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THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY had barely begun be-fore the spirit of promise left in the wake of theCold War was dispelled by a renewed sense of peril.Hopes for a “new world order” were dashed quicklyand violently on September 11, 2001, when it be-

came clear that nothingless than our way of life is

at stake. There is indeed a new world, but order is not its nature. More-over, where it exists at all, “order” still includes many of the same old op-pressions that rightly offend the moral sensibilities of humankind. Themurderous events of the past several years in such places as Bosnia,Rwanda, Sudan, the Middle East, and the United States fully discreditmoral relativism. Yet they risk also subverting the essential urge andneed to understand and engage each other, especially the foreign andthe alien-to-us.

The power of the moment is noteworthy, not because the media tellsus so over, and over, and over, but because of the powerful forces, emo-tions, and fundamental beliefs now in play. This is the moment torevalue the concepts of civilization and what it means to be fully human,to renew our commitment to tolerance and freedom, and to reawakenour awareness of worldwide interdependence and ecological contingency.

Understandably, students come to campuses today in a state of bewil-derment about all of this—a mood that matches their transitional timeof life and their innate curiosity, awakening, and questioning. Althoughcampuses import much from the larger culture, they also have specialproblems of their own that contribute to the exigency of the moment.Campuses face the significant problems of cheating, alcohol and otherdrug abuse, violence, and a sharp rise in diagnosed depression and inself-destructive behaviors such as anorexia, bulimia, and suicide at-tempts. For institutions that seek to educate the “whole person,” thechallenge of educating for personal and social responsibility has takenon new urgency.

Educating for personal and

social responsibilitywill take

nothing less than apervasive

cultural shift withinthe academy

RICHARD H. HERSH is a senior fellow at the Council for Aid to Education, andCAROL GEARY SCHNEIDER is president of the Association of American Collegesand Universities.

RICHARD H. HERSH ■ CAROL GEARY SCHNEIDER

on College&UniversityCampuses

FosteringPersonal&SocialResponsibility

Utah State University

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In an essay entitled “A Moral for an Age ofPlenty,” the scientist-philosopher JacobBronowski (1978) tells the story of Louis Slotin,a tale that reveals in dramatic form the moralanatomy of the necessary interplay betweenpersonal and social responsibility. Slotin was anuclear physicist who worked in the laborato-ries at Los Alamos to help develop the atomicbomb. In 1946 he was conducting an experi-ment in the lab that required assembling piecesof plutonium. He was nudging one piece towardanother, by tiny movements, in order to ensurethat their total mass would be large enough tomake a chain reaction, and he was doing it, asexperts are prone to do such things, with ascrewdriver. The screwdriver stopped, and thepieces of plutonium came a fraction too closetogether. Immediately, the instruments every-one was watching registered a great upsurgeof neutrons, which was the sign that a chainreaction had begun. Radioactivity was fillingthe room.

“Slotin moved at once,” Bronowski reports.“He pulled the pieces of plutonium apart withhis bare hands. This was virtually an act ofsuicide, for it exposed him to the largest doseof radioactivity. Then he calmly asked his sevenco-workers to mark their precise positions atthe time of the accident in order that the de-gree of exposure of each one to the radioactivitycould be fixed” (202). Having done this, andhaving alerted the medical service, Slotinapologized to his companions and said whatturned out to be exactly true: he would die,and they would recover.

In Slotin’s response, we see in heroic pro-portions what morality is ordinarily made of.We see, first, an uncompromising sense thatother people matter, an unconditional concernfor preserving individual life and welfare. Wesee, too, a finely honed ability to size up a sit-uation comprehensively and accurately, atested capacity for systematic thought. Finally,we witness the courage to act. Slotin did notmerely feel compassion and think efficiently;he separated the plutonium.

Morality, as Slotin’s case suggests, depends onthe orchestration of humane caring, evaluativethinking, and determined action. Consider whatwould have happened in that lab if Slotin hadexpressed only one or two of these three faces ofmorality. If he had possessed the cool knowledgeand quick intelligence of the scientist, but had

felt nothing for his coworkers, how “moral”would his response have been? On the otherhand, had he been unable to assess the problemrationally, how effective would his caring havebeen? And, however magnanimous his motivesand logical his reasoning, what would theyhave amounted to if he had failed to act?Morality is neither good motives nor right reason nor resolute action; it is all three.1

The very same characteristics typically as-sociated with “personal responsibility” are in-extricably linked to the development of socialresponsibility as well. Personal responsibilityand social responsibility involve the moralobligation to both self and community, andboth forms of responsibility rely upon suchvirtues as honesty, self-discipline, respect, loy-alty, and compassion. The formation of thesepersonal and social dispositions is powerfullyinfluenced by the character of the communityculture, and the community’s own integrityand vitality depends, in turn, on the values,actions, and contributions of its members.

Is this our business?The cultivation of virtues associated withwhat we label here as “personal and social re-sponsibility” was a guiding principle for theoriginal American liberal arts colleges. Fol-lowing the framing of the U.S. Constitution,the colleges immediately owned a role in fos-tering the virtues required to sustain a self-governing republic. Drawing on this tradition,American colleges and universities continueto proclaim their role in fostering high ethicaland moral standards. The mission of DukeUniversity, for example, is “to provide a supe-rior liberal education to undergraduate stu-dents, attending not only to their intellectualgrowth but also to their development as adultscommitted to high ethical standards and fullparticipation as leaders in their communities.”Similarly, the mission of Swarthmore Collegerecognizes that “a liberal education is con-cerned with the development of moral, spiri-tual, and aesthetic values as well as analyticalabilities.” A recent study of 331 mission state-ments from top-ranked colleges and universitiessuggests that one-third of the campuses cur-rently address values, character, ethical chal-lenges, and/or social justice in their missionstatements (Meacham and Gaff forthcoming).

Over the course of the twentieth century,however, the academy became increasingly

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uncomfortable with the en-actment of this role. Notwith-standing the evidence of avestigial commitment foundin mission statements, manyeducators are reluctant to ad-dress moral issues with stu-dents. Some fear imposingtheir own values on students;others believe that morality is an inherentlypersonal issue, or that teaching and learningshould be restricted to subject matter andanalytical skills. Although research showsthat dimensions of personal and social respon-sibility do continue to develop in college (seeLynn Swaner’s article in this issue), the ques-tion of whether institutions of higher educa-tion should educate for such development isoften raised. The view that educating forpersonal and social responsibility may be

“none of our business” is notat all uncommon.

Yet if, by their very natureas educational institutions,colleges and universities in-escapably influence students’values and ethical develop-ment, then reflecting on andactively crafting this dimen-

sion of education is appropriate. Along theselines, Berkowitz (1997, 18) has pointed outthat “education inevitably affects character,either intentionally or unintentionally.” Simi-larly, Colby et al. (2003, xi) agree that “moraland civic messages are unavoidable in highereducation” and argue that “it is better to payexplicit attention to the content of these mes-sages and how they are conveyed than toleave students’ moral and civic socializationto chance.”

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The view thateducating for personal and

social responsibility may be “none of

our business” is not at all uncommon

C.W. PostCampus–Long IslandUniversity

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tions of higher education provide moral edu-cation by default, many view colleges anduniversities as having an obligation to pre-pare morally astute individuals who will posi-tively contribute to the communities inwhich they will participate. Greater Expecta-tions: A New Vision for Learning as a NationGoes to College, the national report issued in2002 by the Association of American Col-leges and Universities (AAC&U), provides adescriptive picture of how educating “respon-sible” learners can have an impact beyondthe college campus:

Empowered and informed learners are alsoresponsible. Through discussion, criticalanalysis, and introspection, they come tounderstand their roles in society and acceptactive participation. Open-minded and em-pathetic, responsible learners understandhow abstract values relate to decisions intheir lives. Responsible learners appreciateothers, while also assuming accountabilityfor themselves, their complex identities,and their conduct . . . they help societyshape its ethical values, and then live bythose values (23).

Developing these capacities likely requires anintentional approach above and beyond thetraditional academic endeavors of colleges anduniversities. Educating for academic skillsalone is not sufficient to prepare graduates withmoral and civic commitment. Although manyinstitutions espouse the goal of producingmorally responsible as well as intellectuallycompetent graduates in their mission state-ments, colleges and universities—in practice—do not generally educate for morality asintentionally or proficiently as they do for intellectual skills.

We know we can teach students organicchemistry; we know we can teach them Keyne-sian economics and the history of the ItalianRenaissance. But if that is all we do, then wehave failed them. If, in the process, we don’talso teach students about passion and the rela-tionship between passion and responsible ac-tion, then we leave them dulled. Our studentswill have all the knowledge and skills theyneed to act, but they will lack the focus or themotivation or the profound caring to directthe use of their skills. For that, our studentswill need passion with a conscience, passionimbued with a keen sense of responsibility.

Reengaging core commitmentsIn November 2004, AAC&U joined with theTempleton Foundation to convene a nationalpanel of leading education researchers in thefields of character and moral development.The purpose was to assess the efficacy of un-dergraduate education’s contribution to stu-dent ethical and moral development. Thepanel reached two related conclusions: first,higher education must be far more explicitand expansive in emphasizing the develop-ment of personal and social responsibility ascore outcomes of liberal education; second,robust assessments of these outcomes can andshould be developed.

The panel was especially concerned aboutthe inadequate attention colleges and univer-sities give to the purposeful development ofstudents’ personal and social responsibility ata time in their lives when their identities areundergoing formative development. GeorgeKuh (2005), for example, reports a decreaseover the past decade in the percentage of stu-dents at all types of colleges and universitieswho say they have made significant progressin developing their values and ethical stan-dards while at college. “A silent tragedy maybe in the making in American higher educa-tion,” Kuh concludes. “Faculty support for ed-ucating the whole student has declined and sohave student gains in areas related to characterdevelopment.”

On most campuses, ethics, values, and so-cial responsibility have become, at best, tacitconcerns in the explicit college curriculum.Faculty members receive no preparation toaddress such issues in their teaching, and theyoften shy away from helping students connectthe values implications of their course topicsand themes with students’ own lives. Recentdata collected on nearly twenty thousand fac-ulty indicate that fully half of them see stu-dents’ development of a code of ethics orvalues as a low or nonexistent priority fortheir own teaching, while 87 percent viewstudents’ development of a deepened sense of“spirituality” as a low or nonexistent priority(Faculty Survey 2004).

As many leaders from residential campusesconcede, the so-called “hidden curriculum”taught by campus culture works directlyagainst the academy’s espoused goal of prepar-ing students for personal and social responsi-bility. Certainly there are many students on

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any campus who exhibit all the qualities ofpersonal integrity and social responsibilityone might wish—and many programs thatsupport them. Nonetheless, the evidence isabundant that students typically spend only asmall fraction of their campus time on actualstudy; cheating is common; the party cultureis at cross-purposes with both ethical and aca-demic values; the de facto disconnect be-tween student learning and student life tacitlyinvites students to keep their studies scrupu-lously separate from the personal explorationthat inevitably occurs in college; and becauseof this disconnect, students frequently are leftto their own devices in addressing the spiri-tual, ethical, and interpersonal challengesthey encounter in college.

Many have expressed concern about theseaspects of campus culture, but none so elo-quently as Bill Damon (1997, 3):

The future of any society depends upon thecharacter and competence of its young. Inorder to develop character and compe-tence, young people need guidance to pro-vide them with direction and a sense ofpurpose. They need relationships that em-body and communicate high standards.They need to experience activities that arechallenging, inspiring, and educative.Many of the conditions for the develop-ment of character and competence in theyoung have deteriorated in recent years . . .young people often encounter inattention,low expectations, cynicism, or communityconflict. . . . All of these conditions must bechanged if we are to create a society whereyoungsters can attain their full potential.The future of our society depends upon it.

Damon’s succinct call for a “charter” change tomore purposefully educate for character and

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Rutgers University

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competence is every bit as applicable to thecollege years as it is to early childhood andadolescence. In this spirit, the panel convenedby AAC&U and Templeton articulated five spe-cific aims of liberal education that are integraldimensions of personal and social responsibility:1. Striving for excellence; developing a

strong work ethic and consciously doingone’s very best in all aspects of college

2. Acting on a sense of personal and academicintegrity, ranging from honesty in relation-ships to principled engagement with anacademic honors code

3. Recognizing and acting on the responsibilityto contribute to a larger community, boththe educational community (classroom,campus life, etc.) and the wider community

4. Recognizing and acting on the obligationto take seriously the perspectives of others

in forming one’s own judgments; engagingthe perspectives of others as a resource forlearning, for citizenship, and for work

5. Developing competence in ethical andmoral reasoning, and, in ways that incor-porate the other five aims, using such rea-soning in learning and in lifeOf course, it is one thing to articulate such

aims or to say that we in higher educationcommit ourselves to purposefully enrichingour teaching and curricula to achieve them. Itis quite another thing to actually measure stu-dents’ moral and ethical development or theiracquisition of personal and social responsibil-ity. Thus far, most assessment efforts havebeen focused primarily on the cognitive di-mensions. In this case, however, the life of themind is hardly sufficient.

It’s the culture…If education for personal and social responsi-bility is to occur in college other than bychance, then such an agenda must pervadethe institutional culture, and the entire fac-ulty and administration must be committed toit. In arguing for this position, George Kuh(2005) provides six principles: 1. Emphasize character and moral development

in the institution’s mission.2. Adopt a holistic approach to talent devel-

opment—learning takes place in and outsideof the classroom.

3. Recruit and socialize new faculty, staff, andstudents with character and moral develop-ment in mind.

4. Make sure certain institutional policies andpractices are consistent with the institution’scommitment to this agenda.

5. Assess the impact of students’ experiencesand the institutional environment on char-acter and moral development.

6. It’s the culture, stupid.It is this last principle that embeds the otherfive. If we were simply to add a requiredcourse in ethics, or to designate a number ofcourses from which students might choose inorder to fulfill the personal and social respon-sibility component of liberal education, wewould almost certainly fail. Educating for per-sonal and social responsibility will take noth-ing less than a pervasive cultural shift withinthe academy. Faculty are the key to realchange, and we must help them integrateresponsibility into all courses. This is entirely

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C.W. PostCampus–

Long IslandUniversity

compatible with teaching in the social sciences,in the humanities, and in the sciences too.Moreover, student life outside the classroom isrich with opportunities for integration.

The time is right for an initiativeSeveral nationally visible institutions—e.g.,Harvard, Duke, and Stanford—have alreadymade ethics an integral part of their degree re-quirements. Their high profile commitmentsreflect a broader trend, discernible across theacademy, toward articulating ethics and valuesand the cultivation of personal and social re-sponsibility as important outcomes of collegeeducation.

This increasing recognition of personal andsocial responsibility as a goal for college learn-ing was captured in AAC&U’s 2004 reportTaking Responsibility for the Quality of the Bac-calaureate Degree. This report provides a con-cise summary of the outcomes consideredimportant for many of the professions (e.g.,education, business, engineering, and health)as well as for the higher education communityas a whole. Ethics, values, and personal andsocial responsibility emerge as prominentthemes in the professions’ goals for studentlearning in college. Moreover, the Greater Expectations report, which has been enthusias-tically embraced by the academic community,calls upon higher education to educate “intentional learners” who have a clear un-derstanding of the goals of their educationand who include among those goals an explicit commitment to “individual and social responsibility.”

A proactive, high-visibility initiative de-signed to take these goals seriously, to connectthem to a vision of educational excellence for all students and for the larger society, andto provide evidence and assessment tools thatdemonstrate whether they are being metcould make a powerful difference on campusvalues and practices. Moreover, in an erawhen fully 93 percent of high school studentsplan to enroll in college, such an initiativecould, over time, produce an enormous rippleeffect on what Americans consider the impor-tant aims of college education. In the comingmonths, AAC&U will be exploring the possi-bilities for just such an initiative. ■■

To respond to this article, e-mail liberaled@aacu.org,with the authors’ names on the subject line.

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REFERENCESAssociation of American Colleges and Universities.

2002. Greater expectations: A new vision for learningas a nation goes to college. Washington, DC: Associ-ation of American Colleges and Universities.

. 2004. Taking responsibility for the quality of thebaccalaureate degree. Washington, DC: Associationof American Colleges and Universities.

Berkowitz, M. W. 1997. The complete moral person:Anatomy and formation. In Moral issues in psychol-ogy: Personalist contributions to selected problems, ed.J. M. Dubois, 11–41. Lanham, MD: UniversityPress of America.

Bronowski, J. 1978. A moral for an age of plenty. In Asense of the future: Essays in natural philosophy, ed. P.E. Ariotti and R. Bronowski, 202–5. Cambridge,MA: MIT Press.

Colby, A., T. Ehrlich, E. Beaumont, and J. Stephens.2003. Educating citizens: Preparing America’s under-graduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility. SanFrancisco: Jossey-Bass.

Damon, W. 1997. The youth charter: How communitiescan work together to raise standards for all our children.New York: The Free Press.

Faculty Study of Student Engagement. 2004. FSSE2004 frequency distributions total grand frequencies.www.indiana.edu/~nsse/pdf/fsse_2004_total_grand_freq.pdf.

Hersh, R. H., J. P. Miller, and G. D. Fielding. 1980.Models of moral education: An appraisal. New York:Longman.

Kuh, G. 2005. Do environments matter? A compara-tive analysis of the impress of different types of col-leges and universities on character. Journal ofCollege and Character, www.collegevalues.org/arti-cles.cfm?a=1&id=239.

Meacham, J., and J. Gaff. Forthcoming. Learninggoals in mission statements: Implications for educa-tional leadership. Liberal Education 92 (1).

NOTE1. For this analysis and further elaboration, see Hersh,

Miller, and Fielding (1980).