As New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s College Challenge wraps up today, student volunteers and University administrators say the initiative, despite flaws, has helped promote community service this semester.
The Challenge, launched by NYC Service—an office Bloomberg created in April 2009 to oversee community initiatives—tracks various universities’ service efforts through a portfolio of goals and points logged online based on hours volunteered.
The initiative has helped encourage engagement, participants say, though some argue it does not fairly judge schools and has not gained enough campus-wide attention.
David Stone, Columbia’s executive vice president for communications, said on Wednesday, “Ultimately, it is not the ‘who wins, who loses,’ but the effort to promote ... more participation in this extraordinary breadth of community service and civic engagement programs, not just at Columbia but across the city’s universities.”
For every hour students spend with nonprofit organizations, they earn their school one point. As of Thursday evening, Columbia was ranked third with an average of 9,694.03 points, behind Fordham University’s 13,319.55 points and St. John’s’ 22,470.52 points. Barnard fell in sixth place with 2,284.25 points. The deadline to log points is today, and next month, the city will choose the winning school based on a service portfolio that outlines goals and priorities along with the average number of points logged. Individuals with the highest number of hours will also gain recognition.
Vivian Taylor, chief of staff and vice president for community development at Barnard, said, “We already knew we had a community of folks who were volunteers, who believed in service, and not that they wanted their hours counted.” She added of the Challenge, “We wanted to have an assessment.”
Though administrators appreciate the initiative, some say it can be difficult for universities to secure points that accurately represent the different service activities across campus.
“Columbia is many different schools—graduate and professional schools, undergraduate colleges—and communicating with a very large and diverse and decentralized university is always a challenge,” Stone said. With so many disconnected efforts, he added, “It’s always a worthy opportunity to try and bring the larger university together around an endeavor like this.”
Will Simpkins, Barnard’s program director of community and diversity initiatives, said that Barnard, as a small liberal arts college, also faced difficulties in getting students to log hours. “We’re talking about individual classes and individual faculty’s work, department goals, initiatives that are happening in student services,” he said.
Some students expressed concerns with the process of comparing different schools as well. “There are some flaws and I think they’ve been admitted,” said Benjamin Young, a doctoral candidate and teaching fellow in French and romance philology and in comparative literature who served as a volunteer for the American Red Cross. “One of the major problems is, of course, there’s no taking into account the size of the schools.” This is how it would appear with the current online rankings, which show larger universities in the lead.
But Adrienne Jozwick, a writer and researcher for Columbia Public Affairs who has worked on the Challenge, said that the mayor’s office does take into account the size of the school when making final decisions. “They are using a formula to account for the fact that all these schools are a different size,” Jozwick said, adding that the goal is for roughly 13 percent of each college’s population to participate.
Ultimately, participants said the competitive aspect is not the central focus. “I don’t think anyone here would disagree that competition was not the sort of primary objective for our participation, and we’ve made that very clear from the beginning,” Simpkins said.
Claire Wang, SEAS ’11 and a volunteer for Columbia Area Volunteer Ambulance, known as CAVA, said that she and her colleagues merely logged the hours they would’ve already been completing, regardless of the competition.
“I don’t know if people actually increased how much they volunteered, but they showed how much they already do,” Wang said.
Taylor, though, said that the service portfolio component did help Barnard—which she said is one of the top liberal arts colleges in the Challenge—organize information on community service efforts. “It turned out that we pulled together so much information about what we are doing as an institution that I felt very proud of that,” she said.
Despite concerns that the Challenge may encourage unhealthy competition, some students and administrators said that the competition has only been friendly.
“Even if you take it as a competition, the intrinsic value of volunteering is very high,” said Ana-Maria Poveda-Garces, SIPA ’11 and one of the top Columbia volunteers thus far.
“I don’t think anyone would try to be the top volunteer and not actually care about it,” Wang said. “That’s a possible negative aspect of it, but I think in general it encourages people to volunteer in their community more.”
Some volunteers stressed that lack of publicity and low numbers of participants were also problems.
“I think, perhaps, that it should be advertised more on campus and linked with other forms of volunteering,” Poveda-Garces said. Young added, “The number of Challenge participants doesn’t seem that high ... not bad, but not huge.”
Wang, though, said that ultimately, “When you volunteer, it’s not really about beating other schools.”
madina.toure@columbiaspectator.com
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