COLUMN ONE : Venturing Beyond Ivy Walls : Colleges are embracing service-learning, where students go into the community to help those in need. The work is hailed as an important part of education.

Steve Williams was halfway through his studies at Stanford University when he realized something was missing. The teaching was first-rate, the menu of courses impressively rich. Student activities were abundant, and the setting--amid stately palms and towering eucalyptus--was ideal for scholarly contemplation.

What was missing from his undergraduate experience, Williams recalled recently, was the real world.

“I was reading about stuff that took place two and three centuries ago, but there was no connection with events happening in California today,” he said. “My academic studies seemed completely removed from the social ills that were very, very apparent on the streets. It was a real frustration.”

Fortunately, Stanford had an antidote for his angst. Under a program that blends academics with community service, Williams took a class on poverty in America. As part of the required work, he volunteered 12 hours a week at a San Jose homeless shelter. The experience, he said, “was amazing.”

Driven by a yearning to make a difference, college students across the country are tutoring inner-city children, befriending AIDS patients and preparing tax returns for the elderly in a blossoming movement that some say may be changing the very nature of higher education.

In the past, student volunteerism has largely been an after-school pursuit--viewed as noble, but best kept strictly separate from academics. Now that wall is coming down as more educators conclude that public service energizes students, enhances learning and makes better citizens of graduates.

Earlier this month, supporters of the trend got a big lift when President Clinton announced plans for a national service program for college-age people. Details remain fuzzy, but by unveiling his proposal after just five weeks in office, the President placed the issue squarely on the nation’s agenda.

“Clinton has really struck a chord,” said John Sarvey of the Campus Outreach Opportunity League, which provides grants to help colleges integrate volunteer work into the curriculum. “Students are concerned about social problems, and they are excited to see a President who wants to give them a way to help.”

Statistics are scarce, but experts believe more than one-third of American colleges and universities have altered the curriculum to mix community service with the usual lectures and term papers. That practice--in everyday courses such as freshman English and business law--was uncommon as recently as 1986.

Many campuses also are launching philanthropy centers to help professors modify their curriculum and find volunteer opportunities for students. Some schools--particularly those with a religious affiliation, such as Azusa-Pacific University--have even made volunteer work a graduation requirement.

“There is a real hunger among students to do something that is beyond themselves, for more than themselves,” said Indiana University President Thomas Ehrlich, who chairs Campus Compact, a national group of 320 college presidents committed to mixing public service into the curriculum. Providing an avenue for such impulses, Ehrlich believes, is a key part of a university’s mission today.

Students, it seems, couldn’t agree more. They say working in the community reduces their sense of isolation from the world and gives them a compelling context for the often abstract material in their textbooks. Helping others also “feels good,” said Cara Fiorillo, a junior majoring in psychology at Rutgers University.

“A lot of people just go to college, take the classes they need to graduate and then get a job,” said Fiorillo, who comforts children in a pediatric AIDS ward as part of her studies. “I think they’re missing out, because what you get out of volunteering is a really powerful reward.”

Dana Rabois, a Stanford senior, said volunteering at a group home for troubled teen-age girls was “a real eye-opener” that “got me out of the ivory tower.”

“It stimulates you to want to learn more, because it’s not just all on paper,” said Rabois, whose courses also have led her to counsel war veterans who are mentally ill and homeless. “When you’re working with real people, you want to learn, you want to improve, you want to study theories that can help you to help them.”

So far, there has been little academic research on the educational benefits of so-called service-learning. Anecdotally, however, professors across the country say that volunteering motivates their pupils and forces them to wrestle with questions they often do not encounter in their readings.

Some educators draw on the words of Confucius to illustrate the payoff: “I read and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”

“Community service makes for very active, as opposed to passive, learning,” said Connecticut College President Claire Gaudiani, whose campus sends students into state prisons to teach adult literacy. “Students learn theories, then have to figure out how to apply them in the field. That’s real discovery, as opposed to memorizing and forgetting.”

Many professors also view service-learning as an ideal vehicle for teaching citizenship and social responsibility--values that are difficult to impart through traditional methods of instruction.

“We always give lip service to the notion that part of a liberal arts education is to teach people to accept responsibility as citizens,” said professor Jeremy Cohen, whose Stanford communications course sent 217 student volunteers into elementary schools, shelters for battered women and other Bay Area agencies last term.

“But it’s a very hard thing to do in the classroom--especially at a sheltered place like Stanford. Taking students into the field makes that vague notion of citizenship in a democracy come to life.”

Not everyone in academia is sold on the concept. Some purists view service-learning as a cleverly disguised assault on the fundamentals--yet another effort to boot Proust, Latin and physics out of the classic liberal arts curriculum. Others call volunteerism a touchy-feely distraction, and some deride such programs as elitist--using privileged young “do-gooders” to rescue the downtrodden or use them as subjects in academic “experiments.”

Still other educators balk because they see no need to change their teaching methods--nor any powerful incentive to do so given the publish-or-perish race for tenure and promotion.

“Faculty are a very conservative group--not politically, but dispositionally,” said Benjamin Barber, a political science professor at Rutgers and an outspoken champion of service-learning. “If you’ve been giving one set of lectures for 14 years, then the idea of doing something different scares you.”

Finally, lean budget times for higher education make funds for service-learning projects scarcer: “Interest is very high here, but given our economic plight and fee increases, it’s tough to argue that it’s a priority,” said Jeannie Kim of California Campus Compact, an organization of 58 colleges and universities based at UCLA.

Nevertheless, the popularity of service-learning is booming, with both the number and nature of courses expanding. At Rutgers, for example, the number of service-learning classes has doubled in the past year.

At Stanford, about 600 students are enrolled in 36 such courses; six years ago, the university offered only seven classes that incorporated community work. The university spends $20,000 annually on grants to help professors include public service in their curriculum, and employs two part-time staff members who assist faculty and develop volunteer opportunities in the community.

While this trend is new, the concept of service-learning certainly is not. Its intellectual origins may trace to John Dewey’s philosophy of education, which includes the idea that learning and life experience are linked and society is the arena in which education occurs.

The roots of the recent boom lie in the 1980s. Researchers from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching visited colleges and found that “a preoccupation with personal interests seemed to dominate, and that there was a narrowness of vision and lack of . . . commitment to social issues.” Even in the heyday of the Me Generation the researchers detected some simmering of altruism, but found that the colleges provided no organized way for young people to act on their convictions.

Troubled by similar impressions, three university presidents founded Campus Compact in 1985, and the organization--which promotes student participation in community service--has given an authoritative voice of support to the service-learning movement.

Theories to explain the rebound in student altruism are plentiful, but most experts agree that deepening social woes--and the sense that government is not fully addressing those woes--play a major role.

“I think society’s problems just got to a point where they were staring all of us in the face in a way they hadn’t before,” said Susan Stroud, a senior adviser in Clinton’s Office of National Service. “Five or six years ago, you didn’t just trip over homeless people in the streets. Now there’s no big city in the U.S. where you don’t.”

Gaudiani, the Connecticut College president, said many of the young volunteers are children of 1960s activists who had responded to a call for national service by another young President--John F. Kennedy. “I definitely hear an echo of a loud sound made 30 years ago,” said Gaudiani.

Clinton’s exhortations of “shared sacrifice” and “putting people first” are reminiscent of Kennedy’s words, and students such as Marla Maxfield seem to be taking the message to heart. Maxfield is a Stanford junior who spends two nights a week tutoring a 5-year-old homeless boy in math and reading.

“I think a lot of us here feel extremely lucky, because we’re privileged to be getting this expensive, wonderful education,” said Maxfield, whose volunteer work is part of a history course. “This is a chance to give something back, and the rewards, well, they’re just really incredible.”

But what distinguishes Maxfield and other students from their altruistic forebears is the educational link--the belief that service is not only of value to society, but an important asset to classroom learning as well.

“If my students weren’t becoming better writers through community service, then we wouldn’t be doing it,” said Stanford professor Ann Watters, whose freshman English students produce newsletters, pamphlets and other materials for the Red Cross and other community organizations.

“But they are learning to write better, because they are writing things that make a difference to someone. Somebody cares if they’re persuasive, somebody cares if they get the facts straight. That makes a difference--it pushes them to do better work.”

Community Classrooms

Here is a sampling of schools that offer courses blending community service with traditional classwork:

UCLA: The Los Angeles riots fueled interest in service classes. About 1,500 students will take 45 service courses this academic year. Volunteer work includes designing brochures for health clinics, tutoring children at homeless shelters and counseling at halfway houses.

Stanford University: Thirty-six courses taken by about 600 students. Freshman English students write pamphlets, newsletters and other materials for community groups; communications students discuss violence and stereotyping on television with elementary school children.

Santa Clara University: More than 600 students volunteer at homeless shelters and other agencies as part of their work in two dozen service classes, ranging from Christian ethics to abnormal psychology.

Rutgers University: In its third year, the New Jersey college’s Civic Education and Community Service Program involves 1,000 students, 15 courses and half a dozen academic departments. Projects include delivering meals to AIDS patients and teaching dance to inner-city children. Honors students must take a service course to graduate.

Michigan State University: Under one of the oldest programs in the nation, students in business law work as crisis counselors at a shelter for battered women; sociology and anthropology majors volunteer in convalescent homes and day care centers.

Bentley College: Accounting students at this business college in Waltham, Mass., prepare income tax returns for the elderly; others operate a beauty salon at a women’s shelter. Thirty of the 200 full-time professors offer service courses. No such courses existed three years ago.