Civic disengagement, please

The newness of this academic year has already been diminished by tired rhetoric carried over from the last. This past spring, the USG proposed an initiative that would have increased the visibility of "civic engagement" activities on campus. Now, it has been announced, the Student Volunteers Council (SVC) and Community House, the two largest student-run community service organizations, will be moved under the aegis of the University-run Pace Center, supposedly strengthening "civic engagement" on campus.

Besides the objections of many students involved with the SVC to this move last spring, the administration has done little to address the central deficiency of "civic engagement" rhetoric: namely, that it so overused as to be meaningless. When the SVC was attached to the Office of Religious Life (ORL), students could at least observe the extent to which American humanitarian activity has been rooted in the Protestant denominations, whether in the form of the Social Gospel in the early part of the last century or evangelical concern with human rights abuses in Sudan today. When used, all these ambiguous terms, whether "civic engagement," "civic empowerment," or the more straightforward "community service," make individuals feel good about themselves and not much more. Who, after all, would in his or her right mind oppose "civic engagement," especially if it can solve all the problems of society?

But a desire to make students and administrators feel good about themselves should not be reason enough to construct an unwieldy bureaucracy. To many students, the Pace Center is a snowball heading downhill, an increasingly large agglomeration of activities that may impose an unnecessary amount of administrative input in largely student-driven organizations.

Whatever its benefits, the ethos of consolidation and unification evidenced in the building up of the Pace Center stands in tension with the idea of individual self-cultivation that Woodrow Wilson suggested when he coined the University's unofficial motto, "Princeton in the Nation's Service." Civic involvement is by definition a bottom-up phenomenon, and the administration's desire to coordinate and to manage civic activity veers, in spirit, dangerously close to the community service "requirements" placed on middle and high school students. Perhaps it is too late to dismantle this new bureaucracy. It is not too late, however, to dedicate ourselves first and foremost, at the beginning of this new year, to learning, and to activities that we find substantial and suitable to our interests. Freshmen — welcome to Princeton.