The Disappearing Undergraduate Citizen

College is a good place to be. We take interesting classes, have few responsibilities critical to the bigger picture and have the freedom to make a beer or two a priority. But there are important, difficult questions about the meaning and purpose of a liberal arts education that we too often leave unasked. The most crucial one to me is: Should making students into good citizens be one of a liberal arts college's primary goals? If the answer is yes, does Harvard College accomplish it?

Henry Rosovsky, former Dean of the Faculty and key player in the conception of the Core program, quoted the following from Howard Lee Nostrand in his book, The University: An Owner's Manual: "General education means the whole development of an individual, apart from his occupational training. It includes the civilizing of his life purposes, the refining of his emotional reactions, and the maturing of his understanding about the nature of things." Rosovsky stops short of saying that the purpose of a liberal arts education is to make students into good citizens, but neither he nor Nostrand is far from that conclusion.

Derek Bok purportedly also danced around this issue of citizenship and Harvard at a talk he gave shortly before stepping down as President of the University, saying he would prefer to leave that question to his successor. Why are administrators wary of committing themselves publicly to the principle that Harvard College should aim to make its students good citizens, and if it is not accomplishing that goal, then ought something to change?

One of the reasons is that there is little consensus today as to what the definition of good citizenship is, or whether college is the place to figure it out. Plummer Professor of Christian Morals Peter J. Gomes said to me, "When I went to college, I felt privileged. I expected to be changed, and they expected to change me. That was the deal, and the whole culture went along with that deal." "The notion of in loco parentis," he said, "was absolute. College was supposed to finish the job my parents had started."

But life is more complicated today than it was when Gomes graduated. College students comprise a more diverse group than they did 50 or even 30 years ago--socio-economically, racially and internationally; more opportunities exist for people graduating from college; and if there ever was a well-woven moral fabric in this country, it has come unraveled. Consequently, expectations--of students, their parents and the educational institutions themselves--have changed.

Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis '68 put this issue in historical perspective. "The Core grew out of the General Education program, which was a great achievement of postwar optimism," he wrote me in an e-mail. "But [d]uring and after Vietnam," he continued, "the sense that the state was responsible for preserving important values and the College had a role in that too was shattered."

Students are perhaps both more and less cynical today than they were when Dean Lewis was a student. On the one hand, there is less of a sense that authority is malicious; on the other hand, there is the strong sense that the individual should and must fend for herself. Reverend Gomes said that today "so many things go against us," including "cold individualism and self-interestedness," but both he and Lewis noted the University's own failures in accomplishing its seemingly outdated mission to produce better citizens.

"We are now an international college," Lewis wrote. "What does it mean to have citizenship as one of our responsibilities when we have students from China and Russia and Saudi Arabia at the dining table with us? Still, I think we are an American institution and embody largely American values in our approach to education, and we don't do much to encourage national service, for example. So I tend to think that we have a responsibility, and aren't fulfilling it very well, but it's tough."

It is tough, and by the look of things, it will not get any easier. Life is becoming more complicated, not less, and the demands put upon young people are increasing. It is plain that plenty of mediocre citizens emerge from Dexter Gate with no intention of serving better either their country or their kind. But despite the many obstacles in its place, I believe the College continues to have a responsibility to encourage "the whole development of an individual," and "the maturing of his understanding about the nature of things." A four-year college education is an opportunity for students to recognize their role in the larger society and to develop into aware and conscientious human beings. And liberal arts institutions should strongly encourage their students to exploit that opportunity, instead of the current trend, which is to leave civic information almost entirely up to the individual student.

Today, there is perhaps a higher proportion of college-goers who will not buy this reasoning than there was a generation or two ago, but one benefit of the last 30 years is that today's college students who continue to believe in their obligation to the greater whole are members of more international and cross-class groups than their predecessors were. Nostalgia for the period of post-war optimism is of limited value because the landscape of American education has changed so dramatically; in its place, students of this generation must come to terms with a new definition of citizenship and recognize the value of discovering it while they are in college.

Daniel M. Suleiman '99 is a social studies concentrator in Leverett House. His column will appear bi-weekly.