INC NEWS - Community Service Is Not Punishment

[kjj1 at duke.edu]

The recently revised lacrosse team mission statement includes a commitment 
to community service as a positive way of connecting to and learning from 
others:

"Community: As visible members on campus, we have an opportunity to 
strengthen our community through active participation and service. In 
giving of ourselves, we can enrich the lives of others around us. Through 
this process, we might also know the reciprocal benefits of engaging with a 
diverse world."

A team commitment to "engaging with a diverse world" is probably especially 
important in this case, a much needed corrective to the tendency of the 
"social cohesion" of lacrosse culture to become "pack[-like] or "clannish" 
(lacrosse ad hoc committee report). Learning to know, understand, and care 
about and for people who are different from us is an important component of 
education and of self-knowledge and personal growth. I hope the team 
genuinely embraces the values in their mission statement and the 
prohibition of harassment based on gender, race, and sexual orientation in 
their team standard. These values provide a much better foundation for 
positive relations with others at Duke, in Durham, and beyond, than the 
values that gave rise to the events of March 13.

What gives me pause, however, is that when "community service" appears 
elsewhere in the team documents, it appears as a punishment (see "minimum 
penalties" below). The lacrosse team is not alone in viewing community 
service as a form of punishment for behavioral or legal infractions. 
Community service is used this way in student, civil, and criminal judicial 
procedures.

I would like to argue for a distinction between community service performed 
out of a commitment to civic, educational, or moral values and service 
performed as restitution or atonement for actions and behaviors that have 
violated the community in some way.

Community service, ideally, should be entered into willingly out of a 
desire to connect and contribute to one's community in a positive way. 
Community restitution, on the other hand, is not usually entered into 
willingly or positively. It is about accountability, about people somehow 
coming to terms with, repairing, or countering the negative impact their 
behaviors have had on others.

I know this may seem like hair splitting or semantics to some, so I'll give 
just one brief example of the kinds of things at stake in maintaining the 
distinction between community restitution and community service.

In recent years, Old West Durham Neighborhood Association has organized 
over 25 clean-ups of Cedar Hill cemetery. A relative rarity in the south as 
an integrated cemetery, many of those buried in Cedar Hill worked in the 
Erwin Mills. These cemetery clean-ups have attracted many volunteers, 
including community residents, descendants of people buried there, and Duke 
students. These volunteers have had a variety of motivations--residents 
wanting to contribute to a community effort, Duke students wanting to do 
something positive in Durham, people with interests in history or geography 
or native plants, those wanting to honor their ancestors by tending their 
graves. Imagine yourself at one of these clean-ups with this group of 
volunteers. Think about how you might try to engage with and respond to the 
other volunteers, the conversations you might have, the topics that might 
come up, the stories you might hear or share.

Now, hypothetically, throw in to the mix a Duke student assigned this 
"service" as a penalty for yelling "thank your grandfather for my cotton 
shirt" to an African American Durham resident. Clearly, cleaning up this 
particular cemetery would be a fitting way for such a person to begin the 
process of personal accountability and restitution.

But wouldn't this process perhaps be enhanced if it were in the open--if 
the other volunteers could participate consciously in it? Or could decide 
for themselves how to interact in the context? What might these other 
volunteers, those engaged in genuine community service--someone whose 
working-class, white, mill-worker grandfather was buried there, or an 
African American Durham resident, or a fellow Duke student--say or do 
differently if the distinctions between service and restitution were clear? 
How would having more transparency about the restitution process change 
things for the person involved? If they had to be open about how they came 
to be cleaning a cemetery and had to deal with other people's responses?