The National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good

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Higher Education for the Public GoodPortrait of an Engaged InstitutionMaricopa Community Colleges<strong>The</strong> Maricopa Community Colleges of Arizona have taken civic engagement beyondindividual programs and projects and made it an integral part of their institutionalculture. Paul Elsner, Maricopa’s Chancellor Emeritus, traced the effort back the early1980s when the Campus Compact movement started to gain momentum. Given that themodels and examples most often cited by Campus Compact applied only to four-yearuniversities, he said, the challenge for Maricopa was to make these ideas relevant within acommunity college context. “It was a tough sell. We wrestled for a long time with how toget a consensual vocabulary and develop a framework.”An important milestone in the process, he said, was the publication of Habits ofthe Heart, Robert Bellah and his colleagues’ study of civic life in late twentieth-centuryAmerica. <strong>The</strong> book stimulated a wide-ranging discussion at Maricopa about the meaningof service and citizenship in a changing society. Over time, these discussions evolved intoa comprehensive plan to implement social responsibility and service-learning throughoutthe institution, one based on “volunteer service and civic responsibility as not just an episodicexperience for students, but as a long-term behavioral construct.”One college in the Maricopa system made volunteerism a centerpiece of its institutionalmission, Elsner pointed out. “Rather than creating a marginalized structure forachieving this goal, they incorporated it into the whole panoply of student services,activities, functions, and structures,” he said. “<strong>The</strong> entire student activities program movedtoward the support of faculty in making carefully assessed appointments and assignmentsso that students landed in the right volunteer arrangement, one that is consistent with theirinterests and their developmental stages.”An important lesson from this work, Elsner observed, is that the president or CEOmust take the lead and “walk the talk.” Given the challenges facing leaders today, this isexceedingly hard at most institutions. “<strong>The</strong> first thing a CEO is expected to do when hecomes on board is start a capital drive,” he said. “We are drawn away from public purposesall the time.” Another lesson is that programs have to be organized in an open andflexible fashion with the necessary infrastructure to support the mission. In short, civicengagement has to be infused into everyday routines and practices. “What you want,” hestressed, “is wall-to-wall commitment within the institution.”16
Educating for the Public Goodmethod and manner.” Today, he said, we know a great deal about how the human mindworks, but we don’t apply that knowledge in the classroom. “We know a lot about howpeople learn, but it doesn’t seem to affect how we go about teaching.”Participants agreed that if the goal of higher education is to inculcate civic values andpractices and foster a stronger sense of social responsibility, then what is needed is acurriculum that teaches democracy in a democratic fashion, one that promotes dialecticalthinking and knowledge-in-use rather than simply knowledge-acquisition, one thatrespects and incorporates a diversity of perspectives, one that embraces multiple types ofintelligence, and one that is participatory and engages students in the types of issues andchallenges they are likely to encounter in the real world.<strong>The</strong> goal of citizenship education, observed Richard Couto, should be to remake theclassroom into a learning community. “<strong>The</strong>re is no other way to teach democracy than tomodel it. Students should know each other’s names. <strong>The</strong>re needs to be as much emphasison group process as on group product. And there should be permeable boundaries betweenthe classroom and the community.”StudentsA flurry of studies and reports have appeared over the last decade bemoaning the low ratesof political engagement among students. Evidence shows that students are increasinglycynical about government and wary of politicians. <strong>The</strong>ir voting rates are at or nearrecord lows. And their interest in traditional forms of political activism — participating inorganized demonstrations, volunteering in political campaigns, or joining issues-relatedorganizations — is on the decline.<strong>The</strong> annual Freshman Surveys conducted by UCLA’s Cooperative Institutional ResearchProgram show that volunteerism and community service among students have increasedin recent years. Yet it appears, somewhat counter-intuitively, that volunteering in thecommunity does not necessarily contribute to greater political awareness or participation. Infact, it sometimes has the opposite effect by reinforcing students’ feelings of powerlessnessand indignation in the face of persistent social problems.<strong>The</strong> question is whether higher education bears some responsibility for the pervasiveanxiety and disaffection among students. What role might institutions play in reversingcurrent trends and re-engaging students? And to what extent can students be included asequal participants in the academy’s civic engagement efforts?17
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The National Forum on Higher Education for the Public Good

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