Bates College has been named to the 2009 President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll with Distinction. This is the highest federal recognition available to a college for its commitment to volunteerism, service-learning and civic engagement.

This honor recognizes Bates for a multitude of effective programs that seek to sustain relationships between the college and the Lewiston-Auburn community.Bates is one of 115 colleges and universities named to the Distinction List and 621 schools named as honor roll members. Honorees are chosen based on, in part, the scope and innovation of service projects, percentage of student participation in service activities, incentives for service and the extent to which the school offers academic service-learning courses.

The Corporation for National and Community Service oversees the honor roll in collaboration with the federal departments of Education and Housing and Urban Development, as well as the Campus Compact and the American Council on Education.

“I’m not surprised that Bates has been named to the President’s Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, but I am delighted that our work has been recognized,” says Georgia Nigro, a psychology professor at Bates and interim director of the Harward Center for Community Partnerships, which coordinates college-community initiatives.

“Bates students, staff and faculty at the Harward Center work collaboratively and creatively with many local and global community partners. I see Bates people tackling pressing social needs every day.”

The center partners with more than 125 community organizations, from schools and cultural institutions to nonprofit organizations. Students may apply for short- and long-term grants to pursue community-based research and work-study.

Each year one-third of Bates students take community-based learning courses that integrate community projects with academic learning. Each year, two-thirds of Bates students work in the community, mentoring schoolchildren, planting community gardens, supporting seniors in assisted living or monitoring invasive species.

“I have always been a strong believer in community service and giving back in order to learn about one’s surroundings,” says senior Krystina Zaykowski of Brooklyn, N.Y., coordinator of the Longley School Mentoring initiative. “There is more to the world than college, and you can learn about that through community service.”

During the past three academic years, the number of students participating in community-based learning increased by more than 26 percent, and the number of community partners increased by 40 percent.

Bates’ Community Volunteerism and Student Leadership Development Program helps students find volunteer opportunities at public schools and social service agencies. A group of students called Student Volunteer Fellows fill key leadership roles, organizing volunteer programs with each fellow responsible for a different initiative.

For example, in-school mentoring programs allow Bates students to work with children in the Lewiston-Auburn public school system. Mentors annually contribute roughly 2,300 hours of service, visiting their mentees weekly throughout the academic year at the child’s school for an hour at a time.

The Corporation for National and Community Service is a federal agency that leads President Obama’s national call-to-service initiative, United We Serve, and engages more than 5 million Americans in service through its Senior Corps, AmeriCorps and Learn and Serve America programs.

I’ve always been interested in politics, and I like to be involved in my community. I’m a school board member in my hometown and I make the 3 ½-hour trip once a month for meetings. Here, I’ve been with the Bates Democrats and the Bates College Student Government all four years.

Last year I was elected Student Government president. Our most challenging issue is disbursing $300,000 among the more than 100 student clubs. Our decision has a direct impact on the community. That’s one of the most interesting things about Bates: we have a voice in important matters affecting students’ lives and the college’s future.

I’m a politics major. Two summers ago I apprenticed with Professor John Baughman, conducting research for his book on the development of Congress. Last summer I interned in Washington, D.C. for Maine Congressman Mike Michaud. They had me doing a lot of writing. The only other intern who did that much writing was another Bates student, Michael Petrick ’09. That’s when it hit me how Bates, by challenging us to write at a high level, prepares us for the real world.

Read more about career services at Bates:

www.bates.edu/career.xml

Facing the worst economic crisis in generations and an unpopular war in Iraq, President Barack Obama arrived in Washington shattering racial barriers and promising momentous change in the way the United States conducts itself at home and abroad. Reporters from around the globe have descended on the nation’s capital to document the unfolding historic drama.

American newspapers, meanwhile, are pulling their correspondents out.

Wracked by declining readership and advertising revenues, daily papers in every major American city have scaled back their Washington bureaus or closed them altogether. It is the latest sign of a decade-long financial skid in the American news industry, where austerity measures have become commonplace.

But as Washington correspondents vanish, troubling questions arise. If Thomas Jefferson was right that “a well-informed citizenry” is necessary for a healthy democracy, what happens when the American public is unaware of their elected officials’ work in Washington? Could the result be pay-to-play journalism, where information is increasingly available only to those able and willing to pay top dollar for it?

Brian McGrory ’84, metro editor at The Boston Globe and the paper’s former White House correspondent, explains the watchdog role of Washington-based reporters.

“Residents elect people to represent them in Washington, so we don’t want those politicians going off and forgetting where they came from,” he says. “We ought to keep close tabs on how they are spending their campaign money, who is giving them contributions, and whether they are fulfilling their campaign promises. To pull out of Washington and leave these guys uncovered would be a travesty.”

Yet few newspapers have been spared from the current cutbacks. The Newark, N.J., Star-Ledger, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and the San Diego Union-Tribune have pulled their reporters out of Washington. Cox Newspapers, which had 30 people in its Washington bureau including correspondents for The Austin (Texas) American-Statesmanand The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, announced it will close its D.C. operation in April.

The Tribune company, which filed for bankruptcy protection last year, combined the Washington bureaus of the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun and the Los Angeles Times, cutting in half a staff of what had been 70 people only a year ago. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post even reduced the width of their papers to save money on newsprint.

My own former employer, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, is keeping a two-person Washington operation intact even as its owner, the publishing giant Newhouse, closed its D.C. bureau in November.

To save money, newspapers fill their pages with stories from subscription wire services such as The Associated Press and Reuters. Yet wire services are designed to get news out broadly, not explain what a new federal budget means for public education, environmental protection, or police capabilities in, say, Lewiston.

“If you look at newspapers today, they are mostly wire stories that are national or international,” says Jeremy Pelofsky ’97, who covers Congress for Reuters. “You have to wonder if the interests of a city are being served by a wire report. And that’s coming from a wire reporter!”

The result of newspaper cutbacks will not be a news blackout, however. Quite the opposite. News of the Obama presidency and the work of the 111th Congress will explode out of Washington in such overwhelming volume that it will be impossible for all but the most dedicated hermits to ignore.

What will be lost is context and meaning. The main task of Washington correspondents has always been to stand at the center of power, politics, and policy and tell the folks back home what it all means to them. At their best, Washington correspondents aren’t merely reporters, but explainers, experts who “understand how the system works in D.C. and can apply that understanding to the issues and the political players most relevant to readers back home,” says Carolyn Ryan ’86, deputy metro editor at The New York Times.

Those explainers are the people who are losing their jobs.

At this writing, President Obama is talking about kick-starting the economy with a public works building spree reminiscent of FDR’s. It is a Washington correspondent’s job to find out which bridge and road projects back home will get green-lighted — and which won’t. It also falls to the Washington correspondent to see if the money is being disbursed equitably, what role politics is playing, and whether someone’s brother-in-law is getting a sweetheart deal to do the paving.

The value of a Washington bureau was never more evident to me than after Hurricane Katrina, in August 2005. With The Times-Picayune‘s downtown New Orleans offices flooded and abandoned, it fell to the Washington bureau to collect stories from reporters in the field and post them on the newspaper’s Web site. After the storm, the Washington bureau was also charged with tracking what Congress and the Bush administration were doing — and not doing — to aid in the recovery and the awesome task of rebuilding a major American city.

Former newspaper journalist Bill Walsh ’86 is now a senior strategic adviser for AARP in Washington, D.C.

Melissa Harris-Lacewell was hoping to illustrate her Martin Luther King Jr. Day keynote address at Bates with some projected images. But balky technology was making that impossible, the scholar explained to her audience in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall.

So instead of showing the images, she would describe them. “After all, every important African American art form — jazz, rap, hip hop — is based on improvisation,” she quipped.

See a slide show about the 2009 MLK Day observance.

Watch a short video of Melissa Harris-Lacewell previewing her talks.

Harris-Lacewell began her talk by recalling the Democratic convention in Denver, where she saw street vendors selling every kind of item with Obama’s likeness. She described one item showing Obama’s face on Malcolm X’s body. With her audience in an imaginative mindset, she asked everyone to imagine the famous photograph of President Lyndon Johnson meeting with King in the White House in December 1963 (below). Then, she asked her audience to imagine Obama’s face in that scene. Where does he belong in the photo? she asked.

The witty comment set the tone as Harris-Lacewell, associate professor of political science and African American studies at Princeton, helped her audience imagine new identities for Barack Obama — on the eve of his inauguration — and for Martin Luther King Jr.

After a short pause, Harris-Lacewell asked her audience if anyone had placed Obama’s face on King rather than on the president of the United States. Nervous laughter indicated that some had seen Obama playing King’s role. Perfectly understandable, she said: “It’s hard to put black figures into new spaces,” such as the presidency.

With her audience collectively seeing Obama as president, she asked the morning’s key question: Now that Obama is president, who in our society is going to play the role of Martin Luther King? Answering her own question, she said, “All of us are Kings, because presidents need Kings.”

In being Kings to President Obama, said Harris-Lacewell, we must recognize Obama’s experience as a community organizer and his upbringing by grandparents of the Greatest Generation.

That cohort saw their relationship with government as reciprocal: the people would work for the good of society if the government promised to invest in the good of the people. “The Greatest Generation said, ‘We will sacrifice, but you will invest in us,’” she told the audience. It’s a covenant that Obama brings to the presidency, she said.

And by acting as Kings to President Obama, citizens can play the role of community organizers, helping government see that society’s problems are not always nails to be banged with hammers. “A community organizer can get in close enough to a problem to see that it’s really a screw that needs a screwdriver, not a hammer.”

By serving as Kings to Obama, citizens will help “make him accountable for upholding the full promise of the American dream.”

Martin Luther King Jr. also needed his own Kings, she said, people like behind-the-scenes activist Ella Baker. Or like Fannie Lou Hamer, who taught King that economic justice isn’t merely an urban issue but a worldwide poverty problem. Or like Bayard Rustin, who convinced King in the 1950s that he must embrace nonviolence fully, telling him, in Harris-Lacewell’s words, “you can’t ask the people to be nonviolent if you’ve got an armed guard at home.” And James Bevel, who urged King to oppose the Vietnam War more forcefully.

Not that it will be easy for citizens to serve as Obama’s Kings, she said. Citizens must be able to confront great problems even while understanding that failure is likely in their lifetimes. Nevertheless, society’s problems — of the sort exposed by Hurricane Katrina, around health care, housing, education, jobs, criminal justice, and civil rights — must still be tackled with great faith.

“If you cannot commit to a cause that will fail in your lifetime,” Harris-Lacewell said, “you will not create the tools we need to succeed.”

Anthony Phillips

From Anthony: A few weekends ago, I made a guest appearance on the Tavis Smiley Radio show for his “My America” 2008 program. The show aired nationally through Public Radio International on Friday October 25th, 2008 and Saturday October 26th, 2008.

Tavis’ “My America” program gives selected U.S. citizens the opportunity to offer a personal reflection on how the upcoming presidential election will have an immense affect on their lives. I decided to offer a personal testament on the relevance and importance of education for our nation.

Standing in awe over the news that Barack Obama has been elected the 44th President of the United States of America with students and President Robert M. Franklin of Morehouse College

From Anthony: Tuesday November 4th, 2008 will be a day I will never forget. That day I got up early to head over to Morehouse College’s Archer Hall to vote for the next President of the United States of America.

I stood in line for three hours. I was nervous. This was the first time I have ever voted and I had prayed that the person I had decided to vote for would win. I couldn’t believe that I casted my ballot for an African American candidate for president. I voted for Barack Obama, a Black man and a person I believe could lead our country in the right moral and social path for at least the next 4 yrs. Never in my lifetime could I have imagined a Black person having a legitimate chance of becoming President of the United States of America.

Later that evening, I gathered with students from around the Atlanta University Center to observe the 2008 presidential election results. There were watch parties at Clark Atlanta, Spelman and Morehouse. However, I viewed the election results with students from Morehouse in Fredrick Douglass Hall. Upon hearing the results that Barack Obama will become the 44^th President of the United States of America, myself and many other students at Morehouse moved into tears of joy, immense excitement, and pride. Each Black student stood in disbelief coupled with a personal story on how much this election meant to them. Students at Morehouse began to sing “Give me that OoooBAMA spirit” a remix version of one of Morehouse’s college hymms, “Ol Morehouse Spirit.” For this historical evening, I could have never dreamed a day when a Black man could receive so much support from so many races and earn the position of highest office in our country. This is truly amazing. I couldnt have asked for a better setting to have witness the results of the presidential election than Morehouse. I celebrated this election with socially conscious African American brothers who like me personally understood the deep meaning behind this election for people of African descent. Later into the evening, hundreds of emotional students filed the campus singing, dancing, praying, yelling, calling their parents/grandparents, and chatting on what this period in history meant to them. Sounds of the night included “I cant believe our President is Black”… “I love this country”… “Thank YOU LORD”…”He WON”…”WE WON”.

For me, this moment in history, proved to be the first time in my life that I had ever been so proud to be an American. As the President of Morehouse College, Dr. Robert Franklin, “Black people did not make this victory happen alone.” He reminded us that there was a collective effort among everyone from all racial, religious, social and economic backgrounds that made Obama’s victory possible. The implications of this election for Black males means that our nation will now have a national public symbol of a Black male who defies all stereotypes that have been traditionally linked to us. Moreover, with Obama’s victory I began to see the true possibilities for America.  I have always believed in the possibilities for America’s advancement, yet I can now confirm that here in America anything can happen.

Praise God!

Yours in the struggle, I am

Brother Phillips

U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy, following his speech in the Chapel on Feb. 8, 2008, in support of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, shakes hands with Tom Stackpole ’08 of West Tisbury, Mass., as Kennedy’s wife, Victoria Reggie Kennedy, looks on. Kennedy’s appearance was three days before the Maine caucus, won by Obama. Photograph by Elizabeth Mitchell ’09.