From Competence to Commitment
Ernest Boyer
1.Today's students have ambiguous feelings about their role in the world. They are devoting their energies to what seems most real to them: the pursuit of security, the accumulation of material goods. They are struggling to establish themselves, but the young people also admitted to confusion: Where should they put their faith in this uncertain age? Undergraduates are searching for identity and meaning and, like the rest of us, they are torn by idealism of service on the one hand, and on the hand, the temptation to retreat into a world that never rises above self-interests.
2.In the end, the quality of the undergraduate experience (= education) is to be measured by the willingness of graduates to be socially and civically engaged. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote, "Man cannot behold except he be committed ". He cannot find himself without finding a center beyond himself." The idealism of the undergraduate experience must reflect itself in loyalties that transcend self. Is it too much to expect that, even in this hard-edged, comp
etitive age, a college graduate with live with integrity, civility - even compassion? Is it appropriate to hope that the lessons learned in a liberal education will reveal themselves in the humaneness of the graduate's relationship with others?
3.Clearly, the college graduate has civic obligations to fulfill. There is urgent need in American teaching to help close the dangerous and growing gap between public policy and public understanding. The information required to think constructively about the agendas of government seems increasingly beyond our grasp. It is no longer possible, many argue, to resolve complex public issues through citizen participation. How, they ask, can non-specialists debate policy choices of consequence when they do not even know the language?
4.Should the use of nuclear energy be expanded or cut back? Can an adequate supply of water be assured? How can the arms race be brought under control? What is a safe level of atmospheric pollution? Even the semi-metaphysical questions of when a human life begins and ends have items on the political agenda.
5.Citizens have tried with similar bafflement to follow the debate over Star Wars with its highly technical jargon of deterrence and counter-deterrence. Even what once seemed to be reasonably local matters --- zoning regulations, school desegregation, drainage problems public transportation issues, licensing requests from competing cable television companies-call for specialists who debate technicalities and frequently confuse rather than clarify the issues. And yet the very complexity of public requires more not less information more not less participation.
6.For those who care about government by the people，the decline in public understanding cannot go unchallenged. In a world where human survival is at stake , ignorance is not an acceptable alternative. The full control of policy by specialists with limited perspective is not tolerable. Unless we find better ways to educate ourselves as citizens, unless hard questions are asked and satisfactory answers are offered, we run risk of making critical decisions, not on the basis of what we know, but on the basis of blind faith in one or another set of professed experts.
7.What we need today are groups of well-informed, caring individuals who band together in the spirit of community to lean from one another, to participate, as citizens, in the democratic process.
8.We need concerned people who are participants in inquiry, who know how to ask the right questions, who understand the process by which public policy is shaped, and are prepared to make informed discriminating judgments on questions that effect the future. Obviously, no one institution in society can single-handedly provides the leadership we require. But we are convinced that the undergraduate college, perhaps more than any other institutions, is obliged to provide the enlightened leadership our nation urgently requires if government by the people is to endure.
9.vaguelyTo fulfill this urgent obligation, the perspective needed is not only national, but also global. Today's students must be informed about people and cultures other than their own. Since man has orbited into space, it has become dramatically apparent that we are all custodians of a single planet. In the past half century, our planet has become vastly m
ore crowded, more interdependent, and more unstable. If students do not see beyond themselves and better understand their place in our complex world, their capacity to love responsibly will be dangerously diminished.
10.The world may not yet be a village, but surely our sense of neighborhood must expand. When drought ravages the Sahara, when war in Indo-China creates refugees, neither our compassion nor our analytic intelligence can be bounded by a dotted line on a political map. We are beginning to understand that hunger and human rights affect alliances as decisively as weapons and treaties. Dwarfing all other concerns, the mushroom cloud hangs ominously over our world consciousness. These realities and the obligations they impose must be understood by every student.

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