A New Kind of Service

While some students may be afraid of the possibility of a military draft, a Tufts expert believes that compulsory national service may be worth it for both young adults and the country.

Medford/Somerville, Mass. [10.14.04] The ongoing war in Iraq and the upcoming presidential election have focused attention on the issue of a national draft. While the country isn’t expected to begin military call-ups anytime soon, the dean of Tufts’ University College of Citizenship and Public Service says it may be time to institute a policy of compulsory national service that gives young people a choice between civic or military service.

“I think the alternative that you lay out of what, in effect, would be a new kind of draft is not only a good idea. It's also a practical idea. And it's an idea that the majority of Americans will support,” Dean Rob Hollister, the first recipient of the John DiBiaggio Chair in Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts, recently told Aaron Brown on CNN NewsNight.

While some college students interviewed by CNN expressed mixed feelings about the possibility of a draft, Hollister is convinced that many young adults are interested in new opportunities for community and civilian service – including “without question,” he adds, Tufts students.

“I think one of the best sources of evidence about the appetite, about the willingness of young people to serve… are the deans of undergraduate admissions at colleges across the country,” Hollister told CNN. “In the thousands of admissions applications that we read carefully each year that have shown over the last 12 or 15 years a very clear rise in the proportion of young people who already have done significant community service and who are expecting that to be part of their college experience and beyond.”

Hollister also cited a 2003 study in which 56 percent of 1,001 high school seniors surveyed would support a national service system that would allow young adults to choose between military and civilian service.

With the war in Iraq requiring active duty call-ups from National Guard and Reserve forces, speculation about the renewal of the draft has been high. It has been a topic of discussion in the presidential debates, where President George W. Bush has asserted that “the military will be an all-volunteer Army” and Senator John Kerry has accused the Bush administration of running a “back-door draft.”

Te cost of enlisting young adults into compulsory national service may be high, but Hollister believes the ends would justify the means.

“The benefits of that expense would be extraordinary both in terms of giving us the increased number of young people that we need in the military, but our urgent need in society for much larger numbers of people to help tackle our most critical community problems,” Hollister told CNN.

Hollister and his colleagues are engaged in many projects aimed at promoting active citizenship both at Tufts and in the surrounding community. Among the University College’s current initiatives are a campus-wide get-out-the-vote program and a film exhibit on the Asian diaspora. On October 1, the University College hosted a conference on higher education and civic engagement.