Minor Ray - Beyond Politics As Usual

Ileana Marin & Ray C. Minor
Kettering Foundation

THE AIM OF THIS BOOK is to shed light on the political learning, thinking, and acting of college students today. In addition, the book sets out to reveal current practices and approaches faculty and staff at institutions of higher learning and other nonprofits employ to instill democratic concepts, values, and skills in students under their tutelage.

It is a subject that has occupied a considerable portion of the Kettering Foundations research agenda for more than 20 years. In 1993, the foundation published a national study conducted by the Harwood Institute, College Students Talk Politics. This study, based on findings coming out of focus groups on 10 American campuses, revealed that students considered politics irrelevant to their lives and saw little purpose to be served by active participation in the political system. It was not a particularly surprising result. Other observers, many of them in the nations colleges and universities, had seen the signs. And some were making efforts to reverse the trend.

Campus Compact, for example, began in 1985 with four founding membersthe presidents of Brown, Stanford, and Georgetown Universities and the Education Commission of the States. Its goal: challenging institutions of higher learning across the country to make the education of students for responsible citizenship an institutional priority. Now a national coalition of some 1,100 colleges and universities, it has gradually shifted from a focus on community service to promoting a broader view of civic engagement.

Faculty members in some colleges embraced the idea. Among them were Katy Harriger and Jill McMillan at Wake Forest University, who devised an experimental four-year program for a small group of students to learn and practice public deliberation to determine whether this useful and practical way of speaking politics might counteract the alienation from public life that had overtaken so many young Americans. Findings from their 2007 study, Speaking of Politics: Preparing College Students for Democratic Citizenship through Deliberative Dialogue, published by Kettering Foundation Press, indicated that, upon graduation, this group of students had the skills and the interests needed to become more involved, responsible, analytical, efficacious, and community-minded citizens than did their fellow students in a control group and in the larger community.

Almost 15 years after the Harwood study, in 2007, Kettering Foundation collaborated with the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) to publish a report titled Millennials Talk Politics: A Study of College Student Political Engagement. The main goal of this research was to find out whether, and in what ways, college students views and actions around civic engagement had changed as a result of the work carried out by colleges and universities throughout the country and of the political events surrounding it. The study was based on conversations with undergraduate students in focus groups held on 12 four-year college and university campuses across the United States. Findings revealed that the millennials (born after 1985) were more engaged than their predecessors in generation X; they were involved at the local level, but were ambivalent about formal politics; they disliked polarized debates and sought authentic opportunities for discussing public issues; and across the landscape of higher education, opportunities for civic participation and learning remained spotty.

It is not news that many college students today lack confidence in the political system; they are turned off by conventional politics, and seek new ways to engage politically. Gridlock in Congress, partisan politics and polarization, voter disenfranchisement schemes, political corruption, and unethical behavior have motivated them to seek alternative ways, including utilizing the Internet and social media, to address public problems and make a difference in public life.

Todays students live in a virtual global community. Mountains of information about persons, places, and events are at their fingertips through social media and search engine sources. The cell phone in every students pocket can be used to record voice or motion, create text, and take photos. And it can transmit any of these products to a person in the next room or on the other side of the world in real time. It can be usedand has beento record a classroom lecture or to foment a national revolution.