Reflections on the Public Purposes of Our Work

By George Mehaffy, Vice President for Academic Leadership and Change, AASCU

In the midst of all that we are involved in, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the purpose of our work.  It is widely acknowledged that our public institutions are increasingly viewed as a “private good.” Students and their parents, understandably, are focused on college as career preparation.  Yet the last 9 years of the American Democracy Project have convinced me that we, as higher education leaders, need to be forceful advocates for a college education that does more than simply prepare one for a career (important as that is).  We need to advocates for developing students who can be informed, engaged citizens in our democracy.

Here are three simple arguments about why our public institutions must continue to focus on the “public good” of preparing citizens for our democracy.

• First, you only have to think about the dysfunction in Washington to worry about the future of our democracy.  Increasing polarization, growing inequality, and a failure to confront and address our most pressing problems threaten our way of life.  A recent campaign to get all companies to contribute 1% of their profits to environmental protection ended with an ominous note.  When asked why companies should contribute, the response was: “Because there’s no business done on a dead planet.”  In a similar vein, do we really want to live, work, and have our children and grandchildren grow up in a country where democracy has been profoundly weakened?

• Second, involving students in civic work is highly engaging. Civic work, well done, leads to higher levels of student engagement, resulting in greater student success, greater retention, and higher graduation rates.  In other words, civic work can contribute to both student and institutional success.

• Third, the argument that we can’t do civic preparation because it takes away from career preparation is a false dichotomy.   As I read the Business Roundtable or National Association of Manufacturers reports about the problems of recent college graduates, they never say: “she doesn’t know enough Biology,” or “he doesn’t know enough about Accounting.”  Instead they complain about the lack of 21st century career skills: working with people who are different, listening to others, organizing to achieve a goal, communicating effectively.  In fact, these 21st century career skills are also civic skills; indeed, some of these skills are best taught in civic engagement activities. So preparing students for careers and citizenship can be done simultaneously.

In our American Democracy Project, we have continuously stressed the importance of “institutional intentionality.”  Every campus has some imaginative and creative civic project underway.  However, most of the time, these projects are isolated, idiosyncratic, and episodic.  What we need, it seems to me, to realize the goal of producing informed, engaged citizens are institutions committed to having a civic impact on ALL students.

As we approach ADP’s 10th anniversary, I encourage you to reinvigorate your campus’ civic education and engagement efforts. I continue to be passionate about the need for American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) members to carve out a distinctive mission at a time when our institutions are challenged as never before about their mission and purpose.  I believe that the civic mission is not only a distinctive mission for AASCU institutions but one that is critical for our students, for our own success, and for the success of our country.

ADP Faculty Feature: Richard Kendrick of SUNY Cortland Recognized with Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service

By Jennifer M. Domagal-Goldman, National Manager, American Democracy Project

The American Democracy Project is led by a very small national staff (me and the occasional intern). With such a limited staff, ADP relies heavily on the hard work and dedication of our faculty members and Campus Coordinators. Because of their vital contributions to ADP, we love to provide a national stage for their excellent work. Even more important, though, is the recognition that ADP Campus Coordinators receive on their own campuses.

A signature feature of the American Democracy Project is its focus on creating institutional intentionality for preparing informed, engaged citizens for our democracy. One way universities can be intentional about civic preparation of undergraduate students is by recognizing and rewarding faculty members for civic engagement work. The State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland understands this important component of institutional intentionality and that is why we are deeply supportive of SUNY’s Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service.

Please join me in congratulating Richard Kendrick, a long time ADP Campus Coordinator at SUNY Cortland, on his receipt of this important award. Richard is a Professor of Sociology/ Anthropology, the Director of the Institute for Civic Engagement, and has been SUNY Cortland’s ADP Coordinator since 2003. He also served for four years as Chair of the Sociology/Anthropology Department. As ADP Campus Coordinator, Richard served on the Electoral Voices Task Force and contributed a chapter entitled “Voter Education” with co-author Jim Perry to the 2006 ADP monograph, Electoral Voices: Engaging College Students in Elections. ADP applauds both Richard’s tireless efforts to educate informed, engaged citizens for our democracy and SUNY Cortland’s leadership in providing important incentives for faculty civic engagement.

See below for a press release describing Richard’s stellar work taken from the SUNY Cortland website.

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Richard Kendrick

Kendrick becomes the eighth SUNY Cortland recipient of the Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Faculty Service, which recognizes his extensive College service and leadership, as well as his specific contributions in the area of civic engagement since his appointment to the Sociology/Anthropology Department faculty in 1991.

He joined the College as a lecturer and was promoted to assistant professor in 1992. He became an associate professor in 1998 and a professor in 2005. Kendrick served as chair of his department while teaching and directing the Institute for Civic Engagement. He also has coordinated the All-College Honors Program.

A longtime proponent of community-based research, he has worked tirelessly with the City of Cortland on projects that include VISTA, AmeriCorps and the Cortland Community Assessment Team.

In 2003, he was appointed coordinator of the American Democracy Project. His dedication to the area of civic engagement resulted in his appointment as director of the Institute for Civic Engagement. In that role, he led the College’s successful effort to become the first SUNY school to achieve the prestigious Carnegie Community Engagement classification. He also was instrumental in having the College named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for four consecutive years. Some of his campus-wide initiatives promote student voting during elections.

His external grants bring in significant funding for town-gown collaborative projects. Most recent is a Bringing Theory to Practice grant for $100,000 over two years. This project, done in partnership with the American Association of Colleges and Universities, will serve as a national model that will establish the critical connection between civic engagement and student well-being.

A frequent presenter and consultant at meetings of the Rotary Club and the New York State campus Compact chapters, he has served as a volunteer mediator for New Justice Conflict Resolution Services and a volunteer for Syracuse Habitat for Humanity. Within his profession, he is a reviewer for Michigan Journal of Community and Service Learning.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts in politics from Wake Forest University and an Master of Public Administration from University of Georgia. Kendrick earned a Ph.D. in social science as well as a certificate in achievement in conflict analysis and resolution from Syracuse University’s Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs.

ADP Query about Tenure and Promotion Practices that Recognize Democratically Engaged Teaching and Scholarship

By Cecilia M. Orphan, National Manager, American Democracy Project

A signature feature of the American Democracy Project is its focus on creating university institutional intentionality for preparing informed, engaged citizens for our democracy. Tenure and promotion policies and practices that encourage faculty commitment to civic engagement are an important component of this institutional commitment to activating students for lives of engaged citizenship. To this end, we would like to know how your university recognizes civic education and engagement in its tenure and promotion guidelines.

An ADP Coordinator at a school in Tennessee has done preliminary investigations into how engaged learning and scholarship is recognized in tenure and promotion guidelines at a number of institutions. She found that many universities count “community-based learning” in their tenure and promotion policies. As she astutely observes, community-based learning and all that it connotes is important and critical, but it stops somewhat short of describing all that is entailed in democratically engaged teaching and scholarship. She would like to know if there “there are short, pithy, potent terms/phrases (not to replace “community-based learning” but as a conceptual supplement to it) to add throughout universities’ tenure and promotion wording as guidance objectives and touch points?”

As far as we can tell, community-based learning is fairly well embedded in many tenure and promotion guidelines (as are service learning and experiential learning). As we have often observed, though, community-based learning, service learning, and experiential learning are frameworks, processes, tools, and mechanisms for student empowerment and engagement.  The even larger goal, of course, is awakening students to active citizenship and to their responsibilities in and to a participatory democracy. So the question becomes, how do we fully articulate the role of the faculty member in activating students as citizens in a way that extends beyond discrete tools, mechanisms, and specific teaching strategies (such as service learning, community-based learning, etc.)?

The field of civic education uses a lot of different terms, sometimes without much precision. We are particularly interested in collecting precise and descriptive language as guidance for objectives and touch points for tenure and promotion guidelines, but we want to see any tenure and promotion language that refers to educating students for active citizenship.

To contribute to this discussion and share your campus’s practices, please complete this brief, online survey. Thank you in advance for your help. The results will be shared with all ADP campuses. We hope to uncover best-practices for encouraging engaged teaching and scholarship through this query.

To fill out the online query about Tenure and Promotion practices, please visit this website.

ADP Query: Does Your Campus Have a Civic Engagement Center?

By Cecilia M. Orphan, National Manager, American Democracy Project

In the American Democracy Project, we believe that there is no more important public purpose for higher education than the preparation of informed, engaged citizens for our democracy. To this end, we are constantly seeking strategies that universities have used to fulfill their role as citizen educators. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post about Western Carolina University, campuses must find ways to institutionalize civic engagement programming in order to fulfill this public purpose. Institutionalization is of paramount importance because it provides every student on campus with opportunities to be educated and engaged as citizens. We use the term “institutional intentionality” to express this notion. Western Carolina demonstrated its commitment to institutionalizing civic education by incorporating Constitutional programming into a basic and required university function: the Quality Enhancement Plan. And many more of our campuses have been creative and bold in their design and institutionalization of on-campus programming.

One way a university can demonstrate its seriousness about institutionalizing civic engagement programming is through the establishment of a center that facilitates and connects the disparate civic engagement activities on campus. An effective civic engagement center can also perform a variety of functions that include (but are not limited to) conducting faculty development on community-based learning, linking interested students to community-based projects, convening the campus community for discussions about civic topics, facilitating equitable and effective community/university partnerships, providing programming for student civic leadership, and partnering with elected officials and community members to solve public problems.

Civic Engagement Centers Query

Mike McCullough is a professor of management at the University of Tennessee at Martin and is helping run a civic engagement center for his university. He’d like to learn more about other civic engagement centers. That’s where you come in. If your campus has a center that handles some of the activities I described above, or other functions I did not list, please take a moment to complete this brief, online survey so that we can better understand such centers. After the results are compiled, we will share a summary of the findings on the ADP Blog. 

To complete this survey, please click this link.

Thank you in advance for taking the time to complete this survey. Your response will help us better understand this important strategy for institutionalizing civic engagement programming.

Campus Spotlight: Western Carolina University

By Cecilia M. Orphan, National Manager, American Democracy Project

Civic engagement scholars and practitioners often site knowledge about government as an important element of citizenship development. This makes good sense. If citizens are going to solve societal problems and interact with elected officials, it is important that they understand governmental structures. Our nation’s Constitution is likely one of the most important documents for citizens to familiarize themselves with. Constitution Day was created as one way to assure that more citizens will learn about and celebrate this governing document. Constitution Day takes place on September 17th and celebrates the anniversary of the signing of the Constitution. Each educational institution in the United States that receives federal funding must observe this holiday. In the ADP, many campuses have transformed this little-known federal mandate into an opportunity to reflect on our government, our liberties, and our obligations as citizens in this democracy.

Some ADP campuses have extended celebrations of and conversations about the Constitution beyond this holiday by incorporating Constitutional programming into ongoing campus activities. Western Carolina University in North Carolina is one such enterprising institution. Western Carolina has tied discussions about the Constitution into its  Quality Enhancement Planning (QEP) process. The Student Affairs and Undergraduate Studies departments at Western Carolina are hosting a semester-long celebration of the First Amendment as part of the QEP process. Faculty members are encouraged to develop lectures, workshops, exhibits, multimedia projects, and other programs with the goal of educating the Western Carolina community about the First Amendment. Administrators at Western Carolina are encouraging a variety of faculty members from different disciplines to consider how a program about the First Amendment might fit into their disciplinary work. Part of Western Carolina’s goal is to get each person on campus to talk and think about how the First Amendment relates to their daily lives.

What is particularly compelling about the Western Carolina project is that it is using a mandatory university process (QEP) to increase the campus community’s knowledge and understanding of the Constitution. One distinctive thing about the ADP is its focus on institutional intentionality. Institutional intentionality can be defined as how an individual institution organizes its resources and activities to achieve specific institutional goals. Civic engagement programming must be institutionalized on individual campuses so that all students have the opportunity to develop as citizens. By incorporating civic education into their QEP process, Western Carolina is demonstrating its level of institutional intentionality.

In ADP, we work to educate “informed, engaged citizens.” It is campus programming like Western Carolina’s that builds student civic knowledge and helps us realize our goal of educating future citizens for our democracy.

For more information, please contact Carol Burton, Assistant Vice Chancellor for Undergraduate Studies, at Western Carolina University.

Question: How might you use existing campus functions to educate students as citizens?