Last Sunday I climbed onto an Amtrak train in Trenton en route to Carlisle, Pennsylvania to participate in a conference the next day, co-sponsored by Dickinson College and the University of Maine, on education for public service. The topic for the meeting was “What’s Wrong With Public Service? A Challenge for Higher Education,” the implication being that our colleges and universities are not doing enough to challenge our students to aspire to careers in public service.
Lord knows the subject is timely. Last July Barack Obama spoke out, in a speech in Colorado, in favor of increasing both volunteer and service opportunities for all Americans. His vision of service was deliberately broad (“your nation, your community, or simply your neighborhood”), and later he and Joe Biden announced a plan for “universal voluntary public service” that proposed expanding the Corporation for National and Community Service as well as the Peace Corps. The recently adopted Obama economic stimulus package provides substantial funding for AmeriCorps , the National Service Trust.
I was on the first panel — our topic was “Public Service and the Curriculum,” joined by Susan Hunter, the Provost at Maine. We both supported the idea that liberal undergraduate education was the proper curriculum for training students for service. I also made the case that, within the context of liberal education, a major in public policy of the sort we provide at the Princeton Woodrow Wilson School was an excellent preparation. But I insisted that the historic commitment of general education to preparing students for democratic citizenship was, au fond, the essential element in preparation for public service. We were joined in this view by the Dickinson provost, Neil Weissman, who moderated the panel.
But the other member of our panel was Chris Myers Asch, the “founder and advocate” of the U.S. Public Service Academy, who did his best to convince the audience of the idea that what the country needs is an institution based upon a military academy model — “a flagship institution designed to build a ‘more perfect union’ by developing leaders of skill and character dedicated to service in the public sector.” Students would be selected somewhat as they are for West Point, and, similarly, they would work for the government for a period of time after graduation. Myers failed to convince me that what the country needs is for future public servants to wear uniforms and subject themselves to military discipline, much less to be subjected to “character education.” I much prefer President Obama’s broad definition of service to Myers’s insistence that it is only service to federal government that should count, and I am optimistic that the present generation of students will rise to the challenge.
The day was lively, with excellent talks by Nick Burns, formerly of the State Department, and James Comey, formerly the deputy attorney general, as well as a splendid panel of Maine and Dickinson alumni active in public service. This really does feel like a moment when our students will respond to the national challenge.
