In a hermeneutic phenomenological study on the lived experiences of openly gay undergraduate men in elected student government (see Goodman, 2021, 2022), one major theme emerged: the men were elected and selected. This study contained multiple conversations with eight openly gay undergraduate men who were elected to their institution's student…

While highlighting an undergraduate student council at a university, the authors emphasize the importance of being involved in professional organizations. First, the authors briefly highlight scholarship related to professional learning, then give examples of ways that undergraduates were involved in professional learning and community service…

In the history of South African education there have been three contrasting attempts to incorporate learners into the authority structures of schools, namely: "boy-government" (prefect system), "student-government" (Student Representative Councils (SRCs)) and "learner-government" (Representative Councils of Learners…

"Engagement and Employability" examines the central role student affairs plays in helping students gain and articulate career skills through cocurricular experiences. It focuses on the top skills employers seek when hiring recent college graduates. This comprehensive publication provides a discussion and numerous examples of how to…

Building democracies in K-8 schools is a promising approach to increasing young people and educators' civic knowledge, skills and dispositions. The Rendell Center for Civics and Civics Engagement leveraged strategies and concepts from the fields of civic education, student voice, and distributed leadership to build a youth-adult school governance…

In positioning student voice within the Irish education policy discourse it is imperative that this emergent and complex concept is explored and theorized in the context of its definition and motivation. Student voice can then be positioned and critiqued as it emerged within Irish education policy primarily following Ireland's ratification of the…

Students, if organised into representative student governments or movements, can be a highly influential agency shaping higher education policy. This article introduces the Special Issue on student power in a global perspective, which addresses the question of how students are organised in different world regions and what role they play in higher…

The University of Colorado at Boulder's student run Environmental Center leads the campus' sustainability efforts. The Center created the Energy and Climate Revolving Fund (ECRF) in 2007 to finance energy-efficiency upgrades. The ECRF functions as a source of funding for project loans and provides a method of financing projects that seeks to save…

Shared governance is one of the many distinguishing characteristics of quality in American higher education. As a result, students found their way into the governance structure at many institutions of higher education. No sector was exempt, as students became fairly common features of the landscape of board membership in both public and private,…

The purpose of this paper is to provide student affairs professionals with an overview of the law regarding the constitutionality of expenditure limits in student government elections. Unlike campaigns for federal and state office, it is clear that the limited case law on this topic does allow universities to limit the amount of money that student…

The timeliness of civic education for American youth is discussed. Particular attention is given to the history of calls for civic education, the state of civic education in schools today, particularly those serving youth in disadvantaged contexts, and the specific ways in which schools can better address the civic education needs of contemporary…

Campuses with student trustees often see them as both an efficient way to get a student perspective on issues the board is dealing with and a way to use student trustees' active engagement with student organizations to explain board and administrative decisions to the student body. To maximize the contributions a student member can make on the…

Student governance has existed as an integral part of higher education since the time of the first college in Colonial America. Through a detailed history of each phase of student self-governance--from the earliest literary societies to the present-day student government associations--the struggles of students in higher education to acquire and…

According to social scientists Herfried Munkler in Germany and Colin Crouch in England, major developments in Western industrial societies--individualism, increasing social complexity, globalisation--present serious threats to basic requirements of stable societies and expose democracy to the corrosion of its socio-moral resources such as social…

Community colleges occupy a growing role in the American education system. Their unique cross-section of students poses a challenge for teachers of political science. This paper uses information from a survey completed by over 2,000 students at 20 colleges and universities across the United States to shed light on some of the most significant…