By Richard Warch
President, Lawrence University
This report is adapted from my matriculation address to the college community on September 26, 2002, my 24th as president of Lawrence University. I am pleased to share these thoughts with the readers of Lawrence Today. In the pages accompanying this message, you will find an accounting of the 2001-02 academic year, including financial and fund-raising reports, the scholarly and creative accomplishments of the faculty, and some highlights of the year at Lawrence. While I have not crafted my message in direct follow-up to my president's report of last year, there is a sense in which the topic for 2002 is connected to the one for 2001, written in the wake of September 11.
But there is another connection as well. Sixteen years ago, my eighth matriculation address was called "That's the Deal," a title I derived from a quotation from John Gardner in his book Excellence: "Freedom and obligation, liberty and duty -- that's the deal." The theme of that speech related to our commitment to public service, and now I am returning to that topic.
Sixteen years ago, I announced that Lawrence had just become one of the first 100 colleges in the country to join Campus Compact, an organization designed to promote the civic purposes of higher education by encouraging community service that develops students' citizenship skills and values in order best to prepare them to be active, committed, and informed citizens and leaders of their communities. Today, Campus Compact has 850 members, and this year Lawrence has been one of the founding institutions in the establishment of a statewide Campus Compact in Wisconsin.
Campus Compact is not, as they say, the only game in town. Efforts to promote volunteerism and service have proliferated in recent years and are escalating, due in some measure to the aftermath of September 11 and to President Bush's State of the Union Address last January. In that speech, the president said that "we want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self" and went on to call on "every American to commit at least two years -- 4,000 hours over the rest of your lifetime -- to the service of your neighbors and your nation."
That charge echoes proclamations by previous presidents, most particularly President Kennedy, who famously stated in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country," sentiments that echoed the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes and especially Warren Harding, who said in 1916 that "we must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation."
When the first President Bush established his 1000 Points of Light program to recognize community service and volunteerism, and when President Clinton established AmeriCorps -- extending what had been Volunteers in Service to America -- they were following the same ideal of celebrating and promoting volunteer service.
Active and informed citizenship is indeed a worthy aspiration for each and every one of us. Kennedy made good on his pledge by establishing the Peace Corps, and Bush has pledged that the government today will do its part in elevating service as a national goal by recruiting more than 200,000 new volunteers through USA Freedom Corps, to serve in AmeriCorps and Senior Corps, and by doubling the volunteers in the Peace Corps.
While those increases have not yet occurred, what has transpired, through the president's establishment of the Freedom Corps, is the amalgamation of a New Deal-like plethora of programs, the creation of Web sites, and a continuing chorus of those who advocate and celebrate volunteerism. The higher education community in Washington has joined that chorus and has created and allied with a variety of programs and agencies designed to encourage public service. In concert with Campus Compact, an alliance of higher education associations has launched CampusCares, an initiative aimed at giving greater prominence to the broad array of civic and community service activities undertaken at and by American colleges and universities. Other non-governmental agencies have been created to play a role here as well, among them the Partnership for Public Service, which is dedicated to recruiting and retaining top-flight talent in the federal workforce. Lawrence has joined that organization.
Doing service
Those educational associations and others have asked that people like me write about service in publications like this one. It is fitting that I do so, not only because I am enjoined by folks in Washington, D.C., not only because after September 11 our sense of responsibility for others has been elevated, but because doing so is a way for us to recognize and express a central element of Lawrence's mission, specifically the statement that "Lawrence prepares students for lives of service, achievement, leadership, and personal fulfillment."
It is only fair to note, however, that mission statements in and of themselves do not tell you much. In fact, a quick review of the mission statements of other colleges in the Associated Colleges of the Midwest indicates that service, or some values and purposes akin to service, is important to those institutions as well. In addition, expressions of the centrality of service are also to be found in the statements of purpose of the five national fraternities and three national sororities at Lawrence, as well as in the aims and ideals of Lambda Sigma, the sophomore honor society, and Mortar Board, the senior honor society. Endorsing service is not something unique to the college itself. The point, however, is not so much naming service as a purpose or a goal as effecting service as an activity.
How do we do that? Not by offering a curriculum centered on service, or even by listing courses that have service as their sole and central theme. Nor by requiring service as a graduation requirement, something that was all the vogue with a number of high schools some years ago and that has been attempted by a small number of colleges. Perversely, I will admit, we often invoke service as part of a sanction for a judicial code offense, which sends the curious message that service is somehow punitive rather than redemptive, that service involves a kind of involuntary volunteerism, and that one serves one's community only when one has somehow violated its rules and expectations.
Happily, service as sanction represents but a minor fraction of the good work performed in volunteer roles by Lawrence students. The Volunteer and Community Service Center promotes and coordinates a vast array of service opportunities for students, and many student organizations make such opportunities available to their members on their own.
Last year, according to a calculation done by the Center, Lawrence students contributed in the neighborhood of 18,000 hours to various service projects in the Fox Cities communities and beyond -- a figure that is impressive enough, but that may well understate the case. The agencies and causes served include Habitat for Humanity, the Vital tutoring project, Oxfam, the Housing Partnership, the Salvation Army, the Red Cross, the St. Joseph Food Pantry, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, PIECE (which works with children in Jamaica), the Literacy Coalition, and Lawrence Assistance Reaching Youth. As you may know, LARY (as it is called) was named by the first President Bush as his 312th Point of Light in 1990, and in August the Appleton Education Association named the program as the recipient of its annual "Friend of Education" award for commitment to and involvement with public education.Alumni making a difference
Lawrentians are certainly playing their part, on and beyond campus, during their undergraduate years and as alumni. Over the past seven years, for example, we know that nine Lawrence alumni have enrolled in the Peace Corps and 11 in AmeriCorps in the year immediately following graduation -- and more, surely, have done so at later points. Other graduates have gone on to serve a variety of non-governmental service agencies.
Some alumni, in fact, have contributed their time and talent in particularly meritorious ways in lives of service, and have been recognized by the college for their efforts.
Joining them, though perhaps less prominently, are thousands of other Lawrence alumni whose service on behalf of others inspires us all to recognize that individuals can and do make a difference.
A call to government
Lawrentians are also doing their part in government service, an arena that many of our students may well wish to consider as they plot the trajectories of their postgraduate years.
In the next three years, more than half of federal workers will be eligible for retirement, and more than seven out of ten top government managers can claim their pensions by 2004, so opportunities should abound. Eighty percent of all federal jobs are outside of Washington, D.C., so someone who wants to work for the government does not have to go to the Puzzle Palace on the Potomac to do so; indeed, the federal government alone will try to fill more than 200,000 civilian jobs this year.
Hundreds of Lawrence alumni have already seized such opportunities and hold positions of responsibility in federal, state, and local government. These cover a range of areas and interests:
Several hold positions in the State Department, including Chuck Hunter, '83, who is with the U.S. Information Agency in Jerusalem; Susan Raddant, '99, a foreign service officer in Pakistan; Shaun Donnelly, '68, the former ambassador to Sri Lanka, who is now deputy assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs; and Chris Murray, '75, who serves as deputy director of the Office of European Union and Regional Affairs.
Thomas Skinner, '83, serves as the Great Lakes regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, and Rick Chandler, '74, is secretary of the Wisconsin Department of Revenue. David Mulford, '58, was the Undersecretary of the Treasury for International Affairs, and Janet Steiger, '61, served as chair of both the U.S. Postal Rate Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.
Other graduates serve in the Social Security Administration, the Census Bureau, the Department of Labor, the Department of Education, the Food and Drug Administration, the Treasury Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Park Service, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Defense, and the Central Intelligence Agency.
Still others work in a wide range of state agencies and programs. Two are state representatives in Wisconsin, where Barbara Smith Lawton, '87, has just been elected lieutenant governor. Others hold elective offices at the local and county levels throughout the country. Many serve in attorney general and district attorney offices and as judges. One is an investigator with the Las Vegas police department and another the forester for the City of Andover in Minnesota. The opportunities are many.
Unsung guardians
One of the dismal legacies of the Reagan years was the president's overt demeaning of those in government service, an attitude shared in some measure by the current President Bush. Columnist Thomas Friedman recently took the latter to task for it. Writing in the wake of the collapse of Enron and other corporate scandals, Friedman noted that what sets the United States apart from most of the rest of the world is not that we don't have crooked CEOs or bogus accounting excesses and that other countries do. Rather, he wrote, "what distinguishes America is our system's ability to consistently expose, punish, regulate, and ultimately reform those excesses."
Friedman went on to point out that other nations may have "all the hardware of capitalism, but they don't have all the software -- namely, an uncorrupted bureaucracy to manage the regulatory agencies, licensing offices, property laws, and commercial courts. Indeed, what foreigners envy us most for is precisely the city Mr. Bush loves to bash: Washington. That is, they envy us for our alphabet soup of regulatory agencies: the SEC, the Federal Reserve, the FAA, the FDA, the FBI, the EPA, the IRS, the INS."
The people working in those agencies, Friedman asserts, are "the unsung guardians of America's civil religion," which is why, he wrote, he finds "Mr. Bush's constant denigrating of 'the bureaucracy' so offensive. After his own EPA issued a report in June linking fossil-fuel use to global warming, Mr. Bush dismissed the study by saying that he 'read the report put out by the bureaucracy,' as if that explained why it couldn't be credible."
Friedman concludes by asserting that "so much of America's moral authority to lead the world derives from the decency of our government and its bureaucrats," things not to be "sneered at" but "to be cherished, strengthened, and praised."
To be fair, Mr. Bush has also spoken more positively of federal employment, calling it "a noble calling and a public trust," while vowing to make federal jobs "more challenging, more satisfying, and more fulfilling." With trust in government at a 35-year high following the tragedy of September 11 and with the anticipated turnover in the federal government workforce, Mr. Bush's pledge is promising, and government employment may well prove an attractive option to many of our current students and alumni -- not to become worker bees in the bureaucracy but persons who can help craft and implement policies and programs to serve the general good.
Through the Lawrence Career Center, we will be working with the Partnership for Public Service to make such opportunities known to the Lawrence community.
Liberal education and civic virtues
I recite all of this to make the point that Lawrence has much to celebrate regarding the commitment to volunteerism and service evidenced by members of our community and alumni and to have that point stimulate all Lawrentians to engage in such service in the coming academic year and beyond.
But, one might well ask, is this record simply a matter of coincidence, or is there something about the style and culture of liberal education at Lawrence that contributes to it? I believe that it is the latter, though not in a simplistic and straightforward way. To be sure, education for the public good has long been the stated and assumed purpose of higher education. Colonial colleges took as their missions the task of preparing graduates to serve church and civil state, and the land-grant universities were established in the 19th century with the aim of serving the needs of the people of the several states. Independent colleges have shared in that purpose for centuries.
In the main, however, liberal education as practiced at Lawrence promotes students' aptitude for service not by exhortation -- though you might regard this essay as exhortation -- but through the values and attributes we seek to realize in our academic endeavors.
In his book Experience and Nature, John Dewey asked a telling question: Does the scholar's special knowledge, when "referred back to ordinary life-experiences . . . render them more significant, more luminous to us, and make our dealings with them more fruitful? Or does it terminate in rendering the things of ordinary experience more opaque?" Clearly, at Lawrence we hope it is the former and that, through courses beginning with Freshman Studies -- in which some of the most important and abiding human concerns are examined and debated -- and those dealing with the experiences and cultural expressions of different peoples and societies over time and in the present, students will find themselves equipped with the knowledge and perspective to render our life experiences and our obligations to our fellows more luminous and fruitful. Not every course in every instance will meet this objective, but many do, and I urge students to use the information and skills they can impart. Our degree requirements certainly provide ample opportunity to do so.
In a recent op-ed piece in The New York Times, Dartmouth government professor James Murphy wrote about the teaching of civic virtues. His focus was on secondary schools, but his point has validity for higher education as well. Murphy reviewed the moments in American history when "patriotic" education was popular but then observed that "just because civic virtues must be learned, does not mean they can easily be taught -- and still less that they can be taught in schools. Nearly every political scientist who studies how people acquire knowledge and ideas about good citizenship agrees that schools and, in particular, civics courses have no significant effect on civic attitudes and very little, if any, effect on civic knowledge. Contemporary political science ratifies the wisdom of political philosophers, ancient and modern: public virtue is acquired only by active participation in public affairs."
The moral aims of education, Murphy goes on to write, "are academic or intellectual virtues like thoroughness, perseverance, intellectual honesty . . . namely, the acquisition of traits that lead us to be conscientious in the pursuit of truth." At Lawrence, we express and enact our conscientious pursuit of truth through the Honor Code, by which we affirm the intellectual values of integrity and honesty and thus build a community of trust.
Indeed, these intellectual virtues are precisely the ones one should strive to develop at Lawrence. Princeton historian Stanley Katz, among whose claims to fame is the fact that his son [Assistant Professor of Music Derek Katz] teaches here, recently wrote that the challenge for higher education "is to train an elite cohort (these days increasingly selected on egalitarian terms) to lead society politically and socially, as well as to run its businesses and laboratories." In particular, he noted, that cohort needs to be "prepared in those general critical thinking skills that have always been thought basic to liberal education."
Liberal arts colleges are better equipped to provide such preparation than other places, and I hope Lawrence especially so. Should we fail to accept this charge and obligation, if, to quote novelist Toni Morrison, we do not take seriously and rigorously our role "as guardian of wider civic freedoms, as interrogator of more and more complex ethical problems, as servant and preserver of deeper democratic practices, then some other regime or ménage of regimes will do it for us, in spite of us, and without us."
My point is that the summons to civic engagement at Lawrence is represented by, but runs even deeper than, explicit calls to participate in charitable and public-sector activities. From the classical world to the present day, liberal education has been at its heart the education of individuals to be effective and exemplary citizens within a free society. The habits of mind students learn and apply here, the abilities they nurture and strengthen, the virtues they come to respect and enact, should help them serve society directly through the forms of work I have described and indirectly, but no less importantly, through their contributions as liberally educated persons to the communities within which they live and work. Education, wrote William Mather Lewis, "is not concerned primarily with intellectual luxuries but with elements which make the individual a valuable member of society."
If Lawrentians are to play their role in leading society politically and socially, therefore, it will involve more than providing service or seeking employment in government. It will require a kind of civic engagement that will become itself a kind of vocation. The September 20 new student issue of The Lawrentian referred to "the Lawrence bubble," into which the so-called "real world" does not intrude -- which is true, up to a point. However, editorial writer Peter Gillette, '05, went on to encourage students to "stay informed" -- about foreign policy, international affairs, domestic politics, and more. And, once informed, to express their convictions on these issues and let their voices and votes play a role in shaping our collective future. We have choices as a nation, and we elect officials who make them. We should choose the choosers wisely.
Charity or justice?
Finally, service may be, as columnist David Broder wrote recently, "the sturdy foundation of patriotism," but service is no substitute for action. It is right and good that we seek to help the less fortunate, that we assist and assuage the poor. But we must remember that assuaging the condition of the poor is not the same as working to remedy the root causes of poverty. We can contribute goods to food pantries, raise funds for worthy causes through bake sales and the like, but patriotism -- to country and to humankind -- prompts us to undertake more radical action.
William Sloane Coffin, who served as the Stephen Edward Scarff Memorial Visiting Professor of Religious Studies in 1995-96 and returned as a convocation speaker in October 2002, makes the point that we need "to see the difference between charity and justice. Charity is a matter of personal attributes, justice a matter of public policy. Charity seeks to alleviate the effects of injustice, justice seeks to eliminate the causes of it. Charity in no way affects the status quo, while justice leads inevitably to political confrontation."
Coffin goes on to say that the axis of evil about which President Bush has spoken does not consist of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea but "environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons."
Our stewardship of our planet, our concern for the future of humankind, our hope for peace and security beckon us beyond service to civic engagement, to a commitment to apply our critical thinking skills to the realization of that justice that will confront the causes of environmental degradation, pandemic poverty, the spread of nuclear weapons, human rights abuses, and other causes and crises, here and abroad. We should do more than alleviate the consequences of these evils; we should seek to rid the world of them. Our pursuit of truth should embolden us to pursue justice.
Inevitably and properly, each of us will contribute only modestly to such purposes, but we should understand the purposes and we should contribute as we can. So, serve and volunteer and through those contributions of your time and talent become more aware of and sensitive to the problems you are seeking to alleviate. Then apply your skills and knowledge to change the causes of those problems, to become a valuable member of society. Liberal education for a life of service and civic engagement demands no less.