Gutmann pledges to add 400 civic-service opportunities

Penn President Amy Gutmann pledged Friday to create an additional 400 civic-service opportunities for Penn students.

The new opportunities will help prepare students for service in a variety of fields, expand the reach of Penn's service programs and enhance the intellectual impact that civic engagement already provides, she said.

The announcement came during a Friday luncheon in New York, where the presidents of Tulane and Duke universities, the president of Bentley College and the chairman of the board of Tufts University pledged similar commitments of service for their universities.

The service opportunities, Gutmann said, would be phased in gradually over the next four years, and will be divided among the Fox Leadership Program, the Civic House and the Netter Center for Community Partnerships.

Though the exact details of what the jobs will be have not yet been fleshed out, Ira Harkavy, director of the Netter Center, said the opportunities would most likely include more academically based service-learning courses, internships, in-school opportunities in West Philadelphia and expansion of programs both nationally and internationally.

Currently, about 40 percent of Penn's undergraduates participate in some form of community service.

Speaking at the ServiceNation summit in New York, a two-day conference where academic, nonprofit, media and political leaders discussed the potential of volunteer and civic opportunities to address America's social challenges, Gutmann tied the creation of service positions to Penn's founder, Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin "believed that the great aim of education in a democracy was to foster in students 'an inclination joined with an ability to serve Mankind, one's Country, Friends and Family,'" she quoted.

With the new commitments, she said, "we will embed the ethos of civic engagement more deeply in the life of the University."

Harkavy, who attended the summit with Gutmann, said the new opportunities also connect closely with Gutmann's Penn Compact, a blueprint of her vision for the University. Two of the tenets of the Penn Compact are local and global engagement.

"The design of the program is to advance the civic engagement of Penn's undergraduate and graduate students, but really to connect [service] to the core academic mission of the institution," he said.

David Grossman, director of Civic House, said he was pleased with the decision.

"We hope this [announcement] will be a great catalyst to involve more students" in both broader and deeper ways, he said.

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