Civic Engagement: Is UVA fooling us?...are we fooling ourselves?

All of the authors we read this week were deeply critical about the promises of civic engagement for improving democracies and democratic citizens. Their reservations and critiques seem topics that are often overlooked in conversations about what it means to be good citizens. Community service, community engagement, public activism, volunteerism are terms we generally associate as unequivocally good. As we have discussed in class, this assumption forms the premise of the establishment of entire institutions, organizations and public policies, including and especially at UVA. Our administration devotes thousands – probably millions – of dollars into developing programs for community engagement (just glance at the “Public Service” tab on UVA’s homepage) and students, as someone mentioned in class, have volunteered 3 million hours of service at Madison House and thousands of dollars on Alternative Spring Break trips. These activities consume a substantial portion of our time and money, and it seems, few students, administrators and other committed to civic activism are taking a moment to question its benefits or even surmise this possibility of detrimental effects.

Eliasoph, THeiss-Morse, Hibbing et al. contend this sort of citizen activity does not translate into improved political participation, so if we accept their conclusions, we must ask ourselves, what other public good – outside of increased political awareness – do acts of civic engagement produce? Many activists and volunteers might respond they're fulfilling a community’s needs: a need for food, for funds, for housing, education, environmental protection. So too, might volunteerism fulfill our own needs: for satisfaction, for feeling like we are doing good, caring, and contributing to the solutions of the nation’s and others’ social ills, despite the fact that we might be the very benefactors of such ills.

I wouldn’t argue that all forms of civic engagement are ineffective or misguided, and I've been a part of many of them myself, but, as critically-thinking members of an academic institution devoted to service, who study issues and go out into the world and act on those issues, I believe we too quickly accept these normative assumptions of goodness. We need to question the deep-rooted causes of the community’s needs so we can go into these spaces more thoughtfully and more effectively. Why do 20-year-old college students need to tutor the children in Charlottesville’s public schools? And further, what difference does it make? How does an ethic of service serve the University? And how does civic engagement even fit into our conception of academics – does it at all?

This week’s discussion definitely began to complicate these questions about the purpose and impact of civic engagement, but it’s a discussion that should be taking place at a university-wide scale.