9
one should take away from this revealing piece is that we need to help our students make
sense of their undergraduate curriculum, explain to them course sequencing, what the
connections are between and among disciplines, why it matters if all one’s lower level
courses are taken in the third or fourth, or increasingly, the fifth year, why, at the end of
the day, one needs to be able to articulate to others, and importantly, to oneself, a
personal narrative that explains choices, routes, failures and achievements. Advising,
guiding, scolding, encouraging, challenging: these are the things we can do in and out of
the classroom that give students the self-confidence, intellectual acumen, and context to
engage as life-long citizens in enterprises larger than themselves.
The promotion of good citizenship is often defined in a terribly circular way:
civic education, (rarely defined in terms of actual curriculum), encourages civic
engagement, thus resulting in good citizens. This is not a prescription any of my
undergraduates could discern nor follow. When driving on the Washington Beltway
recently, I passed a Giant Grocery store truck with the following statement painted in
bold letters on the side of the vehicle, “Careful driving is a civic duty.” While I am as
much in favor of good driving as any other motorist, when one sees such signs or similar
empty sentiments, one worries that our sense of civic mission has been diminished by too
easy an application, too broad an interpretation of what counts as civic behavior and duty
toward others.
This is a time in history, among many other times in history, when words matter
greatly: values and virtue, citizen, resident alien, immigrant and refugee, patriotism and
loyalty, skepticism and accountability, “support our troops,” “war on terror,” terrorist and
insurgent, enemy combatant or prisoner of war, liberator, occupier, citizen-soldier. What
Convention