Universities should focus on making civic engagement part of their curriculums, a leader in higher education said Thursday evening.
David Scobey, executive dean of the New School for Public Engagement in New York, presented the Annual Civic Engagement Distinguished Lecture on the importance of promoting civic engagement and incorporating public service into university curriculums. About 20 people attended the event, in which Scobey argued that students and professors should encourage service work that has a lasting impact on a community.
“Students are often deeply disengaged from their own education because they don’t see what difference it makes other than in a very instrumental way—get this credential to get this job,” Scobey said in an interview before the event. “In my experience, community-based learning [lets them] see what difference it makes to put your learning into action.”
Scobey said he thought as a short-term program, DukeEngage was a good start, but it would be more effective if it had more components after the experience, such as classes, work-study or a capstone thesis.
“When the short term experience happens in an isolated way, it tends to be less effective for the student—and equally important—less effective for the community where the student is," Scobey said.
If students can go beyond DukeEngage and connect that with additional experiences, they will have a deeper understanding of the issues that they learned about during the program, he said.
Some faculty members also have difficulty making those connections. Scobey mentioned that the system of rewards in place at universities often leads faculty members to become enclosed in their own work, and few of them place public scholarship at the heart of their commitments.
“I didn’t realize there was any hesitance for them to get into the field, just because my experience at Duke so far has been that the professors seem as enthusiastic for it as the students do, so that surprised me,” first-year Jacqueline Geerdes said.
Scobey advocated for a movement away from service to communities and toward partnership with them, as well as from sustained community projects as opposed to self-contained service learning courses.
Erin Sweeney, Trinity '13, an associate in research for the Hart Leadership Program, said she liked how Scobey turned Duke's motto "on its head."
“Instead of thinking of knowledge in the service of society, you should think more of society in the service of knowledge,” Sweeney said. “We should keep working toward a more authentic partnership between scholarship and community and less of a helper-helpee relationship, which he is all about.”
Scobey said his advice for Duke students is to see community service as a joy, not an obligation.
“Approach community-based learning not [as] something just to be done because it’s good spinach to eat,” Scobey said. “Try and tie it as deeply as possible to your own personal development and your intellectual development.”
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