The growing emphasis on volunteer community service can be a powerful catalyst for colleges and universities, helping consolidate unfinished agendas like academic excellence, equity, access and diversity. At Connecticut College, volunteer service plays the additional role of helping define our commitment to becoming a model of an ideal civil society in a global community. The time for expanding volunteer service is ripe: The demands that internal and external constituencies place on higher education continue, while at the same time higher education faces continued pressure on its price and cost, plus loss of public confidence and funding.
Alert colleges and universities are now developing centers where volunteer service can synergistically address all these issues. Impressive efforts are burgeoning at Rutgers’ Walt Whitman Center. Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns just celebrated its 10th anniversary, which I was pleased to attend. Centers like these deserve the attention and support of alumni, parents and campus leaders. They can help presidents and deans to lead, with faculty and students, in redefining the civic role of our colleges and universities.
Such a redefinition has enormous potential. Because of our government support and our nonprofit status we have a civic responsibility to contribute significantly toward the creation of a sustainable civil society in our country and the world. Beyond teaching knowledge and skills, I believe we must accept our obligation for preparing students as citizen leaders to do well and to do good.
Our Connecticut College Center for Community Action and Public Policy is being developed by faculty and staff members in partnership with New London community-based organizations. The center will have two sites, on campus and in the inner city at the New London Community Center. Its dual focus will be to build on existing community service initiatives to create a campus-wide culture of service learning, a new term denoting a wide range of connections between the two, and to develop practical programs that address challenges in the community.
Centers like these are resources for developing service learning courses, service activities and programs. They educate their campuses about service learning, facilitate the integration of service learning into existing course work, stimulate new service learning courses, promote reflective activity for students engaged in service, provide training for volunteer leaders, and help orchestrate community and college responses to community needs.
Colleges and universities have been focusing significant resources on issues like equity, access and multiculturalism for years. They are not strangers, either, to new pedagogies like service learning practicums to complement traditional class work. Coordinating and expanding these efforts increase understanding of equity and access issues in groups beyond those who participate directly. The campus community and alumni, for instance, benefit from the experience of volunteers through linkages like Notre Dame’s Alumni Social Concerns Forum. Campus commitments to learning about different cultures keep expanding naturally through the wider links with other communities that volunteer service creates. Courses deepen.
These centers also can take responsibility for providing the intellectual context for service learning. Ours, for instance, will sponsor a semester-long interdisciplinary seminar that will explore citizenship, community and social justice from vantage points including the philosophical, historical, economic, political and artistic.
Students, faculty and staff who engage in community service need to unpack their experiences and reflect on them in on academic context. Many college courses can readily incorporate service learning, and centers can offer faculty members funding to develop experiential or service learning components for any course in the curriculum. Some faculty members doubtless will develop research agendas exploring and substantiating the connections between service and learning.
In many cases, it appears that people in community service become more compassionate and sensitive to the needs of others and more ready to discipline themselves on behalf of the needs of their colleagues. They learn how much the disadvantaged, the ill, the imprisoned, and children and the elderly have to offer as teachers of important lessons about what it is to be human. Service learning is truly a two-way street.
While the American public continues to show its frustration with higher education, I have found that as we address specific problems on the social agenda, frustration is replaced by admiration. Citizens are understandably concerned about the disintegration of our cities, violence, drug abuse and an under-prepared work force. As campuses integrate volunteer 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 a part. This is an important way for us to win back citizens’ confidence in the integrity of our mission.