By Steven Michels
What today's students are really doing while they're away at college.

Peruse the mission statement of your favorite college or university and you are likely to find references to community service. In the vernacular of the academy, it's called "service-learning." (Christians used to call a similar notion doing "good works," but we won't get into that here.) In practice, this usually means soup kitchens, housing projects, or literacy campaigns-all activities motivated by a certain brand of politics. The idea is that students need to be engaged in the community or on campus in order to facilitate learning and realize the particular educational goals of the institution.

Universities typically consider their attention to service a selling point for prospective students. Sometimes service is required of extra-curricular groups in order for them to receive university funding. Professors take it seriously, too. Their courses often include service-learning requirements, and syllabi detail how this sort of activity advances the objectives of the course. (You can imagine how the business of assessing students might be problematic.) In November, proponents will hold an international conference on service-learning and its connection to moral and civic education. (For some reason, the conference is in New Orleans, not exactly a city known for service or morality.) And service-learning is making its way from the campus to the playground, as it becomes more common in the K-12 curriculum.

The prime mover behind this trend is Ernest Boyer. In his speech "A College of Quality," Boyer said: "We should recognize that scholarship means the discovery of knowledge through research but also we should recognize that scholarship means integrating knowledge, and let us also recognize the scholarship of applying knowledge, finding ways to relate information to contemporary problems, and above all let us recognize the scholarship of presenting knowledge through advising, counseling, and teaching." Boyer intends to serve as a wrecking ball for the proverbial Ivory Tower. The goal, as Boyer sees it, is not only the service of individual students, but a completely "engaged campus," where-to evoke the title of a recent book inspired by Boyer's model-colleges and universities serve as citizens.

There is much to be said about the respectability and righteousness of this position, and we should be grateful to everyone who works to realize Boyer's vision. Nevertheless, there are some problems with aspects of this movement that have gone virtually unnoticed, particularly among those chanting the mantra of service-learning.

The main concern, as I see it, is when service is made mandatory. It's estimated that nearly 10% of all colleges and universities require service of some sort for graduation, and this trend is undoubtedly on the rise. This is Boyer at work, too. "We conclude that today's undergraduates urgently need to see the relationship between what they learn and how they live," Boyer said. "Specifically we recommend that every student complete a service project-involving volunteer work in the community or at the college-as an integral part of his or her undergraduate experience. The goal is to help students to see that not only are they autonomous individuals but also members of a larger community to which they are accountable." Boyer stops short of mandating service, but that's the logical application of his thought.

By definition, however, volunteerism and charity cannot be imposed. When students are required to do service, moral development can never be the result. Certainly, service should be made available to every student who wants it. I would go so far as to say that universities are negligent if they do not provide students with opportunities to serve their community. But regardless of how it is organized, service must remain optional.

This new approach to learning masks an insidious indoctrination. A vast majority of what qualifies as service-learning is politically motivated. When we speak of academic politics, of course, we should understand that to mean left-to-extreme-left politics. Schools with religious affiliations mask their politics with the language of faith and "social justice." In any event, much service-learning is not so much motivated by a notion of charity, as much as it is a way for professors to get students to understand the evils of capitalism and American foreign policy. In short, service-learning is a subtle but clever form of indoctrination.

Mandatory service raises other issues. For one thing, students who go away to school are forced-yes, let's say forced-to work in communities in which they may have no connection, save for the arbitrariness of geography. Also, students might prefer, quite understandably, to spend their free time with their family, especially if that requires travel, or read a book unrelated to their current studies. In any event, students must be given freedom, intellectual and moral, if they are ever to mature and become responsible citizens.

In discussions with students, I have identified two general views on service. The typical college student views the imposition of service as another hoop through which he or she has to jump in order to get a diploma. Other students, perhaps more thoughtfully, do learn something from their time spent serving the community. But what students usually discover, according to what they have shared with me, is that they are glad to be in college, because they have no desire to experience poverty first-hand. In a sense, community-service makes students more focused on their own careers and only reinforces the egoism that service is designed to correct.

In many respects, service-learning requirements make it clear that today's universities and colleges have lost their sense of purpose. In the place of classic literature and academic rigor, service-learning becomes a tool for institutions of higher learning-or liberal faculty members, rather-to make students into activists. But enlightenment must precede activism, and this is where today's colleges are failing most expertly.

If service-learning has a patron saint in Boyer, then Allan Bloom must exist as his opposite. (Yes, the ghost of Allan Bloom looms large in today's university, if for no other reason than no one has responded to his searching critique of higher education.) In its greatest articulation, liberal education means-in the words of Bloom- education proper to "a human being and a citizen." In sum, too much attention is paid to having students do something, and many seem to have lost sight of the fact that students must first learn something.

Colleges and universities are not citizens, nor can they be. We can't, and shouldn't, expect students to take an interest in political processes, when the young have, from their perspective, so little vested in political outcomes. Students may be concerned with terrorism or national security, but only because those issues affect them directly. Consequently, try as we might, no one can make students rush to the barricades, particularly on behalf of someone else's politics. The young will always be relatively disinterested in current events. (As a professor of political science, I could tell you stories about the political knowledge of freshman that would dangle your chads.) Given a bit of time, and much patience, however, most of them will come around.

Pedagogically speaking, service-learning is an idea whose time has come. As a professor who habitually falls into the nasty, and amazingly under appreciated, habit of lecturing for minutes on end, it's useful to remember that mastery involves application. Socrates, teacher par excellence, said that knowledge is useful for its own sake, but I can't fault our students for wanting something more practical than that to put on their résumé. (It's a good thing that service wasn't required of Plato.)

The Ivory Tower, I would argue, is a wonderful place to spend an afternoon, if not a lifetime. But I agree that we should not keep our students chained to its cool and sometimes remote walls. The goal of educators should be to let students chose their own view.

Steven Michels is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.