When she was 3 years old, Nadinne Cruz learned a harsh lesson about the risks of public service. As her physician father was leaving their home to provide medical care to loggers and miners in a remote province of the Philippines, he was shot and killed on the suspicion that he was promoting organized labor. Nevertheless, Cruz has not been afraid to help others. At 18, she left college to document violations of land-reform programs for a national peasant organization. Following graduate studies in the United States, Cruz served as executive director of the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs in St. Paul, Minn., and later was a professor of social change at Swarthmore College. She became director of the Haas Center for Public Service in May 2000.
Stanford: The Haas Center sponsors more than 40 volunteer programs that range from constructing houses locally to preventing the spread of HIV in South Africa. How do you define public service education and what’s the goal?
It may sound simplistic, but you learn by doing, and service learning is driven by a desire to do good in the world and to do it effectively. My ideal for the center is that it be a place full of energized people and the exchange of ideas, based not on armchair philosophizing but on the authority of the personal experience of students.
Eighty percent of Stanford students perform some kind of community service by the time they graduate. Where do most students begin?
The most popular volunteer work is tutoring, and I think it would be irresponsible to engage Stanford students in tutoring without raising questions like, “Why is it that a particular school needs so many tutors? What’s the relationship between the economy of the municipality of East Palo Alto and the tax base of Ravenswood school district?” Those kinds of questions [should be] entertained in both informal and formal ways, and our staff waits, in an “on call” mode, for teachable moments.
How does the Haas Center’s work relate to the mission of the University?
We want the center to be an integral part of the academic core rather than seen as something that’s fun to do, like being in the Band. If we’re going to deliver excellence in service and if we want to make a difference—as opposed to remembering how much fun it was to tutor—that means raising the bar on expectations for public service and not just viewing it as a nice extracurricular activity.
How do you evaluate the cumulative good that students do?
The huge, intractable social issues of our times require the most committed people, and thinking about how many thousands of students over the years have been involved in public service gives me great joy. I’m hoping students who come to Haas will discover the questions that will drive them for the rest of their lives.
