THE NEW STUDENT POLITICS

“This conference seriously reawakened my sense of hope and redoubled my commitment to the utility of service, both personally and generally.” (Michael Kirkpatrick, Fort Lewis College)

About The New Student Politics

On March 15 – 17, 2001 a group of thirty-three juniors and seniors representing twenty-seven colleges and universities gathered at the Johnson Foundation in Racine, Wisconsin for the Wingspread Summit on Student Civic Engagement. The students were nominated by faculty and community service directors and asked to participate in a candid group discussion focused on their “civic experiences” in higher education. These students represented diverse institutions and diverse communities, which provided for a series of rigorous and provocative dialogues.

The New Student Politics: Wingspread Statement on Student Civic Engagement is a document that attempts to describe student political and civic engagement as defined by students at the Summit. It examines contemporary conceptions of civic engagement, politics, and service and provides specific suggestions about how campuses can improve their commitment to student civic engagement through service-learning, increased support for student political activity, and attentiveness to student voice.

The students who met at Wingspread articulated a clear vision for what it means to be engaged in civic life and why they chose particular forms of engagement. Their message can be synthesized into four specific points:

• Their view of democracy is richly participatory rather than procedural, they see the work of negotiating difference as the work of democracy;
• They recognize and seize opportunities to put their community service activities in context, to provide their actions with systems perspectives that politicize their service;
• They see themselves as misunderstood by those who measure student engagement by conventional standards that don’t always fit their conceptions of democratic participation; and
• They have a clear sense of how higher education can and should change to provide an environment more conducive to civic education.

A New Democracy:
The students at the summit defined democracy less in terms of civic obligation than in terms of the social responsibility of the individual. There is a significant emphasis on inclusion—the ability of all to participate-—as a cornerstone of democracy. Students make choices about participation associated with certain social issues based upon personal interests or experience. Their participation is highly individualized (where the personal is linked to the political) but this should not be equated with individualism (where self-interest is the overriding motivation). Therefore, their participation is not tied to any agreed upon or widely shared goal—on the contrary, the highly individualized nature of participation means that their efforts are highly fragmented.

Service Politics:
The students at the Summit described three distinct forms of political engagement: conventional politics, community service, and “service politics.” Wingspread students argued that community service is a form of alternative politics, not an alternative to politics. Participation in community service can be undertaken as a form of unconventional political activity that can lead to social change. Service politics is the bridge between community service and conventional politics. It is through service politics that many students make the shift toward more conventional forms of political activity.