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Evangelical Christian college students navigate campus buoyed by Christian privilege but may encounter silencing or othering tied to their religious beliefs, a feeling of incompatibility with their campus climate, and conflations of their religious and political beliefs that are inaccurate and discouraging. Unsupportive campus climates can discourage evangelical students from having productive exchanges across difference and deepening their own worldview commitments, which is concerning due to their general lack of interfaith participation that challenges stereotypes and unnuanced assumptions. This study explores how evangelical Christians perceive their campus climates and whether those perceptions are different based on other social identity intersections with gender, race, sexuality, and political affiliation. In addition to individual characteristics, how the campus environment and various curricular and co-curricular experiences moderate evangelical students’ perceptions of the worldview climate is examined. A sample of 1235 evangelical college students was examined via means, standard deviations, and ranges for six campus climate measures, one-way ANOVAs to examine whether those measures differed by different identity dimensions, and then multilevel modeling to better understand the role of campus experiences in evangelicals’ perceptions of their campus climate. Evangelical students’ campus climate perceptions were generally positive; more provocative encounters were reported by women than men and evangelical Asian students indicated more divisiveness, more insensitivity, and less space for support than their peers. Political affiliation also revealed several significant differences in perceived campus climate. Interfaith engagement through pre-college activities, formal and informal activities, and friendships were connected to perceptions of campus climate, with those reporting more engagement being more likely to have productive encounters across difference and to report insensitivity or divisiveness. Religious affiliation was the most significant institutional characteristic. This study illuminates how collegiate experiences and campus environments exacerbate or attenuate evangelical Christian students’ perceptions of the campus climate, and the results indicate that effective teaching practices where true interfaith experiences happen and that create inclusive space for evangelical students in the classroom are key to fostering development, especially in light of the social status ambiguity evangelical college students may be experiencing during their college years.

A necessary response to addressing complex global problems rests in the theoretic and practice of social innovation: approaches to solving intractable social issues on a local and global scale. The logic, language, and practices of social innovation can, in turn, motivate energies toward conceptualizing college students as social innovators: individuals capable of meaningfully and cooperatively responding to persistent and transdisciplinary problems including social inequities, environmental change, and public health crises. To provide a philosophical anchor needed to ultimately sustain these propositions, we unite social innovation with Honneth’s concept of social freedom. We then introduce an expanded definition of the prototype as a mechanism that can be utilized to embed social innovation and social freedom throughout the contemporary collegiate academic curriculum. The subsequent section considers students in two interdependent forms of relation—student-student and student-faculty—within the dynamic context of postsecondary learning. We conclude by incorporating our ideas around an imagined possibility for securing social freedom amidst present ecological fragility and provide long-range considerations of our theory for the higher education enterprise.

PurposeWhen it comes to undergraduate education, the terms “innovation” and “entrepreneurship” are often used interchangeably with respect to curricular practices and their associated learning and developmental outcomes. The purpose of this paper is to chart a course through the vast and growing multidisciplinary literature covering both topics to argue that innovation and entrepreneurship are not only different concepts, but they also play out in postsecondary institutional contexts in different and important ways.Design/methodology/approachBased on these differences, the authors propose that developing innovators must precede teaching future entrepreneurs and that the home of innovation education is not necessarily in the business school at all. Ideally, the authors believe innovation should be taught separately from any one disciplinary context. To illustrate the concept, the authors point to an existing program where professors and students from different disciplines work together on actual problems provided by external clients from both the public and private sectors.FindingsBased on the authors’ rationale and approach, the authors propose an agenda that would allow for a deep analysis of the interaction between organizational behaviors and student outcomes, providing insight into effective practices and strategies for mobilizing institutional efforts aimed at teaching innovation and better aligning innovation with entrepreneurship education.Originality/valueThe authors provide a clear rationale for separating innovation and entrepreneurship pedagogy in higher education, terms that have been conflated in literature and in practice for nearly a century. The authors do this in an original way by pairing a theoretical framework with a short case study of an education program that has developed innovation pedagogy at the undergraduate level.

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the cultivation of innovative entrepreneurial intentions among students in three distinctive educational settings: a U.S. undergraduate four-year environment, a U.S. M.B.A two-year environment, and a German five-year business and technology environment. Results suggested that innovative entrepreneurial intentions varied based on educational setting. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.