“Citizenship and the Liberal Arts”
L4L Spring Forum #3

Present:

Kara Brascia
Nick Miller
Tony Roark
Susan Shadle


Discussion focused on how the University can prepare students for engagement in civic life after college, whether by curricular, co-curricular, or extra-curricular means.

Kara brought up Thomas Ehrlich’s proposal that students need to get 3 things out of a university education to become engaged citizens: content knowledge, motivation, and skills (including consensus building, public speaking, etc.). Particular couses are well suited to providing content knowledge, but the are arguably less well suited to providing skills and motivation, at least in their current form. Class size and pedagogical methods greatly affect how well a course can instill skills. Extra-curricular activities (like service learning) are especially effective in providing motivation and habits.

Kara and Susan then introduced the subject of a new category of scholarship students (President’s Scholars) who all now take an introductory seminar on citizenship; this year’s is focused on voter participation, but the course is expected to evolve. Perhaps this class could serve as a model for a future course offered to a greater number of students (or even required of all students).

The majority of the free-flowing discussion addressed possible ways to introduce some type of requirement that all students would fulfill that would somehow prepare them for engagement in civil society after college.

1. A set of courses? Drawn from political philosophy, sociology, other fields…how many? Will all 3 or 4 thousand students be taking this (or these) classes every fall? What will that do to the structure of the core, the current enrollment balance across disciplines?

2. A single course? Where, in which department? What are the ramifications?

3. An interdisciplinary course or set of courses? How, again, to project the ramifications?

4. Each department has a course that would fulfill the “citizenship” requirement?

5. How would the imagined “citizenship” requirement relate to the current “diversity requirement”?

Each of these alternatives introduces acute practical challenges at all levels of the institution, but particularly at the department level. A provisional consensus emerged that some type of interdisciplinary course(s) might hold great promise in minimizing the staffing challenges to departments while maximizing the opportunity to engage issues and values central to civic preparedness.