Silver Bullets for the Needy

By Anastasia Toufexis

Ah, spring break. The traditional time to shed campus cares and haul hormones off for some sun and fun. But as the recess started last week at Vanderbilt University, one group of students was off in pursuit of more serious exertions. A score went to a Sioux reservation in South Dakota to do painting, tiling and light carpentry at a Y.M.C.A. center; a dozen arrived in Juarez, Mexico, to help build a "serviglesia," a church to serve the poor; another twelve headed for Appalachia's "Valley of Despair" to plant fir trees and work on construction and furniture-building projects. Says Vanderbilt Senior Ethel Johnson, 21, who stayed in Nashville with another team sowing gardens, making curtains and teaching English in a community of Cambodian refugees: "Students are vastly underestimated. They have a real desire to get out there and do something to try to help and to have their eyes opened."

Vanderbilt's Alternative Spring Break is simply one rustling of a new spirit of volunteerism blowing across campuses. In California, 40 Stanford volunteers took time out two weekends ago to paint an elementary school gym in East Menlo Park. In Boston, Wellesley undergrads tend to homeless women every night at Rosie's Place, a local shelter. At Northwestern in Evanston, Ill., volunteers have started an "adopt a grandparent" program to aid the elderly. Students at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor help low-income people with tax returns.

No one can say exactly how many are involved overall; the best estimate is that 15% to 25% of collegians engage regularly in some form of public service. Many campus volunteer agencies are finding that interest is higher than it has been since the early '70s. Declares Stanford University President Donald Kennedy: "Everybody's view of this generation was that they were careerist, that they were yuppies inthe making. I always thought that was a bum rap."

Today's volunteers, however, are no throwback to the '60s activists. "It's not enough to say peace, love and happiness," notes Brown Sophomore David Graff, who worked in a storefront school in Harlem and is now a big brother to a youngster in Providence. "We need to be realistic about our expectations so we don't burn out." Linda Chisholm, co-director of the Partnership for Service Learning, an organization that has sent students to assist schools in Jamaica and Ecuador, explains, "They haven't decided who is right and who is wrong. And they aren't saying that others should change. They're saying, 'I'll change. I'll do it.' " The Peace Corps is enjoying an increase in applicants who are college graduates, and Spokeswoman Alixe Glen characterizes most of them as "realistic idealists."

Another difference: today's volunteerism is imbued with an '80s entrepreneurship and conservatism that include carefully defined goals and evaluation procedures. Schools such as Rice University and Georgetown have / hired full-time service coordinators to foster student involvement and match volunteers with community agencies and projects. Networks have been established to pass along information. Campus Compact, started in 1985 by three university presidents, now comprises 259 colleges. COOL, Campus Outreach Opportunity League, run by a former Harvard volunteer, embraces 250 schools. Harvard's Phillips Brooks House Association, the nation's oldest college community-service organization, is a model of how unsoftheaded the approach now is. Students must not only dream up the projects (which now number 50) but write detailed proposals for how to fund and operate them. Last week the city of Cambridge awarded a $23,000 contract to the association, rather than other social service agencies, to run a 20-bed shelter for the homeless.

Many colleges give academic credit for public service. Some, like Brown and Harvard, provide fellowships. Educators and politicians have proposed offering other tangible rewards to volunteers, many of whom are accumulating high tuition debts and feel pressure to earn wages. Rhode Island Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell will introduce a bill this month that would give ROTC- like tuition assistance to students doing community service. Thanks, say some, but no thanks. "Volunteerism should be selfless," explains M. Richard Rose, president of Rochester Institute of Technology. "Ideally you should be like the Lone Ranger. You do a good deed, then you leave a silver bullet and move on."

Making volunteer work mandatory sparks more controversy. Proposed legislation in California would require all four-year students enrolled in state schools or receiving state aid to devote time to community projects. But, argues Robert Pollack, dean of Columbia College in New York City, "required service is not service, it is servitude." Besides, say participants, the spirit of giving does not need that goad. The personal satisfaction, the real-world exposure, the "chance to give something back," as dozens of volunteers put it, is enough. "In class, we study the big questions," says Georgetown Student Elaine Rankin. "At the homeless shelter we live the big questions."

With reporting by John E. Gallagher/New York and Melissa Ludtke/Boston