I just held the final meeting of my Fresh Focus class on “Leadership and Contemporary Moral Dilemmas.”  The students who had discussed bioethics made their presentations.  Like their colleagues, who had attempted to deal with just war theory and Iraq, they confessed to feelings of frustration and discomfort regarding their experience.  Neither group had been able to reach a consensus; the issues were just too controversial, with vehement arguments on all sides.

 

     For a moment, I felt like the class was a failure.  To my mind, one of the purposes of Fresh Focus—my institution’s version of the freshman seminar—was to demonstrate to incoming freshmen that we could have a community of inquiry, that intellectual endeavors could provide a common ground for students from disparate backgrounds.  Rather than rely on non- or anti-intellectual bases of affiliation—like athletic teams or fraternities—my upper-class mentors and I would help our freshmen build a community around the classroom experience, where we shared ideas and cooperated in the exploration of interesting topics.  But all my students—mentors and freshmen alike—seemed to have thrown up their hands in the face of heated controversy.  There was just no discussing the Iraq war, stem cells, or genetic manipulation.  They all had opinions, but couldn’t find a way to air them politely and comfortably with those with whom they disagreed.  They couldn’t stand the heat, so they got out of the kitchen.

 

     I felt like I had let the freshmen down.  Rather than initiating them into the mysteries of discursive liberal arts community, I feared that I had left them with the impression that there was simply no basis for a rational agreement on any of the big issues of the day.  The most we could do was more or less politely agree to disagree.  Such a modus vivendi might be no small accomplishment in a political arena in which the politics of personal destruction seems to rule the day, but it is hardly the way to begin what I hoped would be a long-term exercise in building a community of intellectual adventurers and explorers.

 

     But one of my mentors—Jenna, a very level-headed senior politics major—brought me back to my senses.  She reminded me of how inexperienced the freshmen were and asssured me that this class would stand them in good stead down the road.  Over time, they would become more comfortable exposing their own opinions to the critical scrutiny of others and would learn how to express their differences in a civil and respectful manner.  They would learn how to enjoy the debate that pained them early in their freshman year and how to find at least some of the common ground that had thus far eluded them.

 

     Wow!  Perhaps I had accomplished something, albeit not as quickly as I had expected.  The habits and dispositions necessary to build intellectual community (or community of any sort) aren’t cultivated overnight.  They come from repeated interactions in different settings, from working through and learning from frustration and defeat, from recognizing over time that issues are much more complicated than they had seemed, from seeing that one’s intellectual or political adversary in one setting is one’s ally in another, from discovering that acquaintances made in the dining hall and sorority social turn out to be all the more interesting when you’re discussing Augustine or Nietzsche, and from learning that friendships can withstand deep disagreements. 

 

     If Jenna is right—and I think she is—then liberal arts colleges can provide excellent preparation for citizenship, not always by encouraging students to leave the campus in order to engage in service-learning, but rather by compelling students to live and work and fight with one another and by demonstrating how deep differences can be addressed and occasionally bridged.  It is this experience of finding and building campus community that above all prepares students for their lives as citizens.  Don’t get me wrong: I have nothing against service-learning as an element of civic education.  But all too often we overlook the importance of simply living and arguing together as preparation for citizenship.  You can’t do this very well on a commuter campus and you can’t do it with large lecture classes and a large student body.  The classes and campus have to be relatively small so that there are both the opportunity to converse and controvert face-to-face and the regular contact in a variety of settings.  In other words, small residential liberal arts colleges may well be the best arenas for civic education.

 

     This is not to say that we cannot be much more intentional in our approach to this task.  We are, after all, fighting against what Tocqueville would call the individualistic tendencies of our age, where students have ample opportunities to retreat into small circles of like-minded friends.  I have recently read about Colgate University’s new vision for residential education, which includes a “Sophomore Experience in the Arts of Democracy” (see http://www.colgate.edu/residentiallife/vision.asp), combining workshops on “community building skills,” dinners with faculty devoted to “research topics relevant to democracy and democratic principles,” “Dialogue Circles on diversity and pluralism” and “political action days,” among others.  Much of this sounds not unappealing, but I wonder how much connection there is with what goes on in the classrooms at Colgate.  Are Colgate sophomores reflecting on what it means to be “true leaders in a democratic society” in the courses they take, as well as during the dinners they have with their professors?  Are they engaging in high-stakes but civil intellectual controversy in their classrooms?  I hope so.

 

     I realize that there is always a gap between administrative rhetoric (the quotations above were taken from a paper co-authored by Colgate’s President and Dean of the College) and actual practice, but I have no reason to doubt the sincerity of my colleagues in upstate New York.  They have their eyes on one of the most important contemporary challenges facing us as educators and citizens.  I hope I can learn from their experience as my colleagues and I pursue similar goals, perhaps building outward from our sophomore core course—“Human Nature and the Social Order”—to a sophomore residential experience.  Our new Vice President for Student Affairs is enthusiastic, as am I.  Neither Colgate nor Oglethorpe is the last, best hope of Western Civilization or American liberal democracy, but we are swimming against a tide of incivility and apathy.  Wish us well.