Diversity and Shared Community Norms on College Campuses.

As indicated by recent campus events, as well as prominent court cases challenging affirmative action-based admission policies, diversity continues to be an important issue on most college campuses. This paper argues that shaping the interactions of those from diverse backgrounds, both on-campus and between campus and the broader population, can serve important civic education goals. Recent research on adolescent development and political participation reveals that diverse learning environments are often associated with lower levels of adult political participation. Some argue that this outcome results from emphasizing pluralism and tolerance at the expense of developing strong shared norms. When adolescent peers, for example, all believe that voting is essential to good citizenship, adult political participation increases substantially. But places with high levels of diversity are least likely to have these types of "shared judgments" regarding appropriate or required behavior. This dynamic appears to occur on college campuses as well, as white students' sense of community declines when diversity on campus increases. College educators and administrators appear to have done a good job at promoting tolerance (pluribus), but not shared community (unim). This paper describes an approach developed at Central Michigan University, which draws on the higher education and associational life literatures, to promote the cultivation of a shared community that moves beyond tolerance to the development of shared community norms that promote civic and political engagement. Initial survey results describing student and resident attitudes toward race and ethnicity on campus are reported. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]