Service as a habit, not an extracurricular

By Henry Bair     9/23/15 5:06am

As Rice students, we are repeatedly reminded of the degree to which the university serves the local community. And for the most part, we embrace that reputation happily enough. The barrage of notices about service opportunities and large number of students who volunteer in some form conveniently provide an illusion that perhaps we do all care for those we perceive as disadvantaged and disenfranchised.

As a chair of the Rice Student Volunteer Program, I interact with many students who treat civic engagement as more of an extracurricular activity than a central aspect of the Rice experience; they punch in and out for the two hours they allot to volunteering every week and give it no consideration in the interim. At worst, civic engagement is used merely to bolster a CV. But it can be a much more integral part of our lives irrespective of what we study and what interests us, whether it be music ensembles, drama troupes, sports teams or heritage organizations. Yet why should it?

Civic engagement, in my experience, gives us a more accurate grasp of reality, and presents us opportunities to more comprehensively fathom how social issues we otherwise only learn about from our courses and the media impact human lives. Contrasting with the popular but flawed notion that civic engagement exists to allocate resources from the privileged to the underprivileged, the true spirit of civic engagement is a desire to meaningfully connect with needy individuals in our community. It should be an exercise of our empathy and compassion to actively improve the lives of those around us, practiced as a way of life, of seeing and feeling the world, and not as a diversion punctuating our day-to-day academic routine. “Making the world a better place” may appear a vapid banality, but its underlying tenets of solicitude and charity, honed through civic engagement, should infuse our campus ethos and become unconscious instincts informing our thoughts, decisions and actions.

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Civic engagement can be just as satisfying as conquering a demanding physical chemistry exam, or as fulfilling as completing a rigorous paper on the themes in “Ulysses.” It promotes a true sense of pride more enduring than an A in calculus provides, and an awareness of responsibility more substantial than being president of a student group produces. We discover we can make a difference, and this realization fosters tremendous self-confidence and self-efficacy that easily spreads to other facets of our lives. Civic engagement is thus a greatly reciprocal venture: Rice and its students are threads in the larger fabric of the Houston community, and the relationships we form with those we work with both nourish our personal growth and sustain positive changes in this community.

I’m not claiming civic engagement is some kind of duty — in fact, the exact opposite is true — or that we are somehow morally inferior if we don’t volunteer. Even so, it is lamentable how many individuals I know who chose to forgo civic engagement and later looked back wistfully, conscious of having had and lost some magnificent inner capacity for “making the world a better place.”

The four years we spend at college are the best time to cultivate a habit of service, for we are given numerous opportunities to perform a surfeit of service activities spanning all varieties of civic engagement. For example, the Center for Civic Leadership is dedicated to challenging students’ leadership abilities through civic engagement with established community partners, while the Rice Student Volunteer Program now accepts student proposals to sponsor innovative civic outreach initiatives.

Many of us are volunteering. But we can do better. We should do better. It’s not enough to participate in civic engagement; we should be living a civically engaged life. All this can be initiated by embracing civic engagement as a core component of our education. This is the foundation upon which we can become stewards of the quality of life for ourselves and others. Looking for opportunities to make positive changes and solving problems with our wits and strengths ultimately give us a lasting sense of worth and happiness. Let us reinstitute a Rice education imbued with civic engagement and realize the infinite promises to our worldview this can afford us.

Henry Bair is a Baker College junior

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