College-age voter turnout is low. Political discord is high. What role can colleges play in the discussion around elections, and how can they stay active in the issues those discussions represent?
A new report released on Thursday from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, tries to answer that question. The report draws on years of research, including IDHE’s data on college voter registration and turnout, said Nancy Thomas, director of the institute.
The report, titled “Election Imperatives,” describes 10 things college leaders can do not only to improve civic engagement on campus, but to use elections to further educational goals — things like increasing classroom discussions and empowering student activism.
The report is endorsed by numerous higher-education groups, including the American Association of State Colleges and Universities and the Association of American Colleges & Universities.
This week The Chronicle spoke with Thomas about the report, how to foster meaningful civic engagement, and the difference between political discussion and partisan divide. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why was it important to write this report?
What do we do with elections? Voting isn’t generally in the mission statements of colleges and universities. Civic learning often is.
One of the things that we need to do is turn elections into those teachable learning moments, and then it fits squarely within the mission of higher education. Some institutional leaders and faculty members have had trouble articulating that connection. One goal of this report is to make that connection.
How do we maintain campus climates where everybody feels welcome and yet we can also express dissenting points of view?
There are some other really important educational goals that need some attention right now in higher education, such as the state of political discourse. And addressing polarization, which is not just something that’s happening in public life, it’s actually happening on campuses. How do we maintain campus climates where everybody feels welcome and yet we can also express dissenting points of view? What can we do about student activism, which isn’t a new thing? I’m not even convinced it’s totally on the rise, because students have long been activists. But the attitude toward activism needs to be changed. It needs to be viewed as leadership opportunities and learning opportunities.
What kinds of issues do colleges face during elections?
The problems of polarization, discourse, hyperpartisanship, animosity, divisiveness, and discriminatory rhetoric. Those problems exist beyond an election season, but they can be made more acute depending on how politicians talk about citizens in this country, and how that rhetoric is discussed on campus.
The real obvious problem that comes out of our voting data is that for first-time voters in 2014 — that would be 18- to 21-year-olds — only 12 percent voted. We can talk about the underlying problems, which are problems with discourse and our ability to talk across differences, and problems of exclusion and student leadership. When you measure what the impact is of all those problems, you have the voting rate. And bam there it is. We’re facing a midterm election again. What are we going to do about it?
Is the release of this report now is in preparation for the midterm elections in November?
It goes back is what we do with elections. Do we treat them as something episodic and temporary, and designate a coalition of students to get mobilized and get tables put up so people can register to vote, and drive them in vans to the polls? Or are we going to seize this opportunity and say: We could reshape our campus climate. And we can tackle these issues so that the day after the election we’re still working on it.
This is not an episodic or simply election oriented set of recommendations.
The report clearly outlines 10 recommendations to increase voting and engagement. For some campuses, it might not be possible to carry out all 10, especially before the November elections. Are there a couple that are the most important that campuses could start doing immediately?
We tried to make this accessible and user friendly. The first recommendation is that senior institutional leaders need to get together and discuss the 10 recommendations and talk about their institution’s voting report. That is an easy fix.
The idea there is that we need senior administrators to put some real chops behind the rest of the recommendations, and that might mean financial support. That might mean that they stand up in front of a crowd and speak enthusiastically about some of these other things — there are a lot of things institutional leaders can do.
We tried to track how many college presidents made statements during the 2016 election. And I don’t pretend to have caught them all, but from where I sit, I could only find two. Presidents don’t get into this for a lot of really valid reasons: They’re worried about where their funding is coming from, they’re worried about hurting people, upsetting people.
This is a nonpartisan agenda. We’re not advocating for one side or the other. We’ve got to take out of the work the idea that partisan and political are interchangeable terms. They are not. Political and civic, I can see those as interchangeable. I can not see partisan and political as interchangeable. That has gotten lost in the civic movement for higher education.
Follow Claire Hansen on Twitter at @clairechansen, or email her at claire.hansen@chronicle.com.
Correction (8/9/2018, 10:52 a.m.): This article originally misnamed a higher-education group. It is the Association of American Colleges & Universities, not the Associate of American Colleges & Universities. The article has been updated to reflect this correction.
