  Let us know and AAC&U will eagerly spread the word.  And I will look forward to a time when commitment to sustainability is judged by student learning as well as by the current criteria.

Above all, information and knowledge are growing at a far more rapid rate than ever before in the history of humankind. …More than ever, the sheer magnitude of human knowledge renders its coverage by education an impossibility; rather, the goal of education is better conceived as helping students develop the intellectual tools and learning strategies needed to acquire the knowledge that allows people to think productively about history, science and technology, social phenomena, mathematics, and the arts (1999, p. 5).

One example: as an undergraduate, I made my way through two survey courses in art history, where exams consisted of looking at slides, flashed on a screen for five seconds, and writing down the name of the artwork, the artist, and the date the work was created. I did well on these tests because I memorized enough information to fill the Louvre, but I could not recall 98 percent of it the day after the exam (and that is true to this day).

On the other hand, I will never forget walking into my first upper-level art history course, on Cubism, and having the professor explain that the days of slide-testing were over. The course was about examining ideas, historical influences, and the role of the artist in society, he said, and we could look up the facts we needed to do this examination. I felt like I had finally arrived in college. And to this day, I know a lot about the time in which Picasso painted, his artistic trajectory, and the complicated influence of African art and cultures on his work.

This, I think, is the more important educational goal—to help students to access knowledge as it has been developed, to ask about its use and consequences, and to discover its limits. It also involves taking responsibility for the facts, for their origins, for their accuracy, and for what, and who, is not included in them. With regard to civic literacy, I think the fact that George Washington was the first president of the United States matters less than the course he charted for this country as its first leader, the quest for democracy that shaped this country’s origins, and the moral gaps of the day that allowed people to be held as slaves.

This past week, nearly five hundred people gathered in Minneapolis and explored this more complex educational challenge of preparing students to be knowledgeable and engaged citizens at AAC&U’s Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility conference.  At the conference, AAC&U also released a report, Civic Responsibility: What is the Campus Climate for Learning?, that sheds interesting light on the progress and challenges in preparing students for engaged and mindful citizenship.  ACTA, in another comment on the coverage of this report, expressed its “happiness” that AAC&U was shining a spotlight on the “lousy job” colleges are doing.  We certainly did not use such sweeping language, but we did note that relatively few students completing the survey on which the report is based (conducted of 24,000 students on twenty-three campuses) strongly agreed that contributing to a larger community is a major focus on their campus.  Does this equal a lousy job?  As you’ll see in the report, the job is less lousy than incomplete.  For instance, there are many charitable activities, community-oriented organizations, and volunteer opportunities offered to students, but the array of choices can seem like the world’s largest take-out menu.  And when students enter their majors and the “real” work of college starts to hit, students too often just put down the menu altogether.

On the issue of civic knowledge—as distinct from engagement—we also found that there is a gap between campuses’ broad encouragement of civic engagement and their promotion of specific knowledge about important public issues.  About half of all faculty and 45 percent of students strongly agreed that their campus promotes the value of contributing to the community.  Only 37.7 percent of faculty and 40.4 percent of students strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. social, political, and economic issues.

The real message, however, of both the recent meeting and AAC&U’s report is that students, faculty, and leaders at colleges of all sorts believe that civic knowledge and engagement are important goals of college.  And, while much more work needs to be done, many campuses are developing robust programs that advance both civic knowledge and engagement.

Resources from the Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility conference will be posted online in the coming weeks.

The report, which features campus climate data gathered at twenty-three leadership campuses involved in the initiative, Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility, includes responses from 24,000 students, evenly divided over all four years of college. The report notes that nearly 45 percent of first-year students strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. and global social, political, and economic issues, which is critical to take effective action in communities. However, only one-third of seniors felt as strongly that their campus actively promotes awareness of U.S. issues, and only one-fifth of seniors strongly agreed that their campus actively promotes global issues.

One could speculate different reasons for this drop-off, including the likelihood that seniors have a more realistic understanding of the number and magnitude of social, political, and economic issues that exist in both U.S. and global contexts. A more distressing possibility is that as students move through their major fields of study, fewer of them encounter these issues as part of their coursework. One student, providing qualitative comments in the survey, noted, “Freshman year, there was a required service project during the first week at college [but] other than freshman year, I feel that it’s all simply lip service and no one really gets involved.” Another student said, “If the campus wants to get people involved, they should design activities and help students design their own activities that directly relate to a person’s major and interests.”

AAC&U president Carol Schneider, speaking to a group of faculty and administrators this summer, argued that if education for personal and social responsibility is something that is only “done” in the first year, then students will learn to treat it as they have long treated general education—as something to be “gotten out of the way.” This week, more than 425 conference participants from nearly 200 institutions will gather in Minneapolis to work at sending a new message to students about the continuing importance of education for personal and social responsibility across all of the years that students attend college. I’ll be posting an entry next week about the conference itself, so stay tuned.

According to the Post article, “the number of 16- to 24-year-old volunteers rose 5 percent, from 7.8 million to 8.2 million. The number of applications to AmeriCorps, which puts people to work full time in nonprofit groups for a year, increased 217 percent over the past eight months.”

On the one hand, it isn’t surprising that application rates for AmeriCorps are up—new college graduates often look to such programs as avenues for gaining meaningful experience in a difficult job market. Yet the original report doesn’t tell us why numbers are up. Perhaps it’s not simply a bad hiring climate, as I’ve speculated, but the presence of a community organizer in the White House, or a residual effect of Hurricane Katrina, which occurred at a formative time for these young people.

It may also be due to the movement on many college campuses today to educate students for personal and social responsibility. What do we know about the college-going subset of this 16- to 24-year-old demographic?

In fall 2007, AAC&U surveyed nearly 24,000 students at twenty-three colleges and universities that were part of a project called Core Commitments: Educating Students for Personal and Social Responsibility. We asked the students specifically about how their campuses were—or were not—stressing the importance of contributing to a larger community, particularly as part of the regular teaching and learning that goes on in the curriculum and cocurriculum.

The good news, which aligns with the findings in the CNCS report, is that nearly 50 percent of our sample of students strongly agreed that they came to college aware of the importance of contributing to the greater good. Nearly 60 percent strongly agreed that contributing to a larger community should be a major focus of their institution, and this endorsement increases from first to senior year.

Likewise, one-half of the sample strongly agreed that their campus offers opportunities for contributing to a larger community. When asked to name examples, these students found no shortage of programs to cite: day of service events, alternative spring break trips to areas devastated by floods and other calamities, fund-raising events, clothing and canned-food drives, tutoring school children, youth sports camps, and on and on.

Yet when asked if contributing to a larger community currently was a major focus of their institution, only 40 percent of students strongly agreed, and the percentage drops from first to senior year. And despite recognizing that opportunities exist, only 19 percent of students reported frequent involvement in community-based projects connected to their courses, and only 25 percent reported frequent involvement in community-based projects not connected to their courses.

Even more troubling, only one-third of the sample felt strongly that their awareness of the importance of contributing to a greater good had expanded while in college, that the campus had helped them learn the skills needed to effectively change society for the better, or that their commitment to change society for the better had grown while in college.

I wonder, based on these findings, if colleges and universities have operated for too long under the mantra, “if we build it, they will come.” We need to find ways to involve many more students in our existing service-learning and community service programs, and to help them understand structures and systems and root causes of problems, alongside more immediate, and ameliorative, relief action. We also need to find ways to support faculty and student affairs educators in building opportunities that increase in sophistication over students’ educational careers, so that students move beyond having their awareness raised to having their skills developed and their commitments deepened.

Otherwise, I fear the college graduates among the 217 percent growth in AmeriCorps applicants may be ill-equipped to tackle what awaits them.

These findings and an analysis of the entire survey results will be published in a new AAC&U report, “Civic Responsibility: What is the Campus Climate for Learning?” to be released at AAC&U’s Network for Academic Renewal conference, Educating for Personal and Social Responsibility: Deepening Student and Campus Commitments, October 1-3, 2009, in Minneapolis, MN.