The Gap Between Will and Wallet

By WALTER SHAPIRO

National service -- the image of a vast civilian army of fresh-faced young people embarking on a crusade of good works -- has always held romantic appeal for adults safely beyond draft age. Utopian visionary Edward Bellamy originally broached the notion more than a century ago. Philosopher William James alluded to it in his famous 1910 essay, "The Moral Equivalent of War." Franklin Roosevelt in 1943 spoke of a postwar America where young adults would make a "year's contribution of service to the Government." At the height of the Viet Nam buildup, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara proposed compulsory national service as a remedy for the inequities of the military draft. Now, amid the first stirrings of a rebirth of altruism, the idea has been revived by congressional Democrats eager to inspire what Georgia Senator Sam Nunn calls "a new spirit of citizenship and civic obligation in America."

Voluntary national service has long been widely popular; in an early 1988 Gallup poll, 83% of those surveyed endorsed the concept. The problem is that given free choice, few 18-year-olds are likely to sign on at subsistence wages to empty bedpans or monitor naptime in day-care centers. Existing state and local programs that foster community-service apprenticeships have been unable to tap the wellsprings of middle-class idealism; in 1987 almost all the 7,000 ! young adults enrolled in such programs came from low-income families. The sad truth is that any major commitment to national service requires either a pay scale much higher than McDonald's or the heavy hand of federal coercion.

Last week Nunn and an ideologically diverse group of Democratic legislators kicked off the most ambitious drive for national service in more than a generation. They envision a Citizens Corps that would enlist as many as 1 million young high school graduates to spend at least a year working for $100 a week in places like hospices and homeless shelters in their local communities. The volunteers would also have the option of entering the armed forces at wage rates significantly below those of regular soldiers. The national-service proposal -- originally developed by sociologist Charles Moskos and the Democratic Leadership Council -- is poised between threat and reward. "It's just this side of compulsion," says Moskos, who teaches at Northwestern University, "but we don't cross the line."

The crux of the Nunn plan is the draconian requirement that by the mid- 1990s, aspiring college students (with a few narrowly drawn exceptions) would have to serve in the civilian or military branches of the Citizens Corps before they could receive federal aid for higher education. No altruism, no college degree -- except for those youngsters from families rich enough to pay full tuition. The other half of the bargain consists of a generous educational stipend: a $10,000 voucher for each year of civilian service or $24,000 after a two-year military hitch.

The sponsors of the Citizens Corps acknowledge that the proposal may need to be modified to meet political and practical objections. "But what makes this plan workable is the connection between benefits and service," argues Oklahoma Congressman Dave McCurdy. "If there is a simpler way to go to college that doesn't require service, it's human nature that people will take it."

Not surprisingly, congressional defenders of existing higher-education programs are militantly opposed to the punitive aspects of the Nunn plan. In response to critics who contend that the legislation is inequitable, Nunn counters that "poor people now are being hurt because they will be indentured for many, many years paying back college loans." Yet the price tag for the Federal Government may also be an obstacle in an era of budget austerity. Even though the Nunn plan is predicated on cashing in much of the nearly $5 billion currently spent on grants to college students, there are as yet no hard estimates of the Citizen Corps's actual cost. Using small-scale state voluntary-service programs as a model, Moskos theorizes that $5 billion would cover roughly 500,000 civilian participants.

But something important is lost if the debate over the Nunn plan is limited to this narrow terrain. The revival of interest in national service raises philosophical questions that cut to the heart of American democracy. What civic obligations do young adults have to the nation in time of peace? Does the Government have the right to use its powers to compel individual good works? Should the opportunity to pursue higher education be an entitlement, or should it be transformed into a reward for Government-sanctioned behavior?

Americans have always been rightfully chary about unnecessary governmental coercion. Yet there is a consensus that the recent expansion of the concept of individual rights has eroded a sense of collective responsibility. Whether it is AIDS patients dying alone, neglected children or the isolated elderly, there are problems that erode the civic compact and cannot be solely remedied by conventional Government programs. And while national service is unlikely to replicate the diversity of a World War II Army platoon, it could lessen some of the barriers of social class and race that divide Americans. As Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski puts it, "You know you've changed when maybe for the first time in your life you think about somebody other than yourself."

National service should not be regarded as a painless panacea for all these ills of materialism gone amuck. Nor should the heavy-handed coercion of the Nunn plan be regarded as the only model. Mikulski, for example, is working on a $2 billion program that would trade a $3,000 annual educational voucher for part-time community service. Whatever the framework, national service holds the potential to help bridge the chasm between will and wallet. Maybe after a century the time is finally ripe for a bold new experiment in American idealism.