Tomorrow's Professor Blog

Folks:

The posting below looks at how to make campus libraries more attractive and useful to students and faculty. It is by Michael L. Rodgers & David A. Starrett, Southeast Missouri State University and is number 32 in a series of selected excerpts from the National Teaching and Learning Forum newsletter reproduced here as part of our “Shared Mission Partnership.” NT&LF has a wealth of information on all aspects of teaching and learning. If you are not already a subscriber, you can check it out at [http://www.ntlf.com/] The on-line edition of the Forum–like the printed version – offers subscribers insight from colleagues eager to share new ways of helping students reach the highest levels of learning. National Teaching and Learning Forum Newsletter, Volume 15, Number 3, © Copyright 1996-2006. Published by James Rhem & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Playing as Pedagogy

Tomorrow’s Academia

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Are You a 21st Century Library-Ready Instructor?

Instructor to class, Friday, 11:59 AM:

“The paper is due in two weeks. It should be at least ten pages in length, and include a bibliography containing a minimum of eight sources. You can find many good sources on the third floor of the library. OK, I’ll see you next week.”

The noon bell rings. Students Amira and Ken exchange glances as they rise to exit the classroom.

Amira: “Wow. Ten pages. And I already have three other big projects due next week!”
Ken: “Yeah, it’s a killer. I guess I can Google some stuff while I eat lunch; that’ll save me a little time.”
Amira: “You’re not going to the library?”

Ken: “Where’s the library? JUST KIDDING! If you find anything good there, copy it for me, but I think I can get enough stuff from the Web to put together a paper. He didn’t say NOT to use the Web, did he?”

What Do Your Students Expect a Library to Be?

It doesn’t take a degree in Library Science to know that a library is a special place. Academics surely agree that a good library is at the very heart of scholarship: universities build reputations around the quality of their libraries, and grants are awarded to researchers for the purpose of traveling to specific libraries to use the resources. There’s even that wonderful, papery library smell that, to some minds, is as pleasing as a fine perfume or the salt sea air at dawn. To academics, the library has been, and probably always will be, a special place. But the very emphasis on place is what often alienates our students: many students, especially the younger “Millennial” or “Net-generation” students, have grown up enabled by technology in ways that reduce or remove the importance of place. These students-we often call them “21st Century Learners” at our institution-can chat with friends without meeting on a street corner, deposit and withdraw money without going to a bank, listen to music anytime and anywhere, and even work at a job without going to a place of employment. Many 21st Century Learners experience real joy every time they learn how to carry out another of life’s activities in the new anytime/anyplace style. To them, a brick-and-mortar library, with its hours of operation and resources that require one’s physical presence to access, is too far removed from the anytime/anyplace paradigm to be relevant.

Can a Library Be Relevant to 21st Century Learners?

Librarians throughout academe worry about the ways that libraries are used-or not used-by students. Increasing portions of acquisition budgets are going to online journals, database subscriptions, and other electronic media that require staff and policies to mediate use of the resources. At the very least, someone must arrange passwords for database access and collect fees for pay-per-use services. Perhaps in an effort to counter the student preference for easy Googling over more difficult approaches to research that may yield higher-quality results, required seminars and courses dedicated to information literacy have become standard fare at many institutions. But the challenge that 21st Century Learners present to libraries goes deeper than student preferences for fast and convenient approaches to research. Experiential learning, group work, collaboration, and informal learning are all important attractors that these increasingly consumer-minded students tend to seek out.

How can libraries attract students to the places where the mediators work? Many libraries are becoming noisier, livelier places by creating “library information commons”1: individual study carrels are giving way to small conference rooms equipped with projectors and computers; new furniture comes with wheels so students can reorganize space to better support group assignments. Computers richly endowed with course-specific software are popping up all over, and wireless networks are rapidly becoming part of the basic infrastructure. Perhaps most amazing is the appearance of cappuccino bars in spaces that not long ago featured “NO FOOD OR DRINK IN THE LIBRARY” signs!

But They’re Cutting Our Journals!

What do faculty think of the transformation? Certainly there are some who object to the ostensible pandering to students who seem more interested in comfortable lounges than true scholarship. More pointed objections arise from a perception that library information commons are being funded by cutbacks in periodicals budgets. The reaction is a natural one: many libraries face enormous financial pressure from external forces, notably steep increases in journal subscription prices. If increasingly costly journal subscriptions are cut to balance strained budgets at the same time remodeling projects are moving forward, distinctions between budgets for capital improvements and operations are easily lost. Faculty are left believing that student lounges won out over journals-an impression not likely to be accepted graciously when limited journal holdings threaten scholarship and often, program accreditation within the disciplines. Combine the threat to discipline-specific scholarship with the reality that library information commons projects are usually promoted not by faculty, but by librarians, ?students, and administrators, and it becomes easy for faculty to dismiss the projects as unhelpful and misguided.

How Can a Faculty Member Use the Library Information Commons to Teach Students?

Access to journals and other products of scholarship will continue to be a problem for faculty even if the library information commons is merely a passing fad. But can we at least make a case for the potential teaching and learning value of library information commons and similar installations? Is the library information commons a frill, or can it be an essential tool for teaching the 21st Century Learner? Can its value be maximized by developing innovative ways to use the library information commons in courses?

Some might conclude that it is not worth the trouble to try to deliberately include the library information commons in one’s teaching strategy. After all, the commons is designed to support informal, student-directed learning. However, students who decide to use the library information commons because of its socially comfortable feel nevertheless come to a place where the resources needed to do high-quality scholarship are available. Faculty can and should seize the opportunity to craft learning opportunities that lead students into thoughtful use of library resources-particularly those that help students first to discern differences in the quality of information, and then appreciate the impact of those differences on the product of the scholarly effort.

Librarians stand ready to help students move beyond the “Google everything” approach to scholarship, and if students are showing up in the library to meet in the information commons, perhaps faculty can help to connect students and librarians. It is worth a try. For example, an assignment might be structured to include a mandatory consultation with a reference librarian before the assignment’s bibliography is due. If the library information commons includes (as some do) technology-enhanced studios for practicing PowerPoint presentations, students could be directed to library support staff who would offer tips on proper ways to cite references used in oral presentations. Perhaps faculty and library staff could collaborate to develop a rubric for an “information quality assessment” that could be applied to the sources students use in their work.

How to Learn, Where to Learn

Simple adaptations of assignments such as those listed above can help students see the library as much more than either stacks of journal holdings or a combination coffee lounge and wireless hotspot. For faculty, closer interaction with library staff who are experienced users of resources conforming to the “anytime/anyplace” ideal can provide insight into who the 21st Century Learners are, and what really reaches them. Moreover, faculty who teach online courses can benefit tremendously from working with the library staff: after all, libraries are usually obligated to provide to online students the same level of service that face-to-face students receive. Thus, library staffers are well-equipped to suggest ways that electronic resources might be used in online courses to produce papers and projects of quality comparable to that realized in face-to-face courses. Finally, wise utilization of the library information commons in courses can serve to sensitize faculty to ways that physical space affects learning. Much as MIT’s famous Stata Center2 is designed to promote innovation through the building’s technology and architecture, the commons can, on a different level, facilitate collaboration between students, and a willingness on the part of students to produce excellent work because the resources are readily available to do so.

When Does a Place Become an Event?

No unit within the university has been transformed more by technology than the library. Reorganizing the library’s physical space to make technology-enabled resources both more readily available and more wisely utilized is a laudable action made all the more challenging by 21st Century Learners’ desire for highly social interaction with their peers. If convenience, comfort, and social activity bring students into the library, then so be it. They are in the right place to locate and gather the best data. Through close collaboration with the library, and thoughtful inclusion of the library in course assignments, faculty can play matchmaker, bringing together students and library resources in ways that result in meaningful scholarship.

Notes
1. Not to be confused with “information commons” as an online discussion forum or other virtual space in which opinions, information, and ideas are freely shared, especially as an alternative intellectual property model. See, for example,
“Information Commons Project 2002-04.” American Library Association. 2005.
http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/oitp/infocommons0204/infocom200204.htm.
2 “The Evolving MIT Campus” MIT Department of Facilities,
http://web.mit.edu/evolving/buildings/stata/

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Folks:

The posting below looks at what are the criteria for the scholarship of engagement. It is from Chapter 8 The How and Why of the Scholarship of Engagement, by David N. Cox, executive assistant to the president of The University of Memphis., in Creating a New Kind of University ; Institutionalizing Community-University Engagement, edited by Stephen L. Percy, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Nancy L. Zimpher, University of Cincinnati and Mary Jane Brukardt, Eastern Washington University. Published by Anker Publishing Company, Inc., 563 Main Street, P.O. Box 249, Bolton, MA 01740-0249 USA. ISBN 1-882982-88-6. Copyright © 2006 by Anker Publishing Company, Inc. [www.ankerpub.com]. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: What Can We Do with Laptops in Class?

Tomorrow’s Academy

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The Scholarship of Engagement: What Is It?

David N. Cox

Central to a discussion of a “new kind of university” is the meaning of scholarship. As Boyer (1990) observed in discussing the role of undergraduate higher education in society, “One of the most crucial issues-the one that goes to the core of academic life-relates to the meaning of scholarship itself. Scholarship is not an esoteric appendage; it is at the heart of what the profession is all about” (p.1). If something is “new” about universities, that newness has to include changes in the understanding of scholarship.

As the title of this chapter suggests, a form of that newness may be found in the concept of the scholarship of engagement: what it is, how it is different, and what issues it raises for engaging faculty in meaningful scholarship across all disciplines.

The American Heritage Dictionary (2000) identifies scholarship as the methods, discipline, or attainments of a scholar; knowledge resulting from study and research; or financial aid for education. Focusing on its meaning related to contributions to knowledge, Boyer’s (1990) Scholarship Reconsidered has broadened the understanding of the term to include four dimensions-discovery, integration, application, and teaching. Discovery involves adding to the stock of human knowledge. Integration involves making connections across disciplines that lead to new understandings. Application involves the work of the academy toward more humane ends. Contact, of course, can take many forms. It can be incidental and passive, or it can be regular and active. It can be one-directional or interactive, formal or informal. More recently, the notion of the scholarship of engagement builds on Boyer’s definition by including active and interactive contact between people inside and external to the academy across the range of actions involved in scholarship-from setting goals, and selecting and applying means and methods, to reflection and dissemination. It is that interaction across the range of scholarship activities that distinguishes the contact involved in the scholarship of engagement.

Using the definition of the dynamic interaction inherent in the scholarship of engagement, it is possible to determine what is engagement and what is not. So, for example, Louis Pasteur making the connection between sewage and disease while walking city streets in the 1800s led to scholarship in the form of discovery and application. His resulting search for an intervention to treat a real-world problem shaped the questions he asked leading to the discovery of the germ theory of disease (Strokes, 1997). There is also a long history of contact with persons and places outside the academy in the form of dissemination through the transfer of technical expertise by agricultural agents connected to land-grant universities. In neither of these cases, however, were persons outside of the academy actively involved in any of the scholarship activities. They were not involved in shaping the questions, choosing or executing the means, or reflecting on the results. Moreover, dissemination was one-directional, knowledge transferred from expert to client. Thus while connected in one sense of the term, absent interaction in the processes of scholarship, these examples do not represent the scholarship of engagement.

In contrast, Chicago residents of the Renacer West Side neighborhood and faculty and students a the University of Illinois-Chicago worked together in designing the means to increase employment opportunities for the residents. They did not accomplish their short-term goal of increased employment by residents at the university, but collective reflection by residents, faculty, and students led to discovery and development of a longer-term application that expanded employment opportunities beyond the neighborhood (Mayfield & Lucas, 2000). Residents of colonias in south Texas-rural communities and neighborhoods bordering Mexico, which require sufficient infrastructure and other basic services (U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000)-participated as partners with faculty members and students at the University of Texas-Austin in implementing and reflecting on the impact of a plan for enhancing public service infrastructure for colonias in the area (Wilson & Guajardo, 2000). Community residents in East Saint Louis, Illinois, in the 1990s were instrumental in reframing discovery and application questions being pursued by faculty members and students at the University Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The result was the creation of knowledge more relevant to the problems of the community (Reardon, 2000), And in a West Philadelphia neighborhood, community residents, public school and city officials, and faculty members and students at the University of Pennsylvania worked together to redesign K-12 school curricula, pedagogy, and social service programming, improving student outcomes and adding to knowledge about advancing urban school systems (Harkavy, 1999).

In sum, the scholarship or engagement, therefore, is a set of activities. At its core are four dimensions of scholarship-discovery, integration, application, and teaching. It becomes the scholarship of engagement through its active and interactive connection with people and places outside of the university in the activities of scholarship, setting goals, selecting means and methods, applying means and methods, reflecting on results, and dissemination of the results. Given the range of these dimensions and activities, the depth of connections may vary. At a less engaged level, the interaction may involve only one dimension of scholarship or one of a limited set of scholarship activities. At the deepest level, the interactions carry through multiple dimensions and across all of the scholarship activities. In each case, however, it is the presence of that interaction that distinguishes the scholarship engagement.

Folks:

The posting below looks at the relationship between creativity and national prosperity. While it is from a U.S. perspective, the comments apply to most other countries as well. The article, The Creativity Imperative: A National Perspective, is by Deborah L. Wince-Smith, president, Council on Competitiveness, and it appeared in Peer Review , Vol. 8, No. 2, Spring 2006. [www.aacu.org/peerreview] Copyright © 2006. American Association of Colleges and Universities. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Reflections on More Than Half a Century of Teaching

Tomorrow’s Academia

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The Creativity Imperative: A National Perspective

Many of the other essays in this issue look at the importance of creativity from the perspectives of students, faculty members, and educational institutions. And clearly, each of these constituencies has a stake in encouraging creative behavior. My interest, however, lies in the connection between creativity and national prosperity. Creativity and innovation have become essential to generating the jobs that we will need in order to sustain our standard of living over the coming decades. And as the process of innovation itself evolves and demands new skills, our colleges and universities must rise to the task of fostering creativity among students, faculty, and the broader community.

Creativity may be about fun and games, but it is also America’s single greatest comparative advantage in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

At one of our recent meetings, John Young, the founder of the Council on Competitiveness and former CEO of Hewlett Packard, explained, “Our standard of living is not a birthright. We have to earn it in the marketplace every day.” Today the United States has the highest standard of living in the world. The flip side of this is that we also have very high labor costs compared to other countries. We will never be able to compete directly with countries like China and India on the basis of cost, and, as low-wage nations around the world develop skilled workforces and adopt cutting-edge technology, we can no longer assume that we will win on quality either.

The solution involves one of the basic tenets of corporate strategy-focus on what you do best and do it better than anyone else. And what we in America do best is to innovate-to generate new ideas, design new products, deliver sophisticated services, and introduce new business strategies. The jobs that are most vulnerable to low-wage competition tend to be the least creative. If it is routine or rule-based, if it can be digitized or reliably codified, then it can be “offshored” to a location with lower labor costs.
Thankfully, despite the concerns raised in many of the essays in this issue, America’s colleges and universities are some of the best in the world when it comes to encouraging creativity, innovation, risk taking, and entrepreneurship. But we can do better, and we must do better as the rest of the world builds up capacities that were once our unique advantage.

The Global Innovation Race

The world has changed dramatically over the past two decades. Many nations have embraced market economies and moved toward political democratic norms. Billions of people have joined the global trading system. And this is a good thing. Despite the sometimes dislocating effects of global trade, overall standards of living are rising rapidly around the world. Opportunities that were once undreamt of are now within reach for millions of people.

Taking their cue from America’s success, countries around the world have also realized that they must focus on innovation by investing in education, research, and infrastructure. In the 1980s, the United States faced almost no competition in the arena of innovation. Even today, with only 5 percent of the world’s population, we employ nearly one third of all science and engineering researchers, account for 40 percent of global research and development spending, and publish 35 percent of all scientific articles in the world. But our lead is narrowing. We have seen the rapid rise of advanced manufacturing in places like Korea, Taiwan, and China. Recently, China even surpassed the United States in exports of advanced technology products. And, as high-technology production has moved overseas, research and development activities have begun to follow.

Now, even the service sector has opened up to global competition. Widespread deployment of high-speed telecommunications combined with rising levels of education and falling trade barriers mean that white-collar work that once had to be physically located in the United States can now be performed overseas-not just technical support and software development but even financial research, legal services, or x-ray analysis.

While some people see offshoring as a “hollowing out” of the U.S. economy, I see a rapid ascent up the value chain. Activities that were once considered highly sophisticated, like manufacturing electronic components or developing custom software, have become routine and commoditized. As India, China, and others move up the value chain, it is imperative that we continue to find new ways to generate value that cannot be generated elsewhere. We need to add new rungs to the ladder as others move up behind us. In today’s economy, that means focusing on the most creative aspects-generating intellectual property, emphasizing design, and taking risks on completely new ways of doing business. This does not mean abandoning traditional industries like manufacturing; rather, it means finding innovative ways to create value within those industries.

Innovating on Innovation

For this reason, we at the Council on Competitiveness believe that innovation will be the single most important factor in determining America’s success through the twenty-first century. Two years ago we launched the National Innovation Initiative to better understand the importance of innovation for U.S. competitiveness and to identify a set of actions that the public and the private sector should take to increase our innovation capacity. The result is laid out in our National Innovation Initiative’s report, Innovate America: Thriving in a World of Challenge and Change.

Our research indicates that innovation has changed tremendously from the days of large industrial research laboratories and ivory tower universities. Where, how, and why innovation occurs are in flux-across geography and industries, in speed and scope of impact, and even in terms of who is innovating. We see this transformation in a number of areas. For example, while in the past large corporations pushed out innovations that they hoped customers would buy, now the customers are getting involved and suggesting (or demanding) new directions for companies to pursue.

As the complexity of technology increases, we also see that innovation is becoming more collaborative. Each new product or service now requires a range of organizations and individuals with different assets and skills to come together. The rise of open-source methods in software development illustrates just one of many new models for collaboration. This rapid rise in complexity requires collaboration not only across organizations but also across established academic disciplines. Cross-disciplinary teams are now essential to tackle the most critical problems confronted by business, academia, and society.

It is important to recognize that while science and technology are critical to the innovation process, innovation is not the sole preserve of scientists and engineers. A truly cross-disciplinary team must span the arts, humanities, and social sciences as well as the sciences. And that is why creativity must be a fundamental goal of liberal education. Not only must scientists and engineers learn to think creatively in a range of areas, but also all liberal arts students need to learn how to think about problems with a scientific or technological component. An innovative economy depends on creative people in the arts, literature, design, marketing, management, and a range of other areas. Ultimately, innovation involves looking at the world in new ways, finding new approaches to existing problems, and applying models or theories from one field to another. These are all skills that a creative liberal education should stress.

Educating Innovators

While these trends that I have described-the growing importance of innovation for our national prosperity and the changing nature of innovation itself-have opened up exciting opportunities, they also challenge existing institutional structures. Our educational institutions were created in a world defined by boundaries that are now dissolving-disciplinary boundaries, organizational boundaries, national and regional boundaries, even boundaries between teachers and students or professors and entrepreneurs. While they have evolved significantly from their origins as seminaries and professional schools, few colleges or universities today see their role as the education of truly creative, entrepreneurial innovators.

And yet, while our colleges and universities perhaps were not designed for the tasks that lay ahead, they are better positioned than any of our other institutions to meet the needs of an innovative society. They are the institutions that we rely on for nurturing talent, performing frontier research, and generating breakthrough ideas. They serve as the epicenters for regional innovation hotspots, linking together small and large businesses, state and federal initiatives, entrepreneurs, and researchers. Critical to their ability to play this role-both in their local communities and at the national level-will be the degree to which creativity can become a central value in a liberal education.

The United States has many advantages when it comes to creativity, including freedom of thought and speech, a diverse population, an open society, capital markets that quickly move to support new and exciting ideas, and a heritage of risk taking and pushing back frontiers. For these reasons, the changes in the global environment play to our strengths. We are well positioned to maintain and even increase our prosperity over the coming decades, and colleges and universities will play a critical role in this national endeavor as centers for a creative liberal education.

Folks:

In this month’s Carnegie Perspectives, Tom Ehrlich and Anne Colby revisit the highly politicized Academic Bill of Rights legislation. It is #25 in the monthly series called Carnegie Foundation Perspectives. These short commentaries exploring various educational issues are produced by the CFAT. The Foundation invites your response at: CarnegiePresident@carnegiefoundation.org. Reprinted with permission.

Note: You can comment on this or any past posting by going to: http://amps-tools.mit.edu/tomprofblog/

Regards,

Rick Reis
reis@stanford.edu
UP NEXT: Finishing the Doctoral Degree in a Timely Fashion:

Tomorrow’s Academia

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Political Bias in Undergraduate Education

by Tom Ehrlich and Anne Colby

Under the banner of an “Academic Bill of Rights,” legislation has been introduced in Congress and in several states to help remedy what the sponsors charge is liberal political bias on college campuses. The bill, which has yet to be approved anywhere, would challenge campuses to adopt voluntarily procedures that the sponsors claim would encourage a diversity of political perspectives among faculty, campus speakers, and student organizations.

While the goals of this effort are commendable, we think this particular solution is misguided. Leaders at every university agree that educating students in the practice of open-minded inquiry, while ensuring academic freedom of faculty, is a key component of undergraduate education, but creating a classroom and wider campus climate that is truly open to multiple perspectives on hot-button political issues is extremely difficult to accomplish.

Yet, if we are to educate our students for responsible citizenship, we and they can’t steer clear of controversy. Liberal education and the values of the academy are all about the need to seek and consider alternative conceptions, stances, and views and to consider them respectfully. If a campus is to commit itself to open inquiry and the exploration of a diversity of views, it should affirm the many ways in which controversy occurs rather than limiting its focus to the often simplistic battles between left and right. In many domains, students must learn to think clearly about controversial issues, to form opinions and make a strong case for them, to evaluate the evidence for competing positions, to understand alternative perspectives in their own terms, to engage opposing views with civility and a sincerely open mind, and to change their own positions when persuaded.

This is difficult to accomplish, perhaps especially when it comes to controversial issues that may have an ideological dimension. Unfortunately, in most settings, including universities, people with strong opinions talk primarily to those who agree with them. The result is that often neither students nor faculty are accustomed to communicating across ideological divisions.

In part because faculty may be unaware of the values and beliefs implicit in their approach to a subject, they may not raise their assumptions for explicit examination. This lack of awareness can happen at any point on the political spectrum. Even faculty who want to encourage open debate by drawing out minority opinions are sometimes so convinced of their ideological positions that they can’t imagine how one might make a persuasive case for an opposing view.

A legislative approach to ensuring open inquiry fails because it casts the issue in negative terms, as a matter of policing the faculty-and the campus more broadly-to stamp out “indoctrination.” It is a solution that inherently calls for less, not more, debate. Given the complexity and ambiguity of both political and academic discourse, this kind of policing is also impossible to implement objectively. Cast in negative terms, the effort itself would be destructive to the goal of civil discourse across ideological boundaries.

By contrast, a positive approach, in which administration, faculty, and students from different political perspectives join together to develop strategies for the positive pursuit of more open inquiry, contributes to a climate of openness, respect, and cooperation. This means that faculty and administrative leaders on a campus should be self-conscious in raising the issue of open inquiry-what is it, why is it important, and what should the principle mean in practice?

Convocations and other gatherings at the opening of the school year are often useful occasions to open conversations about these issues. Based on these conversations, the campus might choose to adopt the principles of open inquiry and individual commitment as explicit goals and probe more deeply about how they can be pursued. If such goals have already been adopted, their meaning in practice can be re-examined at these times.

Campus leaders should use multiple opportunities to endorse and support these goals. Materials sent to newly admitted students, as one example, should set an expectation that the campus will be a community of discourse, and that students will be exposed to a diversity of opinion about many issues, including political perspectives. The message should be modeled in the range of individuals invited to speak on campus. University officials do not control all of these invitations, but they do control some, and those invitations can be balanced in ways that emphasize the openness of the institution to a spectrum of differing views.

In the political domain, speakers should include respected exemplars of open-mindedness and civility who (despite their own political convictions) truly believe that in order to be effective, engaged citizens need to be skilled at communicating and forming alliances with people whose perspectives are different from their own. Invited guests should also include those who exemplify political engagement as cooperative public work within a community, reflecting the value of compromise in pursuit of the greater good.

Campus leaders should be in regular touch with a range of student opinions to test whether the campus climate seems to some students to stifle minority political opinions. If so, those leaders should work with students and faculty to ensure that forums are available for the expression of minority views and for thoughtful exploration of multiple points of view. In many parts of the academy, the role of scholarship is seen to include representing the perspectives of the powerless, those who are out of the economic and political mainstream. Academic freedom protects faculty’s right to challenge prevailing views without punitive response. Likewise, it is important for academic leaders, including faculty, to protect the academic freedom of students who wish to challenge the prevailing views within their classroom or institution.

Faculty can also do much to promote the value of open-minded inquiry within the classroom. At the very least, they can examine carefully their assignments and what they say in class through the lens of open inquiry as a course goal. One strategy some faculty use is to ask students to conduct research on and present the strongest arguments they can marshal for two or more quite different positions on contentious issues. This requires students to bring a degree of sympathy to positions they do not hold.

Faculty should also pay attention to assessment. Sometimes students believe their academic work has been evaluated based on the political views it expresses, rather than its quality, even when this is not true. For this and other reasons (which concern good teaching more broadly), it is essential to make assessment criteria explicit and to provide as much feedback as possible based on those criteria.

It has become a commonplace to complain about America’s polarized political landscape. If the next generation of citizens is to set a different tone, they must experience in college an alternative to the politics of vitriol.

Join the conversation »

This Perspective is excerpted from an article originally published in the Summer 2004 issue of Liberal Education, a publication of the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

Tom and Anne lead the Foundation’s work on the importance of civic and political engagement among undergraduate students. In this piece, they argue for the necessity for college faculty members to become much more self-conscious of the variety of ways in which they communicate their political and social views to students. They provide recommendations and precautions for campus leaders who seek to create opportunities for teaching and inquiry that will encourage student learning around difficult issues.

© 2006 The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
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