Volume 11, Issue 1

Moral learning and development happen in many ways in college. In this essay the authors explore the domain of student friendships in college and how the tasks of establishing and sustaining close friendships foster moral awareness and commitment.

This essay acknowledges the current economic challenges that college students are facing in reaching their highest aspirations. But the author maintains that students who are resilient and flexible can overcome obstacles. The author adds that surviving and thriving in college not only result from student behavior; success is also more likely to happen at institutions characterized by strong and consistent student support.

This essay considers women’s capacity for hopefulness and “equanimity” at a time of heightened financial concerns among all students, and women in particular. Women’s connections to family, friends, and faith are described as important sources of hope and stability during these difficult times.

Two closely related questions are often of great importance to college and university students. How is one to reconcile one's particular form of religious commitment with the fact of so many alternative paths of religious thought and life? What approach should one take to the plain fact of religious diversity? This essay sketches six possible answers to the two questions and strongly recommends one of them. It also describes some of the author's assumptions about the nature, scope, and significance of religion in general and shows how these assumptions influence his recommendation.

College campuses need to facilitate interfaith dialogue in which all students—including evangelical Christians with strong religious commitments—feel welcome to participate. To understand some of the challenges involved in interfaith dialogue as well as the goals toward which such dialogue might strive, Catherine Cornille’s five conditions for constructive dialogue provide a useful framework. These conditions are humility, commitment, interconnectedness, empathy, and hospitality.

Factors supporting dishonesty are intricately woven into the fabric of our culture and influence student behavior in higher education. This study investigated the risk factors that, within individuals and a particular institutional environment, created the conditions for academic dishonesty. Based on an extensive review of current literature, the PRECEDE model by Green and Kreuter (2004) was used as a basis for framing questions for an online survey on academic integrity at a small liberal arts institution in the South. Results indicated the significant impact of certain predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors within the institutional culture on academic integrity.

Rarely are character development-related aims espoused by higher education reflected in the design and delivery of distance education programs. Further, literature exploring the character development aspects of distance education is sparse. This study finds that the instructor and students in a fantasy literature distance course perceived myriad kinds of character development related to performance, moral, relational, and spiritual character traits and strengths. This paper considers implications for character development in distance education and directions for future research.

This study aims to gather descriptive information about students’ use of strengths using qualitative theory. Strengths programming directors nominated students based on explicit criteria. The students were interviewed on their backgrounds, strengths programs, signature strengths, strengths application, capitalizing, and benefits of capitalizing. Data indicate that college students who are the best of the best at using their strengths—the capitalizers—utilize sustained social supports and build on successful experiences that give them the confidence to apply their strengths in new situations.

The Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC) is active on many college and university campuses in North America and throughout the world. Much of the focus of this effective and growing organization is on diverse groups cooperating together on practical projects, in the process coming to understand better the values they share, and in general achieving better mutual understanding. As this movement develops, it may need its own set of religious ideas. This article discusses two ideas that might be both useful to, and appealing to, IFYC: the idea of silence and the idea of curiosity.

Preparing first-year students to acclimate to their new college environment, become academically successful, and retain them to their second year of college proves to be both challenging and difficult. This paper reports various measures in place at the University of Miami to assist first-year students with a successful transition from high school to university life, and assist them with student learning and academic success by paying greater attention to learning outside the classroom. Findings in this study show that there must be institutional support at all levels for this type of program to be successful, purposive and effective.

Intercollegiate athletics are an important dimension of campus life at most colleges and universities. Fan support for athletic teams can create a wonderful, exciting atmosphere for sport teams. However, on occasion fan behavior and expressions of school pride can produce an atmosphere that challenges the values of the campus. Such is the case of stadium Blackout events, which can at once be energizing and alienating.

This article uses a case study of InterVarsity Christian Fellowship to explore the social engagement of campus evangelicals. It focuses on InterVarsity’s massive Urbana student missions conference, a gathering that drew 23,000 young evangelicals to St. Louis in 2006. Drawing on ethnographic field observations, it profiles a campus group on the center-left of evangelicalism. Although InterVarsity promotes some conservative positions, it is increasingly progressive on issues of poverty, the environment, and race.

The most recent column of “New Scholars and Scholarship” focused on a scholarly exchange that emerged at a recent Symposium on Assessing Students’ Civic Outcomes hosted by the Indiana University—Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) Center for Service and Learning. The event was cosponsored by the National Service Learning Clearinghouse and the American Association of State Colleges and Universities’ (AASCU) American Democracy Project. Symposium participants were asked to present and analyze studies of recent studies of civic engagement in hopes of possible collaboration. This issue’s column follows through on the challenge presented by the Symposium. It compares several survey projects’ choices of measures of civic dialogue, seeking to understand the purpose of the survey, what is being measuring, examples of survey questions, strong predictors or correlations.

If we are to be mentors to students on their journey, we first need to decide what students are to be and become in developing a global perspective. We then can create interventions—programs, courses, experiences—for students on campus and beyond the campus that will be the most effective. Research on how and what influences character development and working principles for creating an effective environment for students to become global citizens are presented.

In today’s economy, college administrators face challenges in guiding their students towards future careers. Jobs appear scarce, and recent graduates lament that their education no longer seems to hold the weight with future employers that motivated them to go to college. This article proposes that in the midst of the Great Recession, standards of success have shifted slightly so that having a job, rather than having a particular job, is now a mark of achievement, manifesting in a slightly more optimistic feeling about staking a place in the world beyond college.

This short essay chronicles the experiences of Tiffany Hodges as a wife, mother, employee, and student at Edgewood College in Madison, Wisconsin. Hodges discusses the meaning of hope through her eyes, the role hope played in her return to college, how her decision to finish her education impacted her family and her plans for the future. The author also discusses events that inspired or challenged hope, and why it is important to share hope to improve the lives of others.

This essay is a reflection of how hope plays a role in in student success. Based on the experiences of a non-traditional international graduate student, the essay explores reasons that inspire as well as challenge hope in college life.