Gilligan's Army

Are Americans really serious about wanting to improve their country? Ohio's Governor-elect John Gilligan has an idea to test their resolve. Last week on the campus of Kent State University, that monument to how wrong the nation's life can become, Gilligan announced that he will form a state volunteer corps, enlisting Ohio's 700,000 college students, to help part-time to clean up polluted streams, care for the sick, work with police and otherwise abandon their privacy to coax some improvement in their communities.

The notion will strike many as naive tokenism, smacking of barn raisers, do-gooders and Rotarians. But Gilligan's idea suggests a revival of that old American virtue, enlightened self-interest.

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