Citizenship and Higher Education

The Role of Universities in Communities and Society

James Arthur, Karen Bohlin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134312160
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What are the obligations of the university to society and its communities? What are the virtues of university education? What are the university's ethical responsibilities to its students?

The role of citizenship and civic responsibility in higher education is a highly contested yet crucial element of any consideration of the role of university in society.
This book offers thoughtful insights into this role, outlining the intellectual and practical tensions and pressures which come to bear upon higher education institutions. Wide ranging in scope, it offers perspectives from British, European, Canadian and North American educational environments.

Citizenship and Higher Education will prove stimulating reading for anyone concerned with the ethics of education and the university's place in society - including educationalists, researchers, sociologists and policy-makers.

Chapter 1
Introduction

James Arthur

This collection of essays adds a range of scholarly contributions to the continuing discussion about citizenship in higher education. The essays address questions of higher learning based upon principles of citizenship and civic responsibility together with how universities attempt to shape the lives of their students and society. Consequently, many of the contributors approach the notion of citizenship with a degree of wariness as the term can stand for a range of disparate concepts, none of which are universally accepted. Ahier, Beck and Moore (2003) discuss the problematic nature of theoretical discussions of citizenship and lament the lack of a widely used language of citizenship. It is therefore important that we offer some broad understanding of citizenship.Citizenship clearly implies membership in a political grouping of some sort, but it is widely recognized that there are tensions between the political-legal language used in describing this membership and the symbolic-affective dimensions of citizenship. Marshall (1950) spoke about ‘social citizenship’ meaning social and moral identity of the individual situated within a particular community. He emphasized the idea of the ‘social self’ in citizenship by describing the strong interdependence between the self and society. It is this definition of citizenship that is utilized in many of the chapters in this collection with their emphasis on the moral dimensions of citizenship. As Hargreaves (1997) observes: ‘Active citizens are as political as they are moral; moral sensibility derives in part from political understanding; political apathy spawns moral apathy.’ There is much concern in society that students lack a social consciousness, and that they are driven largely by materialistic values. Some of the contributors in this collection argue that citizenship can offer an alternative path for young people—one that helps them discover who they might or ought to become.

It would seem that the primary responsibility of the university is to educate its students, to expand their knowledge, to teach them to pursue the truth and to develop their intellectual and vocational life. The university can also help students make decisions about their personal lives, about freedom and responsibility and about the kinds of ethical codes that might guide them. In so doing the university actively develops the critical capability of students to think problems through that arise in their lives.

Universities in the USA and UK have long been recognized as having a set of wider obligations to society. They bring huge numbers of young people each year in intimate contact with each other. The provision of academic courses in higher education traditionally has assumed that students will become critical, thoughtful and deliberative citizens able to understand and participate constructively in society. The idea that universities have a civic role has been a feature of their rhetoric, as has been the belief that universities are concerned with more than producing technically skilled graduates. However, the contemporary educational experience of students in higher education suggests that it is not necessary for them to engage with questions of character, civic obligation or conscience. Universities, under increased regulations and financial constraints, are not obliged to incorporate within the students’ course anything that is not directly quantifiable. And yet a ‘citizenship culture’ consists of fundamental democratic and personal values that require students to actively engage in educational experiences that are beyond the realm of measurement.

The increasing technical transformations of higher education raise questions in an acute way about the nature and function of universities in preparing their students for citizenship. There is generally no core curriculum that defines the students’ preparation for citizenship and yet the students’ participation in teaching and research necessarily involves them at some level in questions particularly relevant to what it is to be a good citizen. What are the fundamental commitments of the modern university? What should universities be expected to teach—that which benefits the individual or those things that benefit society? As Crick (2000a:145) says, ‘Universities are part of society and, in both senses of the word, a critical part which should be playing a major role in the wider objectives of creating a citizenship culture.’ It is the view of many of the contributors to this book that universiti s should help define, build and advance this ‘citizenship culture’. It is obvious that not every higher education institution can or should do everything. It is also true that not all education takes place in a classroom or laboratory. As Newman recognized in his Idea of a University, the most important educators at any university are peers. Universities often claim that they seek to preserve and enhance a rich social life for their students, but there is more often too rigid a divide between the life of the student residence halls and the life of the classroom and laboratory, between the affective life of student social engagement and the reflective life of the mind.

Aristotle sought the education of free citizens, fully capable of deliberating on the questions of the day, as well as training for occupations so that students could serve the good of the city-state. Aristotle saw education as the means to encourage a commitment by the student to the well-being of the polis as well as a willingness to participate in public affairs. Aristotle’s definition of citizenship therefore presupposes a society, but it also emphasizes the education of the individual in virtue—the civic virtues of moderation, trustworthiness, judgement, the spirit of protectiveness and goodwill. There is a tension between the Aristotelian virtues and the modern democratic ideal. This latter ideal includes teaching the democratic dispositions of citizenship. Liberal understandings of citizenship today might accept the general aims of a university education, but commit the university to adopt a neutral stance towards competing understandings of the good. However, this ‘neutral stance’ is generally selective as higher education courses often emphasize the virtues of tolerance, the insistence on inclusion and the appreciation of different cultural and moral perspectives. Discussions of citizenship take place within the context of plurality and diversity and within an intellectual system that lacks criteria for distinguishing truth among competing claims. Disagreements in universities exist not only about conclusions but also about the principles and methods by which conclusions can be reached.

Considering the level of public investment in higher education in both Britain and the USA, one would expect universities to demonstrate a clear commitment to a culture of citizenship. This would include encouraging students to understand the importance of an active citizenry, but also fully recognizing the centrality of free, rational inquiry in a democracy. However, there are a number of pressures on higher education institutions, which tend to inhibit this commitment. They include the movement from ‘university’ towards a ‘multiversity’, which emphasizes technological expertise and narrow academic specialization, a development that is gradually transforming many first-degree courses into pre-professional training. This in turn binds higher education more tightly to the needs of the economy and the increasing desire of students to be ‘educated’ for employability. There is also a growing schism between community involvement/service, moral character and expertise—‘savvy or skilfulness’ and ‘moral character’ are treated separately so that scholarship is viewed independently of behaviour as a citizen. In terms of schools, the UK government has adopted a policy of promoting citizenship education and ‘education with character’. This will no doubt influence and have implications for developments in higher education. The USA has placed a growing emphasis on character and citizenship education in schools over the past decade, but there is little data that suggest its influence on higher education has been at all significant.

The chapters that follow are written by a number of international scholars and seek to explore the following kinds of questions: What are the wider obligations of the university to society and communities? What are the universities’ civic and ethical responsibilities? Should the university produce a new generation of leaders who have an interest in promoting the common good? How are universities engaged in service learning? Should the university be interested in the ‘character’ of its students? How does the university promote the culture of citizenship? What are the virtues of a university education? Citizenship is primarily about the civil virtues, starting with the relationship between individuals. This is why Ahier, Beck and Moore (2003:162) are right when they say, ‘To approach citizenship from the perspective of the civil rather than the political is to retrace the primary relationship in the historical development of citizenship and to remind ourselves of its bedrock.’

In Chapter 2, I begin by asking whether British universities can even attempt to promote an idea of ‘character’ when the rest of society does not. The chapter examines the student experience in university and describes how universities can be a powerful influence in shaping individuals’ relationships with each other and their communities. It considers how increasingly university thinking is dominated by an ideology of mass production of skills that could be said to be irreconcilable with character education.

In Chapter 3, Charles L.Glenn develops the concept of character from an American perspective on university education. In particular, he explores the idea that a university should essentially ‘stand for something’ and that it should encourage both faculty and students to make certain life commitments. He discusses academic freedom and argues that the freedom of a professor to teach is enhanced within a shared framework of meaning.

In Chapter 4, John Annette explores how the British government’s social objectives seek to encourage volunteering among students and staff in higher education. Over the next three years British universities will receive funding from The Higher Education Active Community Fund to promote these objectives. Of course, students have long been involved in community work and the national network of Student Community Action has been instrumental in offering volunteering opportunities to students. For the most part, student volunteering has been outside any academic framework, but government policy appears to be aimed at incorporating community action into a more coherent higher education framework. Annette focuses on this interest in community and community involvement within the context of debates about citizenship in higher education.

Arthur Schwartz, Vice President of the Templeton Foundation, has a long experience with service learning programmes in the USA and develops Annette’s themes in Chapter 5. The John Templeton Foundation has developed an Honor Roll as well as a Guide to Colleges that Encourage Character Development. He provides a series of personal insights into the civic values that should guide a university.

John Annette and Terence McLaughlin provide us with a second chapter (Chapter 6) to introduce a discussion of citizenship in British higher education from a communitarian perspective. After exploring ideas of what citizenship might mean, Annette and McLaughlin move to a consideration of civil renewal within higher education and draw on the work of scholars in the USA. Annette and McLaughlin advocate active citizenship that encourages HE students to develop skills of civic and political participation, but ask whether, in fact, they appear in the university curriculum.

Karen E.Bohlin, in Chapter 7, provides another US perspective, but focuses on the classical idea of virtue as the moral and intellectual excellences that allow human beings to flourish. She raises the question as to whether virtue can be taught in the university and what a professor’s responsibility is towards his or her students. She explores a number of themes in the student’s university experience and considers the influence of student choices and motivations. Bohlin argues that it is legitimate for university professors to be concerned with the kinds of people students are becoming.

In Chapter 8, Dennis Hayes provides a contrasting perspective to Karen E.Bohlin’s, but whilst he disagrees with many who are advocating ‘virtue ethics’, he agrees that many academics have given up their academic authority in favour of accepting the students’ perspectives as equal to their own. Hayes believes that higher education has become an ‘engagement to teach nothing’, and as a result he concludes that many of today’s students will know nothing worthy of transmission to the next generation.

The chapter on student exchanges (Chapter 9) by Davies et al. provides a concrete example of how students in higher education can broaden their horizons on citizenship through exchange programmes. The exchange programme described in this chapter involves no less than seven higher education institutions collaborating with each other in Canada, Sweden, Germany and England. The chapter provides evidence of how student views of citizenship changed as a result of experiencing a different culture. The final chapter (Chapter 10) by Martin Thrupp provides an interesting commentary and critique of managerialism in British higher education and the compromises made by academics because of it. He suggests that the ethical dilemmas academics face, especially when collaborating closely with government policies, might prevent them acting as ‘critics and conscience’. There are important implications for any culture of citizenship in higher education in Thrupp’s analysis, especially a university’s role in developing community and character and the notion of social citizenship.

Chapter 2
Student character in the British University

James Arthur

The direction in which we have been going in the last two decades, under financial pressures growing more and more serious, and government directives more and more compelling, may produce for us thousands and thousands of graduates able to solve technical problems disinterestedly. But they may well regard larger questions, which cannot be made into technical ones as if they were quite marginal. Such refusal to face the truth could, I suggest, in the long run destroy not merely the university and higher education, but essentially, humankind itself.

Niblett (1990)

Introduction

The purpose of higher education appears more intellectual than moral, especially as universities appear not to be able to draw on any consensus, in an age of moral relativism, to shape the decisions that affect their ethical character. The intellectual aims of a university define the limits of what a university can do. It can teach knowledge about morality, but it does not necessarily teach one to practise the precepts of any particular set of morals. Students are also, at least technically, adults, so on what basis in British society can we teach values to a random group of adults? Nevertheless, whilst universities are indeed not convents or seminaries, they of necessity have an ethos, good or bad, that influences the students in them. It is also expected that universities will have certain duties to society that include moral responsibility for those who frequent them. Indeed, universities hold up various moral criteria by which to define the educational task in which they are engaged—education for freedom, education for citizenship, education for the good life, education for character and so on.The crucial question is: Can universities attempt to define and promote an idea of ‘character’ when the rest of society does not?

According to Barnett (1990:191), the liberal conception of higher education, education of the whole person, has both conservative and radical interpretations.The conservative interpretation tends towards defining higher education as character formation, whilst the ‘radical conception…amounts to nothing less than a total transformation and emancipation of the individual student’. But it appears to me that this ‘transformation’ of the student is above all concerned with character formation. Barnett, in fact, believes that no such radical conception exists in British higher education, chiefly, I suspect, because of the unrealistic nature of this kind of radical individualism. It is also doubtful whether character formation is still an explicitly and widely recognized aim in higher education, especially with the ‘narrowing of vision of what higher education has to offer’ (Barnett, 1990:105). In addition, the business corporate model that operates within many parts of British higher education may also tend to neglect those purposes of a university education that aim to help develop the character of students.

This should not mean that higher education ought therefore to abandon the quest for a defensible and humane form of character development. Universities can be a powerful influence in shaping individuals’ relationships with each other and their communities and they have many opportunities to develop basic human qualities for the benefit of both their students and society. Through the provision of academic courses in higher education, it has often been assumed that students will become thoughtful and critical citizens able to understand and participate constructively in democratic society. This chapter suggests that such an assumption requires critical review. It traces the way British universities have been concerned with the development of student character and reviews the extent to which universities are directly and indirectly involved in promoting the character of their students. It also asks what it would mean for higher education to do something seriously about character development.

Many will still ask whether it is the duty of higher education to help form its students’ characters and also for what purpose this effort should be undertaken? It is recognized at the outset that this is both a complex and vast area for debate and discussion. The last twenty years have seen great and rapid social change and consequently any discussion of student character inevitably involves many complex background conditions in society such as changing attitudes to authority, to parents, to religion, etc. There has certainly been a decline in convention and precedent in working practices. High-profile scandals in business, medicine, teaching and many other areas of public life add to the loss of confidence and the erosion of trust in traditional institutions. It is perhaps also why conduct in public life is more rigorously scrutinized in an attempt to enforce standards of acceptable behaviour. Some would argue that the good society or a moral tradition must form an essential backdrop for the development of character in higher education. Therefore, to enter a discussion about character in higher education might seem like entering a minefield of conflicting definitions and hollow ideology.

There is the question of how to define or what is meant by character, and I present an honest statement of my own position. First, that there is such a thing as character, an interlocked set of personal values that normally guide conduct.

Character is about who we are and who we become. Second, that this is not a fixed set easily measured or incapable of modification, even whilst in university. Third, those choices about conduct are choices about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ actions and thoughts. I believe that we are inescapably involved in forming the character of ourselves and others whilst in university. Character formation does not imply lack of student consent or full participation. My argument is that character development in the modern British university should not simply be about the acquisition of academic and social skills, for it is ultimately about the kind of person a student becomes. It is to do with humans having a purpose that is beyond being an instrument or tool in social processes. This is not achieved within a vacuum, for as Sanford (1969:8) observes: ‘In order to become a person, an individual needs to grow up in a culture, and the richer the culture the more of a person he has a chance of becoming. The central purpose of institutions of higher education is to educate (adults as well as young people); and the aim of education is to develop each individual as fully as possible, to make man more human.’ Reeves (1988:35, 86) notes that ‘education cannot “make a person”, it has a more limited role’; she concludes that universities should create an environment where ethical development commands parity of esteem with mental development. Both Sanford and Reeves locate character formation within society as a whole. The responsibility for character development is therefore something higher education shares with society.

Character development is about the kind of person we become in a particular kind of community. It is also about the kind of ethical understandings and commitments that are possible for us within that community. Character implies that we are free to make ethical de...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Notes on contributors
• Series editors’ preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 Student character in the British University
• Chapter 3 Universities of character?
• Chapter 4 Community, service learning and higher education in the UK
• Chapter 5 Searching for a moral North Star during the college years
• Chapter 6 Citizenship and higher education in the UK
• Chapter 7 Character education at the university: a worthy purpose1
• Chapter 8 The character of higher education
• Chapter 9 Developing citizenship through international exchanges
• Chapter 10 Textual apologism or dissent?
• Bibliography