ABSTRACT
Once Vida was cleaning a bathroom in a guy’s suite and a guy walked in. Vida’s letter conveys her desire to form substantive interpersonal relationships with residents, enact the core values of the Department of Housing, maintain a clean residence hall, and educate residents. Cipolle presented a model that contains four essential elements of critical consciousness: self-awareness —understanding one’s privileges, values, roles, and responsibilities to society; awareness of others —moving outside of one’s comfort zone and interacting with the other; awareness of social issues —such as living-wage and corporatization debates; and fostering an ethic of service and acting as a change agent. Creating a stronger civic fabric keeps corporate managerialism in check and creates opportunities for dialogues across difference to occur. Dialogues across castes and differences are about creating civility and civic engagement, which sounds inefficient and costly, yet is morally the right thing to do.
