The purpose of this statement is to articulate the commitment of all sectors of higher education, public and private, two and four year, to their civic purposes and to identify the behaviors that will make that commitment manifest. It was reviewed, refined and endorsed at a Presidential Leadership Colloquium convened by Campus Compact, the American Council of Education, at the Aspen Institute June 29-July 1, 1999.

As presidents of colleges and universities, both private and public, large and small, two-year and four year, we challenge higher education to re-examine its public purposes and its commitments to the democratic ideal. We also challenge higher education to become engaged, through actions and teaching, with its communities.

We have a fundamental task to renew our role as agents of our democracy. This task is both urgent and long term. There is growing evidence of disengagement of many Americans from the communal life of our society in general and from the responsibilities of democracy in particular. We share a special concern about the disengagement of college students from democratic participation. A chorus of studies reveals that students are not connected to the larger purposes and aspirations of the American democracy. Voter turnout is low. Feelings that political participation will not make any difference are high. Added to this, there is a profound sense of cynicism and lack of trust in the political process.

We are encouraged that more and more students are volunteering and participating in public and community service, and we have all encouraged them to do so through curricular and co curricular activity. However, this service is not leading students to embrace the duties of active citizenship and civic participation (UCLA American Council on Education Study 1999; National Association of Secretaries of State 1998). We do not blame these college students for their attitudes toward the democracy, rather we take responsibility to help them realize the values and skills of our democratic society and their need to claim ownership of it.

This country cannot afford to educate a generation that acquires knowledge without ever understanding how that knowledge can benefit society or how to influence democratic decision making. We must teach the skills and values of democracy, creating innumerable opportunities for our students to practice and reap the results of the real, hard work of citizenship.

Colleges and universities have long embraced a mission to educate students for citizenship. But now, with over two thirds of recent high school graduates and ever larger numbers of adults enrolling in post secondary studies, higher education has an unprecedented opportunity to influence the democratic knowledge, dispositions, and habits of the heart that graduates carry with them into the public square.

Higher education is uniquely positioned to help Americans understand the histories and contours of our present challenges as a diverse democracy. It is also uniquely positioned to help both students and our communities to explore new ways of fulfilling the promise of justice and dignity for all, both in our own democracy and as part of the global community. We know that pluralism is a source of strength and vitality that will enrich our students’ education and help them to learn both to respect difference and work together for the common good.

We live in a time when every sector—corporate, government and nonprofit—is being mobilized to address community needs and reinvigorate our democracy (Gardner, 1998). We cannot be complacent in the face of a country where one out of five children sleeps in poverty and one in six central cities has an unemployment rate 50% or more above the national average, even as our economy shows unprecedented strength. Higher education—its leaders, students, faculty, staff, trustees and alumni—remains a key institutional force in our culture that can respond, and can do so without a political agenda and with the intellectual and professional capacities today’s challenges so desperately demand. Thus, for society’s benefit and for the academy’s, we need to do more. Only by demonstrating the democratic principles we espouse, can higher education effectively educate our students to be good citizens.

How can we realize this vision of institutional public engagement? It will, of course, take as many forms as there are types of colleges and universities. And it will require our hard work, as a whole, and within each of our institutions. We will know we are successful by the robust debate on our campuses, and the civic behaviors of our students. We will know it by the civic engagement of our faculty. We will know it when our community partnerships improve the quality of community life and the quality of the education we provide.

To achieve these goals, our presidential leadership is essential but, by itself, it is not enough. Faculty, staff, trustees and students must help craft and act upon our civic missions and responsibilities. We must seek reciprocal partnerships with community leaders, such as those responsible for elementary and secondary education. To achieve our goals we must define them in ways that inspire our institutional missions and help measure our success. We have suggested a Campus Assessment of Civic Responsibility that will help in this task. It is a work in progress. We ask you to review the draft and to ask yourself what aspects of this can work on your campus and also to share with others practices that are not on this list.

We ask other college presidents to join us in seeking recognition of civic responsibility in accreditation procedures, Carnegie classifications, and national rankings and to work with Governors, State Legislators, and State Higher Education Offices on state expectations for civic engagement in public systems.

We believe that the challenge of the next millennium is the renewal of our own democratic life and reassertion of social stewardship. In celebrating the birth of our democracy, we can think of no nobler task than committing ourselves to helping catalyze and lead a national movement to reinvigorate the public purposes and civic mission of higher education. We believe that now and through the next century our institutions must be vital agents and architects of a flourishing democracy. We urge all of higher education to join us.

This is a work in progress, we welcome your feedback. We will share the perspectives of the Aspen participants in the weeks to come.

Each of you is urged to gather a diverse group of trustees, faculty, staff, students, and community partners on your campus to develop measures of successful civic engagement for your students and for your institution as a whole. To assist you, we have compiled this campus assessment of civic responsibility for your use in framing your discussions.

We know that every campus will fulfill its civic mission in its own unique way. In fact, each campus will make a unique contribution to refining what it means to be an engaged campus. We hope the following will inspire you in that enterprise. We welcome your suggestions and additions.

On the following pages we pose a series of questions on which we ask your thoughtful input as a way to measure just where your campus is in terms of its civic and community engagement. Answers to these questions can serve as a means of exploration and discussion.

I. Students and civic responsibility: How well do we prepare students for citizenship?

As a place to begin, consider that it is Campus Compact’s goal to raise the average number of students involved in public and community service from the current 10% to 30% by the year 2004. Another goal is that 50% of all students will have experienced some sort of community-based learning during their college years. Also consider that we would like to see community engagement activities made available to all students by increasing the number of students funded by Federal Work Study beyond the year 2000 requirement of 7% to 10% by the year 2003.

Mission & Citizenship

a) Does our campus have a civic mission that calls upon us to prepare our students for engaged citizenship?

b) To what extent is this mission widely known and discussed?

• by our faculty?

• by our students?

• by the administration?

c) How well does our curriculum help students develop civic competencies and civic habits? These habits include the arts of civil public argument, civic imagination, and the ability to critically evaluate arguments and information. They also include the capacities and curiosity to listen, interest in and knowledge of public affairs, and the ability to work with others different from themselves on public problems in ways that deepen appreciation of others’ talents.

d) To what extent are our students given multiple opportunities to do the work of citizenship through real projects of impact and relevance?

e) To what extent can students demonstrate knowledge of the American democratic institutions at matriculation and/or at graduation?

f) How well have we worked to increase opportunities for community-based learning, including community-based research and curricular-based community engagement (service-learning)?

g) How well do our campus’s co-curricular activities provide opportunities for civic engagement?

h) To what extent do co-curricular opportunities include, in addition to student service projects, participation in political campaigns and/or other change-oriented activities?

i) To what extent do our co-curricular activities include a regular time and place for reflection about how such experiences might shape students’ view of the world and their future careers and life work?

j) How well does our campus’s culture support students’ participation in genuine, vigorous, open dialogue about the critical issues of their education and the democracy?

k) To what extent are students on campus able to help build and sustain genuinely public cultures full of conversation, civil argument, and discussion about the meaning of their learning, their work, and their institutions as a whole?

l) How well does our campus promote voter registration and participation? Do we regularly invite elected officials to campus to speak, and support public forums on critical issues of the day?

m) How well does our student body on campus reflect the diversity of the nation?

n) How much importance do we place on seeing economic, ethnic, racial, religious, and ideological diversity as a crucial ingredient in learning?

o) How well are students able to encounter and learn from others different from themselves in experience, culture, racial background, gender, sexual orientation, ideologies and views?

p) Do our financial aid and admissions policies assist in creating a campus that reflects the diversity of society?

q) To what extent do our career offices provide opportunities for public and nonprofit career choices?

r) At what stage is our campus in providing financial aid programs to support career choices in the public and nonprofit sectors?

The median number of faculty engaged in community service-learning is currently eight percent. Fourteen percent of campuses surveyed by Campus Compact have more than 30% of the faculty so involved, and 78% of Campus Compact campuses now have a service office of some kind. (Based on a 1998 survey of member schools.)

One of Campus Compact’s goals is that by the year 2004, an average of twenty percent of faculty will be actively involved in teaching courses that engage students in community-based learning and problem solving (service-learning). We would also like to see at least 10% of faculty engaged in research that relates directly to the community of which the campus is a part and 20% of faculty engaged in service to one or more community organizations. Another goal is that every campus will have some system to support faculty in their community engagement in teaching, research, and service.

Faculty Culture

a) How well does our faculty create, participate in, and take responsibility for a vibrant public culture on campus, which values faculty and students’ moral and civic imagination, judgment, and insight?

b) To what extent does our faculty’s teaching include community-based learning and undergraduate action research? Is this work encouraged and supported?

c) To what extent does our faculty discuss the need to develop student citizenship skills and do they discuss what those skills and habits are and how they might be developed?

d) Is our faculty motivated to participate in genuine civic partnerships based on respect and recognition of different ways of knowing and different kinds of contributions in which expertise is "on tap, not on top"?

e) How well do our campus hiring, promotion, and tenure standards explicitly recognize and reward faculty who engage in linking their courses, their research, and their service to community needs and concerns?

f) How well are faculty members prepared to pursue "public scholarship" relating their work to the pressing problems of society, providing consultations and expertise, and creating opportunities to work with community and civic partners in co-creating initiatives of public value?

g) To what extent does our campus have a program to orient new faculty members to the community of which the campus is a part, developed in collaboration with community leaders?

h) To what extent do we have an ongoing program to introduce faculty to community issues and community perspectives on those issues?

The following questions pertain to how well you and the administrative leadership have pursued the issues of campus engagement and diversity. As a reference point, Campus Compact has a goal that by the year 2004, 20% of all administrative staff will be actively engaged in community affairs.

Campus Engagement

a) How well have I, as president, personally and actively engaged in community or public policy development?

b) Have I, as president, engaged my Board of Trustees in addressing my institution’s civic responsibilities?

c) How well do I articulate the philosophical and intellectual meaning of higher education as a agent of democracy, help to highlight the specific and unique quality and character of my particular institution, and make visible the public work and contributions of faculty, staff, and students?

d) Do our administrators create and improve structures that sustain civic engagement and public contributions in many forms?

e) Do our administrators seek to find their own ways to be publicly engaged?

f) How well does the diversity of our faculty and staff reflect the diversity of the nation?

g) To what extent are our hiring practices driven by a desire to achieve broad representation and social diversity, not simply out of moral imperative but out of full recognition that a diversity of backgrounds, cultures, and views is essential to a vital public culture?

An underlying preface to the next set of questions is that the community work that is now done on campus by staff is largely invisible and that more must be done to make visible staff’s multiple experiences, talents, and contributions to student learning and to the community-building process at our institutions

a) To what extent does our staff receive recognition for the often extensive ties that many have with the local community?

b) To what extent are those ties seen as a resource for community-university partnerships, for student learning, for engaged scholarship, and for the broad intellectual life of the institution?

c) To what extent do our administration and faculty view the staff as an integral part of the process to educate students for democracy?

d) To what extent is our staff encouraged to work with faculty to examine and change the campus culture to support engagement?

These campus assessment questions will help define just what it will mean for our institutions, comprised of faculty, students, staff, and administrators, to be intentionally engaged as whole institutions.

Campus/Community Partnerships

a) To what extent does our institution create and sustain long-term partnerships with communities and civic bodies?

b) To what extent can our civic partners point to long-term, positive experiences with our campus?

c) Are these partnerships framed in ways which reflect the college or university’s commitments to and self-interests in community building and civic vitality, that integrate community experience into the learning of students and the professional service opportunities for staff, and that fully understand and appreciate the public dimensions of scholarly work?

d) To what extent does our campus intentionally promote awareness that civic engagement is an essential part of our mission?

e) To what extent does our campus create structures that generate a more porous and interactive flow of knowledge between campus and communities?

f) To what extent do we strive to make our knowledge more accessible to communities?

g) To what extent have we improved the condition of the communities surrounding our campuses?

h) To what extent is a public measure of campus success the condition of the surrounding community and the measurable difference the campus has made in improving the physical and human condition of neighborhood residents?

i) To what extent do we think about procurement and employment practice and use of physical plant as opportunities to enhance our local communities?

j) To what extent do we make sustained efforts to track civic engagement activity by students, staff, or faculty and make an effort to deploy these activities in strategic ways that make maximum impact on the community’s improvement agenda?

k) To what extent are civic engagement activities also embedded in curricular and co-curricular learning opportunities for students?

l) Is civic engagement part of the institutional strategic plan and reviewed annually?

m) To what extent do we presidents lead campus self-assessments of our own civic responsibility efforts?