Welcome to Teaching, a free weekly newsletter from The Chronicle of Higher Education. This week:
- Beth tells you about a summit at Harvard University;
- Dan points you to some recent articles you may have missed; and
- Beckie shares how one reader engages in meaningful conversations about teaching.
Public Service
Higher education is under assault. Parents and students attack it as unaffordable. Political partisans blame it for fostering intolerance and hostile discourse. And in the wake of the Operation Varsity Blues scandal, many wonder whether the most elite institutions are more concerned with perpetuating privilege than contributing to the public good.
Are these universities doing enough, in fact, to serve their local communities, address inequality, and produce civic-minded graduates? That was the starting point of a two-day summit at Harvard University last week, in which leaders from the Ivy League and other highly competitive institutions reflected on their public purpose and whether they were living up to their mission.
As speakers noted, colleges are given a lot: not just the money and trust of families, but tax-exempt status, federally financed student aid, and millions in research dollars. Can they make the case that they give enough back?
Many people, said Lawrence Bacow, Harvard’s president, during opening remarks, “think we’re far more about making our institutions great than we are in making the world better.”
The summit focused in part on rethinking the curriculum: What can be done in the classroom and through academic programming to foster students’ interest in and ability to contribute to the public good?
Bacow, who has been beating this drum since his days as president of Tufts University, has set a new goal for Harvard. He wants to raise enough money to enable every undergraduate to complete a public-service internship, preferably in their hometowns. He questioned whether Harvard is more engaged in helping students serve struggling communities abroad than those in the heartland. “We may be sending more kids to Haiti and Rwanda,” he noted, “than Cleveland and St. Louis.”
Harvard aside, what is holding some colleges back from doing a better job of educating civic-minded students and orienting more academic work toward the public good?
Participants pointed to several challenges:
- students who are singularly job-focused, or too consumed by their own struggles to think about the broader world;
- internship opportunities that are affordable only to those who don’t need to worry about money;
- professors who don’t feel they have an obligation to engage with their communities, particularly at private institutions, or aren’t rewarded for doing so; and
- an administrative structure in which academic life is often decoupled from public service.
On the first point, Howard Gardner, a professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, shared some troubling findings from a study he’s been conducting since 2012 at 10 institutions, including Tufts, Kenyon College, Ohio State University, the University of New Hampshire, and California State University at Northridge. From 2,000 interviews with students and others, and observation of campus life, he and his co-author, Wendy Fischman, found that learning and civics are not foremost in students’ thoughts. Mental health, by contrast, is a “salient” issue, with doubts running deep among many undergraduates about whether they truly belong in college. “When the word ‘help’ is used,” he said, “it’s because students need help rather than wanting to help others.”
Most students, he said, also have a transactional mental model of college – that is, they are there to get a credential, and then a job – rather than an exploratory or transformational view of higher education.
Gardner argued that colleges have fallen victim to “projectitis,” in which standalone centers and ad-hoc funding fuel most public-serving projects, leaving many students unaware of this work. His recommendation: Colleges should avoid mission sprawl, and focus students’ attention, from Day 1, on academics. They should also intertwine communal, civic, or other work with academics.
Easier said than done, of course. But that did lead to vibrant discussions around the concept of “engaged scholarship,” which brings the outside world into the classroom. Speakers distinguished this type of academic work from, say, a service-learning project or extracurricular volunteer work. Instead, the idea is to apply the skills students are developing in a course or their major to real-world problems.
Some, like Boston University, are hoping to infuse a revamped general-education curriculum with co-curricular activities. Others, like Princeton, have programs to help faculty members build service into their coursework. And some are looking to partner with public universities and community colleges to address broad challenges, like the opioid crisis or climate change.
As Holden Thorp, provost at Washington University in St. Louis noted, it’s the University of Central Floridas and University of South Floridas of the world that are the real game-changers for students and their communities – not the elites, which make up just a small fraction of higher education.
In future newsletters and stories, I plan to dive into the idea of engaged scholarship and focus on some of the innovative projects described at the conference. And I’d like to ask readers: Have you retooled or created a course to focus on engaged scholarship? Does your campus have a center that helps connect faculty members to outside organizations so that they can bring the world into the classroom? If so, drop me a line at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com and your story may appear in a future newsletter.
