About Call to Serve
Stanford University is playing a lead role in Call to Serve, a national campaign sponsored by the nonpartisan, nonprofit Washington DC-based Partnership for Public Service (http://www.calltoserve.org). The Call to Serve recruitment initiative aims to promote student awareness and interest in federal government service and inspire a new generation to public service.
With support from the President’s Office, the Haas Center for Public Service coordinates this initiative in collaboration with the Career Development Center, Stanford in Government, schools, and alumni services across campus. At Stanford, we include local and state, as well as federal government in our effort because there are excellent opportunities for Stanford students at all levels.
On the national level, the Partnership for Public Service has joined forces with the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to build this large scale effort to inform a new generation about the importance of a strong civil service, help re-establish links between federal agencies and campuses, and provide students with information about federal jobs.
Stanford is working intensively with five other colleges and universities to identify best practices for government recruiting that can be replicated nationally: Clark Atlanta University, the George Washington University, Louisiana State University, University of New Mexico, the Ohio State University, and Stanford University. To date, more than 570 college and university presidents and 60 federal agencies have joined together to form the larger Call to Serve network.
...it seems ineluctably clear that we will get exactly the government we deserve. If bright and well-motivated people do not have a positive assessment of government work, they will seek fulfillment elsewhere, and government will be left to the less competent—or, perhaps worse, to those ideologues who are prepared to go but only so long as they can work in support of their particular doctrine. That outcome is simply unacceptable; but to produce a better one we have to reverse some perceptions that have been established by a number of years of bureaucracy-bashing—by leaders in other sectors of American life, by the media and—worst of all by politicians running for elective office... The truth is that work in the public sector is exciting, demanding, and deserves the serious attention of all of us. And if it turns out to be the otherwise, we shall have no one to blame but ourselves. The call to public service is not simply an appeal to help society; not a request to exercise some form of noblesse oblige. It is an invitation to become a stockholder in this great joint venture of ours.
Donald Kennedy (1988), Stanford President Emeritus