Be careful what you do--it just might change you

Sometimes events challenge us to figure out how we end up where we are. I reflected on this recently when I learned that a former mentor and friend from my college days, Randall Forsberg, had died at 64.

Randy, as we called her, was known as the mother of the nuclear freeze movement. She had issued a call to halt the building of nuclear weapons in the late 1970s-a time when many feared that the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union might lead to nuclear war.

Randy had awarded me a college internship at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, where I was put to work generating a database of existing weapons systems. There, I got to witness the social movement that emerged from the work of Randy and others-what The New York Times would later call "the largest political demonstration in American history." The experience taught me to think about my personal role in our democracy as well as different ways to civically engage my world. That summer contributed to my decision to get a Ph.D., and I ultimately went on to teach political science at the big university down the street.

These days, however, I find myself engaged in the most exciting professional challenge of my life. And while sometimes it seems I'm doing something so different than what I thought I would do with my life, my role deeply connects with my thinking a generation ago when I believed that citizens had the right and responsibility to be active participants in our shared democracy.

Since June 1, I have had the privilege and challenge of leading the Duke Center for Civic Engagement and its flagship program, DukeEngage-a new initiative that provides full funding for Duke undergraduates who wish to pursue an intensive civic engagement experience anywhere in the world. Our task is immediate and bold: to place nearly 300 Duke students in immersive civic engagement experiences somewhere in the world during the summer of 2008. Our goal-emboldening 25 percent of the student body to participate in DukeEngage within five years-is as ambitious as it is exciting.

The Duke that I have discovered is one where students, faculty and staff have rallied around the notion that together we can help solve the myriad problems that challenge humanity-from Durham to Yemen and places in between. Reflecting on and learning from the 87 students who participated in our Summer 2007 pilot programs, we expect to triple the number of students taking part in DukeEngage next summer. We also are shaping a series of civic engagement workshops to empower these students to maximize their impact and potential both before and after their DukeEngage experiences. This pre-departure training will help build bridges between cultures and apply what they have learned in the classroom to real world settings-what President Richard Brodhead often refers to as "translational knowledge."

We focus on two very important concepts as we build DukeEngage-concepts that have become our "mantra" of sorts. The first, immersion, refers not only to a student's duration of engagement but also to our belief that these experiences have the potential to be most dynamic when students are immersed in the political, social and economic context of the place in which they are doing their work-when they eat new foods, meet new people and confront realities they may have never imagined.

We also talk about transformation of communities and students. For the former, we hope to strengthen and build capacity for nongovernmental organizations and communities that will benefit from the energy and perspective of our students. And as for our students-well, we know that they will come back from a DukeEngage experience newly empowered, envisioning themselves as citizens of the globe, able to impact their world.