Applied Politics 101

Every Monday, Rebecca L. Goldberg '00 travels to Blessed Sacrament School in Jamaica Plains to teach second graders about peaceful conflict resolution efforts.

Every Thursday, Goldberg travels to Dorchester to tutor a young Vietnamese child in English.

And every Friday, she again travels to Dorchester for more tutoring.

But while Goldberg volunteers 10 hours a week, she says her civic participation does not extend into the political realm.

"I am civic minded. I want to work in public schools but I wouldn't want to intern on the Hill," she says.

But Goldberg, who could traditionally be labeled 'politically uninvolved,' she says she distances herself from politics--like most students.

In a survey conducted by The Crimson of roughly 300 students, nearly 94 percent of students say they agree or strongly agree that it is important to vote. Yet., only 77 percent are registered to vote and only 22 percent actually voted in elections last year. So, are Harvard students dispassionate ?

Not really. Thomas Professor of Government and Sociology Theda Skocpol says civic engagement extends from volunteering to political action to even going to Fenway Park with friends.

And with over 25 percent of students volunteering through Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA), from Mission Hill to the Boston Refugee Youth Enrichment (BRYE) program to CHANCE, Harvard students pour their time more into volunteering--which they say is as valuable as other forms of civic engagement.

Real World Problems

When Vincent Pan '96 arrived at Harvard eight years ago, he became involved with volunteer service through PBHA. Four years later, he founded, Heads Up, a Washington, D.C. program where college students tutor inner-city children.

For Pan, the most immediate way he says he felt he would change his community--at Harvard and Washington, D.C.--was not by agigating for political action, but rather lending a hand.

He initially became involved with the Mission Hill After-School Program, which provides classroom assistance, as well as weekly activities, to children in public housing projects of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston.

"We would take the bus, and we saw how the neighborhoods changed--passing by the mansions of Cambridge, through poorer neighborhoods of Boston and finally to the housing projects of Mission Hill," Pan, a former PBHA president, says.

"It became clear that resources weren't distributed equally. And not only did they not have the equality of opportunity, but they had obstacles in front of them," he says.

Michael E. Thakur '01, the incoming PBHA vice-president, says he understands Pan's desire to skip the political process to immediately initiate change.

"Politics involves delayed gratification. The legislation one works for may not get passed or the candidate one supports may not get elected," Thakur says.

"Volunteer services is more immediate. It involves more human-human interaction. You have the chance to watch people grow, and that appeals to people," he says.

But despite Pan's belief in volunteer service, he says he believes societal invovlement is the greater need.

"I think the commitment to the cause, and the means of affecting the cause differs as much as people do. Skills vary from teaching to public interest law to elected office. The key is getting people to commit lives to affect society," Pan says.

Volunteers Who Read The Times

George T. Hill '00, who is also a Crimson editor, says he has had a volunteer zeal since high school, but does not disconnect himself from political life .

"All of my activities in high school were informed by the idea that everybody needs to leave everything better than it was when they found it," Hill says.

"Going to Harvard I knew that neither student government nor [a political organization] would be quite as practical for me as some kind of direct social service."

Hill was involved in a prisoner education program and is the current summer director of BRYE.

But he also considers himself politically involved, frequently listening to National Public Radio and reading the New York Times.

"I also just sent in my request for an absentee ballot from the great state of New Hampshire," Hill says.

"The same beliefs that leads me to work in social service are going to inform my feelings: a need to be politically involved," he says.

Hill plans to involve both of these areas after college, as he is considering becoming a public interest lawyer to focus on prison reform and education system improvement.

Joseph M. Garland '00, outgoing president of PBHA, also professes political involvement, even though he has dedicated his college career to volunteering and is pursuing a career in human services.

"Going and working in after school programs is a good thing to do, but we also have to work on the long-term goals so that those problems no longer exist," Garland says.

On the Campaign Trail

Luke P. McLoughlin'00 is not volunteering in Mission Hill or Jamaica Plains. And he is not an Institute of Politics wonk.

Instead he organized the trip of 100 students to New Hampshire for the weekend to campaign for Bill Bradley.

McLoughlin says that he has been politically involved throughout his time at Harvard, writing for Perspective, the liberal monthly, during his sophomore year.

"I got into this activity [the Presidential campaign] because of this particular candidate," says McLoughlin, who is the head of Harvard Students for Bill Bradley.

He also emphasized the intersection between volunteer work and government activity.

"If you engage in volunteering in something like Project Health, you can't but bump into a place where you think the government could do more or could do something better."

Over the course of his involvement with the Bradley campaign, he says he has come to see the best possibilities of politics.

"Working for Bradley and hearing him hash out positions made me more optimistic about what we as individuals and as students can do to help others especially through the political process," he says.

The Unwilling Witness

Agee Professor of Social Ethics Robert Coles '50, a PBHA volunteer as a student, says that the connection between community service and politics have been intimately intertwined with the story of his life.

And while he agrees with Skocpol's wide definition of civic engagement, he says volunteering is easier to become involved in than politics.

After documenting hunger children in the 1960s as a physician, Robert F. Kennedy '48 convinced Coles and the other physicians to testify in front of a Senate committee.

"The issue is not only service or research, but also the politics of change and how you implement needed medical or social changes."

Despite this experience Coles has always felt that he was more comfortable with service that with political activity.

"It was much more important for me to do the tutoring in the North End than it was to get involved with political campaigns. It never has been something I know about or know how to do," he says.

Coles says that all these activities require personal reflection to reveal their deeper meaning.

"In a sense we were becoming more civicly engaged. It shows the different ways that people have become involved in the nation's life--tutoring, working in clinics, organizing ballots, going on the campaign trail," Coles says.

Building Up

Both Stanfeld Professor for International Peace Robert Putnam and Skocpol say they believe involvement with one's community--on all the different levels of community--extends far beyond volunteer work.

"One aspect of civic participation is people in good shape helping the vulnerable," Skocpol says. "But it is also people coming to work together, to have fun, to influence politics and legislation to espouse a particular view of the world."

And Skocpol says some civic activities must be aimed at building one's community rather than just helping others.

"A lot of people are volunteering or creating new service projects. But the purpose is to provide some social service to the poor, to the disadvantaged, to somebody else," she says.

Skocpol along with Putnam also warns of the dangers of entirely divorcing community service and political involvement.

Putnam says volunteering can sometimes act as too much of a band-aid for deeper social problems.

"But if you only consider your obligation to society to provide service to other individuals, it can too easily lead to a noblesse oblige--providing charity to other individuals without understanding the social forces that produce these problems," he says.

Skocpol, as well as Putnam, suggest politics is one important avenue for solving these problems.

"The poor and working class surrounding Harvard are very fortunate because they have a lot of volunteer programs but you have to ask what's going to happen to all the communities that aren't next to big universities," Skocpol says. "Politics is probably better for that."

Looking Backward?

But Putman stresses that any type of civic engagement--which he says is at a low-point--is helpful in the long term.

Putnam also compared today's lack of participation in civic institutions to a similar situation a century ago, when most of today's institutions were founded.

"Most the founders of those organizations were just young people who got engaged in the problems of society and realized that the old ways weren't going to work, and they needed new ways," Putnam said.

And so while the initial impact of community volunteering is small, the potential to involve more and more people with society's problems perhaps could spark a similar revival.

"Some of the people who get engaged in service for other people will have it in them and become civic inventors and produce for the 21st century what was produced for the 20th century," he says. "It may come out of the experience of volunteering in Dorchester but it will go beyond it.