A couple of weeks ago (10 September) I posted on “Community Action for Frosh,” reporting on an evening I had spent with a group of incoming Princeton freshmen who had spent a week engaging in community action near Trenton.I got a number of private responses to the post, but the most moving was from the daughter of a friend, Cori, who is currently teaching at a community college located on an Indian reservation in Montana:

Dad,

I'm glad that Princeton and other universities are increasingly emphasizing community service and public scholarship. However, I remain concerned that while simultaneously encouraging public service, these universities encourage high 'achievement' in the forms of prestigious jobs and careers. While it might be seen as a worthy sacrifice to give a couple of years of post-graduation life to serving in the Peace Corps or teaching in an inner-city school, ultimately these students are encouraged to pursue careers high on the economic and political ladders. As a result, they will perpetually remain in a social class that is detached from the social classes they will purport to help in their future careers. What universities REALLY need to do to be agents of change is to question what defines "success" and "achievement" for their students. Standards of living need to be questioned so that Princeton students don't feel as if they should be or need to be making $75,000 or more per year or having their name published all over the academic and/or political and/or business world. We need more graduates who are willing to work at the ground level and who are willing to give up personal recognition in order that lower-income and minority persons may step up and speak for themselves (rather than to continue to be spoken about by whites/upper classes on their behalf).

I have since corresponded directly with Cori, a graduate of Penn State who tells me: “The university as a whole didn't do anything special to promote the kind of lifestyle I chose -- but I had an excellent professor who did, and who modeled it with his own life/choices. ... Perhaps you have heard of Lakshman (Lucky) Yapa and the Philadelphia Field Project? He is a faculty member in Penn State's Department of Geography. His work, his writing, and his life espouse a philosophy of simple yet dedicated contribution to chipping away at the "Rock of Gibraltar" (what he calls the destructive side of capitalism) by using our personal agency.”

As it happens, I don’t know Prof. Yapa, but I have no doubt that Cori is entirely correct that it is the exemplary teacher rather than the community-action program that is likely to make the most powerful impact on students. I am pretty sure that the capacity to inspire is not in the job description of most tenure-evaluation processes, however. How, then, are universities to recruit and sustain teachers of the sort that Cori has responded to?