Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney
President
Cedar Crest College

Participating in Democracy, a 3-1/2 year, $1.47 million project, is a national program to create innovative, high-quality, multimedia, educational modules to be used at liberal arts colleges to encourage students to be good citizens. The goal of the effort is to increase thoughtful and ethical civic engagement. We propose to do this by embedding high quality ethics and civics education in on-going curriculum, both in courses for majors and in general and honors education, and in multiplying the off-campus, service learning experiences related to courses.

The major problem we seek to address is the decline in voting and other participatory actions by the population generally and the college student group, 18- to 23-year-olds, in particular.

What triggered this effort and others underway across the nation, like those of Campus Compact, is the awareness that the percentage of students voting has dropped. In the last presidential election, about 1 in 3 of those college students eligible to vote, actually voted. This is part of a decline that began about fifty years ago and has serious implications for our society.

But getting students to vote is not the only objective of the Democracy project; rather, the goal is broader. It is to increase students’ participation in many different aspects of society and in social democracy, from patients’ rights to education reform.

College presidents and faculty at liberal art colleges today are particularly interested in increasing students’ civic engagement because many of them shaped their community habits and voting patterns in the 1960s.

I am one of that group. The first presidential election I was eligible to vote in was in 1964. The summer of that year before the election, two young men who had been underclassmen when I graduated from Cornell were murdered because of their efforts to register blacks to vote in rural Mississippi. The horror of their death is still vivid in my memory and a powerful incentive to stay engaged politically and to move young people to get involved.           

Andrew Goodman and Michael Henry Schwerner, along with a young black friend, James Earl Chaney, were stopped for speeding on a dirt road in Neshoba County. Their bullet-riddled bodies were found weeks later buried in the mud.

The civil rights movement drew many college students into community action from all across the country. The most engaged headed South, marching, sitting in and working to register black people to vote.

Social justice was their passion and civic responsibility was the fire that burned within them and still animates many of those directly involved in our Democracy project at Cedar Crest.

Since the 1960s, there has been growing cynicism about government and a disengagement of people generally and young people specifically, from established institutions and government. As a result, only 30% of those college-age students eligible to vote actually voted in the presidential election of 2000. Nonetheless, more than 80% of college students at small liberal arts colleges like Cedar Crest, volunteer for community service, something of a contradiction in behavior.

The Participating in Democracy project seeks to connect political and civic engagement with the students’ high level of commitment to community service. We want to join volunteering with voting and participation in the public policy choices that shape our common life. It is first, to demonstrate what American democracy is, in all its manifestations, and second, to use our educational programs and institutions to motivate and engage our youth in participating fully in shaping the public good. These are the results we seek to achieve.

By the end of the project, 12 colleges, in addition to Cedar Crest, the lead institution and project architect, will have test-taught the materials. The initial project partners are Lesley University, Heidelberg College and St. Thomas Aquinas College. Ultimately, we expect thousands of students and faculty across the country to have access to and use the materials we develop and to reengage in our common life as good citizens.

This booklet grows out of our first year’s work on the project. It contains two essays by Cedar Crest faculty. First, Experiencing Democracy, by Associate Professor Kim Edward Spiezio, is a statement of the conceptual framework shaping the project. Second, Service-Learning and Political Engagement, by Associate Professors Elizabeth Meade and Suzanne Weaver, sets out the key connection between service-learning, civic activism and restructuring of higher education along democratic principles.

Finally, we conclude with the text of a speech, “Civility, Voting and Sacrifice,” given at Cedar Crest College in April 2001 by Stephen L. Carter, the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale University.

Professor Carter’s speech invites us to reflect on democracy as an ongoing conversation among equals. He encourages us to consider the importance of sharing our opinions, particularly with those with whom we disagree, and being willing to lose in the exchange. He also urges us to remain engaged and vote even when we expect our candidates to lose.

                                                                    Dorothy Gulbenkian Blaney