Public Engagement

Ideally, students, faculty, and staff would all work together in public engagement. In practice, of course, there's usually a separation of roles and a gradient of authority: faculty propose and supervise the project, students carry out the assignment.

A group of students calling themselves SCOPE - Student Council on Public Engagement - have organized a Spring Summit that aspires to overcome this separation. The vision for the Summit emphasizes unification and collaboration:

Vision: Strategic meeting of student leaders, faculty, administration, government officials, public achievement participants, coordinate colleges, and others. The purpose is to underline the meaning of civic engagement and public achievement, while discussing its accomplishments. To bring together groups and individuals who are working toward a more civically involved community in order to collaborate and create a unified message. Many people are working on similar projects but few are making theses resources known and available. In doing so, we will be creating a democracy laboratory and a legacy of civically conscious University of Minnesota. We can contribute to the University community, this state, and country as well as the world abroad by working as a collective body by synthesizing our power and passions.

This is a welcome vision. Students remind us of the power, and the necessity, of collective work. They can bring new energy, and new minds and hands, to initiatives already underway but in steady state. They can also point out to us new things that need to be done. By showing their idealism, as well as their willingness to work and organize, students validate and reinvigorate the public engagement work of their elders.

Many of the students active in SCOPE have taken Prof. James Farr's course on Practicing Democratic Education and have worked with Dennis Donovan at St. Bernard's middle school, putting the coursework ideas into practice in "a laboratory for citizenship". Students from this course also lead Students Today Leaders Forever and went on the Pay it Forward tour over spring break that I featured in my March 22 blog.

I hope that SCOPE will become a constituent group in COPE (the Council on Public Engagement). Students need to be involved in COPE, and to speak up and participate in many of the workgroups and projects that COPE has underway. The undergraduates have told me that they feel more removed from the faculty than grad students are, but in fact they have a different - perhaps less duty-bound or dependent - relation with faculty. They can challenge us in ways that our colleagues, and our colleagues soon-to-be, might find more difficult. We should welcome the challenge.

SCOPE shows us that young people have not lost the idealism that has traditionally been one of their most attractive - and most challenging - characteristics, and it also shows us that engaged idealism need not be politically partisan. Student engagement activities, including but not limited to service-learning, energize them and make them learn better. Experience with engaged citizenship leads them to continue their public service after graduation, whether in Teach For America or in the Marine Corps.

We are coming to the realization that how we should really try to measure the worth and rank of a university is not its inputs - the ACT scores of its students or the federal research dollars secured by its faculty - but rather its outputs: the beneficial things it does for society, the ways in which it contributes to a democratic society. Surely the development of such engaged students counts as a strongly positive output.