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The authors propose an alternative course for faculty and campus leaders to navigate through the politicized Academic Bill of Rights debate. Liberal education and the values of the academy are about the need to seek and consider alternative conceptions, stances, and views and to consider them respectfully. If a campus is to commit itself to open inquiry and the exploration of a diversity of views, it should affirm the many ways in which controversy occurs. However, in most settings, including universities, people with strong opinions talk primarily to those who agree with them, with the result that neither students nor faculty are accustomed to communicating across ideological divisions. A legislative approach to ensuring open inquiry, say the authors, fails because it casts the issue in negative terms, inherently calling for less, not more, debate, becoming destructive to the goal of civil discourse across ideological boundaries. The essay promotes the joining together of administration, faculty, and students from different political perspectives join together to develop strategies for the pursuit of open inquiry, contributing to a climate of openness, respect, and cooperation. It has become commonplace to complain about America's polarized political landscape. If the next generation of citizens is to set a different tone, they must experience in college an alternative to the politics of vitriol. [For original article from which this Perspective is excerpted, see EJ682576.]

The author writes that for too many low-income students the open door to American higher education has become a revolving door. In examining what can be done, he recognizes the centrality of the classroom to student success.

Young people in the United States today are much more likely to be involved in volunteer work of an apolitical sort than in politics. As part of a study on political engagement, the author and other colleagues surveyed students at a diversity of colleges and universities and asked them why they and many of their peers are so much more likely to participate in community service than in politics. In both the student interviews and in interviews with college and university faculty who teach for political development, it was observed that students are offered many opportunities to do community service but they perceive very few opportunities and little encouragement to become politically involved. In contrast to encouragement and/or requirement for community service for high school graduation or college acceptance, community service is also incorporated into many college courses. An alternative formulation of motivation and engagement suggests that young people's high levels of involvement in community service, but not politics, is less a story of their natural inclinations and choices and more a story of structures of opportunity and incentives provided by adults. The author and her colleagues urge educators and political organizations to create structured opportunities, offer encouragement, and provide incentives that will lead to more widespread youth political experience. If these experiences are carefully designed and effectively implemented, the young people who take part will develop long-standing habits of participation, richer political knowledge, more effective skills, and a strong sense of themselves as capable, engaged and responsible citizens.

As one means to combat the dis-integration of the undergraduate experience, the authors make a case for the kinds of integrated education needed to prepare students to respond creatively and with commitment to our society's most critical challenges.

Asera assesses the challenges that community colleges face in educating students in basic skills. For a significant group of college students the seemingly automatic skills of literacy and numeracy have become opaque, creating a particular challenge for community colleges, 98 percent of which offer at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course. Originally such programs were designed to reacquaint returning adults with skills that had become rusty over time; what was needed was a refresher where they could relearn things they had previously learned in high school. Today, these courses are more likely to be populated by students recently out of high school, indicating that they never mastered these essential skills of English and math. Many of these students have had years of negative experiences with school and need courses in which they can, in effect, more successfully learn the content and learn to be students. Over the years, the jargon for such courses has changed: from remedial, to basic skills, developmental education, and pre-collegiate education. Although terminology has changed, teaching, writes Asera, has not. Too often, that is, basic skills courses are taught through drill and memorization of rules, lacking intellectual vitality and engagement. A long-term solution to the problem of under-preparation and student failure must be systemic, addressing alignment of curriculum and assessment across educational sectors. Noting that even as a long-term solution is required, the pre-collegiate classroom needs immediate attention, the writer advocates a different way to think about teaching "basic skills", one that depends on remembering what is actually entailed in successful reading, writing and problem solving, and making the complexity of those processes visible for students so that they can develop strategies for improvement by creating learning environments where students learn about themselves as learners and develop strategies for success.When campus leadership, including administrators, faculty, tutors, counselors, institutional researchers and student peers, join to make pre-collegiate education a campus-wide priority, the ideal of college access for all, Asera's understanding of the mission of community colleges, will evolve from pipedream to pipeline for learning and success.

Reflecting upon the previous decade, an advocate for service-learning continues his call for institutional responsibility while taking a look at the progress made. Ehrlich writes that service learning has come of age and suggests three major directions for continued advancement. The first stresses service-learning's value for enhancing academic learning, including both deeper understanding in the full range of disciplines and in professional preparation as well as the cross-cutting goals of liberal education, such as developing an inquiring mind and a liberal imagination. Community service that is integrated into an undergraduate curriculum enables students to connect thought and feeling, creating a context in which students can explore how they feel about what they are thinking and what they think about how they feel, offering opportunities to consider what is important, and why. A second direction is pursued by faculty who use service-learning primarily as a vehicle to promote the skills and knowledge needed for leadership, emphasizing that the knowledge and skills of leadership are best gained in a real-world environment, where students can practice and where effective leaders can be observed first hand. A third direction, civic engagement, concentrates on tying academic study to volunteer activities such as cleaning up a park, tutoring a child, or serving in a community kitchen. These programs have been shown to contribute to a greater sense of civic responsibility, although focus on community engagement is insufficient preparation for active citizenship if not accompanied by experiences that support more systemic political or policy-related understanding and engagement. Ehrlich advocates that service-learning can and should serve all three of the functions discussed and that, unless to strengthen all of these important dimensions of undergraduate learning, full potential of a powerful pedagogy has yet to be experienced.

Prompted by a student comment that college lacked intellectual challenge, the author and colleagues sat in on an English class described as "a brain dump." The teacher had assigned students to write parodies of "The Road Not Taken," knowing that to do the assignment well, they would have to read and understand Frost's poem. The instructor was meeting students at their level, trying to push them to go beyond it, and lead them in new directions. Noting that most of the students seemed to view college as a passport to professional and economic security, with learning as a secondary consideration, if at all, the disconnect between expectations of students and expectations of professors, the author discusses the genesis and consequences of a shift to a view of education as a social contract that treats students as consumers. The author admires students who squeeze as much as they can from the college experience, and salutes teachers who dedicate their energies to seeing students succeed. Too much is left to chance, however, writes Merrow, and attention must be paid at a national level to maintain a leading global position in educational attainment.

It is hard to find a campus today that does not collect student evaluations of teaching. Not everyone, it is true, puts full stock in the results, but it is hard to argue with the idea that students have important perspectives to contribute. The writer advocates that listening to students is a good idea that does not go far enough. Describing practices at Carleton College, where any faculty member can ask for a student observer to sit in on her or his classes, usually for the entire term, and Western Washington University, where a course which studies the teaching process, Hutchings notes that students not only receive training about what to look for in an effective classroom, they also have a powerful opportunity to reflect on the process of teaching and learning. Some may worry that giving students a bigger voice adds fuel to the fire of consumerism. According to the argument, students may know what they want, but faculty members know what they need, and have, after all, a responsibility to maintain the integrity of the educational process. That is just the point, says Hutchings. Part of a faculty's responsibility should be to let students in on the tricks and truths of the learning trade. Thanks to several decades of educational innovation and research, much more is now known about how learning occurs and what works in the classroom. Sharing that knowledge with students will make students better contributors to the improvement of teaching by raising the quality of the feedback they can offer.

These days it seems as if nearly everyone in college is receiving A's, making the Dean's List, or graduating with honors. What is more interesting is that college students in general are spending fewer hours studying, while taking more remedial courses and fewer courses in mathematics, history, English, and foreign languages. Students everywhere report that they average only 10-15 hours of academic work outside of class per week and are able to attain "B" or better grade-point averages. In a study for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, former Harvard Dean Henry Rosovosky found that in 1950 about 15 percent of Harvard students got a B+ or better: today, it is nearly 70 percent. Last year 50 percent of the grades at Harvard were either A or A-, up from 22 percent in 1966, and 91 percent of seniors graduated with honors. Eighty percent of the grades at the University of Illinois are A's and B's, and 50 percent of Columbia students are on the Dean's List. If today's college students were smarter or better prepared, that would explain the higher grades, but that does not seem to be the case. Over the last 30 years, SAT scores of entering students have declined, and fully one-third of entering freshmen are enrolled in at least one remedial reading, writing or mathematics course. Neither do students seem to be working harder. The assumption behind most college courses is that students will spend two hours studying for every hour they spend in class, but that is rarely the case. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) reveals that not even 15 percent of students come close to this mark. Merrow advocates in favor of "engagement," genuine involvement in courses and campus activities, leading to "deep learning," or learning for understanding, and is very different from just memorizing stuff for the exam and then forgetting it. In today's society, the writer says, the need to educate for understanding has never been more important and is as critical in community college as in the Ivy League. What should students be learning, and what kinds of learning matter most? What kinds of teaching and student interaction promote "deep learning"? Can that learning be measured? What is the evidence? As basic as it sounds, few institutions in America can answer these questions with any certainty. Some in higher education are trying to get a handle on what really happens in the classroom. The National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) looks at the classroom activity which is known to enable significant learning, while the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) directly measures student learning and the "value added" of each campus. Both are challenging ranking systems as measures of college quality. There is also the issue of educational purpose: whether or not students and faculty have common goals. It appears that there is still much work to be done to reclaim the priority of undergraduate teaching and learning on American campuses.