Gov. Jesse Ventura has declared this week “Minnesota Volunteer Recognition Week.” By bringing the value of volunteer service in our state’s communities to light, we all learn something. Yet, singling out one week is not enough. As part of a university education, students learn the facts, formulae and interpretations that go into a degree. However, part of going to college is also learning how to live. To that end, Minnesota would do well to make service a requirement for any undergraduate degree.
The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle conceived of ethics as striving to reach eudaemonia, “the good life.” Living the good life is a process, an attempt to reach a goal that cannot be achieved in isolation. Students must recognize they are part of a community and have certain responsibilities to help others, not for material gain, but because the act and its results are ends in themselves. When this knowledge is taken beyond the University after graduation, genuine improvements can be made in our society as students enter the world with a mentality of volunteerism.
Last week, California Gov. Gray Davis announced a plan to make community service a graduation requirement at California’s public universities and colleges. Such a program would move students out of the classroom and into the neighborhoods they might not otherwise see from the ivory tower. Many of the problems in our society remain problematic because so many well-off individuals have no direct experience with them. Poverty, illiteracy, homelessness, needs of the sick and elderly, etc., are too frequently alien to the average university student. Bringing these issues to the front of a student’s consciousness, where it will remain for the rest of his or her life, is the first step toward meeting these challenges.
The University administration has considered adding a service requirement in the past, but it faded when the primary proponent of the initiative left. The original plan, three years ago, called for an out-of-classroom experience called “Expanding Worlds,” and would have required students to take an internship, conduct community service, study abroad or engage in undergraduate research. While this initiative exhibited good intentions on the part of the University, it missed the point.
By allowing things like study abroad and undergraduate research to qualify, the plan would have created an environment in which wealthy students exploited an opportunity to spend a year having fun out of the country, when they are precisely the people who most need to experience helping those in need of aid. It is one thing to send a check to some charitable organization or to be an activist against the U.S. military action of the year; it is quite another to meet the needy face-to-face.
It is time for the University and the state to generate a plan in line with the California initiative. Asking students to commit one afternoon per week during a single semester of their education will not harm the educational enterprise; it will strengthen it. As the University changes to a semester system, the environment is ideally suited to continue making changes for the better. When students graduate, they should not only know how to pick stocks, understand Keats, build a bridge or write a computer program. They should know living the good life is a worthwhile goal, but takes some work serving the world around them.