SESSION IV: POSSIBILITIES

PART 1: THE POSSIBILITY OF COMMUNITY LEARNING

Suzanne Shanahan: I want to raise some questions about the importance of dialogue and where it takes us. I worry in this conversation that we have a scope condition problem—that we’re looking in the wrong place. Maybe we looking to universities to fix universities, when we need instead to be looking more broadly at the relationship of universities to a variety of stakeholders, a variety of communities that they exist within. 

I think we want to be more aggressive in understanding why there is a growing antipathy to what our institutions are doing incorporate that skepticism into our thinking of what we’re going to do moving forward. I don’t think we do enough of this. We do not think of institutions like Notre Dame as public goods. And I think we need to pivot to understanding them as responsive to the public and as committed to not just the flourishing of the Notre Dame community, but the flourishing of the region we’re in. And that requires a different way for institutions to engage. I think that’s one of the ways we can get back to this notion of universities as a space of common flourishing and service. Here are two examples.

The first one is from Notre Dame, which has been around for 175 years. It produces a new strategic framework every five years, and this last one was the first time that the school had ever mentioned the city of South Bend. That is just extraordinary. And after this latest plan, the South Bend community imagined there would be collaboration on a range of things, but there was no mechanism for that. There was no mechanism for faculty research to have implications for the city. Sure, we can send students out to do service learning, but how do we have a set of shared goals of what we as Notre Dame and South Bend jointly aspire to? Most universities haven’t cultivated that way of being. 

One of the things that at our institute decided this fall was that we were going to hold 25% of our class spaces for community members. We offer about 25 classes a semester—serving roughly 600 students—so this is a meaningful commitment. Any community member can apply to join our courses. They might sit in on my class on Law and Theology or on Religious Freedom in America. The idea is simple: if we want to cultivate genuine deliberative dialogue, we have to be in conversation with people whose life experiences differ profoundly from our own.

Developing that capacity requires moral imagination. It means the university’s edges need to fray a bit. Too often, especially in anxious times like these, institutions turn inward—guarding resources, protecting turf, and “defending their toys.” But perhaps what’s needed instead is the opposite impulse: to open the doors and windows, to bring more people to the table.

The second example comes from Duke, where I used to teach. A few years ago, I helped create the Citizenship Lab at Duke, which I directed for about nine years. It brought together 400 Duke students and about 700 refugees—mostly high school students—into a shared civic space. We read the Federalist Papers and Socrates, but the real goal was to identify shared concerns and work together as citizens to address them.

Every Tuesday evening from 5:30 to 8:30, those 700 community members made their way to Duke’s East Campus—often using every available Uber and taxi in Durham, which was a logistical nightmare. But once they arrived, the lab became a living example of what Maya Angelou called “taking responsibility for the space you occupy and the air you consume.” Students and refugees worked side by side on concrete civic projects.

Some of those projects might sound small, but they made real differences. For example, because of this partnership, every high school student in North Carolina now has access to a calculator on standardized exams. That may seem minor, but when 72 percent of the state’s high schoolers lacked calculators—and when you need one for the ACT or SAT—it was transformative.

Another effort focused on refugee students entering public high schools without basic literacy skills. Many were preliterate and had never held a pencil. Yet the state offered no primary literacy instruction in high schools, meaning these students couldn’t even enroll in ESL classes. As a result of the lab’s advocacy, North Carolina now provides primary literacy education in those settings.

A third project tackled public transportation. Refugee families relied entirely on buses, yet Durham’s bus stops were little more than signposts. The students and community members designed and built bus amenities—shelters, benches, and trash cans—so that every stop now offers basic dignity and comfort.

These may look like modest accomplishments, but they embody the deeper lesson: education as shared civic responsibility. The students and community members weren’t just learning about citizenship—they were practicing it.

That’s the frame I want to offer for our discussion. How might we imagine commitments to higher education that extend beyond the boundaries of elite or non-elite institutions? How can we recover a vision of higher learning as something that serves—and draws from—the entire citizenry?

Jennifer Frey: I want to say something about the relationship between liberal learning and what now we would call service learning. I made service learning an academic requirement to graduate from the Honors College at the University of Tulsa. This turned out to be very controversial move, and I ended up in a lot of conversations about why I thought service learning was important. And most of the objections were coming from people who really did value traditional liberal learning and who saw service learning as in competition with it or a distraction from it. 

Their worry was that the goal of liberal learning is contemplation. You can save the world once you’ve done contemplating. I don't understand service learning as saving the world. And in fact, I think that's exactly the wrong way to think about it. I think that college students are completely transformed by their encounter with people in need and that it is actually a tremendous blessing to engage in that work. Our service learning was all direct service. It all involved encounter. You couldn’t go somewhere and push paper around. And it was very wide ranging. It was helping people shop in a market where everything was free or it was domestic violence shelters. It was serving food at a homeless shelter – all this different stuff. A lot of it involved going into radically underserved schools and doing afterschool work, tutoring, and that sort of thing. But it was an experiment of direct engagement with students we tracked over eight months.

A lot of students were scared to do this, but it was absolutely transformative for them. And they were able to connect those activities to what they were reading and thinking about in their coursework. There was a really direct connection there. I want to suggest that these are really compatible and not competitive and that it’s not about saving the world at all. It’s about growing as a person and understanding that your education is not just meant to better you, but to help you think about where you fit and the broader community and that that’s actually a very important part of a liberal education. 

Suzanne Shanahan: I wonder if that’s not the essence of what it means to be a citizen.

Abram Van Engen: One of the things that has become especially apparent in the Trump administration challenges to higher education to people who have never really thought about it, especially at private institutions like WashU, is that we are supported by taxpayer dollars. Even an English professor at WashU is supported by taxpayer dollars. I think people have typically thought of themselves as supported by our endowment and student tuition without thinking about the ways that the federal and state governments are giving you tax breaks and other support to do what you do.

All of which to say is, I think it would be a very interesting exercise to have professors at places like WashU frame what they’re doing in terms of public service. If you imagine yourself to be a public servant, how does that change or frame your teaching of Shakespeare, your teaching of poetry, or whatever it might be. I just feel like it might help also jar us loose from the sense that what you’re about is your own prestige and your own reputation, and that you're doing your job best when you’re building your own reputation. 

Adrienne Davis: I want to return to the question about our commitments to our broader communities. This is a species of the question that you're asking us to think about, Suzanne. I love the idea of inviting community members in as students. I'd love to hear more about whether they had to commit to being there the whole time, or could they come in and out? Something that WashU did that I was really happy with was a series of Mellon grants called “The Divided City.” A large portion of those were stood up to invite community partners to co-apply with faculty for grants.

It is a radical rethinking of what counts as knowledge production. And it invites the community in to think about what new knowledge is that’s meaningful to the community. And to your point, Jennifer, students were invited in as well as research assistants. I don’t know that we called it service learning, but the students were having these series of encounters.