Ernest Boyer asserts, “Increasingly, the campus is being viewed as a place where students get credentialed and the faculty get tenured, while the overall work of the [college] does not seem particularly relevant to the nation’s most pressing civic, social, economic, and moral problems. [Campuses should] be viewed by both students and professors not as isolated islands, but as staging grounds for action (“The Scholarship of Engagement.” The Journal of Public Service and Outreach, 1996)
As a response, I think that it may be true that college is definitely seen as a place to get diplomas and tenure, that being true doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t relevant to pressing civic, social, economic, and moral problems. I think that there may have been other problems in society that have led to college being seen that way and that its not totally a terrible thing for college to be that, because it doesn’t stop work there from being relevant to pressing issues. By having college as the place that pretty much everyone should go to after high school, that allows a more vast variety of people to be exposed to the ideas relating to these pressing issues in the mandatory college classes that they may have never learned about elsewhere. This isn’t all the way up to the intended staging grounds for action I think but it gets close. For students who already care deeply about these issues it may already be staging grounds for them, although not an all encompassing thing.
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