On steamy nights in New London’s Bates Woods housing complex last summer, Connecticut College sophomore Allyson Clarke worked with six 10-year-olds to develop reading skills. This in itself is not unusual, of course. Hundreds of Connecticut College students volunteer to work with underprivileged youth in the city. What made Allyson’s relationship with her young friends different is that she lived right in the same building with them. She and six other CC students chose to be residents of Bates Woods, a situation that gave them instant credibility in the community and spoke volumes about their commitment.
Allyson and 500 others on campus this year are bringing renewed passion to an old tradition of community service that began in 1915 when Connecticut College undergraduates first began volunteering at the B.P. Learned House in New London.
Over the generations, our students have come to know a lesson stated clearly this fall by J-Board chair Dan Shedd ’96: “Community service breaks the cycle of cynicism.” Service engages people in active citizenship. Students here see themselves as change agents, making a difference but also understanding and reflecting on challenges in modern society. Their academic strength and their commitment to serve makes them stronger contributors to whatever professional or personal lives they choose. Students pass this culture from class to class, just as they do with the Honor Code and the responsibility for shared governance.
Today, that tradition is helping show the way for others. More than 475 colleges and universities, including Connecticut College, belong to Campus Compact, the national coalition that is leading the movement for campus-based community service.
To raise our commitment another notch, this year members of our faculty and staff, in partnership with New London community-based organizations, are developing a Center for Community Challenges. The center will have two sites, one on campus and the other in New London. Its dual focus will be to build on existing community service initiatives to sustain a campus-wide culture of service learning (a new term denoting a wide range of connections between academic disciplines and community service) and to enhance and develop practical programs that address challenges in the community. The center is planned as an asset to faculty interest in integrating service learning into existing course work and new service learning courses, promoting reflective activity for students engaged in service, providing training for volunteer leaders, and helping orchestrate community and college responses to community needs.
The center’s plans also call for a semester-long interdisciplinary seminar to explore citizenship, community and social justice from philosophical, historical, economic, political and artistic vantage points.
In this issue of Connecticut College Magazine you will read more about LEAP, the program for in-residence mentors (page 8) and Campus Compact, of which I am honored to be the new national chair. The Campus Compact organization and “Literature, Service and Social Reflection,” a course I am teaching this semester as part of our effort to increase the ways of integrating service learning into the college curriculum, are detailed on page 7 by Kim Conniff ’95, a student in the course.
Understandably, citizens today are concerned about the disintegration of our cities, violence, drug abuse and an under-prepared work force. By integrating community service into academic endeavors, we are committing ourselves to fresh ways of learning about these problems, of working with service providers and government officials and of applying our traditional strengths in teaching and research to the improvement of the society of which we are all a part.