Conclusion “To Channel Off Discontent”

In the early 1960s, Paul Potter helped develop leadership institutes for students involved in civil rights activism across the South. The seminar largely took on key characteristics of the university’s traditional disciplinary culture: expert lectures with discussions. In the leadership institute report for 1962, Potter wrote that the seminars were effective because many participants had been on the front lines of the sit-ins and freedom rides. Thus, he explained, when they attended the seminars, they could connect the discussions to their activist experiences. However, in his 1963 report, Potter expressed concerned about this model. The participants in the 1963 program, he noted, did not have the same political experiences as the previous cohorts. In Potter’s view, the lack of experiences demonstrated the limitations of the leadership seminar model. “We moved from an anticipated group of experienced and tested leaders whose work in and around decision-making situations would have led them to appreciate the need for the study of certain subjects and problems,” Potter wrote, “to a group of relatively inexperienced, untested young leaders whose lack of experience with or responsibility for larger problems of the movement on a community or national level had kept them from developing sophisticated interests in the material planned for the Institute.” Potter argued that future institutes needed to include some sort of “systematic community work or action program” for students to make connections between the material in the classroom and the community context.1

As the new president of SDS, Potter expanded on this idea in a white paper titled “An Action Education for the Southern Civil Rights Movement.” He remained committed to developing particular programs of study that would directly support the civil rights struggle. The exigencies of day-to-day organizing and the geographical spread of student civil rights activists, he worried, prevented activists from engaging with formal education and research that would provide context for their social and political challenges. He believed that the creation of action education centers on college campuses would provide leadership training, research, and other educational support. Potter also remained committed to developing “systematic community work or action program.” Indeed, he later concluded that “the community may prove a more effective place in which to educate students as radicals than is the insulated university.” The challenge—and the core tension within his idea—was how to best integrate formal education with activism. As Potter argued, the goal was both “dropping out” and “hanging on” to the university.2

The concept of action education centers was not a fleeting idea heaped onto other stacks of SDS white papers. Along with fellow SDS member Rennie Davis, Potter reached out to the University of California, Berkeley. To Potter, the University of California seemed like an ideal place. He had been inspired by the student sit-in and its critique of the modern American university. He was also familiar with the efforts of Martin Meyerson to develop a new community program in the aftermath of the 1964 campus protest. But when Potter asked the University of California administration to support its action education in the Bay Area, he was disturbed by what he interpreted as the administration’s tepid response. In a letter to Davis, Potter wrote, “They are trying to buy us off.” He explained that Meyerson “wants a program to send students into the slums for credit” but did not want to be affiliated with the political goals of either SDS or the local civil rights struggle in the Bay Area. Some in SDS, Potter noted, believed the programmatic effort was an attempt “to channel off discontent.”3 He worried the new program would attract students with social or political concerns but funnel their commitments toward community service, not political activism. He was concerned that this mode of disciplining would mitigate rather than enhance student activism.

Potter’s efforts and the new program at the University of California was but one instance of a broader campus debate that reshaped civics across American higher education in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1969, university leaders, representatives from federal volunteer programs, and former volunteers gathered at a conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The sponsors were the Peace Corps, Volunteers in Service to America, and the Southern Regional Education Board. Robert Sigmon, a returned Peace Corps volunteer, helped organize the gathering. Sigmon called for “service learning”—a model of civic education that connected formal education to domestic and international volunteer service. He and other attendees defined service learning as “the integration of the accomplishment of a needed task with educational growth.” The combination, advocates like Sigmon believed, would provide “breadth and depth and relevance to students’ learning” and “assist in assuring disciplined learning as part of this service.”4

But others, like Potter, called for a different model. Paul Lauter and Florence Howe, both of whom worked with SNCC, argued that the program models for national service on campus—proposals that aimed to make education “more relevant”—sought to absorb the energy of youth “without disturbing or altering the nation’s basic political, economic, and social arrangements.”5 Government- and university-defined ideas of service masked what they believed was the key lesson of students’ various forms of social activism in the 1960s. “What young people discovered in the Peace Corps as well as in Mississippi or northern ghettos,” they wrote, was “to eliminate the sources of misery, they would have to begin to challenge American institutions.” They explained that students and young people in the 1960s had experienced a “process whereby ‘involvement’ in the lives of poor people” had led “to consciousness about, then confrontation with, such institutional causes of poverty.”6 In contrast to service learning, they called this educational process “service for change.”7

The different visions of the university’s civic mission—service learning and service for change—converged in the Nixon administration’s Commission on Campus Unrest. The authors of the report—a committee that included university officials and college students—identified the contradictory demands for and definitions of service in American higher education as a central issue of campus unrest. While government and industry officials turned to the university for research for military and market needs, students, faculty, and citizens urged the university to develop action programs to tackle racism, housing, unemployment, and other related issues that plagued American society. To address demands for rethinking the meaning of service in American higher education, the committee called on universities to support programs that promoted service projects and fieldwork at the local level, albeit with one caveat: “Universities should avoid actions that will aggravate existing local problems or create new problems.”8 Universities should support community service and volunteerism, according to the report, but eschew efforts that were deemed political and outside the service mission of the university.

Service learning provided academic and political leaders with a civic model that reconciled the critiques of the university that inspired campus movements while also fitting with the new political culture of Nixon’s New Federalism. Indeed, the emphasis on the “accomplishment of a needed task” lent itself to broader political shifts across the nation in the late 1960s and early 1970s. University-sponsored community service aligned with New Federalism, a policy proposal that relied upon volunteerism to replace federal programs and address gaps in social services and public goods. When university officials and policy makers defined and promoted service learning in the early 1970s, they thus did so in a way that underscored how it would fill in the service gaps not met by the reduction of federal social programs. By 1973, the National Student Volunteer Program—a new agency within the Nixon administration—listed 565 programs on college campuses that linked a student’s coursework to volunteer service.9

The political and economic logic of service learning also informed the new culture of educational “relevance” reshaping the American university. In 1971, a year after the Nixon administration released its report on campus unrest, Frank Newman, the secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare, shared his findings on reforming higher education in his Report on Higher Education. The report was wide-ranging. Newman analyzed access, cost of education, and credentials. But a common theme in the report was the need for the university to extend education outside of the classroom to make it more relevant to students’ professional and civic development. “We often lose sight of the enormous amount of teaching and learning that goes on outside of colleges,” Newman wrote. Like Meyerson at the University of California and those in the Nixon commission, Newman prioritized the learning that occurred “in business, government, voluntary service organizations, military organizations.”10

The learning in voluntary service organizations in particular became a primary focus of Newman’s thinking on higher education reform. His main policy effort in the 1970s was the GI Bill of Community Service, a policy proposal that offered students tuition credit in exchange for volunteer service. Newman believed the GI Bill of Community Service would give students intellectual direction that would enable them to develop as citizens. Noticeably absent in Newman’s proposal was any reference to the other modes of action education that emerged out of the student movements of the 1960s. Newman, like others before him, embraced the educational value of action in public life in a way that aligned with the prevailing disciplining culture in the American university.

Newman’s report had the effect of further narrowing the possibilities of the new civics in the university. He presented service learning not as one option among others but as the model of the new civics in the modern American university. His vision came to fruition in the 1980s. In his 1985 report, Higher Education and the American Resurgence, he argued that the issue universities and colleges confronted was how “to restore to higher education its original purpose of preparing graduates for a life of involved and committed citizenship.” Again, Newman emphasized community service and volunteerism as the primary means of learning civic responsibility. He also prioritized how students would learn from service over the ways it would benefit the community. “I would say that the first and foremost purpose is not to serve the communities,” Newman explained, “but I think that the first thing would be to educate students in ways that their responsibility to see the larger issue as a citizen is the first task of the institution.” He believed that community service offered a way to teach students a set of professional skills. Thus shaped by the new market ethos of the university in the 1980s, Newman summarized, students would learn “intangible skills” through service that would prepare them for professional success in the new economy.11

Newman’s framework for service learning shaped the contours of civics in American higher education since the 1980s. He played a central role in the first meeting of the Project for Public and Community Service, or what became the Campus Compact. He invited Howard Swearer, Don Kennedy, and Timothy Healy, the three presidents who came under fire for their roles during the anti-apartheid movement on campus, to the gathering. The funding streams for the 1985 meeting and project also came from the foundations of corporations that were criticized by student anti-apartheid activists in the 1980s, including the Ford Foundation, Exxon Education Foundation, and Hewlett-Packard.12 At the 1985 gathering, Newman and the university presidents focused on public service in higher education. Despite the rhetorical shift to “public” service, the type of action remained the same. University presidents defined public service as work in nonprofit and governmental agencies. They prioritized volunteer service as a “powerful educational tool” that would be a key component of “training for citizenship” in American higher education and would “infuse altruism into the ethic of the institution as a whole.” “We call for steps,” they further explained in their public statement, “to be taken now to recapture higher education’s legacy of preparing students for service to others.”13

In the 1960s, Newman chose to highlight students engaged in volunteerism over other forms of activism while developing his conception of civics. He did so again in the 1980s. At the same gathering where they outlined the service and volunteer components of learning citizenship and civic responsibility, Newman, Swearer, Kennedy, and Healy identified the Campus Outreach Opportunity League (COOL) as the model for the Campus Compact. At the first Campus Compact meeting, Newman invited Wayne Meisel and Robert Hackett, two Harvard students who helped start COOL, seeing in their work a range of examples that exemplified “constructive student activism.”14 Meisel called the COOL organization the “student service movement.” As outlined in the “Durham Statement,” Meisel, Hackett, and others in the COOL organization defined their work as “service activism,” which took on three different practices. The first was “direct action”—working in soup kitchens or shelters for the homeless. The second was “education action”—students served as tutors for adults in need of living skills or for elementary students needing reading help. The third was “enabling action”—teaching “people to help themselves” and become self-sufficient. In all three ways, COOL participants envisioned transforming the university through volunteer service work. By the end of the decade, they hoped that every college and university designed new programs that enabled students “to make concerted service efforts in their communities.” They believed that such involvement allowed students to explore public service careers and learn to “become leaders.” As they explained, “By helping students to become involved in community service, we are supporting that kind of leadership and citizenship now and for the future as well.”15

The Campus Compact reflected the triumph of service learning as the prevailing educational model of the modern university’s civic mission. As it was in the 1970s, the emphasis on service learning was also politically flexible. Service learning garnered support from the former civil rights activist John Lewis and the former Peace Corps associate director Harris Wofford as well as from conservative commentators like William F. Buckley. As Buckley argued, “Common service,” such as “helping to care for old people in homes or teaching ghetto children to read or shoring up security in the subways or helping to maintain the parks and museums and libraries would add up to a little but an indelible contribution to society that permits us so much by giving us freedom and sovereignty.”16 Community service also made political sense among American policy makers in the 1990s. Federal efforts like the Points of Light under George H. W. Bush and the Corporation for National and Community Service Act under Bill Clinton also promoted community service among college students, demonstrating the political ambidexterity of service learning as the new civics in American higher education. The Bush and Clinton administrations connected their efforts to the idea of social capital. First articulated by sociologist James S. Coleman and made popular by Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, social capital encompassed the nonmaterial elements of civic life—the circles of trust and community relationships. In the context of American higher education, student volunteer service was promoted as a means of rebuilding social capital among communities.17 As a 1989 Campus Compact report explained, the purpose of community service was to “nurture a sense of human community and social responsibility in our college students, and contribute to the quality of life for individuals and groups in the community.”18

By the 1990s, appeals to action no longer appeared as a model for political education or a means to transform the university but as a new source of charity work and a more relevant professional education. In the transition from action education to service learning, the political goals were largely gutted. Of course, the ideals lingered on in the educational rhetoric of the new service learning and civic engagement centers. University officials, often citing the presence of those centers on campus, boasted about civic engagement opportunities that enabled students to be actively involved in the social and political world. At the same time, university civic and service learning programs tended to prioritize the ways the experiences enriched learning and enabled students to “do good” rather than how those commitments might address structural inequalities embedded both within and beyond the university. Martha Prescod, who was a student activist in both SNCC and SDS, believed what triumphed in the university was a far cry from the ethos and commitments of student activists in the 1960s. “I get a little upset when I see the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday turned into clean-up, sweep-up activities,” she wrote. Activism and civic participation in the 1960s, she argued, “was not about ‘giving back’ or ‘helping those less fortunate’ or doing something for other people. It was about making social change with the understanding that we are all linked together on this earth. It was a ‘doing with’—not ‘doing for’—people who were not treated fairly.”19

The political triumph of the Campus Compact did not mean that the debates as to how best to integrate social action into the university disappeared. Rather, those debates moved into the context of the emergent scholarly literature that grew out of the Campus Compact. In early scholarship, service learning practitioners largely adopted the engaged learning approach normalized by the Newman reports. The focus on charity-based civics was practical, so argued Edward Zlotkowski, the founding director of the Service Learning Center at Bentley University in Waltham, Massachusetts. He worried that focusing on what he interpreted as the ideological aims of political advocacy would inhibit the adoption of service learning across American higher education. He argued that advocates of service learning in the 1990s needed to see “‘enhanced learning’ as the horse pulling the cart of ‘moral and civic values,’ and not vice versa.” Zlotkowski’s views represented those who saw service learning in the 1990s as a movement of socially and pedagogically concerned academics.20

In both Newman’s initial framing and Zlotkowski’s article, the priority was student learning. Other scholars who supported service learning worried that the tendency to prioritize it marginalized community needs and perspectives. John W. Eby, a professor of sociology and the director of Service Learning at Messiah College in the mid-1990s, was a regular contributor to and supporter of the Campus Compact’s efforts to infuse higher education with a broader public purpose. Despite recognizing its value to student learning, especially in terms of developing social responsibility, Eby concluded that “service learning is bad” because “the demands of a learning orientation places on service limits its effectiveness and its ability to address community needs at a structural level.” He argued that the problem with service learning was that it prioritized institutional and student needs over those of the community. Service learning programs were designed for “the needs of an academic institution which sponsors it, the needs of students, the needs of an instructor, the needs of a course.”21 Herman Blake agreed with Eby. A prominent Black sociologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Blake was a leading voice in reminding service learning scholars and practitioners to consider the perspective of the community. Like Robert Green at Michigan State University, Blake worried about the effect of “service” and instrumental research on communities. “My strongest criticism is that practitioners do not look at the community as a place of integrity,” he explained. They “start out with a deficit approach” and ignored the distinct and valuable knowledge within communities on the receiving end of service.22 From the perspective of both Eby and Blake, the challenge was to update the service learning model to better serve the community and not just the students.

While Blake and Eby sought to reorient the programs toward community need, they nonetheless maintained a focus on service and volunteerism. Scholars from the new disciplines that grew out of the 1960s critiqued prevailing models for their myopic focus on community service, a criticism that echoed the views of early activists who initially helped establish the programs. Although supportive of efforts to encourage volunteerism because the experience exposed students to community knowledge and issues, Kathryn Forbes, Linda Garber, and other feminist scholars in the women’s studies program at Fresno State University worried that such efforts tended to reinforce relations of subordination rather than transform them. “Community service,” they argued, “is at best an exercise in observing otherness and at worst a missionary expedition.” Moreover, they wrote, community service requirements tended to only occur in courses focused on diversity, leading students to equate difference with deficiency. “If community service cannot incorporate students, professors, and organizations as partners with similar vested interests,” they wrote, “then it will reinforce volunteer work as observation rather than activism.” The university, they believed, should develop students who “integrate activism into their lives rather than be weekend volunteer warriors.”23

Indeed, a growing set of scholars associated with the Campus Compact increasingly critiqued prevailing service learning models for the singular focus on volunteer and community service as the prevailing form of action in public life. One of the more prominent voices in the 1990s was Harry Boyte. Boyte was drawn to the work of public service programs in American higher education from his work as a student activist in the 1960s. As the director of the Unitarian Service Committee in Atlanta and a field-worker with Robert F. Williams in Virginia, Boyte organized students and local community members to desegregate education and set up alternative schools. He also joined Martin Luther King Jr.’s staff at the Southern Christian Leadership Council, where he helped organize community workshops that directly challenged political and economic institutions. Like others who worked with King in the 1960s, Boyte saw service as an inherently political act. Writing in the early 1990s, he criticized prevailing conceptions of service associated with the Campus Compact and other programs because they prioritized “personal relevance and a sense of membership in a community” and led students to see “service as an alternative to politics.”24

By the 2000s, the growing criticism of prevailing models of service and civics led some scholar-practitioners to delineate between “traditional” and “critical” service learning. In traditional forms of service learning, argued Tania Mitchell, the focus is on student learning in which the service experience enriches the classroom content. Emphasizing the connection between content and experience, advocates of traditional service learning, she explained, enabled students to become “active learners, bringing skills and information from community work and integrating them with the theory and curriculum of the classroom to produce new knowledge.” In contrast, Mitchell wrote, critical service learning programs “encouraged students to see themselves as agents of social change and use the experience of service to address and respond to injustice in communities.” She called on administrators and educators to implement a more “critical” service learning in their practice and outlook, which often involved embracing a progressive political agenda.25 Despite efforts to promote more critical forms of civic engagement in American higher education, prevailing models continue to prioritize community service. In their study on contemporary service learning, Anne Colby, Elizabeth Beaumont, Thomas Ehrlich, and Josh Corngold show that among the six hundred service learning programs, only 1 percent included “a focus on specifically political concerns and solutions such as working with groups to represent the interests of a community,” and about half focus only on direct service, such as tutoring and food pantries.26

What scholars of service learning are confronting—that is, the tensions within and limitations of institutional civic engagement programs—is not something new. Indeed, what is surprising about scholarship on service learning is how little acknowledgment has been given to the models in the 1960s and the institutional debates and programs that predate the Campus Compact. It appears that most scholarly writing on service learning and civic engagement have been in response to the ideas associated with the Campus Compact.27 Efforts by students to reimagine the university and the new civic programs they helped establish have largely been forgotten. Ironically, the amnesia has been aided by historians. With a few exceptions, the tendency among historians has been to treat education policy, intellectual transformations in the university, and student activism as separate categories of analysis.28 It should not come as a surprise, then, that civic and service learning scholars today, when looking at the historical record, find no precedent. Prevailing scholarly approaches to the history of the university and activism thus leave civic scholars, academic leaders, and students interpretively impoverished.

Contemporary interest and writing indicate that civics is still an important mission of American higher education, but scholars continue to express ambivalence about its practice, place, and purpose on college campuses. This is especially the case when student activists attempt to translate their civic lessons on and off campus. Over the course of my writing this book, student activism captured national and international headlines. Concerned with issues related to police violence, economic inequality, and climate change, students challenged the priorities of American universities. University administrators and social commentators have responded in a range of different ways, from focusing on free speech to seeing activism as antithetical to the pursuit of truth. Even those who are strong advocates of civic education in the university have expressed consternation about institutions explicitly supporting student activists, let alone advocating a particular political position associated with a social movement.29 What lessons, then, can be drawn from this history—and the legacy of disciplining democracy—especially for contemporary debates on civic education and the role of the university?

One way of reading this history is in creative terms. In the original version of this book, I defined students’ visions as expressions of “civic intellectualism.” Although the label did not stick, as the book’s title suggests, the formulation captured the broad vision of student activists and faculty supporters who articulated a different idea of what it meant to pursue knowledge and education in and beyond the university. This vision of “civic intellectualism” produced new civic engagement programs in higher education that provide an important outlet for students to learn and engage through public participation in community life. Moreover, the presence of such centers also reflects the creative approach by university leaders. When faced with the political aspirations of their students, they responded by supporting new institutional homes for civic engagement. From this perspective, then, service learning and new civic engagement programs reflect not only the pedagogical possibilities of campus activism but also the ingenuity of campus leaders that brought about significant educational reforms within universities.

Another way of reading this history is in terms of political limitations. The triumph of service learning within civic engagement programs demonstrates the dilemma of turning toward the university as a source of social transformation. At different historical periods, student activists and their supporters expressed an intense faith in the university as a source of not only truth but political change in wider society. But that utopian faith often met an institutional incrementalism that limited students’ political actions both on and off campus. In today’s higher education context, practitioners and scholars associated with the civic engagement centers and programs, like the students and faculty members of the 1960s who helped lay the groundwork for those programs, also confront the institutional regulations that limit the type of opportunities and actions that students can engage in as representatives of the university. From this perspective, service learning and civic engagement programs demonstrate not only the constraints of the programs as a source for political transformation but also the unintended ways they have functioned to deflect and co-opt student political energies away from the university.

Both readings hold kernels of truth. However, the lessons miss the larger and more persistent problem. The university’s mode of disciplining—that is, the very regulations that limited student political actions and determined what was appropriate civic engagement—was concealed by a common refrain embedded in the culture of the university: the institution is a neutral actor. Indeed, most university leaders from the 1960s to the 1980s adopted the argument made by Harry Kalven in what became the Kalven report at the University of Chicago. In response to the mass student politics of the 1960s, Kalven underscored the vision of the university as a community of scholars and source of dissent. “By design and by effect,” he wrote, “it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones.” Yet, he maintained that the institution itself must remain neutral, arguing, “The instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.”30 Academic leaders today have likewise returned to the logic of the report to deflect criticisms of the university as an institutional actor.31 The problem with this reading of “the University’s role in political and social action”—the topical focus of the Kalven report—is that the university was rarely just a “home and sponsor of critics.” If there is a common theme throughout this book, it is that the institution, through its leadership and boards but also its internal mechanisms, also made direct value judgments that impinged and limited the actions of critics, whether student or faculty.

Indeed, institutional neutrality was one of the primary issues of the sit-in at the University of California, Berkeley, where this book began. Throughout the campus movement, Mario Savio consistently emphasized the ways the university was deeply involved in military and corporate research and dependent upon military and corporate funding. This connection, he argued, demonstrated that not only was the university far from a neutral actor when it came to its research and teaching activities, it also lacked the institutional independence and autonomy required for it to be a space for debate, civic action, and the pursuit of truth. However, Savio did not dismiss the ideal of neutrality altogether. Rather, he asked an important question that went to the heart of this institutional ideal. “Don’t you think,” Savio asked, when considering the university’s role in the development of military technology, “in the spirit of political neutrality, either they should not be involved or there should be some democratic control over the way they’re being involved?”32

The second part of his question reflected Savio’s political vision of the university associated with his appeal to action. When he argued that “action and knowledge cannot be separated,” he made a claim on how we come to know ourselves as citizens in a democracy and how we might develop new political knowledge for building consensus. Indeed, Savio envisioned collective action as the educational practice for building consensus on political and social issues in and beyond the university. In response, university leaders maintained a commitment to an orthodox conception of institutional neutrality and promoted service learning as the appropriate form of action education. The combination shaped the contours of disciplining democracy. If we want to think beyond the logic of disciplining democracy, taking Savio’s question seriously—and the other political visions articulated by the historical actors in this book—might be a helpful starting point for remaking the university into a genuine space for public deliberation and civic engagement.