By Richard Ekman

Almost every successful reform movement in America began as a voluntary association of concerned citizens and evolved eventually into a political movement. Sometimes this process took a generation or longer—as the examples of the anti-slavery, temperance, and women’s suffrage movements show. We should anticipate that the growing efforts by colleges and universities to have an impact on the world around them will follow a similar path.
      Alexis de Tocqueville may have been the first to notice the tendency of Americans to create “public associations” every time a societal need arose. Rather than expect government to address the need—or to seek the government’s permission to launch a new institution—Americans from early days have been quick to establish new organizations to address a very wide range of perceived needs—marketing agricultural products, preparing ministers, training engineers, prohibiting liquor, outlawing slavery. These “voluntary associations” (historian Oscar Handlin’s term) may be seen as the equivalent of today’s NGOs. Certainly they were hallmarks of a young nation.
      America’s colleges are themselves part of the tradition of voluntary associations with social missions. Hiram College’s (OH) founding mission in the mid-19th century was in part to increase educational access for rural youth. Marygrove College (MI) shifted its focus in the late-20th century to the needs of the inner-city Detroit community. Many colleges that once served one population now also help others both to gain access to college and to complete college successfully. Private colleges and universities, many extremely long-lived in comparison with the short life spans of business entities or public university campuses, can often point to impressive track records of aiding their communities. Social progress in education has benefited from commitments to access and equity over long periods.
      Yet, it has not been enough for colleges to make their educational programs more accessible. Colleges now reach into their communities as never before to work with others to address issues of shared concern. Pedagogies such as service-learning and internships make abstract subject matter more vital to undergraduates and enhance depth of learning at the same time that they foster work by students and faculty members that has practical value to communities. Rhodes College (TN) students have opportunities, for example, for research internships at the world-class St. Jude Hospital—helping sick children get better while doing research in collaboration with career scientists.
      Are the activities of our colleges to improve their communities approaching a political phase? Might this be politics on campus in the best sense? For years, we worried that voting by young people was declining. The 2004 presidential election appears to have stopped that decline, and colleges and universities played active roles in encouraging students and others to register to vote. The concept of volunteer service, embodied most clearly in the 1960s creation of the Peace Corps and VISTA, has led in some ways to Project Pericles, a group of mostly smaller colleges and universities, which links the study of the liberal arts to more active and informed civic engagement, including in the political process. We already know that 52 percent of young people who attend independent colleges and universities volunteer to help in their communities (in contrast to 41 percent of students at public universities).
      The ameliorative role of colleges in their communities is sometimes prized for different reasons than the ones we acknowledge directly. Columbia University’s Kenneth Prewitt, in his thought-provoking presentation at the 2005 CIC Presidents Institute, analyzed changes in institutional mission statements and concluded that diversity in the student body, once treated as an issue mainly of insuring equitable access to college, is now more often viewed as a desirable educational characteristic of the student experience during college (see “Demography, Diversity”).
      The encouraging picture of private colleges as agents of social progress stands in contrast to the findings of recent opinion research on public attitudes toward all kinds of institutions. This research suggests that people no longer have faith in government or business, and that skepticism is pervasive about the ability of these institutions to serve the common good. Moreover, colleges and universities are viewed as doing too much to educate people for their “individual benefit” and too little to educate people for the “common good.” We need to listen carefully to these skeptics, but also to remind them that, more than most institutions of our society, colleges and universities—especially smaller, private ones—do make positive political and social contributions by producing graduates with enhanced public consciousness. With long traditions of serving their communities and an updated understanding of what involvement in the community really means, these voluntary associations strive today as they did at their founding to make the world a better place.