Resisting the Siren Song: Charting a Course for Justice

Abstract

Edward Zlotkowski's (1995) concern over 20 years ago was that without institutionalization in the academic structures of colleges and universities, service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) might fade away or be co-opted into "still another academic specialty" (p. 129). Fortunately, many heeded his call, and SLCE has become a central and defining feature of many higher education institutions. SLCE leaders on campuses worked hard to build coalitions of stakeholders in the past decades, but many of these stakeholders were enticed to support SLCE for their own ends: Public relations offices needed human relations stories for the media, business offices needed an easy way to ensure they met the 7% minimum threshold for federal work-study students serving in the community, student life offices wanted volunteer structures in place to make it easier to sentence students to community service for disciplinary violations, advancement offices wanted to lure donors based on the institution's service commitments, admissions offices wanted to tout volunteer opportunities, and so on. As an institutionalized movement, SLCE now must find a way to live and thrive within these neoliberal incentive structures that make its continued existence on campuses possible. SLCE lives within the dominant neoliberal structure of American colleges and universities. Simply put, the neoliberal frameworks that infuse American life today strive to monetize all human interactions, turning institutions of higher education into sites of efficiency, productivity, revenue production, and customer service. More than just restricting the range of possible ends, neoliberalism produces within people a desire to conform and promote neoliberal ends. Some scholars are optimistic that SLCE can turn the tide on neoliberalism (Orphan & O'Meara, 2016), and others see SLCE as too wrapped up in a liberal agenda to be an adequate force for transformation (Simpson, 2014). I fall somewhere in the middle, believing that SLCE can create a powerful and transformative sub-culture through which students, faculty, and community members can create structures for justice within a neoliberal framework. But if we are not aware of the incentives driving our stakeholders, we may succumb to them. As Kliewer (2013) warns, "by maintaining a civic engagement movement that does not account for neoliberalism, we could potentially be undermining the very democratic sentiments and institutions that the movement attempts to revive" (p. 73). The future of the movement will depend on the ability of SLCE leaders to recognize and navigate the neoliberal incentives on our work, using them to further our objectives but resisting the urge to let the work be co-opted. Influence of Incentives on SLCE To see if my impressions of the movement were shared by other SLCE leaders, I spent the better part of my time at the North Carolina Campus Compact Pathways to Achieving Civic Engagement Conference and the Campus Compact 30th Anniversary Conference, both taking place in Spring 2016, soliciting attendees' stories about what incentivized their stakeholders to get behind SLCE. They told stories of campus public relations offices needing a "feel good" story of service to distract from bad press at the university. They told stories about faculty who wanted heart-warming service projects for their students in order to get good course evaluations. They told stories of students wanting to change the world by starting yet another campus mentoring program--without ever consulting any of the myriad of extant campus mentoring programs. And like good improvisational actors, the SLCE professionals and partners I spoke with responded to each of these situations with a, "yes, and..." They sought to encourage the energy, money, passion, and learning of these stakeholders but, in the process, nudge them away from their more neoliberal impulses and toward more sustainable, justice-oriented projects. …