My first stop today was a meeting with people who counsel Maryland’s
applicants for national scholarships, such as the Rhodes and Marshall.
I advise our Rhodes applicants, partly because I want to level the playing
field between this state university and the private institutions that
win most of the awards. I served on the Rhodes Trust’s selection committee
in the early 1990s and can give our applicants good advice. It’s also
an opportunity to push for more paid public service at Maryland.
Our applicants are often at a disadvantage because they must work 40 hours
a week for money, which is not the case at well-endowed private universities.
However, this liability actually looks like an advantage when one realizes
that public service shouldn’t be a discretionary, volunteer activity that
is sandwiched between work, family, and leisure time; it should rather
be an aspect of our paid, professional lives. (See www.publicwork.org.)
Many of our students are idealistic but not rich, so they have found ways
to be paid for working in government or the nonprofit sector. Others have
turned ordinary jobs into public-service opportunities. For instance,
one recent candidate worked at a bank where she organized an important
outreach program. This was an impressive achievement that predicts a lifetime
of public service. I have been arguing that we should encourage, recognize,
and reward such workboth because it is the right thing to do and
because it is a good long-term strategy for Maryland to win prestigious
scholarships.
Incidentally, there is pending
legislation that would force colleges to use more of their federal
work-study funds to pay for off-campus jobs with a service element. This
was originally a major purpose of the work-study program, but today colleges
spend just seven percent of their funds for off-campus employment. (They
prefer their subsidized student workers to distribute their department
mail and clean cafeteria dishes.)
Later in the day, amid much practical work involving The Civic Mission
the population of Prince George’s County, by race, since 1940. There was
a huge egress of White people starting at just the same time as busing
(1971). Of course, the mere departure of White people is not necessarily
a bad thing, nor was busing necessarily the cause. But it’s food for thought,
and we will bring the graph to class next week.