In the early '60s, students regularly crowded into a Wilbur Hall apartment to sound off on the civil rights movement, Kennedy's assassination and U.S. involvement in Vietnam. One man who paid serious attention to them was Dwight Clark, then dean of freshman men. "We were really forced during those years to think carefully about issues that might be on any thinking person's agenda," he says.
Clark earned high marks from students for both empathy and energy. "He detected a real frustration with the apparent irrelevance of their classroom education to all this stuff going on around them," says Paul Strasburg, '64. "He was looking for a way to engage these guys, to get them out in the world and somehow tie that to their education."
Clark soon found just how to put student activism to work. In the summer of 1963, he funneled 23 Stanford undergraduates to Hong Kong. There, working as part of a World University Service program, they taught English and provided basic health care to refugees who had fled famine in Mao's China.
Student enthusiasm ran high -- higher than one project could handle. So Clark himself arranged for volunteers to resume work in Hong Kong the next summer, and for women students to participate as well. In 1965, Clark quit his University job to become full-time director of a new program -- dubbed Volunteers in Asia.
Since then, VIA has sent more than 1,300 students -- chiefly from Stanford, UC-Santa Cruz, UC-Davis and Berkeley -- to eight East Asian countries. They've done everything from teaching English to building roads to lending a hand with other community projects. Now Clark, '56, MA '58, VIA's founder, president and visionary for 36 years, is approaching retirement. To make that possible -- and to repay him for all he has done -- VIA alums have established the Stalwarts Fund. Fund-raisers hope to collect $400,000 to provide for Clark's retirement and for other staff and program needs. So far, 200 donors, mostly alums, have contributed $220,000 -- and another $422,000 has been pledged.
For an operation that has always operated on a shoestring, that seems like a lot of money. But Stanford law professor and campaign chair Buzz Thompson, '73, JD/MBA '76, points out that VIA must pay staff salaries "at least in the ballpark with other nonprofits" in order to attract and keep them.
In the early years, students had to cover all their expenses unless they received a scholarship, and Clark took a dramatic cut in salary when he left the University in '65. He lived on $2,400 a year, sharing a house in College Terrace for $125 a month. His cupboards were often filled with Ramen noodles, tuna fish and rice porridge. "Having rather simple material tastes makes it much easier to start an organization that has no demonstrable financial underpinning," Clark says.
One reason money has always been tight is that VIA has no governmental or religious affiliation, and its only link to Stanford is office space that it rents at the Haas Center for Public Service. That independence may help explain why Asian countries have been so receptive to its volunteers. "Through the years, VIA has been able to enter countries at a very early stage in their gradual opening to the world: Indonesia in '68 -- just three years after a bloody coup attempt, China in '80, Vietnam in '90 and Laos in '95," Clark says. "I remember climbing the mountain that overlooks what was the Hong Kong-China border and wondering if I'd ever walk on the other side," Clark recalls. "Now I look back on the 19 years we've been working in China."
Those first volunteers quickly learned some universal truths about schoolchildren. "As they copied the things I wrote on the blackboard, they often left their seats and ran around the room, screaming and laughing as they checked up on their friends," wrote Hope Selby in the Stanford Daily in October 1965. "After two classes like this, I decided it was time to learn a few basic verbs. 'Sit down!' I screamed over the noise and sat down right in the middle of the dusty floor. 'Sit down,' I said again and pointed at one of the boys. When he returned to his seat and the others followed him, I knew a major battle had been won."
Clark tries to stay in touch with VIA alums. Traveling in Asia, he meets many who now work there in government, nonprofit organizations and business. He also has officiated at a dozen weddings of VIA alums. A Quaker, he received certification from the Universal Life Church in 1973. "These have been special moments, when I could have a small part in a significant milestone of friends' lives."
These days Clark, who is not married, divides his time between California and Asia, spending five-week stretches in each. The kitchen table in a small Tokyo apartment is VIA's Asian office for volunteer programs in China, Laos, Vietnam and Indonesia. There are two-year programs for recent graduates and summer programs for undergraduates. Students still have to pay part of their own way, $950 to $1,500; Asian organizations and fund raising cover the rest. Clark notes that the profile of the typical volunteer has changed since VIA's inception. In the 1960s, students frequently enlisted as an alternative to military service. Now many ethnic Asians join VIA to examine their heritage.
Meanwhile, the man who started it all is thinking about slowing down -- but not too much. "The perfect retirement is amazingly close to what I'm doing now," Clark says, "just not at the same pace."
Kelly Young, '99, is a history major from Ravenna, Neb.
