How should Princeton be in the nation's service?

In their lead editorial of Oct. 17, the editors of this daily asked what our hallowed motto "Princeton in the nation's service and the service of all nations" should mean for individual students. It is a good and timely question.

Traditionally, the motto has evoked images of some "public service," either in the military or civilian sectors. A central assumption appears to have been that owning up to the motto required some personal sacrifice for the larger good. One certainly can live up to that expectation in public service. But public service alone strikes me as too narrow a criterion, one that can easily miss the mark. For one, work in the public sector often is indistinguishable from similar work in the private sector and involves no personal sacrifice at all. Second, much of so-called public "service" is just a smart investment in one's own human capital, a useful stepping stone to lucrative subsequent work in the private sector. Finally, and most importantly, many high-level public sector jobs bestow on the incumbent enormous power over fellow human beings. When that power is incompetently used, so-called public service can easily turn into a public disservice.

Red-blooded Americans probably think here of the much maligned midor upper-level "bureaucrat" who, as folklore has it, cannot "walk and chew gum at the same time." It is a nasty folklore with little support in fact. The public servants to worry about are more powerful people, typically political appointees. In this connection, for example, Princeton students might reflect on Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's controversial current stint in public service.

Many Princetonians undoubtedly will see in the Secretary the very embodiment of Princeton's motto, and that may possibly be true of his earlier work in the public sector. His recent public service, however, has come under sharp criticism, not only, predictably, from left-of-center partisans or opponents of the war in Iraq, but, less predictably and most harshly, from commentators on the political right. They include the hawkish William Kristol, editor of the ultra-right Weekly Standard and Senator John McCain, both vocal supporters of the invasion of Iraq, Larry Diamond, senior fellow of Stanford's conservative Hoover Institute, who worked for the Pentagon's Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq and subsequently chronicled the Pentagon's mismanagement of Iraq's occupation in his book "Squandered Victory," and retired Marine Corps General Anthony C. Zinni, former commander-in-chief of the U.S. Central Command, a Republican who voted for President George W. Bush and worked for him as special Mideast envoy but, but in his recent book, "Battle Ready," remarked that "in the lead up to the Iraq war and its later conduct, I saw, at a minimum, true dereliction, negligence and irresponsibility, at worse, lying, incompetence and corruption."

If so-called "public service" per se is not the realization of Princeton's motto, what, then, should that motto mean to the individual student? I propose that it mean "Primum Non Nocere," the physician's ancient dictum "First, do no Harm!" Following that dictum does not mean, of course, that one should never visit harm on anyone. Even the best intentioned and superbly implemented decisions by business or military executives often visit unavoidable harm on some individuals for what these decision makers believe to be the greater good. But on balance every decision a Princetonian makes should reasonably be expected to bestow more good than harm on humankind.

Whether satisfying the dictum "Primum Non Nocere" is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for having lived up to Princeton's motto is up for debate. Some people may believe "Yes." Others would require some personal sacrifice for the sake of the greater good. Military service, for example, would generally meet these people's idea of the motto; investment banking would not, even if it lived up to "Primum Non Nocere."

Whatever one's view on this point may be, however, competence surely is the sine qua non of living up to the motto. For Princeton students, a first step in the quest for competence would be to take full advantage of the many opportunities this university offers students to become highly competent members of society, as voters, as community leaders and in whatever work they may choose to earn a living. Uwe E. Reinhardt is the James Madison Professor of Political Economy and a professor of Economics and Public Affairs. He can be reached at reinhard@princeton.edu.