Unless you put yourself on news diet in higher education or have tossed out all the emails from your university, you’ve been deluged with news about the new kids on campus, innovation and his big brother, disruption.  The innovation movement influences the naming of buildings, the funding of new initiatives, the design of curricular offerings and the branding of programs for our students. What I want to address here is not technological innovation, machine intelligence nor the rise of the robots; I want to address social innovation.  As a twenty-year student of civic engagement on campuses, I’ve been tracking the introduction of programs in social innovation and social entrepreneurship across the country. As chronicled by Ashoka U, more courses are being taught, more faculty are on board, more programs of study are being created and more campuses are signing up to be Changemaker campuses, forty-five universities here and abroad. All to the good. That is how programs are created and make their way into the academic mainstream. Like any new program or discipline that aims to make a place in higher education, problems are framed, claims are advanced, journals are founded, organizations are created, and work begins to establish a presence on campuses.

What is so new about innovation? In some flavors of social entrepreneurship, there is a claim that social entrepreneurship is the panacea we have all been waiting for, that it is new, that it is distinctive and that is far superior to other approaches to social change. In 2015, McBride and Mlyn offered their critique of social innovation’s embrace in higher education, privileging new ideas that will be birthed by our students, instead of carefully teaching them the skills that it really takes to put sound ideas in place—those civic skills and community organizing strategies. As they note, “Engaged citizens know the roles of public, private, and nonprofit sectors and the tools that leverage their work together”.

A recent article in the New York Times takes the recent batch of entrepreneurs to task for solving all wrong problems, those that address the lives of the privileged and connected, paying lip service to social improvement in a cynical use of the term “changing the world”. In Design: The Invention of Desire, Jessica Helfand berates the impulse to destroy, creatively or not. Is “nothing worth saving…is it necessary to start from scratch every time?” According to Helfand, the principles that should guide innovation are not clever branding schemes or the launch of programs that affect people’s lives with the idea that we should fail fast and fail often. As she argues, the values most important for innovation include “empathy, humility, compassion and conscience.” I just looked it up in Google; there is no app for that.

When we think about educating our students for lives and work in the 21^st century, we must not neglect their lives as active members of their communities, whether they become volunteers, board members, teachers, social workers, philanthropists, artists, activists, opinion leaders, public officials or other roles.  In a recent issue of Humanities, Danielle Allen reminds us that we ignore our job to nurture “participatory readiness” in our students, preparing them for lives of civic and political participation. The role of arts, humanities and social sciences is particularly important here, although as scholar and teachers, it is also our job to create new tools that fit new social, economic and political challenges.

Fifteen years ago, at the behest of the leadership of the Campus Compact, I co-taught a year long course titled American Traditions of Philanthropy with Brown University Professor Ann Dill. We enrolled students from elite schools, from the public university, four-year college and community college, as well as a private college whose focus was business education and another private Catholic college. After a year’s worth of lectures and an end-of-the-semester community project, we asked students to article their philosophies of doing good. The students from the public four-year and community colleges stipulated that their obligation was to give back to the communities that had nurtured them by becoming teachers, social workers, and health professionals. The students from the business college believed that their role was to apply their management skills to direct nonprofits, which they believed were poorly managed. They contended that doing so would go a long way to changing the world. The students from the private Catholic university saw themselves empowering community members as citizens. Their role was as community organizers. Finally, the students from the elite universities characterized their role as thought leaders and organizational founders. They saw the current landscape of nonprofit organizations and government agencies as inadequate to serve and change communities; new organizations needed to take their place. These differences in how these students saw their roles in the world were striking—some as direct service workers, others as community organizers, still others as managers and finally others as founders and innovators. We need to be sensitive to the ways in which we empower our students and help them understand their agency in the world.

As we consider which students and campuses are in the community engagement and social innovation fields, we can ask which of our students are truly empowered to be social entrepreneurs? Which are delegated to do more direct service without much access to take up leadership or management roles? We should be clearer about these differences and understand to role of campus culture in citizen making.

Great examples of programs on some campuses aim to marry skills in developing and organizing resources, in working with teams, and with critical analysis. Students don’t create new enterprises until they have worked in the problem space. Students and recent graduates whose goals are social entrepreneurship need time “apprenticing with a problem” as Papi-Thornton characterizes it, understanding how organizations already in place define the problem and their theories of change. Working with others and against the current model of the entrepreneur as a single heroic individual develops the skills and orientations citizens need to truly make a difference.

Paul Light’s Driving Social Change reminds us that transformational change never employs such one tool. Advocacy without the passage of laws gets us nowhere. Volunteerism without a larger conceptualization of the roots of the social problems may be short sighted and misplaced. Without those who are preserving the social safety while others are creating new organizations, many would suffer. No question, we do need new blood and new thinking that addresses problems with which we have become too comfortable. I would argue that we should help our students understand that an array of tools is required for social engagement that improves the lives and communities. Students should understand the role of important books, films and other media that have brought issues to the fore, the role of the civil and the public sectors, the history and life cycles of social movements, and when and why a new organization should be created. Importantly, they can appreciate that a business plan is not a social movement. The anchoring of social entrepreneurship in some business schools has tied them to the business plan as the way to organize for social change. Business thinking that points to ramping up and scaling projects may not the best fit given the complicated nature of social problems. Context matters. Echoing many calls for increased civic education, students need to better understand the tools of citizenship and advocacy. We need to expand the tools students master for involvement in the community, not shoehorn them into narrow views of how change happens.