For two years, I have led a Community Action (CA) orientation trip in Newark, where first years navigate their entry to Princeton through a five-day social justice-oriented experience. Both years, my group visited Newark’s African American Office of Gay Concerns, an organization founded in 2001 to address the spread of HIV/AIDS in the local LGBTQ+ community.
The people working there are dedicated to doing the most they can for the entire community. First-years on the CA trip help out by designing posters for their annual PrEP rally (short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, medicine which reduces the chance of HIV infection), an event held to raise awareness about safer sex practices, in an effort to prevent the spread of HIV.
It’s a fun activity for students to do while the staff members teach them basic gender, sexuality, and HIV-prevention terminology, hoping to get new people invested in the organization. The net impact of making a couple of nice posters is small but, as the Pace Center reminds us every year at our CA training, the trip is more about building relationships with “community partners” to enable future service, than the service done in one week.
If a chief goal of this week of service—besides helping new students transition into the Princeton community—is to lead pre-frosh into expansive, meaningful service, why does this goal go unfulfilled when students return to campus?
The Pace Center for Civic Engagement, according to its website, exists to make “service and civic engagement part of the Princeton student experience” through “engaged discovery,” “community focus,” “impactful programs,” and “student leadership.” The Pace Center often uses the metaphor of the “orange bubble”—a manifestation of the disconnect between life on Princeton’s campus and life seemingly anywhere else—in its marketing. We’ve all seen their vinyl stickers on laptops and water bottles dramatically stamped with “Burst the Bubble.” So much time and money and energy is spent advertising this and reminding us that good citizenship entails good engagement—communicating with and listening to communities to address their needs, not just coming in from afar to offer our time or money or energy for a few hours each week.
The thing about bubbles is that they’re meant to be burst. They’re transparent; we all know what’s happening outside of them. They’re also easily broken, allowing exchange with minimal effort. Hypothetically, all of us could go past Nassau Street and join community members organizing against the theft of immigrant workers’ wages, or get involved with local LGBTQ+ organizations. That kind of active citizenship does not, however, flourish on this campus. In spite of the Pace Center’s stated goals, and it’s co-opting and nebulous use of terms like “advocacy” and “activism,” it is not designed to actually enable expansive civic engagement. It does a wonderful job teaching students about fundraising, entrepreneurship, and volunteering, but the heart of active citizenship is the labor to create a better society, labor which requires challenging existing power structures. They tell us that we can bring about social and political changes, but they don’t teach us how to do the work ethically, let alone what to do when we encounter the resistance that accompanies activist work.
If you interact with the Pace Center enough, you’re bound to fill out a worksheet designed to examine what service means to you. It consists of an inventory of different ways to perform service, and includes more traditional outlets, like tutoring and participating in after-school programs, as well as military service and the nebulous phrase: “talking to friends about. . . issues.” Coming from high school, where many students see community service as something to be ticked off for a college application, my CA first-years often don’t rank informal advocacy highly. The Pace Center claims that it is committed to broadening the definition of service and moving students away from more traditional conceptions. After all, I did lead a trip titled “Social Justice North Jersey.”
However, what the Pace Center provides does not do enough to help students realize this expansive vision of engagement. First, the Center’s training efforts almost exclusively focus on volunteering, rather than other forms of civic engagement. Pace offers only a handful of trainings, almost all of which center around “service” or “volunteering,” and quite a few of which center on preparing for CA. If the Center was truly committed to broadening understandings of civic engagement, they would train students on how to carry out activist work or undertake a direct action. Few students come to Princeton (or any university) understanding what activism is, what it aims to do, or what it requires of them. The Pace Center is theoretically in a position to rectify this, but they merely pay lip service to these ideas. In addition, the Pace Center’s mantra about listening to what a community needs, a focus during CA, rarely comes up any other time. How many of Pace’s student groups are actively consulting with the communities they want to partner with, before offering an idea of what they personally want to do? Whether it comes from a paternalistic sense of knowing what’s best or from a genuine desire to use one’s skills simply missing its mark, we can be doing better. Leaders and members of new Pace student groups could have mandatory trainings on ethical community engagement, at the very least.
The Pace Center, in addition to providing trainings and operating programs like CA, also houses various civic engagement groups on campus. Looking at their website, the Pace Center hosts around 20 campus groups, most of which focus on education and health. Additionally, many of the groups listed under the banner of “Advocacy” are more focused on raising money or engaging in “social entrepreneurship,” than actively challenging existing power dynamics (which is to say, activism). The Pace Center and the university teach us that the most effective change comes from working within, and thus upholding, the systems that we ought to be resisting. They teach us that the best way to channel the power and privilege we’ve been given by attending the wealthiest school in the country, is to wield it for ourselves, as long as we remember the less fortunate.
Ultimately, the Center is not shaping the next generation of grassroots organizers; they’re shaping students for the “non-profit industrial complex.” The idea behind this term is that most large non-profit organizations become ineffective in their work and instead merely turn a profit for the higher-up employees of the organization. Sprout Distro’s “What’s the Non-Profit Industrial Complex and why should I care?” zine posits that a characteristic of the nonprofit-industrial complex is pushing activists towards career-based organizing, instead of grassroots tactics which are more likely to foster change. The Pace Center’s role in propping up this phenomenon is embodied by the fact that there are multiple groups whose sole purpose is to fundraise for national U.S. charities that are doing “work” in far-flung places around the globe. This further compounds the non-profit industrial complex by encouraging problematic ideals of charity as something performed for those outside of our own communities. Not only does it destabilize the economies of “third world” countries and prevent them from implementing their own solutions, but this model of charity also erases the existence of those in need in our own spaces. It encourages us to “other” the receiver of our aid, to view ourselves as their betters as we stoop down to save them. After all, Princeton is where Ivy League professors live in mansions, elderly couples patronize McCarter theater, and three over-priced ice cream shops operate less than five minutes away from each other—it couldn’t need our attention, right?
Thus, few Pace Center-associated groups who have been approved and have access to the Center’s staff and resources embody the center’s stated vision of expansive engagement. The form to create a new group is easy to fill out—you just need to meet some vague core values and explain where you plan to get money. But that’s something you might not have expected that shapes the type of groups the Pace Center houses. Regardless of whether Pace might eventually provide capital to a fledgling group, their form suggests that the group should have the goal of economic viability, when many grassroots organizations never strive for that themselves.
Of course, the Pace Center can never truly carry out an expansive vision of active citizenship. Because the Pace Center is a university institution, it cannot be more radical than Princeton itself; if it were, other administrators would readily bring it to heel. The institution that the Pace Center represents is not interested in teaching us how to reduce police impact on a protest, because that police force might be PSAFE. It’s in no one’s interest at this university to tell you how to pressure administrators when advocacy falls short, because you could challenge someone like Eisgruber. Put simply, why in the world would Princeton teach us how to go about challenging institutions exactly like itself? Yet, even though one cannot expect Pace to teach students how to stage the next sit-in, it is entirely reasonable to expect that each student who passes through their door leaves with not only an understanding of ethical community engagement, but, more importantly, the tools to enact it. It is neither easy nor standard, but the benefits far outweigh the costs.
With this, we’ve come full circle to explain why there are so many groups disproportionately fundraising, rather than engaging: it looks amazing for an Ivy League school, but does nothing to push the institution into the “service of all humanity.” The Pace Center speaks about “activism” as a form of civic engagement but does not actually foster it, ultimately channeling students into apathy and feel-good service. But this piece is not meant as a blanket review of all student groups within the Pace Center, or even to denounce the center itself. I support the guiding principle behind their work: that one cannot be an active citizen without active citizenship, that one cannot expect the advantages of a community without the duties of supporting it. The way that the Center provides and institutionalizes their services, however, imbues apathy into even the act of feeling like a good, engaged citizen. The very organization that is supposed to connect students to service, to make it easier to access, to allow it to flourish, does very little to make service meaningful. They’ve taken the radical concept of activism and co-opted it, in order to say they’re living up to their own expansive vision of service looks like. They’ve taken activist terms just to appear to be with the times.
It is important to teach students that activism is part of good citizenship, but if you can’t truly support it, don’t say you can. Don’t trick students into believing that it will not be as difficult as the institution of Princeton University is going to make it for them to enact radical change. If the Pace Center can’t support activism directly, it should leave it to students to seek out other options, and try to give them what guides it can. If it can’t help students form Center-approved groups, it should keep an informal list of activists on campus and their goals so it can direct students if they approach with interest in an issue.
It took me two years before I had a sense of who was doing what so that I could get involved in causes that matter to me, and that I have the energy for. Two years is a long time: imagine all the potential wasted in those years throughout which I could have been meaningfully engaged. In two years, you can get a driver’s license. You can find someone and marry them. You can probably change careers. But on Princeton’s campus, I couldn’t find groups of students doing activist work centered around causes that I care deeply about.
I know that we can do more to both improve Princeton University for future students and engage with the communities around us. It’s simply a matter of realizing that this institution does not support all forms of participative citizenship and, in the meantime, putting our noses to the grindstone, while keeping an eye out for students doing similar work.
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