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Does higher education prepare students to bridge divides in today’s democracy?

  • Symposium: Embracing Disagreement in Environmental Thought
  • Published:
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Abstract

Recent political events serve as a reminder that American society comprises groups with divergent visions for the future and mutually incompatible ideas of how to achieve those futures. Despite this diversity of policy orientations within the American public, we find that many students in our environmental studies courses have relatively little awareness of, or experience with, that diversity. Without the experience of interacting with people with different policy orientations, it is easy for students to believe policy consensus would emerge if everyone were sufficiently educated on the facts. Factual understanding, however, does not yield consensus on contemporary policy dilemmas such as climate change. We believe that equipping students to be effective agents of change means exposing them to the plurality of cultural commitments and policy orientations latent in current policy disputes. In this paper, we present a preliminary version of a survey tool, the Policy Orientation Survey, to evaluate how the diversity of cultural and policy orientations at a university is distributed across academic units. After describing the tool and its utility, we briefly present pilot results from our own university and discuss implications for higher education.

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Acknowledgements

Funding from Western Washington University's Office of Research and Sponsored Programs made this work possible (Award #PD0100). We appreciate the comments and contributions of the following, who improved and refined the quality of this manuscript and the underlying survey instrument: Jim Proctor, Emma Brush, Jennifer Bernstein and Susan Caplow. We wish to express our strong gratitude to Bethany Cutts, who has been an important resource as we developed our survey and who helped to pilot drafts of the instrument. And, not least, we would like to thank the reviewers who offered challenging but essential critiques. All usual disclaimers about the authors retaining responsibility for errors and sloppy logic apply.

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  1. Huxley College of the Environment, Western Washington University, 516 High St, MS 9085, Bellingham, WA, 98225, USA

    Mark W. Neff & Zander Albertson

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  1. Mark W. Neff
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  2. Zander Albertson
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Correspondence to Mark W. Neff.

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Neff, M.W., Albertson, Z. Does higher education prepare students to bridge divides in today’s democracy?. J Environ Stud Sci 10, 196–204 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-020-00588-8

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