Caryn McTighe Musil

A recent AAC&U publication, Civic Responsibility: What Is the Campus Climate for Learning? (2009), highlights a troubling finding related to the goal of educating students for personal and social responsibility. Conducted as part of AAC&U’s Core Commitments initiative, the survey of 24,000 students indicated that “while nearly one-half of students…strongly agreed that they came to college aware of the importance of contributing to the greater good, only one-third felt strongly that their awareness had expanded while in college, that the campus had helped them to learn the skills needed to effectively change society for the better, or that their commitment to change society for the better had grown while in college” (viii).  

In the face of such embarrassing evidence of college’s low impact on students’ civic development, it is clearly time for a new academic mandate: educating civic activists. This seemingly radical notion was at the heart of the recommendation of AAC&U’s Greater Expectations millennial report that called for developing “empowered, informed, and responsible learners” (Greater Expectations National Panel 2002).

Breaking Down Dichotomies

Seeing this mandate, some might ask: Learners and activists? Aren’t they antithetical terms? This false assumption has sometimes governed practices in academe, misleading people to believe in a series of dangerous dichotomies: that knowing is apart from doing, thinking is apart from feeling, and academia is removed from the world beyond its gates. Contemporary cognitive research and neuroscience reveal the fallacy of such oppositions. Feminist scholar Elizabeth Minnich has long argued for what she calls the “generative tensions” between these pairs, and women’s studies scholarship has likewise asserted the dynamic, integral complementarities between knowing and doing.

In 2007, AAC&U released College Learning for the New Global Century, a report from the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP), which listed among its seven principles of excellence connecting knowledge with choices and action; fostering civic, intercultural, and ethical learning; and engaging the big questions. Each of these principles depends on students’ engagement with real-world problems, far-reaching issues, and questions related to personal and social responsibility. As one student replying to the climate survey for the Civic Responsibility report so eloquently put it, “Being in an environment that cares about the rest of the world helps encourage you to do the same”(Dey and Associates 2009, 1).

But just how might colleges produce a learning environment “that cares about the rest of the world"? Brian Murphy, president of DeAnza College, commented in a recent speech that one of his community college’s academic goals is to educate students to be community organizers. Beyond gaining access to a greater range of employment options, Murphy claims that students also want to build their capacities to engage public power so they can represent their own and their community’s interests. This, of course, is both a fundamental dimension of a healthy democracy and a fundamental outcome of a liberal education.  

A Legacy of Visionary Teaching

Educating students with analytical and practical skills so they can shape the world in which they live and not merely be shaped by it has been a core academic aim of women’s studies since its inception. When I served as executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), I participated in a national task force that published a report in 1990 on the organizing principles of the women’s studies major, twenty years after the first women’s studies program was established at San Diego State University. The report, as summarized in a publication on the major by AAC&U (then the Association of American Colleges, or AAC), was unashamed about the activist purposes of the academic discipline. Women’s studies, it boldly asserted, “provides students with tools to uncover and analyze the ideological dynamics of their lives and become active participants in processes of social, political, and personal change. What we teach, and the way we teach it, encourages students to imagine alternatives to present systems of inequality and participate in political and social transformation” (Association of American Colleges 1990, 208).  

Thus long before Campus Compact was even a gleam in civically engaged presidents’ eyes, the young discipline of women’s studies was designing community-based learning options for students. By 1990, 38 percent of women’s studies majors reported that their department “required a practicum or internship course applying feminist knowledge to institutions in the community or on campus” (Association of American Colleges 1990, 216). Twenty years later, Allison Kimmich, NWSA’s current executive director, describes in this issue of OCWW how women’s studies is still committed to expanding intentional practices and pedagogies through NWSA’s new Teagle Foundation grant. She cites courses that promise to fulfill the academic mandate of educating activists: Social Justice Theory and Practice at Rutgers University; Women and Social Change at Arizona State University; and Feminism and Social Change at the University of Illinois, Chicago.   

Twenty years ago, students attested that women’s studies courses differed from those of other disciplines: they were designed to offer the contemporary education that we now understand is required for the twenty-first century. In a student questionnaire created as part of AAC’s project Liberal Learning and the Arts and Sciences Major, students rated women’s studies highest of twelve majors in ten of fourteen categories. Of particular relevance to the goal of educating activists, students in 1990 indicated that it was “usually true” that women’s studies courses accomplished the following three things: connecting course materials and assignments to personally significant questions (85.6 percent); identifying and exploring problems in the field in relation to significant questions for society (97.3 percent); and exploring values and ethics important to the major (81.1 percent) (224).

Learning from the Leaders

Sometimes when higher education seeks innovative reforms, the remedies are already in motion, and have been for decades. This is certainly true as higher education strives to accelerate student learning for active civic engagement in public and private spheres. It is time to credit women’s studies and its sister programs in ethnic studies for anticipating what would help students thrive, democratic societies flourish, and higher education restore its public purposes.  

Today women’s studies and ethnic studies programs no longer toil away in obscurity, pursuing their commitment to educating activists against sometimes staunch opposition. These programs now stand alongside many other academic enterprises led by people who see knowledge as leavened by dynamic engagement with others inside and outside the academy. These enterprises include service learning and other community-based learning opportunities, wide-ranging global initiatives, and burgeoning sustainability and public health programs, to name only a few. With their guidance, higher education is more likely to reverse the troubling finding that college does little to expand students’ sense of commitment to change society for the better. Perhaps through these initiatives’ collective influence, academia will be able to create “an environment that cares about the rest of the world” and thus help encourage others “to do the same.” 

References

Association of American Colleges. 1990. Liberal learning and the arts and sciences major, volume 2: Reports from the field. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges.

———. 2005. College learning for the new global century: A report from the national leadership council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Dey, E., and Associates. 2009. Civic responsibility: What is the campus climate for learning? Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Greater Expectations National Panel. 2002. Greater expectations: A new vision for learning as a nation goes to college. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities.