POSTED BY STEVE MUMME AND MARGARET LECOMPTE
Steve Mumme is a Professor at Colorado State University and the AAUP-Colorado Conference Co-President, and Margaret LeCompte is a Professor Emerita and President of the AAUP Chapter, University of Colorado at Boulder.
Colorado’s college students are deemed by some to be civics deficient and University of Colorado Board of Regents President, Sue Sharkey, a Republican for Castlerock, Colorado has a plan to fix that. She would have her colleagues on the CU Board require all graduating seniors at CU’s three campuses to complete and pass a college course in civics.
There’s a case to be made, of course, that many graduating seniors are civics deficient, if by civics we specifically mean a working knowledge of American national, state, and local government. Colorado’s public universities, including CU, incorporate general exposure to social sciences in their general requirements for graduation, but American government is usually one of several options available to students for satisfying this obligation. It is quite possible, indeed likely, that many students, and certainly foreign students, may not have much awareness of American political institutions as they grasp their diplomas.
Should American civics then be college mandatory? Possibly, but it’s a harder case to make than meets the eye.
Historically, the burden of civics education in America falls on secondary schools. That is true of Colorado, which mandates a semester of civics (.5 Carnegie unit) for each high school graduate. If high school graduates are civics deficient on graduation, then Sharkey’s proposal looks like asking the university to provide remedial education. If the K-12 system is working, then Sharkey’s proposal looks like a solution in search of a problem. If it’s not working, should not the focus center on strengthening the K-12 civics curriculum?
But Sharkey’s proposal has greater flaw; it misconstrues the administrative role of the Board of Regents. In justifying her big idea Sharkey asserts she is representing her constituents as an elected member of the Board. Problem is, the Board isn’t the college equivalent of the state legislature. It is a university governing board tasked with the distinct work of governing boards nationwide, safeguarding administration, ensuring the institution’s fiscal health and viability, and working with the administration, faculty, and students in advancing the goals and purposes of a great public university.
The ground rules here are very well established and fundamental to the effective management of the university. In what is the most authoritative and widely used guidance for the governance of American colleges and universities, published in 1966, the American Association of University Professors, the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges, and the American Council on Education jointly issued their famous Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. It specifically defines the unique role of university governing boards this way: “The governing board of an institution of higher education, while maintaining a general overview, entrusts the conduct of the administration to the administrative officers—the president and the deans—and the conduct of teaching and research to the faculty. The board should undertake appropriate self-limitation.”
Or, to be more succinct, the business of designing and adopting curriculum is a function of CU’s faculty, not the Board of Regents.
As Michael Lightner, CU’s Vice-President for Academic Affairs, put it, Sharkey’s proposal, if adopted, would be “absolutely precedent setting.” It would fundamentally up-end the working relationship between the Board, the administration, and the faculty. The fact that Sharkey’s proposal has the whiff of a suite of institutional reforms put forward nationally by the highly conservative Goldwater Institute at Arizona State University [also evident in CU’s recent proposal to drop the phrase “liberal education” from its mission statement] means this unprecedented intrusion into the traditional domain of the faculty would also be politicized, tainting the professionalism of the Board of Regents and the reputation of the university. All in all, this is a very bad idea, for CU, certainly, and for all Colorado public universities and colleges.
The quality of civics education in modern democracies is always a legitimate concern. Instead of legislating curriculum from the Board, however, Sharkey should share her ideas with the faculty, starting with the political science department, the faculty unit entrusted with the dissemination of knowledge on American government and politics. And for starters, she and her Board of Regents colleagues might consider reviewing the AAUP’s 1966 Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities. It may well advance their education in the civics of university governance.
