Colleges are failing to produce competent public citizens, and accreditors should pay more attention to their performance in that area, says former U.S. Sen. Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida.
Mr. Graham says that too many Americans have no idea how to organize their neighbors to affect public policy. Even the students he encountered a few years ago during a visiting position at Harvard University, he says, lacked basic knowledge about how to leverage public power.
In his recent book, America, the Owner’s Manual (CQ Press), written with Chris Hand, Mr. Graham calls on colleges to be much more explicit in teaching about what it means to be a citizen.
Mr. Graham—now based at the University of Florida, which recently established the Bob Graham Center for Public Service—is also part of a nascent effort to develop ways to measure colleges’ success at producing public-spirited adults. He spoke with The Chronicle this week.
Q. What was your experience at Harvard in 2005?
A. It was eye-opening, in comparison to an inner-city high school where I had taught civics for a semester 30 years earlier. And the eye-opener was the similarity. The students at Harvard were about as illiterate in terms of the skills of participatory democracy as those students had been 30 years earlier in the high-school classes.
The message I got from that was that we not only had not made progress in 30 years, but that we’ve retreated, at a time when it is increasingly important for citizens to feel self-confident about their ability to solve the problems of their communities, their neighborhoods, their state or nation.
Q. Yet there are a number of initiatives, including the American Democracy Project, that are urging colleges to take civic education more seriously. Are you encouraged by that or anything else?
A. The emergence of President Obama, who himself was a community organizer before he was in any political office, has underscored the importance of political participation and the skills you can acquire at the neighborhood level. I think his campaign was energizing for many people. The question is, Was that just a false spring of new interest in democracy, or will it be the seedbed of a longtime reform?
Q. Some people might worry that colleges’ civic-education programs would have a liberal-Democratic bias. How would you reply?
A. Learning the skills of citizenship is like learning to play the piano. Once you know how to play the piano, you can play jazz, you can play Beethoven, you can play Broadway tunes. The same is true of the skills of participatory citizenship. It’s not directed at any single ideological set of issues. You can decide what motivates you and what you value.
Q. Another objection might be that civic-education programs would be one more burden on students who are already juggling families, jobs, and classes.
A. If our democracy is not important enough for it to be part of a person’s schedule of life preparation, then I think democracy is in very deep trouble. And many of the things that students are dealing with in the other dimensions of their lives, whether it’s as a parent or as a worker or as a homeowner in a neighborhood—the kinds of challenges that you face there often require you to have the skills of citizenship.
Q. You’ve been involved in some conversations about how the regional accreditors might measure colleges’ success in their civic-engagement roles. Can you say anything about what those metrics should be?
A. I’d like to encourage people to think outside the box and not get focused on any particular way of measuring. But having said that, I think there are three buckets of examination.
One would be what is happening to your current students. Some of that could be quantitative: How many of them are participating in community service? How many are voting? How many have taken courses to prepare themselves for their citizenship responsibilities?
The second bucket would be graduates. How much of an influence did the university experience have on students five or 10 years after they’ve graduated? Are they participating in civic organizations? Are they voting at higher levels than the general population?
And third: You know, there’s a saying that if you want to evaluate a college of education, the first place to go is to the local schools. If a college of education professes a commitment to improving teaching and learning, and it is not apparently having an effect on the schools in their vicinity, what confidence can you have that they’re going to make a difference in schools further away? Well, apply that same principle to citizenship: Does the community in which a college is located demonstrate higher-than-average citizenship qualities? Are people more likely to join organizations with civic missions? Are people more likely to come together in their neighborhoods to solve local problems? Are they voting and participating in political campaigns at higher-than-average levels?
But this is a wide-open question. How do you evaluate a college on its citizenship mission? I’m hoping to generate as many ideas as possible.