I spent the morning discussing policies of the National

Alliance for Civic Education. The meeting was at the American Political

Science Association (APSA) headquarters near Dupont Circle in Washington.

I love the building, which is an elegant, Victorian, stone row house.

I think the architecture could be described as Byzantine Revival—there’s

an arch over the door carved with intricate plant forms. Inside, it’s

rather ramshackle: little rooms, piles of reports, filing cabinets that

don’t quite fit, window air-conditioning units. It reminds me of the houses

at the periphery of major universities that get turned into anthropology

departments or study-abroad offices.

Two draft articles have come across my desk lately indicating that people—especially

young people without a lot of education—are more likely to vote if

they receive a state voter guide in the mail. Washington and Oregon

produce guides that give space to every candidate to describe his or her

positions. Everyone (or every registered voter?) in the state gets one

automatically. I’m becoming a zealot for voter guides because they lower

the cost of acquiring information. They are also a form of campaign-finance

reform, because they subsidize communication with state money—equally

for all candidates—and thereby lower the value of each dollar of

private money. Finally, you can make the candidates who choose to participate

swear that their statements are truthful. Rep. Wes Cooley (R-OR) was convicted

of lying on official documents when he claimed in the voter guide

that he had served in the special forces in Korea, when he had done no

such thing.

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 work—both 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

of Schools, I made a showing

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.