Volume 10, Issue 1

Classroom simulations are an effective way to teach university students lessons of governmental processes and civic responsibility, but they can only reach the students in that particular class. For universities that want to address civic education across the campus, how can they take the concept of a classroom simulation, yet implement it at a campus-wide level? This paper addresses the successful implementation of a campus-wide mock presidential election in the fall semester of 2007, and includes a discussion of how civic education can be the responsibility of faculty from disparate disciplines.

Teaching leadership with a global perspective is imperative for all Leadership Studies programs, as daily interactions in economics, culture, politics, technology, communication, and education with individuals around the world have become commonplace. This paper surveys past approaches to multicultural and international education, and describes a “Global Immersion Week” learning activity that uses the “unit approach” as a vehicle to educate students on global issues. Global Immersion Week provided students with the opportunity to read, discuss, and engage in global issues in all core leadership courses during the same timeframe. Results indicate that the learning activity is effective in helping students whet their appetites to explore more global issues and become more globally aware and engaged in current international issues.

As students return and our campuses again become lively with political activity, situations are certain to develop that raise questions about how professionals in a collegiate environment interact appropriately with students around political issues.

This paper describes a study of 21 college-level courses and programs that led to significant gains in participants’ political knowledge, skills, and motivation. The paper considers the ways that these students encountered ethical issues and explores the relationship of ethical dimensions, such as idealism and cynicism, to political learning. The study suggests that educational attention to the moral dimensions of politics can strengthen the depth and resilience of political commitment as well as support more ethically thoughtful and sophisticated political engagement.

Values education needs to become much more closely tied to education for civic agency, the skills, capacities, and identities needed for effective collective action on issues that also advances values of the common good, in environments where civic values are under siege. This will require a bolder and more political conception of the role of values educators, tied to the challenge of redeeming a democratic understanding of the American dream.

This essay considers the shifting terrain of the “religious” and the “secular” in liberal arts education from the perspective of a religious life administrator. The argument shows how current debates about secularity provide a helpful lens for understanding the changing forms of student religious and spiritual practices. Campuses are now finding their secularity challenged: long-held assumptions that equate modernity with an increasing secularization—and that equate religiosity with an incomplete modernity—have come under critical scrutiny. The pressures on secularity should not be understood as its defeat by triumphal or resurgent religion, but as secularism encountering its own limits, and perhaps making room for new modes of understanding beyond modernity’s crisis of belief and unbelief.

In this essay some emerging trends in college student political engagement are reviewed and ideas presented for educating this generation of students for democracy. Drawing upon their work with students on college campuses around the country, Hollander and Longo argue that students are not apathetic, but colleges and universities need to do more to tap into their interest in a different kind of politics by developing more opportunities for students to create a public life that is more open, participatory, relational, and inclusive.

“Developing global citizens” is the goal of colleges today but does this phase have any meaning? College students who view themselves as global citizens also express a complex view of knowing, are committed to the common good, and desire to relate to others unlike them. Education abroad is one effective pathway to develop students with a global perspective, but we should not limit our perspective to cultural differences that are only associated with nations and countries. We instead need to understand and respect justice, equity, fairness, and equal opportunities as virtues and values that are important goals and ends of education.

As the nation prepares for a pivotal general election this fall, it is timely to consider what role colleges and universities should play in promoting student participation in the political process. While colleges and universities have become deeply invested over the past 20 years in promoting community service and integrating service learning into the curriculum, there continues to be considerable uncertainty about the role of promoting student involvement in the political process and in the broader arena of public work.

Two scholars discuss their research based on results from the Academic Integrity Awareness Survey (AIAS), which assesses students' knowledge about, and their decision making process regarding, ethical behavior.

A new and unique academic community in an elite public university offers an educational opportunity to young people from underprivileged homes and with poor educational preparation. In this setting a young man from one of America’s most isolated and unique communities not only obtains an excellent education, he also experiences profound social changes as a result of the faculty, staff and students he encounters daily. Raised and socialized to survive in a rural setting of woods and waters, he becomes an example of how a college of character can have a transforming impact on students.

Using longitudinal data collected by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) on two cohorts of Gates Millennium Scholarship (GMS) recipients and non-recipients, this study examines whether receiving GMS awards during college years affected graduates’ democratic values and civic engagement after college. The results indicated that receiving GMS awards had positive effects on college graduates’ democratic values and civic engagement after college. Those effects were mainly direct, but there were some small yet significant indirect effects of the GMS awards, through their influences on student social engagement in college. These findings can help expand the understanding of the role of financial aid on college students and have implications for preparing college students for lives of civic responsibility.

This book provides a comprehensive blend of visionary inspiration, practical guidance, and the authors’ personal philosophies, experiences, and insights for transforming campuses to become places that tolerate and encourage diverse viewpoints, practices, and truths.

In preparation for the coming election, college educators will play an important role in motivating college students to participate in the upcoming presidential election. This article highlights Rebecca Reed, an alumna from DePaul University, and her journey to becoming socially active and politically engaged through her college experience. Ultimately, this paper suggests how college educators can motivate students not only to vote but also to continue to sustain their commitments to social and political change after the election season is over.