Policy Education and Public Advocacy

Even without a specific emphasis on civics, a solid liberal arts education models what I’d hope for in society as a large: respect for expertise, open dialogue and intellectual interchange.

Any liberal education worth its salt seeks to produce the kinds of citizens that a democratic society needs to cultivate: graduates who are thoughtful, open and intellectually curious and who are able to engage in the profession they desire and contribute to society in countless ways.

There are, however, a number of other ways that colleges and universities can encourage responsible citizenship and encourage the difficult dialogues that a multicultural democracy requires, while respecting intellectual and ideological differences.

Here, I’d like to focus on one approach that holds out the promise of engaging students and their campuses to take a much more active role in addressing problems besetting their local communities.

We might call this approach policy education and public advocacy.

However much we might hope to promote greater tolerance, civility and trust in government; advance greater understanding of this society’s constitutional principles and procedures; and reduce political polarization, academic institutions should place even greater value on vigorous debate, intellectual skepticism and dissent from established orthodoxies.

Therefore, I believe that perhaps the best way to promote civics might be to actually engage in solving a genuine civic challenge.

The approach that I will advocate builds on ideas broached in a report, “Educating for Civic Reasoning and Discourse,” issued by the nongovernmental nonprofit research organization the National Academy of Education and two AAC&U publications, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy’s Future” and “Civic Prompts.”

These reports stress the importance of helping students develop a mind-set or disposition that values the importance of understanding policy issues in their full complexity; learning how to weigh complex, sometimes contradictory evidence; being willing to consider diverse points of view; and anticipating positive and negative policy outcomes and impacts.

The policy-oriented approach that I will discuss is designed to introduce students to the challenges of researching a local problem, identifying and debating policy alternatives, building and reaching a consensus, and taking steps to promote, publicize and implement practical, pragmatic solutions.

Serious local problems envelop our campuses. Those issues may be institution-specific, such as food or housing security or gender-based abuse or hazing. Or they might be timely: What are the most effective ways to get students, staff and faculty to act safely during the pandemic, whether this involves vaccination, mask wearing or social distancing? Or how can the campus best balance academic civility with vigorous debate and disagreement? Or how can a campus increase participation in wellness programs?

At my university, a big challenge is to enroll a student body more representative of the state’s population. According to my understanding, roughly 1,900 Black students who were admitted to UT ultimately decided to enroll elsewhere.

Rather than leaving a problem to a particular campus office and its professionals, why not involve students in formulating a solution?

Might it not make sense to have teams of students, directed by faculty, research the issue of recruitment and enrollment in a rigorous manner? Members of these research teams might interview prospective students and their parents to better understand their hesitancy to enroll at UT, work alongside admissions officers and recruiters to better understand the challenges they face, and devise approaches to outreach that might better address disparities in enrollment and matriculation.

Other issues that a college or university might address exist off campus but are nonetheless local. These local issues might include homelessness or housing shortages, or environmental disparities or affordability, or water or air or noise pollution.

To me, the attraction of a policy education, public advocacy approach is that it is:

• Skills-oriented: It requires students to develop the research, interpretive, synthetic and analytic skills that are needed to understand an issue in its full intricacy as well as the communication, leadership and organizational skills needed to raise public awareness and implement policy.
• Informed: The proposals that the students devise are products of rich, rigorous research and critical inquiry.
• Collaborative: Students must work collectively in pursuit of a common objective.
• Geared toward consensus building: It requires students with diverse perspective to reach an agreement through deliberation and bridge building.
• Problem- and outcomes-focused: The goal is to address an authentic, real-life problem in a concrete way.

Some bumper-sticker slogans are not as simplistic and unsophisticated as they might appear at first glance. The catchphrase “Think Globally and Act Locally,” in particular, speaks to a basic truth: that one of the best ways to make a tangible difference in the quality of life is to address those challenges that lie right around us.

If we’re serious about civic education—and a growing number of institutions and organizations are, including the AAC&U and the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement coalition—then our goal must go beyond strengthening students’ content knowledge or encouraging polite, mutually respectful campus conversations. We need to enable our students to take tangible steps to make our campuses and surrounding communities more equitable and just places.

Steven Mintz is professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin.