Forty-eight years ago, a senator three weeks away from a tight presidential election arrived on a college campus in the middle of the night. Democratic presidential candidate John F. Kennedy drove up to the University of Michigan to find hundreds of students and faculty waiting to catch a glimpse, and in an off-the-cuff speech that evening, he proposed a corps in which young people could volunteer themselves to public service. Tens of thousands wrote in to offer support for the idea, and these were the seeds for what would become the Peace Corps. In an impromptu speech late at night and less than a month from Election Day, Kennedy brought service and politics together and created a lasting institution in community action.
Now, almost 50 years later, the fledgling ServiceNation coalition is looking again to help close the gap between volunteer work and policymaking in Thursday’s bipartisan candidate forum. ServiceNation hopes to compel young people and college students to penetrate the communities around them while simultaneously inspiring policy reform and bipartisanship. The group also hopes to show that civic and social activity are not mutually exclusive but are rather intrinsically intertwined.
On a campus where various kinds of activism are essential to the school’s historical identity, the forces of hands-on community service have ebbed and flowed according to the political climate of the era. Columbia had a golden age of service in the early ’60s—volunteering was the most popular cocurricular activity campus, and Alfred Lerner Hall was still the Ferris Booth Citizenship Center, which functioned similarly to the student branch of the umbrella organization Community Impact today. But that gave way to an intense decade of political turmoil, in which political activity captured the attention of the student body to the detriment, some have said, of volunteer work.
After a relative decline in hands-on community service among the student body following political unrest in the late ’60s and ’70s, public service has recently made a roaring comeback at Columbia.
“In this anniversary year of 1968, there are some who have said that students today are not as active and engaged as we were at your age,” University President Lee Bollinger said during Commencement in May 2008. “Not for a moment should anyone dare to question your capacity to integrate all these different ways of being and to find your own ways to advance the public good. Yours is a generation of hands-on engagement, of service and giving.”
City Year co-founder Michael Brown, whose organization works in struggling schools and is a member of the ServiceNation coalition, said he is hoping that bringing the two presidential candidates to speak about service at a college campus will have a similar effect to Kennedy’s impromptu service corps speech at Ann Arbor in 1960, inspiring both individual action and service policy.
“We’re hoping that this event inaugurates a new era of service and that Columbia and Columbia students will be at the heart of it,” said Brown, who founded City Year with his college roommate. In June 2006, Columbia hosted City Year’s summit.
When former Columbia College Dean of Students Roger Lehecka helped found the Double Discovery Center—a now-professional organization that works with students in failing local high schools—over 40 years ago, community service groups dominated campus life.
“At that time, it [the creation of Double Discovery] clearly represented an upswing in student service of that sort and a greater confidence that young people ... could create things on their own that would be meaningful, and change the lives of, in this case, high school students who needed help to prepare for college,” he said.
But Lehecka noted that as Columbia entered a turbulent period in the late ’60s and ’70s and as the nation was captivated by the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement, the interest in hands-on service groups waned, and another cause captured the campus’s attention.
“What happened on campus in 1968 led to a decline in faith that that kind of volunteer work could make a difference,” Lehecka said. Instead, Lehecka said, students turned away from community-based volunteer work and towards efforts in civil rights, anti-Vietnam War protests, and student politics.
“It probably did slip, as Columbia did, in the ’70s,” chair of the Double Discovery Center Board of Friends Jerry Sherwin said. But in speaking for Double Discovery, he said that the program has only improved over the years, blossoming into a professionally-run success story that encourages interested Columbia students and yields positive results in local schools.
Whatever past disinterest may have existed, service groups at Columbia today are surging, with almost too many cropping up each year to keep pace with Columbia funding. Community Impact Internal Affairs Officer Lauri Feldman, CC ’09, said that limited resources to fund and house so many potential programs presents a new problem for CI. The ServiceNation event, she anticipated, will be a tremendous boon to the organizations.
“This is a day about direct service, about showcasing the work that students on campus do and even further drawing people to community service,” Feldman said.
The relatively new Columbia Rotaract Club, which was founded three years ago and is centered on global volunteer work, is one of the new generation of organizations. And Media Officer Sajaa Ahmed, CC ’10, said that the 50-person group has seen more interest than ever.
But as service expands, Columbia may also see a closer relationship between policymaking and community action. Bollinger’s commencement speech last year emphasized the importance of service in politics, a philosophy he underlined again recently.
“We live in a world where free markets are a very important way of organizing the society, there’s a very strong emphasis on self-interest as human motivation upon which you can build a successful collective structure,” Bollinger said. “That can only work if there is a parallel kind of commitment to the whole of the public good that is not based on that human motivation. I think this is a kind of defining, underlying philosophical question in the highest regions of politics.”