Serving Up a Better Harvard

The world’s latest truism must be how everything has changed in only a few short weeks. The calamities of Sept. 11 immediately swept aside all the old realities, rendered the other news of the day insignificant and antiquated any opinions or judgments that didn’t take the bombings into account. When I originally wrote this editorial three weekends ago, I intended to emphasize the importance of service to a proper education. But after the horrific drama of the last few weeks, unlike so many other perspectives, mine has only been strengthened. There are now more examples than ever of individuals and groups whose responses to Sept. 11 reveal our basic human gift to serve others, and more than ever I am convinced that a Harvard education should nurture this element of our character.

President Lawrence H. Summers is centrally placed to restore, reform and remake Harvard—a responsibility that requires his own best intentions and calls upon the wise counsel of the rest of the University. As my own time as an undergraduate winds down, I’d like to share with him the one fundamental insight that I have distilled from my Harvard experience, a sentiment I happen to share with many others who have passed through here. I feel strongly that if any one truth, one iota of Veritas, should guide Harvard under his administration, it should be Woodrow Wilson’s observation that “it is not learning but the spirit of service that will give a college place in the public annals of the nation.”

On the surface, we have reason to hope that Summers would agree with Wilson, a fellow public servant and university president. You may have read in the fall greetings of Dean of the College Harry R. Lewis ’68 how, for instance, Summers has already spent a few hours with students and staff at Phillips Brooks House and visited the Mission Hill Summer Program, one of the dozen urban camps staffed and run by the Phillips Brooks House Association (PBHA). In addition, several weeks ago he held audience at the Public Service Leadership Summit, a three-day event sponsored by the FAS Committee on Public Service that brought together about 25 student leaders on campus. Admitting that he was impressed with our public service endeavors considering that we could be otherwise advancing our careers, he raised and answered some questions that sparked much discussion among the summit participants about the role of service in the lives of undergraduates and in the life of the University.

We agreed that “public service” is necessarily a broad term. This was the underlying belief of the summit organizers, who selected students not just from PBHA and other, more typical “public service” programs but also from publications and ethnic groups who serve the common good. But many of us took issue with Summers’ skepticism about the public service value of advocacy programs. We argued that advocacy groups like the Progressive Student Labor Movement, when they provoke discussion and the pursuit of truth, are a form of public service, and that of all the institutions in the world, a university dedicated to moral actions and social justice has a responsibility to support—or at least not to discourage—students who stimulate debate on these vital issues. Harvard should take the lead in instilling in students both the ability and the will to spring into action when action is needed—and action is always needed. In short, I consider it Summers’ duty as president to challenge undergraduates and the rest of the University to use the many opportunities available here to heed, in their own fashion, the words inscribed on Dexter Gate: “Go forth to serve thy country and thy kind.”

I am hardly alone in believing undergraduate public service to be essential to Harvard’s interest in producing responsible citizens and leaders. Scores of programs available chiefly through PBHA and the Public Service Network provide invaluable experiences to hundreds of us who are invested in communities outside Harvard’s gates, leading us not only to be skeptical of Harvard’s presence in some of them, but also to become committed to making for ourselves a life and not just a living. Recognizing the distinction is no small feat, and for me, it has meant abandoning many assumptions I held as a student in awe of Harvard and, in the process, delaying my graduation. Why does the Harvard experience, featuring brilliant scholars and endless resources, not help us see the difference more easily? Perhaps it is no coincidence that, save some privileged encounters with exceptional teachers like Agee Professor of Social Ethics Robert Coles ’50, the Rev. Peter Gomes, and Timothy McCarthy ’93, I have found truth not within Harvard Yard but in the PBHA programs that have led me beyond.

In this, my last semester, I have high expectations for the change Summers will bring to Harvard. I hope he encourages students, faculty, administrators and workers alike to find ways of combining knowledge with virtue and to find our own personal ways of serving others. But the ultimate responsibility for insisting on the priorities of this University lies with the students. There are many avenues for social action—mentoring and after-school programs as well as advocacy and peer counseling—and I was gratified to know of so many new students seeking those avenues through the First-Year Urban Program and the First-Year Day of Service, and to see them streaming through the PBHA open houses. We should strive with them and with relief effort participants to engage more regularly in activities of “compassion and consequence,” a phrase Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles recently used to characterize PBHA.

It is never too late to dedicate one’s time and energies to some form of public service. With images and lessons from the last few weeks promising to remain with us for years to come, it is more than ever incumbent upon us all to lead lives of understanding and compassion, to heal the suffering of others and to confront division, prejudice and hatred in this land and beyond. It is especially important at this time, when in the aftermath of the tragedy on Sept. 11 we have been forced to acknowledge again the presence of racial intolerance in America. I hope President Summers joins the students in articulating the link between a Harvard education and the progress of social justice, whether by broadening the dialogue on the meaning of a Harvard education or by expanding opportunities for service learning. Together we may convince the rest of the Corporation that the ultimate business of the University—even as the University seems more and more itself a business—is to serve society.

Trevor Cox ’01-’02 is president of the Phillips Brooks House Association.