Volume 13, Issue 3

The college extracurriculum, which is comprised of nonacademic student activities and experiences that occur outside the parameters of formal course work, provides one of the most important influences on the moral beliefs and behaviors of students during the college years. This article will examine some of the positive and negative moral influences of the extracurriculum and discuss how colleges and universities can better connect extracurricular activities to the moral mission and academic purposes of the institution.

In order to understand the character and moral lives of college students today, it is necessary to set an examination within a larger framework of the macrosocial and cultural forces that have developed emerging adulthood as a relatively new and important phase of the American life course. Also helpful are identifying some of the key social-structural features of standard college life in the United States today, which exert significant influences on college students. In the midst of considering how to address issues of morality and character among college students, it is also necessary to explicitly name our assumptions and beliefs about what is good for human persons, what a good human life looks like, and then consider the role that college life may play in nurturing or hindering its achievement. Interrogating our own assumptions about what is normal and good for youth and college students is helpful. This essay concludes by commending an approach of “realistic care” as superior to the alternatives.

Colleges and universities are places where students are immersed in course work and planned activities outside the classroom, where habits based on values and character can be formed. Whether working with students to achieve learning outcomes specifically related to academic courses or helping them work through the consequences of a conduct issue, those in student affairs can enable students to think analytically and develop their cognitive skills. Tying the cognitive understanding of ethical and moral reasoning to experience can transform students’ lives. The key to effectiveness is the real collaboration between faculty and student affairs.

Social class is a powerful and often unrecognized influence on student participation in the extracurriculum. Spontaneous student-created extracurricular experiences depend on students affiliating and interacting with each other; student social class is a powerful influence on student affiliations. Students tend to exercise consciousness of kind- and self-select to interact with culturally, ethnically, gender-, and class-similar members of the campus community. However, planners of extracurricular experiences typically neglect student social class in planning, promoting, or conducting an experience as well as neglecting social class as a topic for planned experiences. This article explores social class as both a personal characteristic and as a feature of the campus environment. Social class affects how members of the campus community perceive and participate in campus curricular and extracurricular activities and how extracurricular experiences are designed.

Research suggests that students are becoming increasingly interested in exploring their meaning and purpose (HERI, 2005). How college students understand these terms and how they are prompted to reflect on such existential questions, however, deserves further attention. In this article, the authors share narratives from a qualitative inquiry with undergraduates who discussed their perceptions of the ambiguous, but significant terms meaning and purpose, the role and salience of meaning and purpose in their lives, experiences during college that encouraged students to think about these concepts, and implications for practice in higher education.

The author explores some of the more elusive aims of civic engagement and the tension from the role of self in context of community. Thoughtful reclamation of the role for self can be a catalyst for different “aha” moments in terms of self-authorship, multicultural understanding, and sustainable and effective change agency. This commentary seeks to shine a light on these ideas as a way of generating and focusing a conversation with the potential to transform practice.

As universities look for more effective ways to address violations of behavioral standards, a proposed solution is to infuse intentional development into well-established conduct processes inherently focused on legal mandates and due process. The E.P.I.C. Journey Sanctioning Model was designed to refocus the outcomes of the conduct process to transform decision-making patterns through the use of counseling techniques, journey sanctioning, and mentors. Explanation of the model’s components is included along with identification of tools and strategies that are implemented to create a more intentional learning environment within the conduct process.

Student poverty is an issue with which far too many students are confronted. Student affairs professionals must increase their awareness of this human dynamic and develop programs, services, and personal knowledge to support students faced with this challenge.

A growing number of universities have implemented community-based research pedagogy into their undergraduate education. Integrating academic training with community engagement has the potential to engage students in a way volunteering may not. This interview with Trisha Thorme, an anthropologist and assistant director of Princeton University’s Community-Based Learning Initiative, addresses the potential of community-based research to influence students’ academic and civic development.

From 1983–2011, the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter (HSHS) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was the only student-run homeless shelter in the United States. However, college students at Villanova, Temple, Drexel, the University of Pennsylvania, and Swarthmore drew upon the HSHS model to open their own student-run homeless shelter in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in January 2012. This article describes the process by which the Student-Run Emergency Housing Unit of Philadelphia opened its doors, as well as the successes and challenges encountered in its first year of operation. The feasibility of this student-run model expanding to other American cities is also considered.

In order to build local capacity in an international higher education setting, the Qatar Study Tour and Young Professionals Institute (QST and YPI) was created as an inquiry-based learning experience shared among diverse participants and designed to enhance learning at both the local and international levels. The intent of the QST and YPI model was to be more respectful of the host international setting and to offer greater educational impact than conventional study tours. This heightened impact was confirmed by both quantitative and qualitative assessment.

This critical essay reviews Small’s (2011) book reporting research on the spiritual identities and discursive practices of college students in intrafaith and interfaith dialogue. Small’s recommendations and research methods are instructive and helpful to both scholars and practitioners in higher education and student affairs. This research opens new pathways for discussing faith diversity in higher education in ways that recognize issues of marginalization and supports true pluralism.

This article explores a student’s expectations and the lived realities of a two-week service learning trip to Honduras. Originally, her expectations were critical and cynical. But through a series of journal entries she made during the program, she shows how her expectations were transformed by the actual experience and how she achieved her own service learning objective.