1	In the News From politics to art, the headlines of Hispanidad. read more...
2	Up Front Columnist Ruben Navarrette, Jr., offers a meditation on the touchy subject of “selling out” when it comes to assimilation. read more...
3	Up Front Leading educator Dr. Eduardo Padrón finds, in his students, hope for a more enlightened public discourse. read more...

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CHANGING THE CONVERSATION

Students are awakening to politics with questions and ideas bent on change.

In the wake of another rowdy political season, I find myself confronted by a troubling contrast. On the one hand, American electoral politics: Like you, no doubt, I found myself immersed, doing my best to sort through an array of sound bites and Madison Avenue sleight of hand. Substance was often hard to come by, and I wondered frequently what these political and media gurus thought of me as a voter.
On the other hand, the place I spend most of my life: higher education’s classrooms, a hotbed of real conversation, the assumptions here are dramatically at odds with those that appear to guide our political theater. The learning environment embodies dialogue, collaboration and diversity. It invites authenticity.
Today, these students are in love with ideas and inquiry. They are the hope of civil society, growing up in environments that are increasingly sensitive to their role in the community. Faculty across the country are blending classroom work with community involvement, changing and accelerating students’ appreciation of themselves and their impact on the world.
“They realize,” as one professor put it, “that they can make a difference, that what they have learned can truly change lives.”
This extended classroom “opens eyes, topples walls, nourishes critical thinking, stirs up excitement, creates bonds,” offered another faculty member. “It turns on light bulbs and turns off prejudice. ... It encourages us to read, critique and appreciate the world, perhaps more closely than many of us are used to.”
Those who “read, critique and appreciate the world” are not apt to settle for the choreographed politics of recent years. Criticize their devotion to their
iPods and blogs and text messaging at your own peril. They have already changed the world that we think we own. They have the unprecedented potential to alter the conversation—political, economic, social—you name it.
They are connected in ways we never dreamed and they understand the new media far better than we. They are asking why it took $2.6 billion to run the congressional campaigns, when at the press of a button millions of people can be enthralled with new ideas, free of charge. Some will even run for office soon and will no doubt ask why they need a bankroll the size of Texas to join the conversation when the ideas should be the ticket.
Of course, the possibility exists that they will be swallowed up. The very same toys of their kingdom only increase the velocity, the surface glare, the irreverent momentum of our times. And this is where the wisdom of age and time and patience has a historic role to play, for it is never enough to be adept. It doesn’t matter if you talk into a tin can or a satellite telephone; it is the conversation that must change.
These students can, indeed, leap across the universe in a single bound, but it may be the smaller, more private moments that determine their course.
The critical responsibility of the educational community today is to ask questions of value: Toward what ends shall we employ our dazzling inventiveness? What is required to reinvent our civil discourse? How can we see beyond the lethal divisions that lay waste to so much human possibility?
We will merely pose the questions, which is our duty. The answers must come from those who will surely dictate the conversation for many years to come.
I, for one, have full confidence in them.

Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón is president of Miami Dade College, the largest institution of higher education in the nation.