Sam Marullo

C. Wright Mills's Friendly Critique of Service Learning and an Innovative Response: Cross-Institutional Collaborations for Community-Based Research:

C. Wright Mills would be a friendly critic of service learning, acknowledging its benefits for providing students with experiential learning opportunities to connect personal troubles with social issues. Yet he would be critical of service-learning practices that perpetuate institutional power inequalities and that do not advance the social change objectives of community-based organizations. We offer an innovative approach that helps to address some of these concerns which, when used in conjunction with “best practices” of service learning, has the potential to make a greater impact on the community than most service-learning projects. This paper highlights how two sociology programs in two urban universities—a large, elite university and a smaller, minority-serving university—have completed significant community-based research projects by having classes of students at both universities work on projects both consecutively and simultaneously across several semesters to complete substantial research projects with and for community partners. We use a case study approach to identify five key practices that have enabled the two universities to effectively collaborate across institutions.

Editors' Introduction: Service-Learning Pedagogy as Universities' Response to Troubled Times

This is second in a two-issue series conceptualized as documenting educational innovations in higher education that could be seen as responses of colleges and universities to changing economic, political, and social forces. This issues authors diagnose a number of different problems in the current practices of colleges and universities and prescribe pedagogical initiatives that link students to the community through service learning, which is the integration of community service activities into the curriculum through intentional analytical processes. The authors of these articles are pushing the theoretical and praxis boundaries of service learning to tackle challenging issues such as how to best enhance the students learning experience to create self-motivated learners who become civic participants, how to structure programs and practices to best support such work, and how to alter institution- and discipline-driven reward systems to promote and sustain faculty involvement in service learning.

Editors' Introduction Universities in Troubled Times—Institutional Responses

The rapid pace of change under way in Americas colleges and universities has sparked a wide-ranging and often heated public debate about the social role and responsibilities of higher education in American society. From small, private liberal arts colleges in economically distressed urban areas to state-supported land-grant and research institutions, schools nationwide are taking these challenges head-on often with government, corporate, or foundation collaboration and support. Yet, the national debte has too often overlooked and thus not benefited from the proactive and innovative ways that a growing number of colleges and universities are responding to these challenges. This article reviews the broad social, economic, and political trends that are reshaping higher education and introduces the two-issue series of American Behavioral Scientist dedicated to analyzing a cross-section of these innovative institutional and pedagogical endeavors and considering their potential for reorienting the traditional teaching, research, and service missions of colleges and universities.

Political, Institutional, and Bureaucratic Fuel for the Arms Race

Revolutionary changes in Eastern Europe are fundamentally intertwined with the thawing of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Paradoxically, the arms race between the superpowers continues. This paper examines the paradox by first considering the conventional explanations for improved relations and demonstrating their inadequacies, then turning to the structural factors that appear to help explain the changed relations, and finally examining some of the social forces that cause the arms race to continue despite the thawing of the Cold War. Structural factors cited here as having contributed to the improved relations include: changes in the global economy, the development of a civil society in the Eastern bloc, domestic and international peace initiatives, and cultural changes. Despite these changes, the arms race continues due to the stability of strategic policy and the way it is made, military-industrial institutional operations, political and economic interests, and government operations. In each of these areas, much sociological research is needed to help guide the policy-making process away from continuing the arms race.

The Functions and Dysfunctions of Preparations for Fighting Nuclear War

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of the functions and dysfunctions of the nuclear arms race on American society. The analysis of the positive functions does not serve as a justification for the status quo, but is undertaken to point out the numerous constraints mitigating against change. The dysfunctions of U.S. nuclear war preparations are explicitly considered here to point out the direct, indirect and opportunity costs of adhering to a policy of extended deterrence. The juxtaposition of both functions and dysfunctions provides insights concerning potential sources of change and policy alternatives that may decrease the negative consequences without weakening U.S. national security.