Something is terribly wrong with the state of American democracy. Most citizens don’t vote, negative campaigning reigns, and public distrust, contempt, and hostility toward “government” have reached unprecedented heights. Student interest and engagement in politics are at all-time lows, according to the most recent surveys that we have done at the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles. While academics occasionally comment on this sorry state of affairs, they seldom suggest that higher education may have played a part in creating these problems, or that it can or should do anything about them.
Most of us probably think of democracy primarily as an external process, in which people do such things as discussing public-policy issues, campaigning for candidates, and voting. While these activities are indeed important elements of a healthy democracy, none is likely to occur in the absence of appropriate internal conditions: an understanding of how democratic government is supposed to function, an appreciation of the individual’s responsibilities under this form of government, and a willingness, if not a determination, to be an active participant. In other words, a person is more likely to become an active citizen if he or she has acquired certain knowledge, beliefs, and values. Such intellectual qualities are precisely the ones that educational institutions are in an ideal position to foster.
The problem for us in higher education is that we have not done a very good job of developing a solid understanding and appreciation of democracy in our students. Many of my faculty colleagues might argue that the failure or success of our representative democracy is not higher education’s responsibility or concern, but they forget that promoting “good citizenship” is one of the most commonly stated values in the mission statements of our colleges and universities. We are on record as committing ourselves and our institutions to the value of promoting good citizenship.
But comprehending our democracy involves a lot more than knowing what’s in the Constitution and being able to describe the three branches of government. The poor condition of our democracy today is a product of complex forces that have little to do with what we learn in high-school civics courses. Those forces include broad economic and corporate trends, the influence of lobbyists, financing of political campaigns, and the role of the mass media.
We need to help all students -- not just political-science majors -- understand how our system actually works today. Take the most basic of all ingredients in any functioning democratic system: information. Even the most elementary understanding of how a democratic political system is supposed to operate recognizes its central role: A democracy works only to the extent that the voter is well informed. And if citizens really understood and appreciated the importance of information to our system, I believe that they would take a much greater interest in learning about the mass media.
The majority of Americans, for example, get their political news from prime-time TV newscasts. That this particular medium is not doing an acceptable job is revealed in a disturbing finding from a survey conducted during the last Presidential campaign: It showed that the more people relied on TV for their news, the less they knew about the three major Presidential candidates.
Our educational system should help students to become better critics and analysts of contemporary mass media and of the political information they produce. Most faculty members put a high premium on the development of students’ “critical thinking” skills, but we still have a long way to go before we can say that we are producing graduates who have sufficient critical understanding of the media and the motivation to demand better information. I’m reminded here of a wonderful little book by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner called Teaching as a Subversive Activity (Dell, 1987), in which they argue that in an information society heavily dependent on commercial mass media, an important function of education should be to help young people become expert “crap detectors.” Given what we see happening in contemporary politics, the need to develop those capabilities in our students has never been greater.
What kind of new “citizenship curriculum” would help students become better-informed and more-involved participants in the democratic process? First, students need to understand that the media that produce most of their political “news” are large businesses run for profit. In this very basic sense, then, the news media do not really play the role of critical mavericks traditionally assigned to them. Rather, they are an integral part of the business community and therefore subject to the same pressures, values, and motivations that govern the operation of any other large business: marketing, competition, profit.
News media become profitable by selling advertising and by getting as many people as possible to read, listen to, or watch what they produce; the more people they attract, the more they can charge their advertisers. As a result, we shouldn’t be surprised if they try to avoid offending the thousands of corporate advertisers on whom they are so dependent for revenue.
Institutions will have their own appropriate ways to educate students about these facts, but several alternatives come to mind. What about an interdisciplinary freshman seminar that contrasts the theory of representative democracy with the role actually played by the various media today in informing or misinforming citizens? What about a required seminar for all students that focuses directly on the news media (especially television) and their impact on our thinking about and engagement in, or disengagement from, politics?
In designing our citizenship curricula, we also need to consider the possibility that our students’ alienation from government may be symptomatic of larger societal forces that tend to promote the values of individualism, materialism, and competitiveness over the values of community, service, and cooperation. These latter values, of course, are central to any democracy: We pool our wisdom when we vote, and we pool our resources through taxes so that we can receive services and benefits that we cannot obtain on our own. Uninformed citizens are bamboozled by rhetoric denigrating “bureaucracy” and “tax and spend” government, as if there were some other more responsible way for government to function. Informed citizens, by contrast, understand that the real issues are how tax money actually is spent and who pays how much in taxes. Informed citizens will demand that their politicians design tax and budget policies that will address the nation’s real problems.
Our students, then, need to be taught how to inform themselves so that they can formulate the right questions. How about taking a hard look at our journalism-and-communications programs with this idea in mind? All told, these programs graduate thousands of students each year, many of whom will help determine what their fellow citizens learn from the media. How much emphasis does each of these programs put on training its students to understand the most important questions citizens should ask concerning public issues -- as opposed to training them to pursue the most obvious or sensational facets of a story?
Why has higher education failed for so long to make good on its professed commitment to promote citizenship? Many institutions are caught up in the “pursuit of excellence,” which usually means competing to acquire as many resources as possible and jockeying to build up their reputations so that they move up the pecking order among similar institutions. Those traditional approaches to excellence can lead us to ignore academe’s own “citizenship” responsibilities, embodied in our basic purposes of teaching and public service. It is not that we don’t need reputations or resources, but rather that the efforts to achieve them can become ends in themselves, leading us to forget that they ultimately should contribute to improving the education and service we provide.
Just as excessive materialism and narcissism can interfere with the individual’s ability to be a good citizen, so can an academic institution’s preoccupation with acquisitiveness and self-aggrandizement interfere with its ability to be a good citizen in the community of institutions and in the larger society.
If we want our students to acquire the democratic virtues of honesty, tolerance, empathy, generosity, teamwork, and social responsibility, we have to demonstrate those qualities not only in our individual professional conduct, but also in our institutional policies and practices. To emphasize the importance of these democratic virtues, why not begin a campuswide effort to determine how citizenship and democracy can be given a more central place in the general-education curriculum? And why not explore how we might integrate “service learning” into the general educational program -- beyond the scattered courses or internships in which it may be emphasized now?
Some of my academic colleagues might argue that “a traditional liberal education” is the best way to prepare young people for the responsibilities of citizenship. While there may be some truth in that argument, the uncomfortable reality is that whatever we are currently providing -- call it liberal learning if you like -- simply isn’t getting the job done. Most of our citizenry -- and that includes most of our college-educated citizenry -- seems neither to understand what democracy is all about nor to accept responsibility for making it work.
And for people who might think that we in higher education have no real power to strengthen American democracy, consider the following: We educate a large proportion of the citizens who bother to vote, not to mention most of the politicians, journalists, and news commentators. We also educate all of the school administrators and teachers, who in turn educate everyone at the pre-college level. And we do much to shape the pre-college curriculum through what we require of our college applicants. In short, not only have we helped to create the problems that plague American democracy, but we are also in a position to begin doing something about them.
If higher education doesn’t start giving citizenship and democracy much greater priority, who will? Corporate business? The news media? Politicians? How can we ever expect the democratic dream to become a reality unless education changes its priorities? The future of American democracy is, to a certain extent, in our hands, and if we want to improve it, we have to change some of our ways of doing business.
In light of the reduced budgets and other external pressures that many of us face today, it is fair to ask whether we have the wherewithal to undertake any such initiatives as citizenship development. I would argue that most of the educational resources and personnel needed to develop a greater emphasis on educating citizens for democracy already exist on campus; educators just need to recognize that they have the capacity to draw those resources and personnel together in new and creative ways. Citizenship development should not be considered an “add on,” to be pursued only if new money ever becomes available. Rather, it needs to be viewed as an integral part of the educational program.
The academic autonomy that we constantly seek to protect may be the most powerful tool that we have for refocusing our programs to better promote democracy and citizenship. The fact remains that, despite increased public attacks on colleges in recent years, we still retain control over practically all of the decisions that really matter: whom to admit and how to admit them; what to teach and how to teach it; how to assess and evaluate our students; how to structure extracurricular programs; what subject matter we choose for our research; and how we hire, reward, and tenure our colleagues.
If we genuinely believe that it is in our own best interests -- not to mention those of our students and of the society that supports us -- to introduce a focus on democracy and citizenship into our curriculum and other campus activities, we have both the autonomy and the intellectual skill to do it.
Alexander Astin is a professor of higher education and director of the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles.