AAC&U News |September 2005

Tufts University Lays Foundation for Lifelong Civic Engagement

Tufts University, a research institution with campuses in the Boston area, has long been known for its engagement with civic life and public policy. Since the founding of Tufts's University College of Citizenship and Public Service in 2000, this commitment to civic engagement has become more integrated into the life of the institution.

Unlike academic divisions that offer courses and grant degrees, the University College at Tufts seeks to foster civic engagement across the undergraduate curriculum and cocurriculum, and increasingly in graduate and professional programs. The college provides support and funding for a range of projects--from incorporating experiential learning into the core curriculum and developing specialized, service-intensive courses to educating a select group of "Citizenship and Public Service Scholars" and broadening civic engagement research and service opportunities for all students.

Through such initiatives, Tufts hopes to encourage lifelong active citizenship. Already, deans from the campus's schools of arts and sciences, engineering, medicine, dentistry, and veterinary medicine are incorporating civic engagement into their strategic plans. As Director and Associate Dean of University College Nancy Wilson explains, the university's goal is not to develop just one or two signature programs, but instead to make civic engagement part of "the academic fiber of the institution," a "hallmark" of a Tufts education.

The 5, 35, and 100 Percent Strategy

In the years since its founding, the University College of Citizenship and Public Service has reached about 2,500 Tufts students, according to Nancy Wilson. Currently, the college is broadening the reach of its programs through a "5, 35, and 100 percent" strategy, which formulates different approaches to civic engagement for different groups of students.

As the first part of this strategy, Tufts engages 5 percent of the undergraduate population in sustained and intensive service work. Students in this group typically enter Tufts with a strong background in volunteer work or a special interest in public service. Foremost among these students are the Citizenship and Public Service Scholars, a select group of sixty undergraduates who take intensive classes, spend at least eight hours per week leading or supporting a civic engagement project, and ultimately become leaders for civic engagement on campus.

At the same time, Tufts is targeting a larger group of students and faculty through its 35 percent strategy. For students in this group, the experience of service will be "pivotal," according to Wilson, "but maybe not the major thing that a student does while they're at Tufts." The school seeks to reach these students through semester-long community-based courses, grants to students who develop proposals for community engagement projects, and service-based internship programs.

The greatest challenge for Tufts is the 100 percent strategy, through which the university intends eventually to reach every student. At the heart of this effort is ongoing curriculum development work. By working with faculty and departments to incorporate civic engagement into core courses, Wilson says, the University College hopes to ensure that students in all majors will have an experience early in their undergraduate career "that highlights the role that they can play in civic life" and lays the foundation for active citizenship.

Creating Opportunities for Service

The 5, 35, and 100 percent strategy is based upon an explicitly tiered set of expectations about students' civic engagement, and relies on a range of different programs and courses to achieve its goals. In Nancy Wilson's view, such a tiered approach has the advantage of allowing the university to be "flexible about the range of ways" that students can become civically engaged.

This flexibility is reflected, on the one hand, in the range of academically based service opportunities at Tufts. Students enrolled in courses developed with support from the University College produce documentary films about social and political issues, work with immigrant groups in Somerville, and participate in watershed restoration projects on the Mystic River, among many other projects. In one philosophy seminar that is part of a new certificate program on ethics, law, and society created with help from the University College, students visit a prison and reflect on the nature of justice and punishment in the U.S. A two-semester American studies course that focuses on race, power, and privilege similarly blends theory with direct experience by placing students at schools and community organizations in Boston's Chinatown.

Many of these community opportunities are coordinated by the Lincoln Filene Center for Community Partnerships, an outgrowth of a previously independent nonprofit organization that is now a key component of the University College. In addition to connecting faculty to community partners, the Filene Center has identified local partner organizations in Tufts host communities for student engagement programs such as Civic Engagement Summer Scholars, which provides grant money to students who wish to pursue civically engaged research with faculty during the summer months.

The University College is also building the number of faculty across Tufts who integrate civic engagement into their research. Such faculty and curriculum development work, Nancy Wilson says, "ensures that active citizenship is seen as part of the intellectual experience at Tufts, and not as an alternative to critical thinking."

Current Challenges and What Lies Ahead

The range of academic and cocurricular opportunities offered through the University College can also present problems. Unlike programs that incorporate civic engagement into a single, shared general education program, the nature of civic engagement at Tufts is highly varied. Ensuring that all students reap the educational benefits of their experiences can be difficult in such a context, especially when the service does not occur only in a course setting.

Nancy Wilson emphasizes, however, that Tufts's flexibility about student engagement is balanced by a consistent emphasis on student learning. Whether civic engagement occurs in a formal class setting or in extracurricular volunteer work, she says, students must be given the time and tools to learn from their experiences. For that reason, Tufts makes a special effort "to build in the reflection process in a really thoughtful way, so that students pause, reflect, and learn something from the experience, instead of just doing it and moving on. We encourage sharing of reflection between students and comment on students writing--so that journal entries form part of a learning conversation."

As Wilson and others at Tufts's University College look toward the future, additional challenges remain. In the near term, the college hopes to increase the number of students who are civically engaged at an intermediate level from the current 20 percent to an envisioned 35 percent. The University College has also recently launched a longitudinal study that promises to provide data about the Citizenship and Public Service Scholars program by tracking behavior of these and other students over time. At the same time, the college is organizing special alumni/ae service programs for Tufts graduates. Through such projects, Tufts continues to extend its ambitious plan to foster active citizenship--in college and beyond.

More information about Tufts's University College of Citizenship and Public Service is available online. Tufts will be among the campuses presenting at "The Civic Engagement Imperative: Student Learning and the Public Good," an upcoming AAC&U Network for Academic Renewal Conference."

AAC&U's work on civic engagement is coordinated through the Center for Liberal Engagement and Civic Engagement; AAC&U also has online resources on civic engagement.