For the fourth consecutive year, St. Thomas University has been selected as a national leader in civic learning and democratic engagement.
The NASPA Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement project (CLDE) identifies universities based on their commitment to developing thoughtful civic engagement and implementing best practices in the field of engaged scholarship. This year NASPA highlighted some of the nation’s top colleges and universities in the program – placing STU alongside prestigious institutions such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins University.
“Our responsibility is to graduate students with the best academic credentials possible, but also with a spirit of community service and engagement,” said University President Msgr. Franklyn Casale. “Our fantastic Center for Community Engagement provides every student an opportunity for service learning that enhances the classroom experience tremendously.”
St. Thomas University has a long history of community engagement as a key component of its Catholic Identity. The St. Thomas Center for Community Engagement serves as a central unit for supporting community-based research and learning courses on campus. With collaborations locally in North Miami Dade County, regionally in the Central Florida Farmworker community, and internationally in Miami’s sister-diocese of Port-de-Paix, the Center supports faculty and students in leveraging their teaching and research into the most urgent problems of our region.
“St. Thomas is excited to again be selected to participate in NASPA’s network of institutions dedicated to developing students’ sense of civic and moral identity as a core element of our Catholic mission,” said Anthony Vinciguerra, Coordinator of the St. Thomas University Center for Community Engagement. “Being recognized as a national leader in this field is a reflection of the quality of our current efforts, as well as our ongoing commitment to improve these efforts to bring faculty and student resources to bear on the urgent social problems of our world.”
For more information on the STU Center for Community Engagement visit www.stu.edu/cce. To learn more about NASPA’s Lead Initiative and view a complete listing of participating institutions, please visit http://www.naspa.org/rpi/lead-initiative.
