Civic Learning in a Diverse Democracy:
Education for Shared Futures
By Carol Geary Schneider, president, AAC&U
Just over ten years ago, in the midst of the so-called
culture wars, the Association of American Colleges and
Universities (AAC&U) launched Diversity Digest.
We felt that a newsletter would play an important role
in creating and sustaining a community of leaders and
learners who shared the view that diversity is inextricably
linked to claims of excellence in higher education.
Diversity Digest met our highest expectations.
As Diversity Digest now becomes Diversity
& Democracy, we introduce a new name and a
new design. In doing so, we recommit ourselves to the
unique and critical role this publication has played
within the academy. Yet even as we affirm our commitment
to the abiding questions of social responsibility in
a diverse democracy, we also look toward the horizons
of diversity’s role in the global community.
Our revised publication, then, links new challenges
with AAC&U’s enduring commitments. In this
context, it is fitting that the new name includes a
conjunction. This is all the more appropriate because
diversity is about deepening complexity and connection
across and within distinct but intertwined groups. In
Diversity & Democracy, we will explore
questions of race and gender; class and
ethnicity; sexual identity and religious identity.
We will explore questions of diversity in the classroom
and in the neighborhood; in the United States
and abroad; at the boundaries and
in the borderlands. We will share insights into diversity
and learning as well as diversity and
teaching. And we will do all of this with a constant
focus on the generative tensions between diversity and
democratic aspirations, and between such democratic
values as liberty and equality, freedom and mutual responsibility.
We hope that the new framework of our newsletter will
facilitate these explorations and reinforce our goal
to educate for a just and equitable future.
The Imperative of Civic Engagement
In my letter introducing Diversity Digest
in 1996, I wrote that diversity issues “challenge
educators to reexamine our most fundamental assumptions
about significant knowledge, cultural identity and privilege,
connections across difference, inclusive community,
and democratic principles. Above all, diversity asks
us to address the links between education and a developed
sense of responsibility to one another.” These
words remain equally true today. Moreover, a decade
of pioneering work on campus has given us a wealth of
new models and effective practices for linking diversity
and civic learning, and for engaging students directly
with the unsolved challenges and inequalities that mark
our world.
Critically, however, the expanded leadership for civic
learning about diversity and democracy still remains
on the margins rather than at the center of undergraduate
learning in the American academy. All the research AAC&U
conducted or consulted for its current major initiative,
Liberal Education and America’s Promise (LEAP),
tells us that civic learning remains optional rather
than essential for the majority of faculty, students,
and employers. The apparent disconnect between the goals
of college learning and democratic principles is an
ominous sign. If our institutions of higher education
are to prepare students for principled engagement in
a diverse democracy, they must foster—explicitly,
intentionally, and enthusiastically—pedagogies
geared toward civic engagement and democratic action.
Last June, the U.S. Supreme Court made the challenge
of educating American students for democratic citizenship
even more difficult. By overturning voluntary school
desegregation plans, the Court sent yet another message
that both equity and diversity—despite their inextricable
relationship to democratic principles—are less
than essential to education. Although the Court’s
decision did not expressly challenge affirmative action,
it comes as another blow in a decades-long series of
setbacks to school and campus integration. As sociologist
Troy Duster pointed out ten years ago in Diversity
Digest, California’s immediate compliance
with a 1996 proposition prohibiting consideration of
race in admission processes provided a stark contrast
to Brown v. Board of Education’s language
of “all deliberate speed” when the Supreme
Court called for an end to legally segregated public
schools. In other words, when desegregation is at issue,
the U.S. historically has been slow to advance but quick
to backpedal. The recent decision in Parents Involved
in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No.
1 sadly affirms this tendency. Responding recently
to the June 2007 decision, Duster noted that the Court
“has left the door slightly open for the role
of diversity in achieving educational goals, but the
burden of proof has shifted dramatically and the climate
for work tying democracy to diversity has worsened.”
Given this difficult climate, it is more imperative
than ever that we in higher education explicitly link
diversity of all kinds—both in our pedagogical
content and our educational environments—with
the values of a democratic society. With this project
in mind, it is fitting that this first issue of Diversity
& Democracy features work from several institutions
involved in Shared Futures: General Education for Global
Learning, a project of a larger AAC&U initiative,
Shared Futures: Global Learning and Social Responsibility.
These institutions are seeking ways to engage their
students and faculty with the significant questions
of civic responsibility that arise in an interdependent
but unequal world. They are searching for ways to make
all students, whether immersed in studies of anthropology
or aerospace engineering, aware of and accountable to
the global contexts in which they live.
Collaboration for Shared Goals
In the context of this publication, “Shared Futures”
does not simply refer to our common fate as human beings.
It also refers to educational movements that have many
common goals, but too often act alone: the U.S. diversity
movement, the global learning movement, and the civic
engagement movement. Our title and tagline implicitly
link these three movements. They expand our conversations
about diversity and democracy beyond the U.S. as we
argue for civic learning about a future that we inevitably
share with others throughout the globe. In this rhetorical
move, we echo the commitments of the Shared Futures
initiative, which approaches global learning as an imperative
for responsible citizenship not only internationally,
but locally as well.
AAC&U has suggested, and the Shared Futures initiative
implies, that each of these seminal movements is deeply,
if differently, engaged with questions of democratic
life and practice. As such, they are intricately intertwined.
Students who understand their relationships to peers
in Sri Lanka, Suriname, or Spain will also realize the
weight of their actions at home. Likewise, students
who see that they can enact change through civic engagement
will respond not only by contributing to their local
communities, but also by taking responsibility for the
choices and actions that will eventually affect their
counterparts around the globe—whether through
economic webs, an interconnected climate, or interdependent
political systems. Students who realize the potential
embedded in U.S. pluralism will understand the ethical
imperative to realize that potential, both within and
beyond the borders of the U.S.
Whether the starting point is civic engagement, global
learning, or U.S. diversity, each of these three movements
leads to the others. Each is necessary to higher education’s
success in preparing students for an interconnected
world. Thus the intentional collaboration of these movements
toward shared goals is one result we hope to encourage
through Diversity & Democracy.
Renewing American Commitments
Although our reimagined publication signals a new commitment
to these topics, AAC&U’s engagement with questions
of diversity and democracy is hardly new. When AAC&U
launched American Commitments: Diversity, Democracy,
and Liberal Learning in 1993, we challenged campus
conversations around diversity to confront the larger
context of the nation’s democratic aspirations
and ideals. It is worth quoting at length the lessons
learned by that project’s National Panel in the
course of multiyear conversations:
Our focus on links between this nation’s
diversity and its democratic values has pointed the
American Commitments initiative inexorably toward
unresolved issues that cut across campus and society:
issues of communities and community; issues of the
terms and tensions that frame connections among members
of a democracy who, historically, have not been equal.
Framing the question this way, those participating
in the American Commitments initiative have grown
increasingly uncomfortable with the individualistic
assumptions that permeate public discussion of higher
education. Traditionally, the academy has emphasized
the benefits of higher learning—both intellectual
and economic—to each individual learner. But
diversity and democracy together press educators to
address the communal dimensions and consequences of
higher learning. By highlighting the social nexus
in which all learning occurs, the linkage between
diversity and democratic society challenges us to
think more deeply about what individuals learn from
their experience of campus ethos—and how that
learning in turn constrains or enriches the quality
and vitality of American communities.
It is no longer sufficient to speak of American communities
alone, when global forces have stretched existing communities
across national boundaries and created new communities
beyond national identities. And it is difficult to speak
of democracy outside of the framework of constitutional
citizenship. Yet it is important to try. For what I
wrote in 1996 remains true today: “America stands
at a crossroads, uncertain whether to move forward or
back on the civil rights efforts that began to transform
our society only a generation ago. It has never been
more important for educators to make explicit the connection
between campus learning and the democratic values that
guide diversity work.” We are all at
that same crossroads. We are all dependent on our success
in shaping a shared future in which diversity is fully
embraced as the ultimate test of a democratic community.
Welcome to Diversity & Democracy.
