Civic Responsibility and Higher Education (review)

Civic Responsibility and Higher Education, edited by Thomas Ehrlich. Phoenix, AZ: The American Council on Education/The Oryx Press, 2000. 403 pp. $34.50

During the past four decades, there has been a fascination with the relationship of education to democratic citizenship and political participation, a relationship made evident by the numerous studies on political socialization that correlate education to political attitudes, behaviors, and knowledge (e.g., Almond & Verba, 1963; Putnam, 1993; Nie, Junn, & Stehlik-Barry, 1996; Niemi & Junn, 1998; Hahn, 1998). In these works, education is the single most powerful predictor of civic and political engagement, and therefore considered one of the keys to strengthening civic culture. Almond and Verba (1963) observed that among other variables "none compares with the educational variable in the extent to which it seems to determine political attitudes" (p. 379), and Putnam (1993) stated that "education is one of the most powerful influences on political behavior almost everywhere, including Italy" (p. 118). On the other hand, Nie, Junn, and Stehlik-Barry (1996)argue that political engagement (knowledge of and participation in politics) is determined by one's relative, rather than absolute, educational attainment, whereas democratic enlightenment (values and norms) increases in step with educational attainment. Although it is clear that formal education has an effect on political behavior, it is more difficult to determine if education is an independent variable or a proxy of other variables, such as social class, and school is sorting out by socioeconomic status. In addition, there has been a smaller body of work on the theory of democratic education, highlighted in 1916 with John Dewey's landmark Democracy and Education, which asserts the prominent role of education to the success of democratic culture (e.g., Dewey, 1916, 1939; Gutmann, 1987; Torres, 1998).

Civic Responsibility and Higher Education consists of 19 essays, organized in five parts, which originated from a conference sponsored by the American Council on Education. The volume is most concerned with building on the widely accepted relationship between education and democracy by describing the obstacles, challenges, and potential of higher education for improving civic engagement. Consequently, it is not firmly located in either the empirical or theoretical traditions, as most chapters are predominantly descriptive, prescriptive, or polemical. On the whole, the book deals with issues of meaning in higher civic education, an approach that generally creates more questions than answers. The primary contribution of this volume is its description of the current state of higher civic education in the United States and its sampling of current programs of civic education.

Ehrlich, the editor of this volume, asserts that the greatest challenge for higher education is to meet Dewey's mandate for civic engagement; namely, that democracy "is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience" (p. vi). By raising important and challenging questions, such as what higher educational institutions can do to promote civic engagement, and attempting to identify the good models of the civic-minded campus, the authors hope to fulfill their conviction "that higher education has the potential to be a powerful influence on reinvigorating the democratic spirit in America" (p. xxviii). They agree that this role is too often either ignored by national reports or denigrated as being part of the problem.

Part 1 (Sax, Sullivan, Boyte & Kari) explores the problems of promoting civic engagement in higher education from the point of view of students and from that of the institutions. A common theme is that the civic mission of universities and colleges is failing and is in need of revitalization and redefinition. In a study by Sax, citizen development of college students is analyzed using national data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) of UCLA. An interesting finding is that volunteer rates by university students have risen in step with the decreasing participation of students in political activities, suggesting that although there is a strong inclination for activism, students seek opportunities outside of formal politics for its...