Service or self-serving?
By
Each year the University requires all incoming freshmen to participate in a day of service during their first full weekend on campus after orientation.
This day of service - dubbed Building Community: Serving to Learn - not only helps to unify the freshman class, but also enforces the University's core values: teaching faith and service. It aims to teach freshmen the practices of sustainability and service in the surrounding community.
This year, however, the University taught 100 freshmen how to be self-serving by failing to send them outside the bubble of The Bluff.
These freshmen were required to do yard work behind Merlo Field and for the University-owned houses lining Willamette Blvd., as well as pull ivy behind the tennis center.
This service activity blatantly went against the point of The Building Community: Serving to Learn Program: to get freshmen out into the community.
While some freshmen did not mind helping Physical Plant others were disappointed they could not help make an impact elsewhere. They too thought their service would be more beneficial outside of the UP community.
Instead, the University could have hired student workers to do the landscaping. There are plenty of students still looking for work-study positions.
Before requiring unpaid students to give the University a cosmetic uplift, the administration should have first considered people outside the UP community who need basic things done. The freshmen's efforts would have been better spent serving food to the homeless or spending time with the elderly.
Building Community: Serving to Learn isn't solely about the UP community. It is also about showing students how to reach out beyond our comfortable abode here on The Bluff.
