NOTE: The following speech was given at a meeting of the National Campus Compact held April 13, 2000.

The most frequently cited proof that we have a serious societal problem comes from national surveys of college students. They show us a paradox: Although individual student volunteer activity is at an all-time high, participation in civic life has dropped precipitously. Student voting records are dismal -- about one in five eligible students elects to cast a ballot. A year ago, the annual national survey of college freshmen by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute revealed the lowest levels of political interest since the survey began in 1966. Just 21 percent, for example, wanted to take part in community action programs; only 28 percent were interested in becoming community leaders. As troubling was the decline in what the report calls “indicators of social activism”: student interest in helping to promote racial understanding -- at its lowest level in a decade, or in influencing other social values. Yet these same students were performing volunteer work in record numbers -- almost three-quarters of them. Survey director Alexander Astin calls this “the bright light on the horizon.”

But civic disengagement is not a young people’s issue. Last month, in a cover story for The New York Times Magazine titled “The Invisible Poor,” James Fallows asks why, at a time of unequalled national prosperity, we see so little discussion -- much less action -- focused on the poor. He finds it “striking how much less talk there is about the poor than there was eight years ago, when the country was economically uncertain, or in previous eras, when the country felt flush.” We are not engaging in widespread discussion of ways to ease the nation’s growing inequalities of wealth. He sees two systemic causes: “an unusual social and imaginative separation between prosperous America and those still left out,” coupled with a decline in our national sense of community. We may think globally, especially in matters of commerce, but, in the words of Harvard government Professor Michael Sandel, the “sense of national community, and to the mutual responsibilities of citizens of the nation” that fueled previous efforts at progressive social change, “don’t seem so readily available today.” Fallows does not find us mean-spirited: “Prosperous America does not seem hostile to the poor, and often responds generously when reminded.” Too often, though, we do not remind ourselves, and look for opportunities to help that move beyond individual action.

One of the more interesting articles I have read in recent years is Harvard University Professor Robert Putnam’s “Bowling Alone.” The title refers to the fact that while there has been an enormous increase in bowling by individuals, the number of bowling leagues has decreased significantly. Putnam goes on to note that virtually every volunteer or civic organization, from the PTA to the Elks Club (and everything in between) has witnessed a similar decline. Clearly, efforts to revitalize citizenship are broadly needed.
Now having given you a somewhat alarming view of current national civic dispiritedness, let me share some truly joyous examples of what I see -- what we all see -- as an antidote. Service learning is a spur to civic engagement, an expression of higher education’s social mission, and an academic powerhouse, strengthening both teaching and learning. You’ll find the following snapshots familiar in one key respect: they bring to life the academic, personal, and societal transformative power of service learning.

I wish you could have been in the room with me and California State University Chancellor Charles Reed last month as we met with San Francisco State University student Cecilia Shepard, a 38-year-old public housing resident and single mother of five, who has just been awarded the highly coveted Howard Swearer Student Humanitarian Prize for community service. A self-identified drug addict for eight years, Ceci achieved phenomenal gains for herself and for the other residents of her public housing complex as she combined the resources of the community and of the University with her own extraordinary energy and talent.

Utilizing two San Francisco State service learning courses, one in political science the other in health education, Ceci is helping to change her community -- bringing a university health program right into her housing project, getting 500 computers donated and installed by HUD in every apartment in that housing project, with SFSU computer science students (in yet another service learning course, lined up to provide on-site training for both adults and youngsters in the housing complex.) For her part, Ceci Shephard describes her service learning classes as “phenomenal.” So impressive was her remarkable story that at the end of our interview, I thought for just a moment that Chancellor Reed was going to leap from his seat to embrace Ceci in a bear hug!

I wish you could have been in a San Francisco first-grade classroom with me and California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi shortly after the “America Reads” program began. There we watched a Chinese first-grader named Albert tutor his fellow first-graders in the use of a computerized reading program that he himself had learned only a few weeks earlier. Congresswoman Pelosi has told the story of this 6-year-old teacher in Washington so many times that Albert has become a legend in the halls of Congress. And it is college and university students across the nation who, by joining “America Reads” and “America Counts” by the tens of thousands, are helping to ensure that Albert and many more youngsters like him will have the skills they need to succeed in school, and later, in the world of work.

I wish you could have been with me some years ago when the introductory literature course I was teaching was interrupted by a young nursing student, who, late for class, came crashing in, eyes beaming, cheeks alive with passion, bubbling over with the emotion of having just helped to deliver her first baby at a clinic for the indigent in our small university town. Many years later, I encountered her in San Francisco, now gray-haired, but eyes still sparkling. having helped to deliver, I guess, thousands of babies, but still remembering the first one and still recalling that class that she had so innocently but delightfully disrupted.

I wish you could have been with me in Boston several years ago, to observe, almost simultaneously, a group of mostly black and Puerto Rican Robert F. Kennedy cadets from the Kennedy Library working with an elderly Irish population in the notorious South Boston neighborhood that had steadfastly opposed school integration, while a group of mostly white, mostly Irish students from the local Jesuit high school volunteered in the neighborhoods of Roxbury with a population that was 98% Black and Hispanic. It was truly democracy in action and community service at its best.

I wish you could have been with me to hear the former USC medical dean describe an exciting but still experimental open-heart operation process performed for free on an indigent patient in front of a class of medical students. Was that teaching, he asked? Was that research? Was that service? The answer is that it was all of those three, and, again, that is service learning at its best. To my examples, you can, I know, add many of your own.

A NATIONAL MOVEMENT, A NATIONAL MOMENT
But let us turn from anecdotes to the broader picture. As I view the national scene, and as I look particularly closely at my own state, California, I have come to believe that we are reaching a very exciting stage -- perhaps even a turning point -- in service learning.

Higher education is now talking openly and often about values—particularly those of active citizenship. We are recognizing that our students need a sense of community and social values, and that our democracy depends on the readiness of each new generation to take personal responsibility for the governance of society. We have an obligation to turn things around again, and with service learning, we can.

All in all, this movement in higher education has become a true wave, sweeping across the nation. I strongly believe that we have -- at this moment -- an historic obligation and an historic opportunity. Service learning and its outgrowth, civic engagement, promote everything we most value in the academy, and if we embrace this movement together, we can truly transform our students, our communities, and ourselves.

I imagine that a close look at service learning initiatives on your respective campuses would show that we are at different points in catching this wave. Some campuses have been heavily invested in service learning for years; for others, the effort is younger. For some, faculty participation in service learning is widespread, and civic engagement is a recognized campus value. Others are moving ahead through the efforts of a dedicated few. Where you are now doesn’t matter. If you value the engaged university, and if you are realistic about its demands -- in time, in money, in ongoing community communication -- you will reap its considerable rewards.
More than our individual effort is now supporting service learning. I can think of no bigger catalyst than the organization that has brought us here today -- National Campus Compact. Campus Compact has brought us together, has forged strategic partnerships on our behalf with a range of educational and civic organizations, has developed vital sources of seed funding for service learning, has stimulated and shaped a national conversation, and has, at the same time, provided the kind of detailed help and advice that a venture of this kind demands. The director of USC’s nationally-recognized service learning program wrote that “the most help for people encountering the day-to-day crises of program operation have found Campus Compact to be most responsive. Campus Compact has been a godsend to those practitioners slugging it out in the trenches.”

We know we have a national movement when we achieve a national media profile. Time magazine made service learning its theme in selecting the “College of the Year 2000” for its annual Time/Princeton Review College Guide The award went to the University of Southern California, in recognition of its comprehensive engagement with its surrounding community. That Los Angeles community happens to be South Central --a name made nationally familiar by the 1992 race riots. Such a spotlight on service learning adds visibility and a certain validation to our work, and helps us build both internal and external support.

A very exciting new source of interest and potential support is starting to arise. State governmental leadership is seizing on service delivered through higher education as a timely and vital initiative, giving us both support and additional impetus. In California, Governor Gray Davis last year asked the State’s three systems of public higher education to consider developing community service requirement for graduation. He has stated his willingness to allocate funds for the new fiscal year for a service initiative. After a great deal of work between the Governor’s staff and higher education leadership, we have won his assent for encouraging, rather than requiring, service, and are fine-tuning our specific funding proposals. In Florida, Governor Bush has taken a similar supportive stance, and we are seeing more and more examples in statehouses across the nation.

OUR STRENGTHS
So what shall we do with this opportunity? First, I think, we should take full note of service learning’s greatest assets, our “selling points,” if you will. Selling points for campus administrators, if they have not yet lent both moral and practical support to your efforts. Selling points for faculty who are not sure what this “service” business has to do with their academic interests. Selling points for students who may be uncertain about what they stand to gain from this special kind of course. And selling points for potential community partners, potential sources of external funding, potential students, civic and political leadership.

Service learning offers benefits them all, by enhancing student learning; providing fresh opportunities -- focuses -- for faculty research; strengthening a sense of shared community on the campus; earning community respect; improving student recruitment and retention; supporting diversity; addressing at their root educational problems such as remediation; improving your institution’s reputation; winning strong public support; even increasing private giving. And above all, fulfilling our overarching educational goal: to graduate men and women who are prepared -- and eager -- to make ours a better and more just society; who believe in something and will act on those beliefs; who will vote, volunteer, and be active in civic affairs. We are bringing a larger and more diversified population of students to our campus than ever before—the future leaders of our community. Thus, this mission—preparing new generations of principled and active citizens—has become absolutely critical.
The truly wonderful thing about service learning is its demonstrable educational value. Repeated studies show us that students absorb knowledge better when they are given hands-on opportunities to apply it. Students engaged in service earn higher grades and have better graduation rates. Service learning also builds problem-solving skills and a wealth of other real-life capacities. Through service learning, our students can get the full educational package: subject matter mastery, strong social values, and the skills to apply both in the world beyond the campus. We are fulfilling -- in fact, enhancing -- our academic goals, and we are finding a way to build the qualities of character and the social values that we also recognize as part of our mission. Faculty recognize the pedagogical value of service learning and many find in it an opportunity to foster principles of social justice in which they believe strongly -- principles that may have helped draw them to education in the first place.

The latest study to reinforce these academic and civic benefits of service learning was published last January by UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute. The study added to the already-long list of good outcomes of a well-conducted service learning course greater student enthusiasm for an eventual career in service; more active student participation in the learning process; and -- touching two fundamental academic goals -- stronger writing and critical thinking skills! The study also found that both faculty and students develop a “heightened sense of civic responsibility and personal effectiveness through participation in service-learning courses.”

The academic power of service learning is our greatest strength, of course. But what has helped service learning to move from the margins toward a more central place in the curriculum is the exciting discovery on campus after campus of the wide range of curricular opportunities for service learning. Set aside teaching, nursing, social work -- the obvious and longstanding professional examples. With creative and motivated faculty behind it, service learning can work effectively in virtually any discipline. Here again, a few snapshots to suggest the range of possibilities:

• San Francisco State students in a philosophy department bioethics course spend time with hospice patients, then bring their experiences to the class discussion of ethical issues in terminal care.
• In a San Diego State University course called “Community Applications of Business Principles,” students successfully negotiated a Marriott Corporation pledge to donate more than $50,000 worth of furniture to a local battered women’s shelter as a hotel was being remodeled.
• At California State University Northridge, microbiology students conducted water tests to enable a local community worried about septic tank leaks to determine whether, and by what, the water was contaminated. The students testified before the city council about their findings.
• At USC, varsity athletes coach sports clinics at neighborhood schools.
• At Santa Clara University in California, the Eastside Project brings about 500 students each quarter into the University’s poor and largely minority near neighborhood to work with youth, families, schools, and small businesses in activities linked to classes from many disciplines, including anthropology, psychology, accounting, philosophy, and religious studies.
• A San Francisco State University finance class team entered a City-sponsored competition to produce a design and financing package for affordable senior housing -- and won first place! Our team got special praise for the way they worked with a non-profit housing developer, with the neighborhood, and with others in the community -- including Mayor’s Office staff and the Bank of America. The project is going forward -- there is a reasonable chance that it will actually be constructed!

Here, too, you could multiply these examples many fold. Students who have had experiences such as these begin to learn their power -- to navigate the complexities of community activism, to listen, learn, and partner, and to make things happen. They can be forever changed.

Service learning can reenergize the classroom, generating a new kind of classroom dialogue, a more participatory and egalitarian approach to teaching and learning. In the reflective analysis and discussion of the community service experience that is a key part of these courses, students find themselves major contributors. They engage with their professors in ways that may be unaccustomed to both parties -- and enriching for both.

THE ROLE OF PRESIDENTIAL LEADERSHIP
Service learning programs are necessarily individual, fitted to a particular campus and the community -- communities, I should say -- that it serves. But there is one universal: you need the strong, tangible support of your president or chancellor, and other key university leadership, to make service learning a deeply-rooted and broadly- shared campus value. We have a good model for this process, and I’d say that we need to approach the issue of civic renewal on our campuses as we have for some time now approached the issue of diversity: With visible presidential leadership and institutional support from the top down. With an articulated commitment in your mission statement, your strategic plan. And with the campus budget -- your institution’s values made visible.

Let me confess right now that I was once a skeptic about university community service and service learning. When Campus Compact was founded in 1985 Reed, I saw it as an elite institution guilt trip. I don’t think there has ever been a time in which I have been more wrong about American higher education, our students, and our leadership. What began that year has culminated in the most extraordinary reform movement that higher education has seen, probably since the creation of the community college system. And I have gone from skeptic to drum major!

What has that meant on my campus? As with diversity, I have made service learning, and civic engagement a repeated theme -- in my monthly message to the campus; in small-group conversations with faculty, and with our Academic Senate; in brown bag lunches with student leaders. We were immensely fortunate to be able to bring to campus for a stay of several years, the father of community service learning, Dr. Thomas Ehrlich. His charge: to bring together a core group of faculty interested in this new movement, and to help design both individual faculty support structures and an overall campus framework for service learning. Over the first three years, assisted by funding from California State University systemwide leadership, we made more than 80 grants to faculty interested in developing a service learning component in a class. The provost and I found a way to establish and fund a new, campus-wide Office of Community Service Learning, and we tapped an extraordinarily creative and dedicated department chair to head it. I’ve touted our service learning program to alumni, to community friends and leaders.

During this period, we also conducted a campus-wide, grass roots strategic planning effort, which resulted in a comprehensive, workable, and broadly accepted blueprint for our near-term future. Pervading this document is a commitment to community-service partnerships as an integral part of our academic mission. Now, seven years after we began this effort, San Francisco State offers more than 100 separate service learning courses, in 41 departments. And there will be more.

ISSUES
I have said that this is a pivotal and promising time for service learning. Still, as we move ahead, we need to recognize some key common issues that face us as we seek to bring the full power of service learning to life. I’ll mention just two that demand immediate consideration.

The heart of service learning is university-community partnership. But how do colleges and universities conceive of that partnership? Higher education’s historical approach to community involvement has too often been a well-meant paternalism, an unspoken but no less felt view that the university had the “experts” and the “answers,” which it would generously apply to community “problems.” Noblesse oblige, to state it harshly. We now recognize that an approach we would reject in our teaching works no better in the community. It is hard, and often sensitive work to establish and maintain a true footing of equality between partners in campus-community projects. We may, for example, think that we are certain of what the pressing issues are -- but our neighbors may see things differently.

For example, when the University of Southern California sat down with South Central parents and principals to discuss things it could do in the K-12 schools, the university learned that the community’s biggest immediate concern was the children’s safety. So USC worked with residents and local police to develop a “Kidwatch” program that has become a national model. In addition, USC police expanded their patrol area so that it now includes a neighborhood 16 times larger than the campus. The campus listened, shaped its activities in concert with its partners, and eventually developed a genuinely mutual, positive, and very productive relationship.

We also need to think about how we toss around that word, “community.” If we think of “the community” as a monolith, a single large entity, we are going to run into trouble. Every community is an interwoven, sometimes overlapping collection of many communities, with many leadership voices, many concerns, many needs. Sounds a lot like our campuses, doesn’t it?

I imagine that every faculty member in this room could talk powerfully to the second major issue in service learning: the need to develop appropriate incentives, support mechanisms, and rewards for faculty involved in this complex and labor-intensive kind of pedagogy. With all the good news about higher education’s growing investment in civic engagement, we have not managed to do nearly enough about this issue. First, and most fundamentally, we need to make a place for service learning in retention, tenure, and promotion policies. We will have to find a way to achieve this, if we are to make civic engagement a permanent and significant part of university life and education, but I confess that I do not see an easy path. Faculty themselves must take the lead. On our campus, the Academic Senate is discussing the issue, and I expect to have more conversations with them on this subject.

Then there is the fiscal issue -- which is also a faculty issue. While short-term resources for service learning planning have not been too difficult to find -- most campuses can find ways to provide training and curriculum development funds for interested faculty -- long term support is another matter. Service-learning is labor-intensive and therefore costly. Indeed, a program that relies upon regular interaction between the students and the community, careful oversight of that interaction on the part of the faculty member, and the thoughtful integration of that experience into the classroom makes for a course that is extraordinarily difficult and time-consuming to develop, to teach, and to assess.

We may need to consider how we weight faculty time for teaching a service learning course, or how we can supply substantial assistance with such things as monitoring each student’s service experience with the agency involved. Campuses have done a good job of obtaining outside funds from such sources as Campus Compact, FIPSE, the federal Learn and Serve program, and private foundations, but most of us have yet to develop a secure and satisfactory funding base for the full dimension of our service-learning programs.

One potential source of support, at least for public institutions, is new state budgetary allocations designed specifically for this purpose. Winning legislative and gubernatorial support is a shared, not a campus-by-campus enterprise, and this is one more place that statewide Campus Compacts can be of immense value.

WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE?
While individual approaches to service learning, and individual projects, are going to remain in large measure campus-specific, I think that service learning will best be served by the expansion of an approach that we are already seeing: the formation of coalitions -- through Campus Compact and in other configurations, involving community, corporate, and civic entities, as well as campuses themselves -- to strengthen and coordinate efforts, and to win additional support

It is this strategy, I believe, that has made California the national exemplar it is of community service learning. Let me talk for just a moment about one piece of that positive picture: the California State University’s efforts to develop among its 23 campuses the kind of broadly-rooted, collective effort that will allow service learning to flourish.

Three years ago, the CSU -- with Tom Ehrlich’s guidance -- developed a strategic plan for service learning and civic engagement -- the first such systemwide plan in the nation -- and established a Chancellor’s Office-level service learning office, providing visibility and clout for all our campus efforts. The two key objectives of the plan over a five-year period are to engage students at each CSU campus in at least one community service-learning experience prior to graduation and to offer a range of community service opportunities. These goals clearly align with the Governor’s call to service.
We recently added a CSU Advisory Group on Community Service, whose membership includes a number of presidents, to develop recommendations to the trustees on ways to strengthen further CSU community service initiatives and encourage engagement of the campuses with their surrounding locales. Last month, the Advisory Group presented a group of resolutions, which the CSU Board of Trustees approved, responding to our Governor’s request for a higher education service learning proposal, and clearly establishing service learning as a priority for each campus president. The Trustees acknowledge the strength in community service and service-learning that is already evident throughout the system, and require that each CSU president ensure that all students on her or his campus have opportunities to participate in community service and service learning. We are now working to make service learning “an expectation, condition, or requirement” for undergraduates. That is a flexible standard, but one which makes clear the value we place on service learning.

Beyond the CSU campuses themselves, the CSU’s comprehensive, collective approach to service learning has already had considerable impact. It has enabled us to win support in the Governor’s Office, develop new private funding possibilities, and has given moral and practical support to hundreds of faculty, thousands of students, and the many thousands of our community neighbors who are reached by a CSU service learning project.

IN CONCLUSION
With its growing visibility and success, the service learning movement, is doing several important things for higher education. It is giving us a range of effective ways to carry out our social responsibilities. It puts us, politically, on the cutting edge, demonstrating our capacity to effect important, positive social change. And it meets the public calls for curricular rigor and assessment. Service learning is concrete and evidence-based, and the outcomes of the service experience -- for both the student and the community partner -- are assessed as part of the course.

But most of all, service learning is reconnecting us to our soul. Last year, in his annual baccalaureate address, Yale President Richard Levin reminded the graduating students of his words to them as freshmen: “I told you that this is a place where ideas are taken seriously…where community service is taken seriously, where involvement and moral responsibility are taken seriously.” He praised them for their community service while at Yale -- the University has an extensive program -- and told them that “What you have done for this city you must now do for your country and the wider world…The nation needs your involvement, and the wider world demands your attention.”

That is the message and the great joy of participation in service learning. If we catch this national spirit -- and help to move it forward -- we may someday look back on the service learning movement as equivalent to the GI Bill in its tangible benefits to our society, and to the Peace Corps in its uplifting of our national spirit.

You are doing splendid work. I admire you, I thank you, and I wish you every success.