Dive Brief:
- Following a year marked by protests and student discontent, more colleges are adding civic engagement requirements to the curriculum for the coming academic year.
- Michael Willard, faculty director for the Office of Service Learning at Cal State Los Angeles, told Inside Higher Ed the trend reflects a recognition that institutions are failing their missions of "preparing students to be citizens through new forms of engagement in civil society."
- The institutional soul-searching comes at a time in which students say they plan to increase their participation in campus protests; a recent national freshman survey found more incoming students feel "very likely" to participate in demonstrations, with the greatest increase represented by African-American students.
Dive Insight:
Today's students have indicated loudly they do not intend to be passive participants in society — and this permeates into their experiences in higher education. Frustrations over societal injustices have bled into an intolerance for any perceived injustice or racial hostility on campus. Protests over campus culture have forced a number of changes on campus, from the addition of new academic programs to the removal of institutional leaders.
Administrators will need to be proactive about monitoring the pulse of the institution and addressing any issues that present, whether issues of racial injustice, faculty issues around tenure and compensation or any myriad of issues that may present themselves on campus. But recent surveys have shown that while leaders believe higher ed overall to be in a real state of instability, they have much more confidence in their own campuses.
This represents, at best, a significant disconnect, and at worst, aloofness on the part of campus leadership as it relates to the realities of the campus environment. Such civic engagement requirements could be one way to gauge student attitudes ahead of any high-profile protests.