Julie A. Manley White, Ph.D.
The Work in Action
Last month, I joined fellow higher education leaders — including members of the U.S. Congress — at Campus Compact’s 2026 Policy & Impact Summit at The George Washington University. The gathering brought us together around an urgent question: What does it take, right now, to keep civic and community engagement at the center of higher education?
Our panel reflected on how we prepare students for civic and democratic life, whether our current moment has changed that work, and what it takes to build capacity at the institutional level.
Campus Compact’s role
Campus Compact has long been the connective tissue for place-based education in service of the public good. Its network of hundreds of colleges and universities shares a conviction that higher education’s purpose is not only to prepare workers, but to cultivate citizens — people who are rooted in their communities, responsive to their neighbors, and capable of building democratic life together.
This summit was proof of that conviction in action. Having congressional representatives in the room alongside college leaders, funders, and community organizers sent a clear signal: the work happening on our campuses is not peripheral to national policy — it is central to it. Place-based civic engagement, anchored in locality, reminds us that these social relationships are critical to a thriving democracy. This summit strengthened a shared commitment to build together, share what’s working, and show up for one another.
The purpose of education
Higher education carries a dual mandate: preparing workers and preparing citizens. Those missions can be in tension, and community colleges especially feel the pressure to prioritize workforce outcomes at the expense of a fuller, civic-minded education.
For me, that fuller education began before college. Growing up in a rural town, it was the library and my teachers who first cracked open the world. The library was a refuge — a place where I could encounter ideas bigger than my immediate circumstances, where the horizon extended past my vision. My teachers did the same: they introduced me to perspectives that challenged and expanded me, and they made me feel that my curiosity mattered. That early experience of being invited into ideas, of belonging in a world of learning, is what education is supposed to do.
Research bears this out: 94% of employers say higher education should prepare both skilled workers and informed citizens — and the majority believe colleges should foster cross-cultural understanding, community engagement, and belonging for students of all backgrounds.* We can, and must, do both.
Clarifying our purpose
We are living through a moment when civic learning is being defined by a narrow and exclusionary view of history — one that erases the experiences of communities who built this country and who continue to sustain its economy. The pressure on higher education to retreat from this work is real. It must be resisted.
As Dr. Karen Stout stated in her plenary at the DREAM 2026 conference, “Adversity does not narrow our purpose; it clarifies it.”
This moment demands clarity about who we are here for — and the courage to act on the answer.
The work in action at Pierce College
At Pierce College, civic and social engagement are embedded in our general education curriculum through the core abilities of Intercultural Engagement and Global Citizenship. But curriculum alone isn’t enough. Values have to show up in structure — in who and how you hire, what you fund, and where you focus.
Pierce’s Strategic Plan 2025–2032 is organized around Belonging, Advancing Student Success, Thriving Communities, and Institutional Sustainability. To make it real, we created a Vice President for Equity, Engagement, and Belonging; embedded tribal relations in senior leadership; launched Community Ambassador programs; and deepened our work as an emerging Hispanic Serving Institution.
Working with Achieving the Dream’s Community Vibrancy framework and the Aspen Institute, we identified seven zip codes in our service district to anchor our efforts — zip codes with high concentrations of poverty-impacted households at the intersection of tribal communities, Latino and BIPOC neighborhoods, and households headed by parenting students. In these neighborhoods, we are focusing on deep, authentic relationship-building with communities furthest from opportunity and justice.
Building sustainable partnerships
When the panel turned to partnerships — with government, nonprofits, tribes, K–12 schools, and community organizations — I keep returning to three words: authenticity, relationship-building, and perseverance.
For example, our tribal partnership work involves Washington’s State Board for Community and Technical Colleges, sovereign tribal nations, K–12 systems, and indigenous voices within our own institution. That kind of multi-layered collaboration can only happen when you show up consistently, engage in deep listening, and persist even when challenges arise.
What we need from each other
In these times, we must recognize that new tools are being deployed to undercut institutional autonomy, the freedom to teach and learn, and the civil rights of students and neighbors. Accordingly, we must build new tools together, share what’s working and what isn’t, reform where we are falling short, and mobilize at scale.
The Policy Summit demonstrated that we are not each other’s competition; we are each other’s infrastructure. That’s what this summit proved, and it’s what I’m carrying back to Pierce College.
*This data is from a presentation at Compact 26 by Ashley Finley, Vice President of Research and Senior Advisor to the President, American Association of Colleges and Universities