{"id":4129,"date":"2003-01-23T17:08:01","date_gmt":"2003-01-23T17:08:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4129"},"modified":"2003-01-23T17:08:01","modified_gmt":"2003-01-23T17:08:01","slug":"paid-public-service-etc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4129","title":{"rendered":"paid public service (etc.)"},"content":{"rendered":"

My first stop today was a meeting with people who counsel Maryland’s<\/p>\n

applicants for national scholarships, such as the Rhodes and Marshall.<\/p>\n

I advise our Rhodes applicants, partly because I want to level the playing<\/p>\n

field between this state university and the private institutions that<\/p>\n

win most of the awards. I served on the Rhodes Trust’s selection committee<\/p>\n

in the early 1990s and can give our applicants good advice. It’s also<\/p>\n

an opportunity to push for more paid public service <\/b>at Maryland.<\/p>\n

Our applicants are often at a disadvantage because they must work 40 hours<\/p>\n

a week for money, which is not the case at well-endowed private universities.<\/p>\n

However, this liability actually looks like an advantage when one realizes<\/p>\n

that public service shouldn’t be a discretionary, volunteer activity that<\/p>\n

is sandwiched between work, family, and leisure time; it should rather<\/p>\n

be an aspect of our paid, professional lives. (See www.publicwork.org<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

Many of our students are idealistic but not rich, so they have found ways<\/p>\n

to be paid for working in government or the nonprofit sector. Others have<\/p>\n

turned ordinary jobs into public-service opportunities. For instance,<\/p>\n

one recent candidate worked at a bank where she organized an important<\/p>\n

outreach program. This was an impressive achievement that predicts a lifetime<\/p>\n

of public service. I have been arguing that we should encourage, recognize,<\/p>\n

and reward such work—both because it is the right thing to do and<\/p>\n

because it is a good long-term strategy for Maryland to win prestigious<\/p>\n

scholarships.<\/p>\n

Incidentally, there is pending<\/p>\n

legislation<\/a> that would force colleges to use more of their federal<\/p>\n

work-study funds to pay for off-campus jobs with a service element. This<\/p>\n

was originally a major purpose of the work-study program, but today colleges<\/p>\n

spend just seven percent of their funds for off-campus employment. (They<\/p>\n

prefer their subsidized student workers to distribute their department<\/p>\n

mail and clean cafeteria dishes.)<\/p>\n

Later in the day, amid much practical work involving The Civic Mission<\/p>\n

of Schools<\/i>, I made a <\/a>showing<\/p>\n

the population of Prince George’s County, by race, since 1940. There was<\/p>\n

a huge egress of White people starting at just the same time as busing<\/p>\n

(1971). Of course, the mere departure of White people is not necessarily<\/p>\n

a bad thing, nor was busing necessarily the cause. But it’s food for thought,<\/p>\n

and we will bring the graph to class next week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}