I am conflicted in my criticism of our new Center for Community Engagement. On the one hand, it was only through a fellowship with the Center that I was able to spend a month in New Orleans this summer working with Habitat for Humanity, and it was good work. Inasmuch as I was directly helping someone to rebuild her life, the effort seems to justify itself and, in some sense, to lie beyond the sometimes abstract business of general criticism. On the other hand, I find myself strangely apprehensive about the sudden preeminence of the Center at the College, and the seemingly undisputed way in which it has assumed a central part in the Amherst experience. I worry that we never took the question of whether the Center really belongs at a liberal arts college quite seriously—that instead, the whole thing slipped in rather unnoticed, and that the significance of its arrival has, since, been precariously underestimated. I suspect part of the reason the question hasn’t been raised is that the answer seems too simple to make the effort worthwhile—of course a Center for Community Engagement belongs at the College—but to look into the relationship between engagement and the liberal arts will never be a simple thing, because to deal with that relationship is, in a basic way, to deal with the more general (and more persistent) question of the liberal arts as a whole—of its basic purpose and of its promise to the surrounding world.  For instance, let’s assume for a moment that performing a service for an individual in need of that service, and without payment, is a good thing. Simple enough, I hope, but if we accept this premise, we become obliged to take a more critical look at the liberal arts education we receive from the College (not a bad thing), and try to determine if the “good” it affords is as good as the “good” of the community service. In other words, if we accept that Habitat work is good, then the question becomes whether reading John Donne is as valuable to the individual (and through the individual to society) as working for Habitat for Humanity? Or if not John Donne, any sort of academic study at Amherst College? If our answer is no–which, perhaps, at first it must be–we then have to ask ourselves, what it is about reading John Donne, or even coming to the College in the first place, that justifies our being here for four years and not being in New Orleans rebuilding house. There seem to me to be three immediate options. On the one hand, it is conceivable–though bizarre–to accept Habitat work as “good” without feeling an obligation to engage the problem of affordable housing. If short-term self-interest were the guiding force in our lives, we might see the suffering of the people in New Orleans, be aware of our potential to relieve some of that suffering, and, because the cause did not immediately concern us, we might still feel no need to travel to the place and help. On the other hand, we might clearly see our potential for doing good work (being the robust twenty-somethings that we are) and perceive that potential being wasted in the slow and more introspective movement of the liberal arts education. In other words, we might conclude that, yes, John Donne has written a very many pretty things, and even that we enjoy reading them, but that our reading them represents, in some fundamental way, an indulgence–an accident of our privilege–and, as it is only pretty rather than helpful, that we have no real right to our inheritance and should leave the books for various hammers.  On the last hand, and differently, we might have had some experience at the College—perhaps, here:
I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I Did till we loved ? were we not weaned till then? But sucked on country pleasures, childishly….
That, though it seemed unrelated at the time, and centuries apart from the storm-beaten city, lent something to us, in access to ourselves, that made more vivid both the suffering we would come to witness and our obligations entangled therein. It seems true that each hand has his indulgence and that the burden of the original problem must be shared across all three, for the problem is complicated: it is that I could tell you, had I never read a word of Donne, that I would not have seen New Orleans as vividly, but I cannot show you what the difference is, what it feels like, or what its different mandates are–only that I went, and it seemed to me upon return more and more certain, that our sympathies will only ever be keen as our imaginations, and that imagination is elsewhere than our service won.  In any event, it is no longer a question of whether we should have a Center or not. We have a Center, and presumably (barring some great scandal!) the effort spent on the Center was not done so provisionally. I believe, for better or worse, it is here to stay, if for no other reason than that the vague intentions of a vague majority have, historically, sunk deep roots. However, we should all at least realize that a serious commitment to a Center for Community Engagement (and if we are to commit, it should be seriously), if accepted, must represent a significant redirection of the resources of the College (resources, in the most general sense)—perhaps towards progress, possibly elsewhere, but at least away from what has been a bedrock commitment to the measured, contemplative, and imaginative growth of the individual. The commitment would also represent a revision in our understanding of the purpose of our own education: whether it is to prepare us for the immediate cries in our world, the hungry now, and poor, or whether some withdrawal from the world–which might also be, originally, a commitment to that world–is necessary at intervals in our development, in order that we might hear cries clearly and feel their purpose deeply.