January 28, 2004

Moral education: Evaluating Emory's efforts alongside peer institutions

Educators miss a critical opportunity if they assume that students are fully formed moral beings by the time they enter college or university, according to the research team from The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The college years are perhaps the most crucial period for a solid grounding in moral and civic education, but most educational institutions have pushed these concerns from the center of campus life to the margins and have segregated them to the extracurricular realm.

Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont and Jason Stephens spent several years visiting a number of colleges and universities in the United States and analyzing their research, and point to twelve schools that emerge as benchmark institutions in promoting moral and civic education. These range from major research universities (Duke) to small liberal arts (Tusculum) and community colleges (Turtle Mountain in North Dakota and Kapi‘olani in Hawaii), from public schools (Portland State University and California State University, Monterey Bay) to those with a religious affiliation (Messiah College and the University of Notre Dame), and from colleges for women (Alverno, St. Catherine, and Spelman) to a institution dedicated to military education (the United States Air Force Academy).

However disparate their sizes and educational foci, these twelve schools share the common goal of crafting a holistic and intentional approach to moral and civic education. These schools achieve this goal through the shared features of: 1) integrating moral and civic education into the curriculum of the institution, 2) developing education that goes “beyond the intellectual realm to action, both inside and outside the curriculum,” 3) linking the issues of diversity and multiculturalism to education, and 4) creating a campuswide culture of shared values that unifies and reinforces these programs. The authors of Educating Citizens divide these twelve institutions according to the three approaches to moral and civic education that equip students to become engaged citizens, which include emphases on virtue and character, systematic social responsibility, and engagement with and response to their communities.

Educating Citizens is a work of incredible depth that has the potential to become the standard reference volume for educators committed to moral and civic education. Its exploration of leadership styles, fostering of campus culture, moral formation theories, pedagogical strategies, curricular approaches, faculty dynamics, extracurricular programs, assessment options, and obstructions to implementing moral and civic education is impressive and comprehensive. Educating Citizens will likely become an invaluable resource in every aspect of campus life, from presidents, deans and provosts seeking to chart a vision for their department or institution, to campus life administrators shaping first-year seminars and living-learning communities, to faculty planning courses and extracurricular programs that make civic and moral education central to learning, to students who want guidance for their own academic paths.

How Does Emory Measure Up?

Anne Colby and her research assistant visited Emory in November 1999 while preparing her research for the book, but did not include Emory among the twelve core institutions. The authors do, however, cite the Hughes Science Initiative as a program that presents “valuable opportunities to expose both majors and nonmajors to the values that are foundational for science – open-mindedness, honesty, risk taking” and describe in detail the minor offered by the Violence Studies Program. They also note that at Emory, it is often lecture track faculty who provide significant leadership in moral and civic education, commending their “considerable leadership” and “sense that they can have real impact on teaching at Emory.” This ability to assume leadership roles, they conclude, is possible primarily due to “the stability of long-term contracts” and substantial funding from foundation and government grants.

Despite these commendable programs, the authors cite Emory as an institution where faculty comment that they often are not able to pursue initiatives in moral and civic education because they feel that they are “swimming upstream” against the “strong emphasis on scholarly productivity.” Yet Colby and her fellow researchers also include a gentle reminder that faculty at Duke and other major research universities have managed to build networks that promote moral and civic education even in the face of this institutional pressure. How would Emory compare if the researchers returned to campus in 2004?

Since Colby’s visit in 1999, Emory—with significant leadership and support from the Center for Ethics—has launched or brought new vigor to several key initiatives in moral and civic education that rank favorably with those at the twelve core institutions profiled in Educating Citizens, including:

The addition of these programs, combined with the vision and commitment to ethical concerns from Emory’s new president, James Wagner, bring the University to the edge of what the Center’s director, James Fowler, would define as a kairotic moment. This is a time ripe with possibilities, new directions and commitments, and the opportunity to bring moral and civic education back from the margins of University life and return it to the core of what makes Emory a distinctive and vital institution. Education Citizens presents a considerable challenge to Emory, but also highlights the University’s considerable strengths, resources and potential to be an institution where the concern for moral and civic education informs and shapes all that we do.

Educating Citizens: Preparing America’s Undergraduates for Lives of Moral and Civic Responsibility.
Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont, Jason Stephens. Jossey-Bass, New York: 2003. 332pp, $28.

[ Posted by Paul Ficklin-Alred at January 28, 2004 02:08 PM | More Book & Film Reviews articles ]

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