University of Michigan - Flint
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Center for Service Learning and School Partnerships
Presidential Statement on Civic Engagement - Juan Mestas, Chancellor of University of Michigan-Flint
Education is a sacred trust. For a public university, education is a sacred public trust. Our primary responsibility to the public is to provide the students with a good education. In doing so, we acquire many other responsibilities.
A public university has the responsibility to create a learning environment that values and rewards honesty, integrity, fairness, compassion, and commitment to the welfare of others. A public university has the responsibility to contribute to the formation of capable professionals and able leaders, yes, but also of good, solid citizens who contribute to the well-being of their communities. Public institutions exist because the public believes, accurately, that a well-educated citizenry is essential to the health and prosperity of a democratic society. Thus, a public university cannot hover ten feet above the ground, casting a shadow but not leaving a footprint. Our commitment to the search for knowledge and truth transcends our time and our space, but we engage in that search for knowledge and truth here and now-and that entails a civic duty.
A public university has the responsibility to be a wholehearted participant in the efforts to improve the educational, cultural, and social conditions of the community it serves. That is part of our accountability as custodians of the public trust, but is also a matter of neighborliness-good, old-fashioned neighborliness. A community of scholars exercises its civic responsibility best when its members act as citizen scholars, practicing what Ernest Boyer called the "scholarship of engagement," connecting the resources of the university to the most pressing problems, needs, and concerns of the community.
These connections emerge almost effortlessly when we create a climate in which, as Ernest Boyer said, "academic and civic cultures communicate continuously and creatively with each other." We can exercise our civic responsibility through the design of the curriculum, through community-based research, through service-learning activities, through outreach efforts, through partnerships with civic and cultural organizations, and through individual acts of neighborliness. We must do it in the context of our commitment to excellence, and we must do it as a moral duty.