The real civic engagement

On behalf of the Pace Council for Civic Values, I write in response to The Daily Princetonian editorial of Tuesday, Sept. 11, "Civic disengagement, please." While some of the Editorial Board's concerns about the emphasis on the term civic engagement at Princeton and the recent decision to move the Student Volunteers Council (SVC) and Community House under the organizational structure of the Pace Center are understandable, several others demonstrate a flawed conception of the organizational change and the mission of civic engagement at the University.

First and perhaps foremost, contrary to the Board's claim, "civic engagement" is far from meaningless. In fact, the Pace Center has worked hard to make known a simple and quite specific, definition: Civic engagement is "taking action to identify and address issues of public concern." The Board is correct to imply that the term is broadly applicable, referring not only to direct service activities, but also to community-based research, political campaigning and issue advocacy, among others. Yet the truth is that the breadth of the term civic engagement is hardly a weakness. It allows individuals engaged in a wide range of activities to consider the relation between those activities and a broader mission in support of the public good.

As for the SVC and Community House being placed under the aegis of the Pace Center, the Board's skepticism is reasonable. I too was skeptical of the move in the initial planning stages. But what the Board has failed to recognize is the degree to which the merger has involved input from all the relevant stakeholders, and especially students, as evidenced by a half-day session to iron out plans for the coming year, involving staff and student leaders from Pace, the SVC and Community House, the very day the Board's editorial was published.

Moreover, the reorganization will allow the SVC and Community House to maintain autonomy and pursue individual missions while being strengthened by the resources and collaborative potential of a common organizational home in the Pace Center. The Board refers specifically to a concern about the SVC's departure from the Office of Religious Life (ORL), but in reality, the SVC's mission has not been faith-based for decades. And any "inspiration" the organization might have drawn from its historical roots in religious activism will hardly be disrupted by the administrative shift to the Pace Center. Indeed, the physical location of the SVC in Murray-Dodge Hall, home of the ORL, will not change. Rather, the nondenominational mission of service the SVC has long adopted makes the organization a natural affiliate of Pace.

Community House's service-based mission makes it, too, a natural division of the Pace Center. As with the SVC, Community House's weekly projects will continue to operate autonomously. There will be little, if any, added "bureaucracy," but rather new institutional and financial support to allow for strengthened community outreach and better coordination with the SVC and other campus service organizations. In fact, Pace's resources have already allowed for a major improvement at Community House: a new program facilitator.

Finally, the Board implies in its conclusion that there is some tension between civic engagement and "learning." Nothing could be further from the truth. Civic engagement is about using learning to support the common good. As Woodrow Wilson explains in the "Princeton in the Nation's Service" speech to which the Board refers, "we are not put into this world to sit still and know; we are put into it to act." Civic engagement in a university setting is about training students to move beyond just learning to learning for the promotion of the common good.

As Wilson explains, American universities cannot be "mere seminaries of scholars. Most of them, the greatest of them and the most distinguished, were first of all great colleges before they became universities; and their task is twofold: the production of a great body of informed and thoughtful men and the production of a small body of trained scholars and investigators ... These two functions are not to be performed separately, but side by side, and are to be informed with one spirit, the spirit of enlightenment ... which values life more than it values the mere acquisitions of the mind."

If the Board rejects the University's focus on "civic engagement," "civic empowerment" and "community service," I challenge it to propose an alternative concept that responds to Wilson's call for a university that trains students to do more than "sit still and know," but rather, also, "to act." And I echo the Board's own question: "Who, after all, would in his or her right mind oppose 'civic engagement,' especially if it can [aim to] solve all the problems of society?" No one should oppose it, and that includes the 'Prince.' Philip Levitz '08 writes on behalf of the Pace Council for Civic Values, Community House and the SVC. He can be reached at plevitz@princeton.edu.