Class of 2001 Graduation Pledge

By Colman McCarthy
Special to The Washington Post
Monday, June 5, 2000; Page C04

Should you ask one of this spring's college graduates about his or her GPA, the answer might be 2.8, 3.6 or another grade point average. If they graduated from Georgetown University, American, Harvard, Manchester or some 50 other schools, the GPA could stand for the Graduate Pledge Alliance.

Coordinated as a national campaign since 1996 by Prof. Neil Wollman of Manchester College, a Church of the Brethren school in Indiana, the pledge is taken by graduating seniors who are conscientiously selective about which companies or organizations they will work for. Ideals before dollars.

The voluntary pledge reads: "I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve those aspects of any organization for which I work."

In the current job market flush with major corporations actively searching the campuses for employees and often offering hefty first-year salaries, the graduating pledge-takers are saying, as much with hearts as heads, not so fast. First, a few questions.

What are the ethics of my potential employers? How are their products or services benefiting society, if at all? What is the employer's record on such issues as antitrust, health and safety, age, race, sex discrimination, pollution and animal testing. Has the company been fined or convicted for civil offenses? What are the salaries of the executives above compared with the workers' below? In the company's theology of capitalism, is worshipping the dollar-god the sole article of faith, with no heed paid to the victims of structural violence?

At Georgetown University, 28 graduating seniors took the pledge. The campus organizer was Jamie Dunchick of Orwigsburg, Pa., who learned of the pledge campaign only in mid-May and believes hundreds more would have signed on had time allowed. Dunchick, a peace and justice minor who volunteered as a teacher's assistant at the School Without Walls this past year, says that "the pledge is a way to stick to the moral concerns that I and my friends have at this age. It will stand as a reminder to us throughout our lives to stick to the values we have learned in the justice and peace program at Georgetown. We want to use our lives for a higher purpose than merely earning money."

Dunchick plans to seek employment with a public interest group that works with refugees.

Her ideals are shared by Mitchell Furlett of American University. He says that schools rarely address in substantial ways the ethical issue of where to work: "I realize that jobs are plentiful this year, but I've seen few that I can feel morally good about accepting. This pledge is helping change that." Furlett, one of several AU students arrested during April's demonstrations at the World Bank, is volunteering at a prison this summer.

Along with Manchester College, where some 60 percent of the senior classes since 1988 have embraced the pledge, the nation's most organized campus is Harvard. Last year, 271 seniors filed past the statue of John Harvard in the commencement procession after taking the pledge 24 hours earlier during Class Day ceremonies.

By this year's commencement on Thursday, a similar number of graduates are expected to have taken the pledge. One of the organizers is Sinead Walsh, '00, who will do human rights work in India after graduation. An English major from Dublin, who researched a pending report for Human Rights Watch on racial disparities in U.S. drug arrests, is anything but a corporation-basher chanting anti-capitalist slogans. "No matter where people work," she says, "there's so much they can do on the everyday level. I don't believe that a dichotomy exists in most careers that are not traditionally 'public service.' It's possible to be a socially concerned person in those jobs."

To ward off dabblers and sunshine idealists, anyone taking the pledge at Harvard was required to attend at least one of three panel discussions during the spring. These were titled: "Making a Difference," "Earning a Living, Sharing the Wealth," and "Building a Career, Building a Community."

Speakers came from such groups as Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Grameen Foundation USA, Clean Water Action and the Campus Green Vote.

Skeptics and cynics are likely to dismiss the pledge-takers as little more than coddled leisure-class dreamers yet to be knocked around in the real world.

That goes against the evidence. Ask some of the tens of thousands of conscientious people currently working for socially conscious corporations or public interest groups where they were first inspired to follow what Robert Coles described in "The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism" (Houghton Mifflin, 1994).

Odds on, they will say, as do Jamie Dunchick, Mitchell Furlett and Sinead Walsh, it began in college.