Agent of Democracy - Society for College and University Planning

Public Work at Colgate
ensure that we are thinking broadly across the totality of what
we are doing. We also have faculty heavily involved in other programs.
A few have even offered to live in our residential halls!
Perhaps the most important involvement has been the very
informal ways faculty mentor students. As one would expect,
our faculty spend lots of time with students in their offices talking
about all sorts of things. As part of this, faculty have been really important
in helping change the culture. One of the hardest parts
of the shift is getting students to understand a changed set of expectations
for college life. Faculty are involved in helping explain
the message.
It is also interesting, however, that faculty have not driven
this process. There is a division of labor that works for us. There
is a lot of “chatter” in the higher education community about getting
faculty reengaged in the “out of the classroom” experience. I
am not sure that this needs to be a priority for doing civic education.
I don’t think that we need to return to a mythic version of
1950. A lot of this is driven by changes that are good. Faculty have
working spouses. Faculty are engaged in research that really matters
to moving society forward. I would argue that we need faculty
to worry about how to do civic education through the classroom
with more engaged pedagogies (e.g. problem-based learning,
service learning, community-based research). We need student affairs
folks to worry about doing this through things like residential
programs and student organizations. And we need student affairs
and academic affairs leaders (e.g. administrators and faculty idea
entrepreneurs) to be talking/coordinating with each other.
Brown: Are you saying, that with more nonacademic professionals
available, that they are better at “doing civic education”
than faculty members?
Weinberg: No. Nothing works better than service learning.
The data collected by Campus Compact, the National Survey
on Student Engagement, and others is very clear on this point.
I would argue that faculty should be doing it in the classroom.
And student-affairs folks should be doing it through campus
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