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In a survey of over 3,000 undergraduate students, the nonprofit American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) found significant gaps in knowledge regarding American history and government.
The survey polled students with multiple-choice questions, including but not limited to: who is the president of the Senate? How long are senators’ and representatives’ term-lengths? Who is the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court? The survey results showed a disconnect between the respondents and facts, with an equal share of students identifying President Joe Biden as president of the senate as identified Vice President Kamala Harris.
But experts at Hunter College’s Department of Political Science in New York City caution that results of surveys like these should not be taken at face value.
Dr. Leah Christiani, an associate professor of political science at Hunter, said that these kinds of surveys that are often narrowly defined with “’gotcha’ questions” have “done a poor job of actually capturing” whether or not college-age Americans know little about politics. Christiani noted that ACTA did not perform a control survey of similarly aged respondents who were not in college, which offered no comparison to reflect on college students’ civic comprehension.
While Dr. Lina Newton, an associate professor of political science at Hunter, agreed that the questions provided by the ACTA survey tended towards assessing trivial knowledge, she said the surveys can be an important starting place to consider Americans’ overall lack of civic understanding and the duty of postsecondary institutions to close that gap. By shaping students’ understanding outside the national spectrum, where so much news media is often focused, institutions can help them these students their vote has the potential to make a real difference.
“This has been a long complaint about Americans, period. We have relatively low levels of civic knowledge, and how can we continue to function as a democracy with low levels of knowledge, when the founders of the Constitution clearly and explicitly wanted Americans to be civically virtuous and engaged in politics,” said Newton. “The founders expected people to be active in lower levels [of politics], and education was supposed to help create these virtuous citizens.”
Hunter College requires all students to take an Introduction to American Government course, whether they are pursuing the study of political science or not. Newton said while students may not have been able to answer the questions the ACTA survey specifically asked, many come to class with a general understanding of the national landscape of politics.
“They may not be able to tell you who the Speaker of the House is, but we’ve also cycled through [a few] in the last year,” said Newton. “But, is he [Mike Johnson] the person who we hear from the most, or is it Marjorie Taylor Greene? People know who Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is. They’ll know that Kamala Harris is Vice President, but they may not know she is also president of the senate.”
Newton said institutions do have a duty to give their students extensive civic knowledge, not just expanding on national politics but making local and statewide politics and government accessible.
“We try to equip our students with basic knowledge. In New York City, this is your city council member, this is state senator, your state assembly member. If you are upset about financial aid, and you attend a public college like Hunter and CUNY (City University of New York), that’s [directed by] the state government,” said Newton. “What happens at state level has way more impact on your education than what happens at national level.”
Students need to have more information about politics and American civics in order to fully participate in the American political system, she said.
“I tell students, you want to have an impact, go to your local school board election. A high turnout for a school election is 23%. Our town just had a budget vote separated by 100 votes. It’s about rethinking all the different places in this wonderful, complicated system, we can have an impact. That’s more important than trivia,” said Newton. “Part of the responsibility of postsecondary institutions has to be creating citizens to behave democratically and think critically. Not just the teaching of trivia, but hands-on courses where students are engaging in active learning, to register people to vote, or go to their communities and pass on knowledge.”
Liann Herder can be reached at [email protected].