Chapter 2 Michigan State University Evolving the Land Grant Philosophy of Service

Limiting Field Research Demonstrations

The new disciplining culture at MSU that emerged at the end of the decade was rooted in the institution’s initial response to civil rights activism in the East Lansing area. Located in the middle of Michigan and with a predominantly White student population, MSU seemed like an unlikely place for students to engage in civil rights action, let alone develop an interest in the civil rights struggle. Except for occasional solidarity protests, MSU’s campus was quiescent in the first part of the 1960s. But the geographic location of MSU and its quiet atmosphere were misleading. MSU students in the campus NAACP Youth Council chapter were focusing their attention on a pervasive problem in the East Lansing area: housing discrimination. MSU was located in East Lansing, an area where Black citizens could not live, even if they attended the university. This contradiction was palpable for Black students like Ernie Green. Green found the MSU context to reflect the conditions of his upbringing. Green had graduated from Central High School in Arkansas, which was located in the same school district where the Little Rock Nine had captured national attention. The contradictory position of the university—at once opening up access to Black students while abiding by local segregation practices—also took on international tones. In 1960, MSU had partnered with Nigeria. This partnership brought a small contingent of Nigerians to MSU who, like Green, could not access housing near campus. In this context, Green and others in the campus NAACP chapter sought to challenge MSU for its failure to address and take a stance on the pervasive problem of housing discrimination in the East Lansing area.2

In the first part of the 1960s, the primary approach by the NAACP Youth Council campus chapter was to research housing discrimination in the East Lansing Area. MSU chapter members—Green and Joe Syfax—implemented a case-study approach that was common to the national chapter of the NAACP. The MSU NAACP chapter would send Black students to look for off-campus housing. If they were refused housing based on their race, the group filed formal complaints with the East Lansing housing director. The group also developed a database of instances to substantiate their claims of the problem of housing discrimination for Black students. The goal of the research effort, explained members of the MSU campus chapter, was to make
“democracy a matter of political action.”3 Even if framed as a mode of democratic action, the efforts of the MSU chapter reflected the influence of the disciplinary culture of the university on student thinking. After all, their model of political action was fieldwork research, a common methodological approach in sociology. In this light, faculty members at MSU, especially in the sociology department, saw the work of the NAACP as an extension of students’ academic training. Wilbert Brookhover, a sociologist, linked his course to NAACP research efforts. Brookhover was interested for both political and academic reasons. A trained social psychologist with a focus on the minority experience in schools, Brookhover had testified in Brown v. Board of Education as an expert witness. In the context of his course, Brookhover had integrated teams—one White and one Black student—meet with realtors to record their reactions to their efforts to receive housing. What emerged in the context of Brookhover’s class and the efforts of the NAACP was a model of research that connected the tools of fieldwork methods to the political project of civil rights.4

Unlike NAG at Howard University, the MSU NAACP campus chapter gained institutional recognition. This is not too surprising. The work of students in the NAACP aligned with Hannah’s own politics on civil rights. Hannah was on the Civil Rights Commission, created by the 1957 Civil Rights Act. The commission’s mission was to investigate and make recommendations concerning civil rights issues in the United States—an approach that was largely replicated by the NAACP Youth Council. Moreover, NAACP’s field research largely fell within the realm of the land grant philosophy of higher education. Indeed, like other land grant presidents, Hannah believed deeply that research should serve a practical purpose that could inform public policy making. As such, a student and faculty team conducting field research on housing discrimination was a reasonable service activity on campus because it fit prevailing disciplinary research cultures and the extension philosophy of MSU. But even if NAACP actions fell within the realm of Hannah’s philosophy, it did not mean that Hannah or the university administration provided active support for their efforts. The MSU administration’s stance on the NAACP was largely laissez-faire.

Hannah took a different position when NAACP students translated research into political action. Despite being faced with multiple years of research that demonstrated racist real estate practices in the area, the East Lansing city government neither addressed individual cases nor developed policies that banned racial discrimination in housing. Students’ frustration with the slow response from the East Lansing City Council led them to organize a sit-in at the East Lansing City Hall in 1965. “The leaders of the community have failed to grasp the moral urgency of this problem,” explained NAACP members who engaged in the sit-in. Thus, they concluded, “stronger action was necessary.”5 In contrast to how they responded to NAACP’s field research, Hannah and MSU administrators intervened directly in the sit-in, coordinating with the East Lansing Police by sending university vans to transport the students to the county jail.6 The coordination with the police department—and the visual effect of sending vans with the MSU logo to help arrest students—sent a clear message: MSU not only discouraged student political action; it actively disciplined students for engaging in such actions.

Hannah’s response to the sit-in went to the heart of MSU’s service mission. On one level, the sit-in and the response by the Hannah administration represented divergent interpretations of the land grant teaching mission. Students believed the sit-in was in line with the community extension philosophy of education at MSU. In MSU’s extension programs, once problems were identified, a research demonstration program was designed to address them. Similarly, NAACP students believed the sit-in served as a research demonstration that highlighted the problem of housing discrimination in East Lansing. Indeed, Sheldon Imber, a student at MSU, interpreted the sit-in as educational similar to the research demonstrations in community extension programs. As such, she called for more civil rights activity in the next year. Those activities, she believed, could serve as an “enlightening experience for students.”7 Students who engaged in the sit-ins also argued the activity was itself a form of education. Responding to East Lansing community members who called on students to return to their education, sit-in participants retorted that “a ‘real’ education is not contained in books alone.”8

While students interpreted the sit-ins as an educational opportunity in line with the land grant mission, Hannah interpreted acts of disobedience as not being a legitimate activity for the university and as being counter to his idea of good citizenship. Nationally, Hannah was an outspoken critic of the freedom rides and other acts of civil disobedience as an effective political strategy for achieving civil rights. He believed deeply in change through the process of law. Indeed, in his speech to the graduating class that same spring, Hannah underscored his support for the cause of civil rights and encouraged students to be on the forefront. But he believed that “they must work for change under the rule of order.” Hannah explained that students engaging in forms of civil disobedience “creates a climate of unrest” that disrupted the normal function of the university.9 If students interpreted the sit-in as a form of education, MSU leaders like Hannah largely interpreted the action as disruptive.

On a broader level, the sit-in and the response by the Hannah administration represented divergent interpretations of MSU’s service mission as an institution. Indeed, students believed that the sit-ins also concerned the role of the university within the community. Peter Cannon, an MSU student from South Carolina, argued that the position of Hannah and of MSU was a “double standard.”10 Hannah promoted and called for civil rights around the country while remaining neutral on discriminatory practices within East Lansing. Similarly, the university recruited students of color, even as the institution turned a blind eye to the experiences of the problem of housing faced by those students. He argued that MSU as a public institution had an obligation to take a clear political position on the problem of housing discrimination in East Lansing. Hannah, however, believed his position—and that of the university—was ultimately limited. He distinguished between his private position as a citizen and professional role as a president, believing that he did not have the authority to speak on behalf of MSU. “I am dedicated to open housing,” he explained to students, “but I cannot tell East Lansing how to run its affairs.”11 Hannah explained further that off campus, he was only one citizen of the city and had only one vote.

Whether encouraging students to work through existing systems or defining his institutional position in a narrow fashion, Hannah defended the idea of institutional neutrality. The problem was that Hannah was far from neutral. In addition to sending university vans to support East Lansing Police, Hannah also directed its Public Safety Department to work with the East Lansing Police to establish a political surveillance unit of faculty and student activists who helped organize the sit-in.12 Hannah’s response to NAACP’s protests and forms of civil disobedience shaped a particular institutional logic of disciplining democracy at MSU. In a range of different ways, MSU supported field research or student engagement in the community, seeing such experiences as part of the community extension philosophy. But the research “demonstration” aspect of the land grant philosophy had limits. Students could only demonstrate what they learned if it was deemed nonpolitical by the university.

Tutoring in the Community

The distinction made by Hannah between appropriate and inappropriate forms of field research “demonstrations” also shaped the boundaries of the provision of academic service to the civil rights struggle in the South. In the first part of the 1960s, a cohort of student activists and faculty members also sought a more public position from MSU that made clear to students and community members that it supported the movement for civil rights within its institutional mission. Two individuals played a key role in pushing MSU in this direction: Mary Ann Shupenko, a White student at MSU and member of the campus NAACP, and Robert Green, a Black faculty member in MSU’s sociology department and faculty adviser to the NAACP. Green was a sociologist of education who, like Brookhover, committed himself to the civil rights struggle both as an academic and as an activist. While Shupenko and Green initially connected through Green’s course on “Race in the Schools,” the model that inspired them was the 1964 Mississippi Summer Project.13 In recruiting students and faculty across the country, SNCC field-workers argued that the Mississippi Project, with its connection to the political project of organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, represented “pedagogical revolutions,” especially for the college students who came from the “much-maligned liberal arts undergraduate education.”14 Shupenko and Green agreed, believing the summer project contained the seeds for a pedagogical revolution at MSU.

The Mississippi Summer Project connected formal education to political organizing. Students like Shupenko were to serve as tutors in traditional academic subjects, while faculty members like Green were there to provide academic expertise to both staff and local community residents. But their roles as “teachers” and “experts” were misleading. Liz Fusco, the Freedom School coordinator, believed the experience in the South would encourage volunteers like Shupenko to and Green reconsider “what education is, since the people we presume to be ‘teaching’ know and understand so much more than any of us from the middle-class white North do.”15 The emphasis on experiential learning was also embedded in the political organizing of the summer project. The political structure of the project linked the Freedom School to the formation of community centers, where Mississippi residents and Northern volunteers could meet, discuss relevant social and political issues, and develop organizing strategies. In connecting the Freedom School and community centers to the formation of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the summer project aimed to develop a grassroots model of democracy that sought to not only transform the political system in Mississippi but also to create a mode of “participatory citizen-ship” education.16

Shaped by their experiences in Mississippi and utilizing their MSU campus connections, Green and Shupenko started the Student Tutorial Education Project (STEP). STEP was a cross-institutional model between MSU and Rust College in Mississippi. They focused on partnering with Rust College because it was facing accreditation and financial issues due to the role of its students in the Mississippi movement. Green and Shupenko believed a partnership could help provide direct financial support to Rust College as it navigated state-level politics of funding while also engaging MSU students with a college that took a prominent role in the civil rights struggle in the South. At the core of the partnership was the Freedom School model. The goal was to bring MSU faculty and advanced undergraduate and graduate students to Rust College to provide academic support for Rust College and local high school students. MSU volunteers were tasked with tutoring students, while MSU faculty members provided support to Rust College staff. Like the Freedom Summer, the STEP program also included “a ‘community’ project with maximum participation of local adults.” Indeed, Shupenko and Green understood STEP as another institutional hub in the political organizing for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.17

Green, in particular, saw the STEP project as an effort to reorient the service mission of MSU. He saw the political goals and aspirations of the civil rights movement not as outside the university but as a central part of the institutional service mission. “Most people in the university don’t see social change as the role of MSU,” but Green believed that “anything that causes pain and injustice is in our domain. The university has to be an instrument of change.”18 To build support for the program and its vision, Green invited Martin Luther King Jr., who likewise linked formal education at MSU to civil rights activism. King interpreted the program as a means to infuse a sense of moral concern and commitment into the formal curriculum of the university. King challenged the four thousand students in the audience to get involved and encouraged them to transform “conviction into action.” He linked such involvement to their education. He defined the STEP program as a “broadening” experience for students, one that would help individual students identify their own individual prejudices and lead to further political commitment. For both Green and King, the STEP program represented a model for other universities to engage students in the struggle for civil rights.19

While both Green and King interpreted STEP as a political project, the program was interpreted differently in the context of MSU. Indeed, the political vision of the STEP program was constrained by two factors. The first was leadership. Inspired by his experiences in the South, Green took a leave of absence from MSU. He joined the Southern Christian Leadership Council (SCLC), where he served a director of the Citizenship Education Program. Shupenko, who also helped organize the connection between MSU and Rust College, took a gap year and worked directly with SNCC. With these changes, the STEP program fell under the leadership of John Duley, who had worked with Green in forming the partnership. Duley prioritized King’s spiritual interpretation of the STEP project but did not share the same political interpretation articulated by Green. A campus minister with the United Christian Ministry, Duley was concerned with what he defined as the spiritual gaps in modern higher education. Duley interpreted student demands for educational “relevance” as the “new morality for higher education.” In contrast to Green, Duley was less interested in social transformations led by students and more in their individual and moral development, primarily through community service.20

The second factor was the logic of the institution that distinguished between formal education and political action. In turning to MSU to support the STEP program, students and faculty participants confronted institutional regulations of student groups. Since it was an affiliated project of MSU’s student government, students had to sign what was called a “non-agitation” agreement that prevented students from engaging in political activities as part of the STEP program. This requirement influenced how students defined the mission of the STEP project within MSU. In material for the promotion of the program, the student coordinator, Laura Leichitler, refrained from including language that supported SNCC’s efforts or that of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Instead, she promoted the STEP program as a “non-political tutorial program” and a “community education tutorial.”21 Of course, these rhetorical moves were also politically strategic. After all, the program was navigating not only the institutional politics of MSU but also those of Mississippi. Even if the rhetorical shift was politically strategic, the new mission had the effect of influencing how MSU student volunteers understood their roles in the civil rights struggle. Wayne Albertson, a STEP participant, acknowledged the intentional, nonpolitical nature of the program. “We acted on the premise that our activity was educational and not explicitly political,” Albertson explained.22

Green attempted to maintain the STEP program’s political commitment. Indeed, SCLC’s citizenship program provided Green with a model that connected tutorial education in political and constitutional rights to community organizing at the local level. In 1966, he met with MSU volunteers at Rust College and encouraged them to join the Meredith March Against Fear. For Green, participation in the march was an extension of the STEP mission to be engaged with the community as well as of his work with SCLC. Green’s efforts confronted a programmatic context shaped by the program’s emphasis on tutoring as its primary activity. In a community meeting to discuss whether to join the march, MSU volunteers debated a range of issues. Some students assumed the distinction between the educational nature of the program and the political nature of the march, while others adopted the view that such political engagement might endanger the program itself. While the student community overwhelmingly supported involvement, it set strict limits: interested volunteers had to receive parental permission and could only participate in the march on Sunday, outside of program time.23 Activism in the form of political protest and community organizing—the other “learning situations” from the Freedom Summer—was no longer interpreted as a core educational activity of STEP; rather, it was treated as outside the program mission.

With these programmatic constraints, only a small cohort of students, including Albertson and Kathy Wolterink, participated in the march. Albertson concluded that his involvement was vital to his work as a tutor, noting how the protest enlivened the meaning of education between him and the students at Rust College. Wolterink also noted that the Meredith March “gave me an opportunity to experience what it means to stand up for what you know is right, in the face of hostility, hatred, and the threat of violence.”24 But Albertson and Wolterink were the exceptions, not the norm. The STEP program discouraged and limited student involvement in political activism. Many student volunteers maintained the view that the program’s purpose was to serve an academic need in Mississippi—a view that was infused into the student culture at MSU. Indeed, when STEP volunteers returned to campus, Char Jolles’s headline presented a juxtaposition between the STEP volunteers and sit-in leaders: “STEP Sent Educators, Not Agitators.”25

What triumphed was a tutorial model of education disconnected from civil rights activism. This tutorial model shaped the institutional conditions of a new culture of disciplining democracy that promoted MSU’s service to civil rights without a political commitment. When Jim Krathwohl reflected on whether the STEP project was successful, he focused on the educational experience of the MSU college student. “The volunteers,” he wrote, “learned as much as the students.”26 A nascent culture of service learning emerged in the context of student life—one that was increasingly supported by university administrators. Indeed, this interpretation—of learning through nonpolitical community service—took on even greater institutional salience in MSU’s partnership with the Peace Corps.

Defining Service Learning

The civil rights struggle captured the political imagination of students at MSU. But it was not the only experience reshaping ideas of education and community extension at MSU. In the first part of the 1960s, the first director of the Peace Corps, Sargent Shriver, turned to American universities to provide training for international volunteer work overseas. In a letter to Hannah, Shriver asked: “How can institutions best participate in the Peace Corps program to enhance their educational functions and to increase their capacity in world affairs in the U.S. interest?”27 The question connected deeply with Hannah’s philosophy of the land grant university and his focus on connecting academic research and education to a national policy goal. Hannah believed the Peace Corps training exemplified the university’s public service. Indeed, MSU’s training partnership with the Peace Corps in the 1960s provided MSU administrators with another model for updating MSU’s public service mission and expanding the undergraduate curriculum.

Within the context of the Peace Corps–university partnership, Peace Corps officials emphasized the educational potential of the volunteer service. Shriver believed the Peace Corps–university partnership would serve two purposes. First, the volunteer experience would serve as an educational experience for young Americans, thus contributing “to the education of America and to more intelligent American participation in the world.” Second, the partnership would also influence American universities like MSU. As Shriver envisioned, the partnership would help “American education expand its horizon—its research and curriculum—to the whole world.”28 Using Shriver’s focus as a guide, MSU administrators also prioritized the potential of the volunteer experience as a form of education. In MSU’s proposal for Peace Corps training, Donald Grummon, a professor of counseling who oversaw the Peace Corps training, emphasized the need for volunteers to embrace a learner’s mindset, even if they were there to provide educational support to Nigerian students. The whole program must be “broadly educational,” Grummon explained in the proposal; he emphasized that “an attitude of ‘we have much to learn from the host country’ should be assumed.”29

The primary focus at MSU was thus pedagogical—how to train volunteers as both experts who provided technical aid and learners who worked in collaboration with host country communities. The dual learning goal was best captured by the volunteer role. The role of MSU in Nigeria was to help develop the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as well as the elementary school system. In both capacities, Peace Corps volunteers served as teaching assistants who also worked on community development projects. They were thus positioned to be both academic experts and experts-in-training. The main emphasis of MSU’s Peace Corps training was on balancing American expertise with respect for local culture and traditions. “While scholarship . . . must be the first consideration in sending our people abroad (else why send them?),” a MSU training guide explained, “merely the possession of these skills is far from enough to act as a specialized representative of our American society.” The training guide also emphasized that the volunteer should be “thoroughly educated in cultural relativistic views and in the implications of the cultural concept” so that the volunteer can be both “tolerant and understanding” in their overseas work. This position was deemed necessary for the Peace Corps mission. The volunteer must learn from the community so that they “furnish our citizens with accurate information about peoples and customs in other lands.”30

David Schickele captured the educational vision of the MSU–Peace Corps partnership. Schickele participated in Peace Corps training at MSU, prior to serving for two years. He interpreted the volunteer experience itself as a distinct form of learning, one that endowed his intellectual understanding of the world with social and cultural meaning. “No real intellectual understanding,” he concluded about his experience, “can exist without a sense of identification at some deeper level.”31 This was more than a fleeting reflection on his experience. He also believed it offered a new model of updating the American liberal arts. He challenged what was often treated as two warring camps: liberal arts defenders and progressive educators. Schickele described the Peace Corps as a “total education, a bonding of the active and contemplative in which experience is made meaningful and books become experience.” The volunteer experience, he further argued, closed “the gap between thought and action, academic education and experiential education, education and work.”32

The perspectives of volunteers like Schickele provided MSU administrators with an example of the educational possibilities of the Peace Corps experience, both in terms of educating young Americans and in supporting MSU’s service mission. Eugene Jacobson, the assistant dean for international studies, believed MSU’s partnership with the Peace Corps enhanced both the overseas work of the agency and the academic research and teaching at MSU. He underscored this point in a letter to Shriver. “We are convinced that the integration of Peace Corps training with the regular University program,” he wrote, “enhances both the Peace Corps training effort and the capability of the University for making meaningful international contributions.”33 George Axin agreed. A seasoned expert in professional development in land grant personnel and the coordinator of the MSU-Nigeria training program, Axin interpreted the training program and volunteer experience as being akin to the land grant tradition of extension programs. He understood the experience in terms of advanced fieldwork research. “Because of the nature of the work they are doing,” which included gathering data for future study projects and uses in theses, Axin explained, the Peace Corps experience represented “significant academic achievement.” As such, he worked with faculty in the program to codify the experience within the traditional disciplining culture of the university through the granting of academic credit for not only the training programing but also the overseas experience.34

MSU administrators’ excitement for the Peace Corps partnership, especially as a model for education, masked two critical issues. The first was how the MSU–Peace Corps partnership promoted a political goal in the guise of volunteer service. From its inception, there were concerns about the Peace Corps raised by students, especially regarding the national character of volunteer service. Indeed, Nigerian students at MSU raised a fundamental issue at the core of the partnership: MSU’s support of American political goals in Nigeria. In the State News, Daniel Archibong argued that the Peace Corps was “another tactical move to win the cold war.” As such, he continued, the imposition of the Peace Corps onto host countries represented “the image of the disliked or the just ousted representatives of colonial governments” and thus “will aid in prolonging ill feeling against colonial thinking and values.”35 In Archibong’s view, the Peace Corps was an extension of both Cold War politics and colonial legacies that demonstrated the very political nature of volunteer work overseas. The partnership with MSU—as a research and teaching university—concealed the political goals of international volunteerism in the form of education.

The second issue concerned the training itself. The training model that MSU administrators celebrated was largely a replication of academic and disciplinary models at the university. The program took on characteristic patterns of academic instruction. At the end of the training program, prospective volunteers wrote two papers; one explored the functions of education in American society as compared to other cultural contexts, and another focused on the opportunities and problems of teaching in a cross-cultural context. In other training contexts, students were given exams. This “excessively academic approach,” wrote the Peace Corps training evaluator Meridan Bennett, “caused much of the material to remain dead.” Most materials presented, she further noted, “were simply a re-run of one of the regular undergraduate courses.” Bennett’s conclusion became a common refrain among Peace Corps evaluators. “Places like Michigan State,” Bennett wrote, produce “a simulacrum of training” that is “largely irrelevant to the field experience.” The limitations of the training program, Bennett argued, led the Peace Corps to fail in its stated mission, both in expanding the university and in providing aid to host countries. She wrote, “In trying to educate the universities to the realities of the world (if, indeed, that is one of our purposes), we are prejudicing the service of thousands of rural development and CD [community development] workers. The losses to the countries we are trying to help is staggering.”36

Roger Landrum—a volunteer who also trained and served with Schickele—raised both of these issues in his reflection on his experiences at MSU and in Nigeria. Landrum returned home critical of the ways the MSU–Peace Corps training promoted the role of the volunteer overseas. He reinterpreted his training on volunteer and development aid—in particular, the view that institution and nation building in Nigeria required American knowledge—as perpetuating a colonial logic. As he told Peace Corps staff and university officials when he returned home, “volunteers object[ed] to the image the Peace Corps has created because it is essentially Americans moving into darkness with light.”37 In challenging the political nature of his volunteer work, he also prioritized what he learned from the experience itself. “Most of us feel differently,” Landrum explained—“that we learned more than we gave. That needs to be defined.”38 Landrum inverted the idea of development in the Peace Corps, but in a way that limited the very mission of the organization. He prioritized the ways he learned and “developed” through experiences over the ways American knowledge and expertise—the mission of the Peace Corps–higher education partnership—professedly helped develop the host countries.

At MSU, advocates who saw Peace Corps volunteerism as a new model of education responded to the criticisms of the pedagogical problem of the Peace Corps training model raised by evaluators while ignoring the political and social limitations of volunteer service. Indeed, MSU advocates interpreted reflections like Landrum’s in terms of cross-cultural learning rather than as a critique of the colonial logic of the Peace Corps–MSU partnership. A key figure at MSU who prioritized the experiential and cross-cultural learning of the Peace Corps experience was Duley. He believed the Peace Corps provided a theoretical framework for his thinking on the new models of civic education emerging at MSU. In outlining his theory of experiential learning at MSU, Duley drew on the work of the psychologists Richard Hopkins and Roger Harrison. In their analysis of the Peace Corps, they focused their attention on the cross-cultural elements of the volunteer experiences. A key theme in their report was the place of emotions and values in the Peace Corps experience versus the academic focus on higher education. At the university, Harrison and Hopkins wrote, “feelings and values may be discussed but rarely acted upon.” In contrast, they argued, in the Peace Corps, “values and feelings have action consequences, and action must be taken.” Like Peace Corps staff and volunteers, Hopkins and Harrison concluded that the methods of higher education were successful in preparing students’ intellectual capacity, but Peace Corps training prepared students for situations that required them “to adapt to or to act in unfamiliar or ambiguous social situations.”39

Duley thus adopted one component of the Peace Corps–MSU partnership. Using the frameworks proposed by Harrison and Hopkins in their study on cross-cultural training, Duley developed a pedagogy of experiential learning that combined seminars with community experience. The objectives of the community experience were to “relate intuitive response and the intellectual understanding of experience” and to “use experiences as a source of knowledge about oneself and other cultures.”40 Duley believed that the volunteer service, whether in East Lansing or overseas, functioned as a form of “field” experiential learning where “meanings and values can be explored and experimented with; not just examined abstractly, but tried out in living situations.” Discarding the underlying politics of international volunteerism and its limitations, Duley focused on the need for field experience learning situations to better prepare students for adaptable thinking.41

While Duley used the Peace Corps to inform his theory of experiential learning, MSU students connected the Peace Corps model of service learning to the work in the East Lansing community. The Peace Corps, argued MSU student Frank Bianco, brough to light “the potential of American youth to aid undeveloped nations.” He applied the appeal of the Peace Corps to the American context. “It has lately become apparent,” he wrote, “that our own nation is in need of contributions that can be made by volunteer youth in combating the poverty problem in the United States.”42 When the Peace Corps captured Bianco’s attention, he was taking a sociology class on education taught by the sociologist David Gottlieb. The class focused on school funding and racial inequality in the East Lansing area. Reflecting on the idea of the Peace Corps, Bianco and other students asked Gottlieb what students at MSU could do to address these issues at the local level. They linked the question to their own education at MSU. “While part of the function of the University is to prepare young adults for responsible citizenship,” the students argued, “no outlet is provided where these responsibilities can be assumed.”43 With the Peace Corps serving as a model and with the support of Gottlieb, Bianco started the Student Education Corps (SEC), a program in which MSU students served as volunteer tutors in math, English, and science in Lansing schools.

Bianco interpreted the SEC as a carbon copy of the Peace Corps and its domestic counterpart, Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA). “The kind of concern and service shown by the originators of the SEC,” Bianco wrote, “is the same type of concern and service shown by new volunteer organizations in the United States today.” In this way, the SEC program adopted the same logic of development and education that informed the Peace Corps. The project ignored the political and economic conditions that produced educational inequalities in the Lansing area. Instead, its mission was “to help alleviate the social and educational inequalities of culturally disadvantaged groups” through mentorship and “providing needed inspiration and motivation to continue with their schooling.”44

Bianco also believed that the SEC represented more than just an opportunity for students to volunteer. He argued that the SEC addressed the critiques of the university’s curriculum while also serving as an expression of the university’s service mission—one that aligned with Hannah’s vision of good citizenship. “Citizenship should not be an indefinable abstraction,” Bianco explained, “but rather, a concrete state of social consciousness which embodies both privilege and duty.”45 In Bianco’s view, volunteer service made citizenship “concrete” and encouraged students like himself to recognize their privilege and duty. How a student volunteer learned from community service—whether at home or overseas—thus became the model of the new civics as MSU. As MSU administrators expanded and codified such opportunities in both the curriculum and extracurriculum, those opportunities were also used to delegitimize other forms of political education and dissent that emerged on campus in the late 1960s.

Promoting “Constructive” Activism

In 1965, the MSU Committee for Peace in Vietnam organized a teach-in on the Vietnam War. The event attracted over two thousand students. The teach-in was one part of the organization’s political education. Students on the committee also linked the teach-in to protest and organizing. Two weeks later, the committee organized 150 students to join the anti–Vietnam War protest in Washington, DC. The MSU Committee for Peace in Vietnam also organized the Lansing Chapter of the Vietnam Summer Project. The Vietnam Summer Project sought to engage students and community residents in a political education campaign. At the core of the effort was a model that combined formal education with community organizing. Training for the Vietnam Summer Project included the development of a study group program that focused on the historical and political backdrop of US involvement in Vietnam; role-playing exercises that focused on engaging with difficult conversations on American foreign policy and community members’ belief systems; and what was defined as “neighborhood work.” In “neighborhood work,” MSU students were encouraged to choose precincts where they lived, because “the most effective volunteers are those who live in the neighborhood being canvassed.” The role of the student was also to take the position of a learner. The volunteer should “listen closely and discern how various types of people think about the war” and “discover what other issues arouse most concern in the community.” The effort, in other words, took on other modes of community engagement that were increasingly common at MSU in the 1960s. But there was one distinguishing characteristic, and it reflected both the political reasoning of MSU’s NAACP chapter and the original vision of STEP; if the other university-sponsored programs linked their engagement to either academic or national service, the Vietnam Summer Project linked community engagement to political dissent.46

The anti-war movement at MSU again revealed ideological preferences within the service mission of the university. In response to the teach-in and anti-war organizing around the East Lansing area by MSU students, Hannah largely expressed rhetorical support. Hannah interpreted the teach-in model as being akin to the ethos of academic education and research. “No conscientious university president would refuse to give consideration to recommendations from responsible students,” he explained, especially if “arrived at through careful study and serious reflection.”47 However, Hannah’s support for MSU students’ right to dissent changed with the publication of the 1966 Ramparts article that highlighted MSU’s link to the CIA in Vietnam and its role in developing the security apparatus of the Diem regime.

The controversy centered around MSU’s public service mission. Hannah defended MSU’s role in Vietnam, seeing security training as an extension of the university’s mission and philosophy of instruction, research, and service. “To say that a university should never undertake to serve the national policy,” Hannah argued, “is to deny the right of the public university to exist.” Indeed, in Hannah’s view, the sole purpose of the university was to support national policy efforts. He continued, “In everything it does, the public university carries out the national policy.”48 For anti-war activists at MSU, research and education activities tied to the war reflected the university’s misconstrued understanding of service. As Stu Dowty, an activist for SDS, explained, “universities are ‘service stations’ par excellence to those institutions we seek to alter—they are part of the institutional structure preserving the status quo.”49 Like some student activists at MSU and in SDS, Dowty wanted university officials to not only create opportunities for students to engage in “service” for the movement and related political struggles for social change but also separate the institution from those “service” activities they deemed immoral.50

The efforts that grew out of earlier activism at MSU, such as the STEP and SEC programs, were recast as counterexamples to the anti-war movement and the critiques of the university. Indeed, it was in the context of increased anti-war efforts that focused on the university that Hannah established the Office of Volunteer Programs, a campus clearinghouse that consolidated the SEC, STEP, and other student-run volunteer programs. The first administrator of the Office of Volunteer Programs was James Tanck, an MSU graduate who was deeply involved in student government and coordinating the SEC. Tanck aligned the office with Peace Corps volunteerism in a way that differed from Duley’s philosophy of experiential learning. In outlining the mission of the office, Tanck took a position similar to that of Hannah on “social action” at MSU in the 1960s. Highlighting both civil rights activism and the Peace Corps, he prioritized what he deemed as the more constructive and nonpolitical elements, in particular student tutoring and volunteering with local charities. Involvement in the freedom rides, sit-ins, and voter registration allowed “students to look and serve beyond the ‘ivory tower,’” Tanck wrote, but he concluded that the volunteer development work of the Peace Corps “refocused student involvement from picketing to constructive social action.”51

In making this interpretive argument about action at MSU, Tanck at once associated student “action” with the land grant tradition of providing service to the community and discounted the value of other forms of activism and civic participation. While such action was typically taken by faculty and administrators at MSU in the form of scholarly research and lectures, Tanck believed students could offer similar types of service through volunteerism. “The concept of student volunteer action,” he wrote, “is simply an extension of this tradition to include the service of the University’s students as well.” The office also became the interpreter of what appropriate student service looked like. The new office, Tanck explained, represented the main contact point for residents and ensured that no promises were made to a community “without the University’s knowledge or consent.” As the liaison to community residents, the office was thus set up as a way to interpret where and how students got involved, creating a filter that shaped students’ conception of community engagement. It also served to mollify residents of East Lansing, where the university was expanding.52 On both levels, the new office created disciplining boundaries of what could and could not constitute community and civic engagement at MSU.

Tanck also believed that the new office served a secondary purpose: good public relations. As Tanck noted, student volunteerism would promote a positive public image of the university. Informational news releases “on positive student action,” he explained, held “tremendous public relations value” for “the public at large and particularly to alumni.” In the context of anti-war activism on campus and broader critiques of the service mission of MSU, university administrators employed a rhetorical strategy that delegitimized anti-war activism. They juxtaposed what they defined as the constructive activism of those doing volunteer work with the perceived deconstructive efforts of anti-war protesters. Clifton R. Wharton, the new president of MSU in the 1970s and the first Black president of the institution, was a strong supporter of the various volunteer programs on campus, providing institutional funding for the growth and expansion of the Office of Volunteer Programs. During the student strikes and protests regarding the Vietnam War, Wharton used the programs and student participants as a way to deflect from the broader questions concerning appropriate service on campus. In public interviews and reports on anti-war activism at MSU, Wharton explained that the protests on campus distracted from the students who were “committed to positive activism as student leaders, tutors for the blind, ghetto workers and the like.”53

Indeed, this institutional move that juxtaposed what Tanck deemed as the positive activism of student volunteerism with the perceived destructive activism of students associated with the anti-war movement became a rhetorical tool of the Nixon administration. In the early 1970s, the Nixon administration provided federal support and funding to university-based volunteer programs tied into regular coursework and used the MSU office as the model for the University Year for Action. Tanck became the head of Nixon’s National Student Volunteer Program, which oversaw the University Year for Action. A couple of months after the student strike at MSU in 1970, the Office of Volunteer Programs invited representatives from the Nixon administration to MSU’s campus as a way to promote an alternative type of student social action. Tanck helped facilitate the visit of Pat Nixon, the wife of President Nixon. On her visit to campus, Nixon encouraged students to get involved in volunteer projects because, as she explained, “volunteering is protesting in a beneficial way.”54 Like Wharton, Nixon emphasized what many in the administration defined as more constructive forms of activism.

Nixon’s visit was also part of a broader promotion of a particular kind of volunteerism in the university promoted by the administration, one that served state manpower needs. On a visit to MSU two years after Pat Nixon’s visit, Elliot Richardson, the director of Health, Education, and Welfare under Nixon, defined community action as the “new volunteerism” that tapped into the compassion and concern of students to address “problems of manpower and financial shortages.”55 Shaped by institutional responses to anti-war activism and broader political shifts at both the state and federal level, volunteer service shifted from being a key element of students’ various forms of social activism and education to being one of state manpower needs.56 Indeed, the mission of the office took on the priorities of the “new volunteerism” as outlined by the Nixon administration. Under both John Cauley and Jane Smith, the two directors of the office from 1969 to 1979, most programs focused on volunteer management and the most effective ways to allocate student volunteers in community service opportunities. Office reports over the course of the 1970s counted the hours of students working in a variety of social service agencies to demonstrate the “manpower” impact of student volunteerism. Volunteerism was quantified and commodified for the university’s public relations.

University officials also distinguished the efforts of the Office of Volunteer Programs from the other forms of community engagement that emerged at MSU in the late 1960s. As Cauley explained, the goal of the office was to distinguish “between legitimate voluntary activity and what is realistically academic field placement.”57 This institutional categorization had the effect of not only disconnecting student volunteer commitments from field research experiences but also fragmenting the student movements’ broader critique of MSU’s service mission.

One of those programs that Cauley distinguished from the Office of Volunteer Programs was the Center for Urban Affairs. Like the Office of Volunteer Programs, the Center for Urban Affairs was also started in the context of and in response to campus protest activism focused on civil rights. In the mid-1960s, a new student group was formed on campus—the Black Student Alliance—that carried on the legacy of the MSU chapter of the NAACP, demanding the university to fight housing discrimination. In addition, the Black Student Alliance called for the university to create more programs that better supported the Black community. “The university should develop a project,” said Barry Amis, one of the founding members of the alliance, “for the black students of Lansing and take a greater interest in the Lansing community.”58 In response to the advocacy of the Black Student Alliance—in particular, the occupation of the administration building in 1968—the Hannah administration established a new office designed to support projects that connected Black students to the Lansing area. Operating under the Office of the President, the center was made to fit prevailing institutional logic. Indeed, the new office reflected other organized research units established in the postwar university and focused on ways to apply social science research to policy and social problems.59

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, students and faculty attempted to expand the center’s mission. Indeed, the center was overseen by Robert Green. Drawing on his experiences in the movement, Green became a leading advocate for reorienting research models from the perspective of the university to that of the community. “Community residents and a growing number of concerned researchers,” he argued, “have asserted that community-based research rarely benefits the residents of the communities researched.” Too often, he argued, researchers believed their role was to “define and describe the problems” rather than begin from the perspective and knowledge of the community. For Green, the issue came down to the lack of community input and power. Local residents—often those who were the subject of research—“feel their voices have been overruled by the ‘experts,’” even though many of those residents “see no relationship between the proposed study and the problems as they see them.” In Green’s view, the issues were compounded by the fact that most researchers who came into the community were White, middle-class individuals who brought a set of assumptions about the “ghetto.” As such, Green argued, scholars needed to redesign
research and education models to create cooperation that prioritized the knowledge and experiences of residents on the one hand and the political implications of research at the community level on the other. Too often, he explained, “neutrality” had been “concealed by a cloak of ‘academia.’” He argued that the university needed to develop a different approach that taught students and scholars to “perceive [his or her] role not necessarily as neutral but as one that will directly benefit the community.”60

Green believed the center would serve as a model for redesigning education and research in the university, especially in relation to minority students. “Past efforts to educate in our society have basically dealt with the ‘transmission of culture,’ with a common core of white middle class values,” he argued. The transmission tended to “justify and perpetuate the oppression of Black people, American Indians, Mexican Americans, and other minority groups.”61 Under Wharton, the center was expanded and became the College of Urban Development. As the university’s first African American president, Wharton shared Green’s concern about Black residents in Detroit and the broader role of the university in addressing urban issues. Wharton believed that the purpose of the college was to provide researchers and students with a means to bridge the theory-application gap.62 In contrast, Green saw the role of the college and in particular its work in the community differently. He was more concerned with community empowerment than the application of a particular theory or research problem. Green attempted to develop a model of “service learning” more sensitive to community knowledge and concern. “The Intent of the S-L [service learning] program being the provision of a service to the community, all efforts will be made to avoid the misuse of the community,” he explained, and “in this regard, faculty advisors/consultants should make certain that an outcome of the S-L project will be of direct benefit to the community.”63

Green’s efforts at the center were constrained by administrators and faculty who interpreted such activities as being outside the service mission of the university. During the transition from the Center of Urban Affairs to the College of Urban Development, many faculty members were skeptical of the education and research models articulated by Green, arguing that universities should not be compromised by involvement with outside communities. In particular, some faculty explained to Green that the program lacked intellectual standards because of its activist leanings.64 Members of MSU’s board of trustees expressed similar concern about the perceived politics of the center. In 1970, Clair White, a trustee member, called for a probe into the operation of the center. “If this [institution] is being used as the basis of a political operation,” he explained, “I want to know.”65 Although the board did not cut funding, the institutional culture and skepticism, especially as the center transitioned into a full college, set limits on Green’s broader goals for the college. Concerned with the perception of the new college, Green increasingly focused on the academic and learning elements of community involvement over broader goals of community empowerment and social activism. “With the advent of college status,” Green concluded in 1972, “the academic function must take on the overriding and unifying emphasis of our efforts; it is no longer one among equals.” As such, he explained further, “all non-campus work must be carefully coordinated so that it is a contributory part of the academic function.”66

With the prioritization of the academic components of community out-reach in the college through such education projects as the Urban Service Program and Field Experience Program, student learning took precedence over community impact and input. In the academic year 1973–1974, students were involved in a range of community projects, including a consumer education program, urban planning for a community center, and an outreach effort for ex-offenders returning to the Greater Lansing area. While the experience provided a needed service to the community, the broader purpose, especially for students, was defined in terms of academic goals. Maxie Jackson, a graduate student and assistant in the college, oversaw the field experience program. He explained that its value was that it took the “student out of the traditional classroom setting and into a practical, applied experience.” Jackson underscored that the experience was “no less demanding than the classroom” and was designed to “supplement and complement the student’s academic program” in terms of skill development and career exploration.67 The evolution of the center to the College of Urban Development reflected the disciplining boundaries of rethinking education, research, and student involvement in the community. Inspired both by his former students and his own activist experiences, Green and other faculty members challenged and extended the meaning of research and education. Institutional concerns over whether the kind of community research Green did was “political” or appropriately intellectual set limits on the meaning of student action as part of research and education at MSU.

Legacy

Writing in 1965, Trudie S. Barreras, a master’s student at MSU, was supportive of recent demonstrations at MSU. But his support came with an important question. He worried that the increasing emphasis on demonstrations and other forms of political action at MSU had the potential of becoming the “cheapest form of involvement.” “Good citizens, your desire to ‘stand up and be counted’ is admirable,” Barreras wrote. “But here is the critical question: Is this all that you can do?” He encouraged his peers to link their political actions to service work in the community. Doing so, he believed, would demonstrate a deeper commitment to the community and to the political cause. If students did not make this connection, he argued, “we should not be surprised if our efforts generate little but disgust among the unconvinced members of our community and, perhaps, do more harm than good to the cause which we are trying to support.”68 Indeed, Barreras’s point was vitally important to discussions of good citizenship; a sole commitment to political action without other forms of involvement was a limited form of being a “good” citizen. The problem, however, was the inverse: MSU discouraged students from—and actively disciplined them for—connecting their various forms of community service to political activism in the form of civil disobedience and dissent.

Over the courses of the 1960s and into the 1970s, student activists and faculty supporters at MSU attempted to reconstruct the meaning of service and education by developing new community programs. With faculty support, students organized a range of community involvement projects, from STEP in the South and SEC in Lansing to the Vietnam Summer Project. MSU administrators offered support as well, interpreting student efforts as a means to expand the definition of community extension programs. There were also new partnerships—such as that between MSU and the Peace Corps—that directly connected a student’s education to volunteer service in the world. The new projects inspired MSU administrators to establish the Office of Volunteer Programs and expand the offerings in the Center of Urban Affairs or what became the College of Urban Development. However, university support always came with an important caveat: the university could not support efforts that were deemed political, such as civil disobedience or political dissent, or actions that challenged the institution’s commitment to national service. Indeed, in the middle part of the 1960s, MSU established offices that supported new community engagement programs as it actively disciplined students who participated in the civil rights sit-ins and anti-war protests both on and off campus. The emphasis on community service also served a strategic purpose. In response to campus activism that criticized the role of MSU, university administrators promoted the what they deemed as the constructive activism of volunteer service associated with its new offices and programs.

The institutional reasoning for supporting some types of action in the community over others was multipronged. The emphasis on volunteer service and academic field placement aligned with Hannah’s politics: he ultimately saw forms of civil disobedience as counter to his understanding of good citizenship. But his political views only partly explain the evolution of new community engagement programs at MSU. Hannah also interpreted activism as incompatible with formal education and research and thus outside his philosophy of community extension. In contrast, the emphasis on volunteer service fit with the existing mission of MSU as an institution that served national policy goals. Indeed, the promotion of volunteer service aligned with the Nixon administration’s efforts to utilize student volunteers to support the “manpower” of Nixon’s New Federalism. A coalition of students and MSU supporters, especially those who helped form STEP and SEC, also adopted the institutional logic of community extension. Barreras’s op-ed reflected the more general view of students at MSU. The broader political visions of community engagement and the role of the public university articulated by students like Ernie Green and Dowty and faculty members like Robert Green proved to be the exception rather than the norm.

By the mid-1970s, MSU administrators could point to a range of opportunities, from volunteer service through the Office of Volunteer Programs to academic field placement in the College of Urban Development. MSU administrators saw those opportunities as an expression of the university’s updated service mission. So too did the new students who participated in those programs. “Students still care,” argued MSU student Peggy Gossett in an editorial for the State News, “but in a realistic way.” Challenging the idea that students in the 1970s had become apathetic, Gossett argued that “this generation of students has not abandoned the social and political concerns”; rather, “those concerns have merely been rerouted and reconstituted into more workable attitudes to fit in the world in 1974.” With the end of the war and the broader civil rights movement, she explained, “no longer are students advocating for peace and love for all,” but “instead they are becoming Big Brothers and Big Sisters and volunteering their time to Family Planning, the Listening Ear, or the Women’s Resource Center.” Over one thousand students, she proudly claimed, were doing volunteer work.69