The university of social justice: beyond community service, colleges educate for social change.

To borrow a term from social movement theory, universities can be "movement halfway houses" that educate leaders for social justice. Higher education institutions have trained and nurtured numerous social movements and activists that have changed our world. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which played a key role in the civil rights movement, came from a coalition of college students. Northern college students infused Freedom Summer's voter registration drives. More recently, student networks have rapidly expanded protests of corporate globalization and the U.S. Army's School of the Americas. Anti-sweatshop and living wage movements also are building momentum because of students.

These movements emerge, in part, because university faculty and staff are part of the conscientizing process of young people. Universities emphasize systemic analysis of social problems. They prize critical thinking skills. They encourage creative use of language and symbols. Combine these skills with higher education's focus on developing leaders, and we can see the potential of the universities to produce multiple generations of justice seekers.

We find the summons in our institutions' mission statements, the statements that no student, faculty,, or staff ever really reads. But it's there, the call to moral learning and social justice. At some schools, the commitment is explicit: "Loyola Marymount understands and declares its purpose to be: the encouragement of learning, the education of the whole person, the service of faith, and the promotion of justice." At others, the call is embedded in an understanding of the proper use of knowledge: "Emory's mission lies in two essential, interwoven purposes: through teaching, to help men and women fully develop their intellectual, aesthetic, and moral capacities; and, through the quest for new knowledge and public service, to improve human well-being."

Universities experience enormous pressure to deliver a marketable product. But higher education is called to be more than a conduit for career-making. Our students are more than clients. Classically, education was meant for the whole person--for "full human flourishing." As University of Chicago professor Martha Nussbaum notes, U.S. higher education has been devoted particularly to the "cultivation of the whole human being for the functions of citizenship and life generally." At the core, universities are more than service providers with privileged clients. We are moral actors shaping the character and justice of society.

BUT EDUCATING change agents for social justice is not the same as encouraging increased volunteerism on campus, which is embraced much more easily by institutions and a broad political spectrum. As community service hours are required by many high schools for graduation, students arrive at college open to giving time to "those less fortunate." In fact, the Higher Education Research Center's most recent freshmen survey reported that 84 percent of students had volunteered in the last year.

At the same time, only 4 percent of college students have ever given time or money to a political organization. Less than 15 percent of voters under the age of 25 voted in the last election. The civic engagement of many young adults today is decidedly local, short-term, and apolitical (although the recent burst of antiwar organizing seems an important exception).

These statistics introduce a contrast between the approaches to "service" and "moral learning" that are embedded in our universities. As Keith Morton, director of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service at Providence College has noted, most of the service programs in our universities focus on "understanding the `other' and, in so doing, reshaping one's self identity." In order to sensitize students to difference and the need for social cooperation, short-term service programs often focus on what service means for the student and their character formation. Volunteer activities thus center on charitable activities and/or temporary relationships that ameliorate immediate needs. The goal for student development is to realize the necessity and richness of a character based on giving and caring for the other.

While this "personal development" approach to service is worthwhile, the model also misses things. Big things. Absent are historical, economic, and political analyses that help students understand how social issues are structured in a specific community, in a specific place, at a specific time. Absent are social justice lenses that challenge students to understand social arrangements and how social change occurs. Absent is an emphasis on political engagement as key activity for those who care about people and communities.

Making the connection between personal development and social justice models is not easy for many universities and students. College students are in a developmental stage that focuses on interpersonal relationships and learning. Thus tracking how bank loans affect economic development in southwest Atlanta is not always seen as meaningful service. Students flock in droves to reading and tutoring programs in local elementary schools. But few of those students can articulate how property taxes impact school resources--and even fewer will ever vote in a local school board election.

NEGOTIATING THE threshold from interpersonal learning to structural analysis is one of the core challenges for moral learning in the university. The "service learning" movement within higher education has offered several avenues for making these connections.

First, the teaching process of many courses is shifting in higher education. Service learning models encourage many professors to pair in-class time with hands-on field work. A student might work in a local addiction clinic while she studies, in class, the social and economic influences on drug use. Deep reflection on the practice in the clinic helps both student and professor change the way classes are taught and texts are read.

Second, service learning approaches to education also change the content of academic courses. Several universities are now creating programs focused on community building and social change. Here the focus is on reading across multiple disciplines to understand the strengths and needs of communities. Community development literature is read next to economic and social theory, ethics, and environmental studies. The collaborative nature of intellectual development in the classroom, matched with the hands-on nature of group projects, forces students beyond individualized models of social change.

Universities that nurture change agents are those that bring together the personal and the political. They break through cycles of remedial charity and systematically address preventative justice. Or as my college mentor often bellowed, they call us to be "poverty warriors," not just poverty companions.

Melissa Snarr is director of the Ethics and Servant Leadership program of the Center for Ethics at Emory University in Atlanta and a lecturer in religion at Emory College.

RELATED ARTICLE: The common good.

Exploring social change on the stage, street, and classroom

The University of San Francisco, whose motto is "Educating Minds and Hearts to Change the World," challenges students to put both intellect and motivations to work for the common good. For example, in USF's yearlong, residential Erasmus Project, sophomores devote five hours a week to community action. Projects range from the library (researching fair trade coffee for Global Exchange) to the street (serving breakfast to day laborers and collecting their stories). The day laborers' stories will be passed on, as the basis of a possible play, to students in USF's Performing Arts and Social Justice major.

Guadalupe Chavez, an Erasmus alumna and School of the Americas arrestee earning a master's degree at USF's Center for Teaching Excellence and Social Justice, finds in her alma mater the kind of education she wants to give her future students: "I think politics and education go well together--I don't think it can be any other way." Nor is she waiting for graduation to start educating others. Her Peace and Justice Studies minor requires fieldwork; hers was to help eighth graders in San Francisco's Mission District form a social justice club, in which students talk about everything from local gangs and sweatshops to the prospect of war in Iraq.

--Elizabeth Palmberg

Elizabeth Palmberg is editorial assistant at Sojourners. University of San Francisco, 2130 Fulton St., San Francisco, CA 94117; [phone]; www.usfca.edu.

RELATED ARTICLE: `We are the source of hope'.

Local culture meets global issues.

During its 148-year history, Berea College--which from the beginning served a poor, interracial, co-educational student body--has never kidded around about its commitment to a "gospel of impartial love." The college charges no tuition and admits only low-income students, most of whom come from the surrounding Appalachian region (although other students hail from dozens of countries). This gives Berea a unique perspective: When a class on globalization recently took a field trip to Chiapas and Oaxaca, Mexico, it was the first time some students had left Kentucky.

Several service learning courses integrate the school's historic commitment to service in Appalachia into a larger perspective on economics, gender, and local culture. This combination of theory and hands-on service also shows up in Berea's Sustainability and Environmental Studies Program, where classes often involve local problem solving, including a soon-to-open campus eco-village.

At Berea, working locally is part and parcel of thinking globally, as shown in recent years by campus visits from the Dalai Lama and farm labor activist Baldemar Velasquez. As junior Tricia Feeny, a member of Greenpeace's U.S. youth delegation to the recent World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, says of her fellow grassroots activists, "We are the source of hope."

--Elizabeth Palmberg

Berea College, Berea, KY 40404; [phone]; www.berea.edu.

RELATED ARTICLE: The city as text

Preparing Christian agents of urban change.

How does a suburban Christian college educate students to meet the needs of a city? Eastern University wasn't satisfied to address this question through the usual means of most evangelical schools--an occasional service-learning trip here, a seminar from an "urban representative" there. Instead, a group of visionaries relocated from its suburban main campus to the heart of Philadelphia and set up shop, first as the Institute for Urban Studies in 1999, then as the Campolo School for Social Change (CSSC) in 2001.

Named for fiery activist-preacher Tony Campolo, a professor emeritus at Eastern, the graduate school is structured to deliver its message, as Dean Vivian Nix-Early puts it, "incarnationally." That means students learn not only through core curriculum on youth leadership, counseling, social policy, and economic development, but through field-intensive research and interdisciplinary action. Students and faculty alike come to view "the city as text," hitting the streets to learn from people who live there about the issues facing their neighborhoods, such as homelessness, health care, and education. And while CSSC has "covenanted" with two Philadelphia neighborhoods to encourage transformation from the inside, the school's vision stretches far beyond city limits. Nix-Early sees CSSC's mission as a global one: "The school exists to prepare Christian agents of change--compassionate professionals and activist scholars--to use their professions and lives to transform urban communities around the world."

--Kate Bowman

Kate Bowman is news/Internet assistant at Sojourners. The Campolo School for Social Change at Eastern University, 990 Buttonwood St., 6th Floor, Philadelphia, PA 19123; [phone]; www.eastern.edu.

RELATED ARTICLE: Teaching peace.

Integrating justice in all fields of study

With the wide range of disciplines at liberal arts institutions, Goshen College is one school that integrates peace and justice issues into every academic track. Teaching peace is part of the official mission of the Mennonite-affiliated Goshen College, located in northern Indiana. The Peace, Justice, and Conflict Studies department is a keystone among the college's academic programs. A PJCS course is required for graduation.

Other rare assets are an environmental studies department buttressed by a 1,150-acre natural reserve, and an international education requirement that sends nearly every student to another country, often a developing nation, for a semester.

What's exceptional about Goshen College is not just the existence of a peace and justice department, but the way that professors promote critical thinking about justice issues in all fields of study. "I think people get more open minded by the end of their four years here," said senior Hallie Pritts.

Peacemaking is part of the upbringing of many Mennonites. Yet dialogue and analysis are necessary to further examine justice concerns in all areas of education.

Celeste Kennel-Shank is a Goshen College student focusing on environmental studies and history. Goshen College, 1700 South Main St., Goshen, IN 46526; 1-800-348-7422; www.goshen.edu.

--Celeste Kennel-Shank

RELATED ARTICLE: The world is a stage

Building international and cross-cultural knowledge.

Chicago's North Park University, affiliated with the Evangelical Covenant Church, emphasizes international and cross-cultural studies. Of particular distinction is the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. The center seeks to encourage ecumenical dialogue and interfaith reconciliation through a program that includes academic study, publishing, conferences, guest lectures, and cultural exchanges within the diverse student body at North Park and the neighboring community.

According to CMES founder Donald Wagner, one of the main purposes in creating the center was to "raise for Christians the issues of peace and justice in the Middle East and also emphasize what indigenous Christians are going through there." One way the center has achieved this is by hosting and funding the production of "The Longing," a play written by Robert Hostetter, professor of Communication Arts and Theater at North Park. Based on interviews with Palestinians, "The Longing" tells profound stories of displacement and the desire for a just peace and has been performed 20 times from Chicago to Atlanta.

Christa Mazzone is an intern with Call to Renewal. North Park University, 3225 West Foster Ave., Chicago, IL 6062S-489S; 1-800-888-6728; www.northpark.edu.

--Christa Mazzone