Category Archives: academia

a university’s impact on society

An important discussion is underway at Tufts about how to enhance and evaluate the university’s impact on society. Here is my emerging view:

A university can have “impact on society” by doing things that benefit people outside of academia. For example, Tufts veterinary scientists contributed to eradicating rinderpest, also known as cattle plague, which had caused suffering among nomadic peoples around the world. We should be proud of that kind of impact.

But a different kind of impact occurs when faculty, students, and staff engage with people outside the university in productive dialogues or collaborations that benefit both sides. I see three reasons to emphasize that kind of “impact” in our strategic planning, even as we continue to celebrate and support academic work that simply benefits society.

First, participating in and strengthening public dialogue is a moral imperative. A university has no right to define good impacts unilaterally, to choose priorities for any society, or to select appropriate means to attain desired outcomes. These are questions of value, and other people (from Medford, MA to the globe) must help to decide them. But because we handle ideas with sophistication, we can strengthen the public dialogue.

Second, “impact” encompasses the whole university if it is understood as intellectual and practical engagement with society. Liberal arts professors are unlikely to discover the equivalent of the rinderpest vaccine–a concrete benefit that can be transferred from the university to society. But liberal arts professors and students certainly contribute to public dialogue and debate.

Third, if impact is defined as public engagement, it is a comparative strength of Tufts. To be sure, many fields–from bioethics to international development, from museum studies to city planning–are now focusing on public dialogue and collaboration. Therefore, most universities now employ people who are interested in engagement. But Tufts is particularly rich in such work. This highly selective list of examples could easily be expanded:

The Tufts Community Research Center has won several large federal grants for sophisticated science. TCRC has a unique governing committee composed equally of Tufts faculty and community leaders; all of its projects involve collaborations with community groups, and many of its research grants originated with ideas from NGOs.
Classic professor Gregory Crane, editor-in-chief of Tufts’ Project Perseus and a pioneer in the digital humanities, has shown that classics offers excellent opportunities for diverse people to construct new knowledge together. For example, Crane enlists Muslim seminary students in the Middle East to help annotate the classical Arabic texts that are essential for our understanding of Greek sources.
The Lincoln Filene Center for Community Partnerships within Tufts’ Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service cultivates durable and reciprocal partnerships with NGOs and public agencies in Medford, Somerville, and Boston’s Chinatown. These partners then collaborate with Tufts on teaching and research projects.
The Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine, the Eliot Pearson Department of Child Development, the School of Dental Medicine, and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service are among the departments, programs, and schools at Tufts whose formal mission statements highlight public engagement.

If this analysis is correct, it raises some interesting questions about how to encourage, strengthen, and assess “impact” across a whole university. I don’t have the answers, but I would want to head off several misconceptions.

First, impact is not simply about expanding the scale of our engagement. We do not necessarily want more of our faculty to become “talking heads,” influencing public discussions through the mass media. That can be valuable, but it is not appropriate for everyone. Engagement is important at all scales and in many venues.

Second, engagement is not “service,” understood as an additional requirement above research and teaching. Engagement is a dimension of research and teaching that can strengthen a scholar’s core work.

Third, engagement does not mean the same thing across a university that promotes the liberal arts, the applied sciences, and several professional disciplines. But engagement can have significant (if diverse) meanings for all those parts of the university–and can help bring them together.

campus speech codes and college student voting: or, how to make an empirical claim in the Times with no evidence

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Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, is an opponent of campus speech codes. In today’s New York Times, he argues that these codes “discourage civic engagement” among college students. Lukianoff is entitled to his opinion of “stringent speech codes.” But his op-ed makes an empirical claim–that speech codes reduce students’ voter turnout–with a breathtaking lack of evidence that makes me wonder why the Times accepted his piece.

Lukianoff opens with this claim: “Despite high youth voter turnout in 2008 — 48.5 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds cast ballots that year — levels are expected to return to usual lows this year, and with that the usual hand-wringing about disengagement and apathy among young voters.” The relevant number is actually the turnout rate of currently enrolled college students, which was 59.7% in 2008. As our graph shows, that rate has been quite stable for 40 years, so it is unlikely to “return to usual lows” in 2012.

Further, college students voted at a much higher rate than their non-student contemporaries. That doesn’t disprove Lukianoff’s claim that colleges “do as much to repress free speech as any other institution in young people’s lives.” It could be that colleges repress free speech and voting, but other factors associated with attending college, such as higher socioeconomic status, boost turnout more. To isolate the effects of the speech codes, we should compare colleges that have stringent speech codes to those without. Lukianoff hasn’t done that, and neither have I. We do, however, know that Tufts students voted at around 90% rates in both 2004 and 2008, even though Tufts has a “red” (bad) rating from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Meanwhile, the University of Pennsylvania–a rough peer of Tufts–gets a green rating and has a very similar voter turnout rate as ours: 89.6% in 2008.

CIRCLE is working on a tool that will allow colleges to measure their turnout accurately if they choose to do so. That will make this kind of research much easier and more robust. Meanwhile, the limited available evidence suggests no correlation at all between the presence of a campus speech code and turnout. I wouldn’t try to publish that null claim, because the evidence is too thin, but I don’t see how the Times can publish an article that rests on the contrary assumption when there is no evidence whatsoever for it.

By the way, I have mixed feelings about the speech codes themselves. Free inquiry is a profound value. On the other hand, a central mission of the university is to select and promote high-quality speech. We constantly evaluate and filter speech when we decide whom to hire, admit, and invite to campus, how to grade students’ work, which courses to approve, which groups and events to fund, and which books to buy for the library or print through the university press. In making those judgments, we ought to be guided by J.S. Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville and make sure that we are not suppressing unpopular views that would contribute to the dialogue. At the same time, we are not governments that must recognize almost untrammeled freedom of speech as a human right. Within our communities, we are entitled to balance individual freedom against criteria of quality, properly defined. More on that here.

the civic mission of higher education

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I am going to Woods Hole, MA, today to speak to the National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on Science, Technology and Law. I have been asked to brief them on civic education at the college level, but I hope to broaden the conversation a bit. This is what I plan to say:

Civic education is one of the ways that higher education serves American democracy and civil society.

Civic education may also have other advantages for students:

It can be moral education, making people into better individuals.
If civic education involves working together to address social problems, it can enhance the skills that individuals need to succeed in a 21st century workforce.
Civic education can be a form of liberal education. A civic framework is a fruitful one for considering texts in the humanities and questions and results in the social and natural sciences.
Civic education can give students a sense of purpose and well-being. For example, we found through a rigorous longitudinal study at Tufts that students “flourished” better if they engaged for a sustained period in community service perceived as contributing to social change.

But I will focus on civic education as a way of strengthening democracy and civil society.

American colleges and universities have always claimed to serve the republic, but their idea of what that requires has changed over time and varies among institutions:

A typical 19th century college sought to create gentlemen who knew their responsibilities to ascribed groups, such as their community, state, region, and denomination. The college president was usually a minister who taught a mandatory “morals” course.
The great 20th century research universities tried to create independent, critical thinkers capable of making informed choices on the basis of information. Intellectual freedom and independence from politics and faith replaced loyalty as the cardinal virtues. The University of Chicago’s reforming president, Robert Maynard Hutchins, said in 1933: “‘education for citizenship’ has no place in the university.” He meant that a modern research university must seek dispassionate academic knowledge.
There have been plenty of other models, too: land-grant universities proposing to strengthen democratic communities, Jesuit institutions devoted to social justice, etc.

Let’s say we want to evaluate whether we are doing civic education well enough already–or perhaps we want to develop a plan for doing it better. We need to know what works, and there is a growing body of research on specific practices, from service-learning to inter-group dialogue. I’m happy to answer questions about that literature if people want. But more fundamentally, we must decide what our democracy and civil society need from citizens. Should we be most concerned about information and knowledge? Skills? Civility? Devotion and duty? Independence?

Secular universities tend to be uncomfortable with that discussion because it is openly normative (about values) and controversial. Yet colleges and universities create cultures with powerful norms and values—so pretending that they can avoid that discussion is a mistake. And if they put individual choice and freedom ahead of all other values, that is itself a value-judgment with significant consequences.

I approach this debate with a normative framework that says: citizens are people who deliberate with peers to define public problems and then collaborate with peers to address those problems. In doing so, they honor certain virtues, such as a degree of loyalty to their communities that does not preclude critical thinking and dissent. The government is a tool that they can use to address public problems. It had generic strengths and weaknesses as a tool, and people will disagree about that. The role of the government is one of the things they must deliberate about. So citizenship is not an appropriate relationship with the government; rather, government is a topic for citizens to discuss. Note also that collaboration—actual work—is just as important as deliberation. People who merely talk about public issues are ineffectual and often naïve or misinformed; we learn from acting together. Citizens construct or build public goods: tangible good like parks and schools, and intangible ones like traditions and norms, In doing so, we create civic relationships, which are scarce but renewable assets for civil society. The literature on “social capital” is really about those relationships.

If one adopts this normative framework, then there are positive things to say about today’s America, but we face some alarming declines. Between 1975 and 2005, membership in groups was down by 14%; being interested in public affairs, down by 31%; working on community projects, down by 38%; and attending community meetings, down by 44%. These trends do not reflect changing choices and values alone–they also show evidence of weakening institutions. But it is clear that simply giving people the choice to be active citizens does not yield sufficient levels of citizenship.

Meanwhile, most prevalent and influential groups are no longer general-purpose associations with fairly diverse and active members who care about one another. Those associations have been replaced with single-issue organizations that members pay to pursue particular goals or benefits. And communities have segregated or re-segregated by ideology, race, social class, and culture.

If you share my normative framework, then one question you can ask about modern colleges and universities is whether they produce citizens who are capable of deliberating, collaborating, and building civic relationships. You will not be as interested in whether they know what James Madison thought about the Bill of Rights or who is the vice president of the United States. These are worthy topics but they do not seem essential for effective citizenship. (I defend that position in my chapter in this book.)

If you share my framework, you probably want college students to work together on complex, applied, sustained projects that address social issues and that require deliberation. That seems a promising approach to pedagogy (and it comes in many flavors and forms). It also implies some interesting new approaches to assessment. But you should not be satisfied with improving civic education for college students.

Why not?

First, because 42% of young Americans do not attend college at all, and only about one in four completes a four-year degree. Civic engagement is strongly stratified by education, and BA students are already highly engaged compared to their peers. So by focusing on better pedagogy for undergraduates alone, you risk exacerbating the gaps.

Second, people attend college rather briefly, and are unlikely to remain very different as citizens decades later just because they took some special civics courses as undergraduates.

And third, equating the civic mission of colleges and universities with undergraduate civic education misses our most exciting potential.

Institutions of higher education are anchors in their geographical communities, unable by charter to move and thus committed to where they are. They have resources, ideas, information, and the ability to convene citizens to talk. These assets are becoming relatively more important as certain other civic institutions, such as metropolitan daily newspapers, local political parties, and unions, are collapsing. If colleges and universities step up as civic institutions, they will also improve learning opportunities for their students.

Academia also produces knowledge that all citizens–not just undergraduates–need to be responsible and effective. It is not easy to know how to address complex social problems. That raises difficult questions of fact: what are the problems and what causes them? It raises difficult questions of value: what are good means and good ends and who has the right to decide? And it raises difficult questions of strategy: how can an individual or small group organize an effort or movement that succeeds?

Although academia produces plenty of scattered findings relevant to all these questions, the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Value questions are sharply divided from factual questions–into separate departments and disciplines. The social sciences focus on how institutions work, not how individuals can be effective. Themes like deliberation, human agency, collaboration, and public reason are marginal across the disciplines. Civic Studies would be that field or discipline that pulled together relevant methods and insights to inform active and responsible citizens. It would not just be a pedagogy or an educational program but also an advanced research agenda. If we could reorient universities to that agenda, our students would benefit–but so would society as a whole.

[I find that I gave a somewhat similar talk at Oglethorpe University in Atlanta in 2007.]

civic engagement makes Tufts students happier

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Thanks to a grant from the Bringing Theory to Practice project, my colleagues and I have been able to study the relationship between civic engagement and “psychosocial well-being” among Tufts students by means of a large, longitudinal survey and some qualitative research. One conceptual framework that informs our research comes from the psychologist Corey Keyes, who has shown that people fall on a continuum from “flourishing” to “languishing” that is quite separate from the continuum that runs from mental illness to its absence. Flourishing has huge mental and physical health benefits–regardless of whether one has a mental illness. People can say they are flourishing if (among other things) “their own daily activities [are] useful to and valued by society” and they have a “sense of belonging to, and comfort and support from, a community.” We propose, in turn, that programs and projects of civic engagement can boost flourishing.

At Tufts, according to a summary by Michelle J. Boyd, Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Jonathan Zaff, and me:

Current [civic] engagement … was related to higher flourishing scores (Keyes, 2002). … Students who recently engaged in civic activities, most notably activities perceived to be focused on social change, had significantly better scores on indicators of psychosocial well-being (e.g., connection with others, intrinsic motivation toward learning, strategies for managing stress). Furthermore, students who were engaged only for the first semester did not show a lasting psychosocial benefit, and students who had lower socioeconomic backgrounds were less likely to become highly engaged. Moreover, we found that the students who were civically engaged through courses did not necessarily experience better psychosocial outcomes unless they viewed the activities as aimed at social change.

Sometimes, people ask us whether civic engagement is a solution to specific student pathologies, such as alcohol abuse and depression. I think the evidence for that is much weaker than the evidence for flourishing. At least in our Tufts undergraduate sample, civic engagement is a path to finding meaning, purpose, and satisfaction.

acting like a professor on the radio

Peter Levine

A Blog for Civic Renewal