The Graduation Pledge of Social & Environmental
Responsibility: An Effective Tool for Education and Action on
Human Rights
May, 2006
by
Matt Nicodemus, Executive Director
Graduation Pledge Alliance-Asia, Taipei, Taiwan
mattnico8@yahoo.com
Presented at the International Conference on Human Rights Education
in a Diverse and Changing Asia, May 22-24, 2006, Soochow University,
Taipei, Taiwan.
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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Signers of the voluntary Graduation Pledge commit to consider
social and environmental responsibility in their future choices of work and their on-the-job
choices. This paper discusses how the Pledge can play important roles in educating students
about human rights and preparing and supporting them to protect and promote human
rights throughout their careers.
ABSTRACT: Since its inception at Humboldt State University in northern California in 1987,
the Graduation Pledge of Social & Environmental Responsibility has been a way for students
at a growing number of campuses worldwide to voluntarily commit themselves to social and
environmental responsibility in their future choices of work and their on-the-job
choices. The non-partisan, non-sectarian Graduation Pledge has drawn strong support and
involvement throughout its existence, not only from the many thousands of graduates who
have signed it, but also from educators and community members who readily perceive how it
encourages students to explore and discover their deepest values and then manifest those
values in one of the most important arenas of life: their work.
This paper examines the many powerful roles the Pledge can play in educating students
about human rights and preparing and supporting them to protect and promote human
rights throughout their careers.
Beginning when they enter a school with an active graduation pledge program, students
can be introduced to examination of central questions regarding human rights,
social-environmental responsibility, and their mutual relationship. They can throughout
their studies refine their personal answers to those questions, and see more clearly how they
will be faced with myriad future professional situations in which the social-environmental
choices they make may impact the human rights of many people, including themselves.
Students contemplating the pledge promise can be informed about the wide range of
resources available to support their conscientious career and job decisions, and they can learn
about inspiring cases of other principled individuals, including pledge signers, and
organizations that have made a difference for human rights. They can also study different
potential employers' human rights records and find out how to investigate other employers
and improve employers' human rights performance.
The actors assisting students in their process of self-discovery and development of
resolve to work responsibly can include all members of the campus community, plus a
wide variety of people and groups from outside the school. At commencement, the
combined influences of these various actors, along with students' own evolution of belief and
vision, find expression in graduates making the lifelong pledge commitment. This
oath-taking, even if done privately, within the students' minds, occurs in the context of a
highly meaningful, widely accepted public rite of passage, which can more firmly imprint the
pledge commitment into their consciousnesses.
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After graduation, pledge signers have access to an extensive and ever-expanding
network of fellow pledge takers, and to a vast array of people and organizations devoted to
helping them live and work in ways that will preserve and strengthen human rights
wherever they may be employed and whatever their job descriptions.
As more and more educational institutions make the Graduation Pledge option a part of
their school experience, the world could gain an enormous human force for the advancement
of human rights.
Matt Nicodemus, a co-author of the original 1987 Graduation Pledge of Social and Environmental
Responsibility at Humboldt State University and co-founder of the Graduation Pledge Alliance (GPA),
is executive director of the Graduation Pledge Alliance-Asia in Taipei, Taiwan.
Matt hopes that
readers of this paper will want to learn more about the Graduation Pledge, discuss it, study it, inform
others about it, organize or join a campaign for it, sign it, support it in other ways, or combinations
thereof.
He can be contacted at mattnico8@yahoo.com.
Additional information about the
Graduation Pledge is available from the Graduation Pledge Alliance at www.graduationpledge.org.
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Each year, well over one million students enter the workforce. Think
of the impact on our society if even a significant minority of applicants
and job holders inquired about or attempted to change the ethical
practices of their potential or current employers (Graduation Pledge
Alliance, 2006).
Graduation Pledge Alliance brochure
Maybe I’m just one person, but who knows? If we all act as role
models, it could have an effect (Barnett, 1987).
Michele Van Hentenryck, 1987 graduate of
Humboldt State University and one of the
first signers of the Graduation Pledge of
Social and Environmental Responsibility
Introduction
Over the past half century, it has become increasingly accepted that the continued
existence and well-being of humanity and other species on Earth depend on the extent to
which people everywhere, acting both as individuals and together in organizations, do so
with a commitment to social and environmental responsibility (SER).
Countless initiatives
to increase public awareness of and action for SER have been taken in all sectors of society,
and in today’s climate of numerous severe damages and profound threats to life on Earth
coexistent with enormous hope and potential for significant improvements in the world, an
urgent need exists for everyone to learn more about SER and discern the many ways we can,
with our continuing life choices, help make those improvements.
Northern California writer
Wendi Grasseschi notes:
Responsibility is the ability to respond. Inherently, to respond means to act,
to create, to change. But responsibility also implies an awareness of the
impacts of one’s actions, and it is this concept that is finally becoming part
of the global community’s consciousness. The days of action without thought
are obsolete in this increasingly closely knit world (Grasseschi, 1992).
Also obsolete is the notion that human rights issues are distinct from environmental
issues.
Scanning almost any day’s news headlines provides convincing evidence that
human rights abuses can both directly result from environmental problems, as in recent cases
of Taiwan citizens’ health being threatened by secret, illegal river dumping of highly
carcinogenic industrial waste, and also produce eco-destruction, such as that seen in most
war zones.
Global warming is a phenomenon which poignantly illustrates this deadly
two-way dynamic, with the world’s poorest people often being forced to burn foraged wood
for cooking and home heating while at the same time being the ones put most at risk by
temperature increases that will come from all the carbon their survival fires put into the
atmosphere.
If, as one popular dictionary (Collins Cobuild) states, “Someone’s environment
is…all the circumstances, people, things, and events around them that influence their life,”
then our social and environmental concerns, and the actions for justice and planetary survival
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which flow forth from them, must be inextricably linked.
Since its inception at Humboldt State University (HSU) in northern California in 1987,
the Graduation Pledge of Social & Environmental Responsibility has been a way for students
at a growing number of campuses worldwide to voluntarily commit themselves to social and
environmental responsibility in their future choices of work and their on-the-job choices.
The Graduation Pledge in its current form reads as follows:
I pledge to explore and take into account the social and environmental
consequences of any job I consider and will try to improve these aspects of
any organizations for which I work (Graduation Pledge Alliance).
At schools where the Pledge is offered, graduating students are given the opportunity to
voluntarily accept and commit to the Pledge at or around the time of commencement.
Over
the years, pledge signers have included college and university graduates, recipients of
advanced academic and professional degrees, and students completing community college
and high school.
Successful graduation pledge campaigns have been initiated on around two hundred
campuses, including schools in the United States, Canada, France, Australia, Singapore and
Taiwan, and new pledge efforts are presently being considered for the Philippines and India.
The over one hundred educational institutions with active pledge programs span a range
from the some of the most famous, elite academies to small, relatively unknown schools.
At
many of these campuses, faculty members, administrators, and staff have joined in pledge
activities and shown visible support for pledge takers at commencement.
The non-partisan, non-sectarian Pledge has drawn support and involvement throughout
its existence, not only from the many thousands of graduates who have signed it, but also
from educators and community members who readily perceive how it encourages students to
explore and discover their deepest values and then manifest those values in one of the most
important arenas of life: their work.
In 1988, addressing the first group of Stanford
University students to be offered the pledge option, then-university president Donald
Kennedy pointed out to graduates that the Pledge
. . . asks that we consider outcomes – not that we declare allegiance to some
normative standard it supplies. It should be as acceptable to the political
conservative as to the liberal, because it does something we all need to do more
of – that is, it helps us focus on the consequences of what we do, urges us to
estimate them, and urges us to try to decide whether they are acceptable
(Kennedy, 1988).
Around the same time, the New York-based Council on Economic Priorities praised the
Humboldt State University pledge organizing pioneers:
In a society that too easily seems to accept material gain and profit as the
major symbol [sic] of success, it is heartening to know that many of today’s youth
are judging success by more meaningful standards. As the Council points out
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in our research, all citizens should make corporations more responsive to the
social concerns that affect all of us. Actions such as yours will help create the
environment to make that happen (Ihne et al, 1988, 24).
News of the Graduation Pledge has traveled far and wide, carried by pledge takers and
activists, the hundreds of thousands of guests attending graduation ceremonies featuring
pledge distribution, and numerous news media reports.
The Pledge idea has been described
in various books, and has been recognized with several important awards.
Most meaningful, though, in the growth of the Graduation Pledge, have been the pledge
signers themselves, their inner explorations, their investigations of potential employers and
possibilities for making a positive difference in and through their work, and their myriad
different socially and environmentally responsible choices at work, choices which have
expressed their true dedication to ideals and to the practical ideas which can embody them.
Those choices, some major and risky, others smaller but no less significant, have made real
impacts, on pledge signers’ employers, on the social-environmental consequences of those
employers’ activities, and on everyone who is moved by the pledge signers’ examples.
This paper examines the many powerful roles the Graduation Pledge of Social and
Environmental Responsibility can play in educating students about human rights and
preparing and supporting them to protect and promote human rights throughout their
careers.
The Graduation Pledge and human rights in academic educational settings
Beginning when they enter a school with an active graduation pledge program, students
can be introduced to examination of central questions regarding human rights,
social-environmental responsibility, and their mutual relationship. They can throughout
their studies refine their personal answers to those questions, and see more clearly how they
will be faced with myriad future professional situations in which the social-environmental
choices they make may impact the human rights of many people, including themselves.
Prof. Howard Stauffer, a mathematician at Humboldt State University who himself has
turned down highly lucrative and interesting work because of its military implications,
discusses the Pledge with students in his classes each semester:
I tell them about my confrontations with questions of ethics and suggest that
they will likely face similar challenges. . . . it is not my place to tell them what
their ethical position should be, but rather to warn them that they will likely
be confronted with the issue in their jobs. I urge them to begin thinking about
the issue and take a position (King et al, 1993, 3).
Another HSU teacher, Prof. Bill Devall, author of Deep Ecology – Living as if Nature
Mattered (Peregrin Books, 1985), invited student and community pledge activists to speak to
his Critical Thinking classes, assigning students to write follow-up essays expressing their
reactions to the pledge idea and describing how they would go about checking into the
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social-environmental consequences of a job opportunity in their field of interest (GPA, 1988,
March; Ihne et al, 1988, 5).
Here in Taipei, at Soochow University (SCU), where a pledge program was unofficially
initiated last spring, students, one faculty member, and representatives from Graduation
Pledge Alliance (GPA)-Asia have begun discussions with the staff of the Human Rights
Program (HRP) on campus to explore how information about the Pledge could be integrated
into various HRP classes already being taught at the school.
At nearby Chinese Culture
University (CCU), a number of teachers bring guest speakers in to address students about the
Pledge and their responsibilities to society.
One of these teachers, Teresa Wu, regularly
urges her pupils to pay attention to and question the many kinds of discrimination they may
witness in their future employment.
“If you see people mistreated in your office or if your
company is doing something harmful to the environment, you must come out and say
something rather than just pretend that it doesn’t exist,” said Wu, director of CCU’s
Language Center and founder of her campus’s GPA group, in one interview last year (Shih,
2005).
But it’s not only via teachers’ instruction that the Pledge can have an impact in the
classroom.
On various campuses, pledge activists make guest presentations about the
Pledge in many different kinds of classes.
Students, too, have given in-class speeches on the
topic, sometimes using information they’ve obtained from their campus pledge group (GPA,
1988, March).
Students acting with pledge-motivated responsibility have been the
instigators of some important learning and change experiences.
In the Zoology Department
at HSU, philosophy major Lindamarie King and other pledge supporters found an alternative
to animal dissection by purchasing videos, laminated pictures, and plastic models to use in
preparing for exams (King et al, 1993, 2), while over in Chemistry, senior Bill Ziemer’s
questioning of what was being dumped down laboratory sinks after experiments and where
it was going led to a department-wide meeting, resulting in revision of waste management
and disposal policy and new, more ecologically sound student lab reporting requirements
(Ihne et al, 1988, 5).
Recently, Scott Seider of the GoodWork Project reported fascinating results of his study
of students at Harvard College who performed 10-20 hours of community service work each
week (Seider, 2005).
He found that while most of the subjects in his sample were
predisposed, through one or more means, to public service, “it was these students’
unanticipated participation in a framework experience that led to the development of a
worldview in which service-work came to be seen as important, meaningful, and, for many of
these students, a moral obligation” (21). A “framework experience,” in Seider’s model, is “an
experience that shapes an individual’s view of community and the role that he or she can
assume within that community” (20).
Class offerings grounded in education about
responsibility and rights have the potential to serve as such framework experiences for
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students, as did a freshman course, “Personal Choice and Global Transformation,” for one
student, who explained, “It wasn’t all that thematic or academic in a sense, but it was
inspirational and sort of allowed people to think broadly about what they wanted to see
happen in the world, which I think there should probably be a place for that in the
University” (22).
Listening to another of Seider’s interviewees recount her transformative
involvement in Harvard’s annual student-run First Year Urban Program (FUP) (a four-day
“service orientation program” that takes place before the University’s regular first-year
orientation week) opens our eyes to the real potential for graduation pledge-related study
and discourse to effect deep changes in participants:
The most important part of FUP is the discussions, and the issues that are
brought to light….I was so angry when I read about stories about prisons and
about how people are treated, and how in many ways the system is wrong
and no one is doing anything about it….It was amazing because I hadn’t even
thought about some of this stuff. I hadn’t thought about how oppression
permeates our lives in ways we don’t even think about. And FUP made me
really, really angry. I left FUP saying oh my gosh, I really have to do
something (18).
In Appendix 1, I have included a list of SER learning targets for use in the design of
academic activities and assignments.
Appendix 2 presents excerpts from a recent proposal
for a comprehensive social and environmental responsibility program at CCU.
Learning about the Pledge and human rights outside the classroom
Students contemplating the graduation pledge promise can be informed about the wide
range of resources available to support their conscientious career and job decisions, and they
can learn about inspiring cases of other principled individuals, including pledge signers, and
organizations that have made a difference for human rights. They can also study different
potential employers' human rights records and find out how to investigate other employers
and improve employers' human rights performance.
The GPA’s website, www.graduationpledge.org, is one place many people go to get the
latest information on responsible career-building and tips on making changes within the
organizations they will be or are working for.
Psychology professor Neil Wollman, GPA
coordinator and senior fellow of Manchester College’s Peace Studies Institute, which
sponsors the GPA, claims that their online collection of socially responsible jobs, internships,
and volunteer programs (http://www.graduationpledge.org/jobs.html) is one of the best
around.
Wollman has made special effort to balance the resource, listing links to
organizations across the political spectrum.
One of his group’s next big projects will be to
assist in creating an online community especially for people who’ve made the pledge
commitment.
Another organization that has evolved directly out of pledge-related endeavors is the
Sustainable Careers Institute (SCI) (www.sustainablecareers.info), directed by
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educator-consultant Melissa Everett.
Everett, author of Making A Living While Making a
Difference: The Expanded Guide to Creating Careers with a Conscience (New Society
Publishers, 1999), has created Good Work Central, “a wide-ranging library and collection of
links on work ethics and options, education, and career counseling to create a society that is
more democratic, just, humane and ecologically sustainable” (Everett, 2006).
The SCI also
“promotes a new work ethic for a new era” through providing training and resources on
education and career options to institutions of higher learning.
Everett has traveled
extensively to supply school career center staff across the U.S. with the sorts of information
that are increasingly demanded by their socially and environmentally concerned counselees.
Much of the most personally impacting activity to educate and support those
considering the pledge takes place on the campuses where the Pledge is offered.
This is
where conscientious students have the chance to interact more directly with each other and
with other people who want to help them live out their promises.
Sophomore Liz Hoffman
devoted one of her weekly columns in the University of Pennsylvania student newspaper to
introducing the Pledge to her schoolmates and showing specific ways students could put it
into practice (Hoffman, 2006).
The Campus Times at the University of Rochester carried a
story last spring describing pledge education work of the student group Grassroots, whose
members were cooperating with the school career center to compile and make available job
search resources.
Grassroots member Aadika Singh stated, “The pledge is not just for
seniors or just for graduation.
(Buitrago, 2005).
It’s for all students to consider and reflect upon at all times”
The article noted that the group was planning to hold a panel discussion
featuring “employed members of the university and the Greater Rochester community”, who
would address “issues of social and environmental responsibility in their work.”
One of the most memorable events I remember from my own work with the Pledge in
its early years at HSU was a very well-attended April, 1988 public forum, “Careers &
Conscience: Examining Military-Related Occupations.”
Not only did the forum bring
together four panelists who had made very different career choices (one nuclear weapons
designer and another who had quit such work, a Navy Pentagon spokesman, and a radical
physicist who refused to train students who might do military work), but its entire
organization, a joint effort between members of the GPA, Student Citizens for Social
Responsibility, and the College Republicans, expressed a common assumption that “each
speaker honestly believed believed that his choices were socially and environmentally
responsible”; the three and a half hours of passionate, mutually respecting discussion we all
engaged in demonstrated “a special spirit of cooperative search for truth” that is often lacking
these days when widely disparate viewpoints meet on campus (Elias, 1988; GPA, Ihne et al,
1988; King et al, 1993).
Like the members of Grassroots at Rochester and GPA at HSU, Irish-born literature
major Sinead Walsh, the lead organizer of Harvard pledge activities in 2000, arranged for
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several panels of speakers from a number of cause-oriented groups to appear on campus
(McCarthy, 2001).
The added twist was that students desiring to take the Harvard pledge
were required to attend at least one of the three forums.
Aware of how easy it could be for
some graduates to sign the Pledge and then soon forget it, Walsh and her colleagues also
prepared smaller-sized pledge cards that could be carried in signers’ wallets and distributed
advice books full of useful information and advice for job and volunteer service seekers (Pope,
2000).
“We’re aiming to give seniors practical, every day ways to help in work life,” she
explained (Reiter, 2000).
At Stanford and at least several other schools, pledge activists have done their own
investigative homework and drawn on the resources of a variety of issue-oriented
organizations on and off campus to gather and make available different news and views
about the social-environmental performance of companies and other employers.
Students
for Informed Career Decisions, who coordinated the Stanford pledge program in 2001-2002,
posted on their website detailed suggestions for how to research potential careers and
employers, and what they had found out about “25 companies that commonly recruit on
college campuses” (Students for Informed Career Decisions, 2002).
Speaking to the
Washington Times, SICD head Ned Tozun expressed his feeling that “the pledge is especially
relevant at Stanford, since many of us will end up becoming influential individuals with the
potential to make a significant impact, whether it be positive or negative” (Duin, 2001).
A
decade before, the University of Colorado pledge group created a leaflet, “Thinking about the
Graduation Pledge of Environmental and Social Responsibility,” which was handed to
graduates when they picked up their pledges at cap and gown distribution (UCSU
Environmental Center, 1992).
Above a list of resources available at the university to assist
investigation of the policies and practices of prospective employers, the leaflet suggested that
You can think of fulfilling the commitment of the pledge as involving two
separate tasks: First, there is looking within yourself. You might identify
what personal principles are important to you. Then consider how these
principles manifest on a company level, both in relations within the company
and the relations the company maintains with the larger community and
the environment….Second, there is looking outside yourself by undertaking
a concrete investigation of companies for which you may consider working.
One observation made by numerous student pledge advocates is that their study of and
reflection on pledge information, their involvement in organizing campus activities and
events, and their interactions with older, experienced and highly committed pledge group
members have greatly enriched and strengthened the inner sentiments which first led them to
join in work on the Pledge.
This echoes opinions expressed by the Harvard students
GoodWork’s Seider believes had a “framework experience” in FUP, including Louis, who
recalled,
Before FUP…I’d say that I was taught to think about community service as
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an extracurricular activity….It was not presented as a framework of thinking.
And, I think, that’s what FUP really did for me. I saw people that were
integrating their studies and their service, their activism, and how they
engage with this community….And it was just really powerful for me
(Seider, 2005, 20).
If we can manage to involve students earlier in examination of social-environmental
responsibility issues and get them helping schoolmates to do the same over a longer period of
time before graduation, then that pledge organizing itself can dramatically develop and
amplify their intentions to do their very best for the world.
Of course, the large majority of heart- and mind-expanding discussions about the
Pledge do not take place in classrooms or at public events or freshman orientations.
Instead,
they occur among students in smaller, more personal contexts, among friends, over
dormitory dining tables, in conversations with classmates, or during phone calls home, for
example.
In these settings, students can relax and be themselves, which is essential if they
are going to get in touch with their deeper values, hopes and perceptions to the degree
required for making a lifelong commitment to responsible work.
The most effective
graduation pledge promotion gives students ‘big’ questions that they can explore, both alone
and in social situations, to better understand themselves and others.
“Talking to friends and
colleagues is a great way to actively reflect on the pledge and to support mutual efforts to
develop commitments to social and environmental responsibility,” claimed the writers of the
aforementioned leaflet for University of Colorado graduates (UCSU Environmental Center,
1992).
Presently, our Asian regional office of GPA is developing and beginning to distribute
draft bilingual versions of “Questions to Explore in Social and Environmental Responsibility
(SER) Work Discussions” at pledge-active schools in Taiwan (see Appendix 3).
This fall, we
will conduct a pilot project to assist the formation of peer discussion-support groups on some
of these campuses; the groups will give participants the chance to examine pledge-related
topics in a series of informal conversations.
The Pledge in graduation activities
The pledge statement is kind of what education is all about. We become
educated men and women so we can go on and act in a socially and
environmentally responsible manner (Barnett, 1987).
Former HSU student body president
Mark Murray, 1987 pledge signer
I think any graduate could go along with that feeling and be proud to
(Ihne et al, 1988, 25).
Larry Murray, father of Mark Murray
The actors assisting students in their process of self-discovery and development of
resolve to work responsibly can include all members of the campus community, plus a
11
wide variety of people and groups from outside the school. At commencement, the
combined influences of these various actors, along with students' own evolution of belief and
vision, find expression in graduates making the lifelong pledge commitment. This
oath-taking, even if done privately, within the students' minds, occurs in the context of a
highly meaningful, widely accepted public rite of passage, which can more firmly imprint the
pledge commitment into their consciousnesses.
The word “graduation” is derived from the Latin root gradus, meaning step or pace.
“Commencement” is the time at which something begins.
For students finishing their
studies and stepping into the next phase of their existence, taking a lifelong oath to respect
the Earth and its people can be extremely meaningful.
In a paper presented at the 4th
National Conference on Ethics in America in 1993, GPA-HSU member Lindamarie King
argued that Pledge oath “gives students the chance to consciously orient themselves to seek
responsible livelihoods just as they are graduating and facing critical employment choices”
(King et al, 1993).
Receiving her CCU bachelor’s degree in English last year, Theresa Pi, a
returning student, reflected,
I hope by taking the pledge, a little seed of conscience will be planted in
my heart which will grow and give me the courage to do the right things
for our society and the environment. As a mother, I look forward to
making the world a better place for my children (Nicodemus et al, 2005, 4).
Dr. James Dalton, instigator of the new pledge project at Bloomsburg University in
Pennsylvania, said recently that the purpose of the Pledge was “to remind us all to honor our
values, to continuously consider the social and environmental consequences of our choices,
and to improve the social and environmental aspects of our workplaces, communities and
society” (Eby, 2006).
Looking back on his 1989 graduation from Manchester College,
William Benysh, a biology teacher at Wabash High School in Indiana, stated,
I feel now the Graduation Pledge was a great statement of optimism
and an acceptance of the responsibility of adulthood….I took those words
seriously. It's strange to think back on the impact that the Graduation
Pledge and the mind-set that I had at the time has had on me. Social
and environmental responsibility is a way of life I have chosen
(Graduation Pledge Alliance, 2005).
Unlike Benysh, who appears to have grown into his commencement declaration,
another Manchester graduate, Dana Nixon, knew she was driven to service when she made
the pledge commitment in 1996.
“Once your eyes are open to injustice, they can never be
closed,” she commented (Graduation Pledge Alliance, 2005).
Someone else whose
pledge-signing reflects a lifestyle he’s already practicing is Brett Siegel, 38, who got his
philosophy degree from Broward Community College in South Florida just last week; Siegel
already purchases only food that’s locally grown, conserves fuel, and has left jobs when he
wasn’t satisfied with his employers’ ethics (James, 2006).
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Just as pledge signers differ in their perceptions of the graduation promise, the ways in
which the Pledge option is presented to students vary from campus to campus.
Some
schools have special gatherings for pledge-taking, such as Duke University, where each April
the Community Service Center hosts an event for graduating seniors “who wish to affirm
their commitment to achieving high professional standards” by signing the Pledge (Duke
University Community Service Center), and the University of Virginia, at which a small
ceremony was staged for the thirty 2001 graduates who made the promise (Duin, 2001).
The
first unofficial pledge distribution at CCU, in 2004, took place in just one English instructor’s
senior-level public speaking class, a route followed the next year by Prof. Cynthia Yu at
nearby SCU, who handed out pledge cards to her advisees at the annual spring teacher
appreciation dinner put on by graduating English majors.
TAS student organizers, unable
to obtain administrative approval for including the Pledge in their June, 2005 commencement,
were allowed to set up a table just outside the school cafeteria where the post-ceremony
reception was held; there, graduates could pick up pledge cards and supplementary materials,
sign their cards, and leave personal contact information. Many pledge programs also provide
the opportunity for students who aren’t able to take the Pledge in person to do so online.
However, from the beginning, most pledge campaigns have set as their objective the
achievement of maximum integration of the Pledge into their institutions’ official graduation
ceremonies.
At HSU, our original concept for the Pledge was derived from several
preceding initiatives, including one by upstate New York citizens who passed out to high
school graduates ‘diploma’ leaflets describing military service choices they’d face, another by
University of California-Berkeley physics students seeking a departmental graduation
ceremony pledge to avoid military-related work, and the oath at one point required of all
science and technology graduates from the University of Zagreb in Yugoslavia, which
committed them to use what they’d learned only for constructive, humane purposes (Ihne et
al, 1988, 2).
The peacemakers who conceived these inspiring projects had all chosen
commencement as the time and place where they could make the strongest impact on young
people.
For our own pledge, we envisioned an abundance of exquisite moments, and
further exquisite developments following them, that could occur if the Pledge were central to
the graduation ceremony, and we found that a majority of HSU students and faculty agreed
with us.
By the next spring, knowing of that support and having found even more on other
campuses led us to make this statement in the graduation pledge organizing manual we
produced:
Why is it important that a graduation pledge option be incorporated in
commencement ceremonies? The main reason to push for a pledge option
is that many students who choose the pledge want to do so in front of their
peers. If the graduation ceremony is for the students, then the students
should play a role in creating and re-creating the celebratory rites of their
educational passage. This idea is already embodied in the custom on
many campuses where student bodies assist in the selection of
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commencement speakers and awards….Because the ceremony represents
for many a symbolic point of entry into the outside, “real” world, signing
the oath at such a unique and momentous time may deepen the penetration
of commitment into a signer’s consciousness. This ‘reinforcement’ of the
pledge is enhanced by the ceremony’s displaying that our educators grant
a place of significance to questions of responsibility in life decisions (Ihne
et al, 1988, 3).
Marylyn Fletcher, principal of Arcata High School in 1988, when students there followed our
lead (both schools are in the same town) and successfully campaigned for the Pledge to be
offered, thought the timing of the pledge-signing was right:
Graduation is a time when students think about their future, about what
they believe in, what they think about their place in the world. This is
an act of thinking. And that makes it a worthwhile project (Ladd, 1988).
The same year, students in the Coalition to Humanize MIT wrote an open letter to then
president Paul Grey, in which they urged Grey’s administration to allow the Pledge into
MIT’s commencement exercises.
Pointing out that the school’s education reform was
“beginning to devote more attention to the social impacts of technology in the curriculum,”
they asked, “What better place is there to reinforce the message of responsibility than the
graduation ceremony?” (Cowan et al, 1988).
Bob Caylor, editorializing for the Fort Wayne,
Indiana Post-Sentinel, expressed the same idea, perhaps more forcefully:
….the Graduation Pledge, or some variant of it, is a ritual of passage
that, when encouraged by a college or university, sends a valuable
message: Work has great meaning, and any work has effects far beyond
the person paid to perform it. That sounds like a better way to send
graduates into the world than most commencement speeches
(Caylor, 2004).
Examination of rituals gets us into the realm of anthropology, a field in which I have no
formal training but much pledge-connected interest.
Not long ago, I asked a couple of local
anthropologists for some brief analysis of the ritual aspects of the Pledge at graduation.
Both of them, teachers at National Taiwan University, were very busy, but one, Prof. Wang
Mei-Hsia, e-mailed a short explanation which I was thrilled to read:
Concerning rituals, anthropologists focus on the following issues: how
a person can refresh him/herself, how a community can be redefined
and how new cultural concepts can be incorporated into society by means
of ritual practice (Wang, 2006).
This statement resonates deeply with the perspectives and passions which drove the 1987
campaign for inclusion of the Pledge in HSU’s commencement and our subsequent efforts to
more fully integrate the Pledge into the school’s graduation ceremonies, and which continue
to underlie the graduation activities of pledge promoters and signers around the world.
Any commencement is a richly complex social happening, replete with human connections
14
and the potential for inter- and intrapersonal communication.
Furthermore, graduation
ceremonies are not isolated packages of experience; they exist over time, being built up to,
occurring, and afterwards living on in participants’ memories.
We thought carefully about all of this at HSU, and attempted to ensure that awareness
and appreciation of the Pledge would be woven throughout the whole fabric of the
graduation process.
This included carrying out extensive on-campus publicity in the month
or so before commencement (including encouraging faculty and students to discuss the
Pledge in their classes), getting graduation speakers to mention the Pledge in their
commencement addresses, providing rainbow-colored ribbons for pledge signers and
supportive faculty and staff to pin onto their caps or gowns, passing out informational
leaflets to all guests at the ceremonies (suggesting they ask their graduating loved ones what
the Pledge meant to them -- eventually, the university administration also inserted a brief
description of the Pledge in the commencement handbook), visibly offering pledges to
graduates as they descended from the stage after receiving their diplomas and providing a
table at one side of the stage for those wanting to sign the pledge publicly, interviewing
graduates and guests at post-ceremony receptions, and working to get extensive local, state,
regional, and national media coverage of HSU pledge activities and GPA’s grand
movement-building endeavor.
All of these elements of our early organizing are still present in the words and deeds of
today’s pledge programs, and in the minds of many pledge signers.
Jonathon T. Jacoby,
leader of the 1999 Harvard pledge project, e-mailed to a reporter one year later that he felt “a
public display of Harvard students’ desire to make a positive impact upon society and the
environment could go a long way in raising awareness of the kind of citizens we ought to be”
(Reiter, 2000).
Of his own pledge-taking, Jacoby said, “It gave me an opportunity to
communicate to my peers in a formal, public manner that I intend to live according to my
own ideals of social justice.”
In 2001, at the University of Maryland, where students
couldn’t convince the school to permit green ribbons to be worn during ceremonies, ten
pledge signers planned to don them anyway, and more than a hundred students signed a
petition for the ribbons to be sanctioned in future graduations (Duin, 2001).
Green ribbons will also be a prominent feature of commencement at Tufts University
near Boston, according to this year’s co-coordinators of the Tufts University Pledge, seniors
Negar Razavi and Karen Lin.
“We are hoping that the Class of 2006 will leave an amazing
and important legacy by being the first class to really rally behind the Graduation Pledge,”
according to Razavi, who added, “We are looking to get as many of our classmates to sign the
pledge as possible” (Dince, 2006).
Razavi and Lin see that pledge signing will not only help
produce more socially and environmentally conscious individuals, but also have an influence
on those not taking the Pledge.
“We hope [students] will educate their family and friends
about the commitment they made through the Pledge,” said Lin.
15
I join Lin and Razavi in
their hopes for big success for the Tufts Pledge, and I dream, as we did back in 1987, that with
more and more successes in an increasing number of locales, the not-too-distant future will
see it be the norm for students to receive and thoughtfully sign responsibility pledges at
commencement.
Following through on the pledge commitment
It’s just something you sign and keep as sort of your memento, along with
your pictures and diplomas, to remind you. It’s to make you say, ‘Hey,
I think about what I’m doing’ (Gordon, 1988).
Peter Blando, former editor of the California Aggie at
the University of California-Davis
Casting our feeble votes every few years no longer suffice[s]; it’s time
to vote with our lives (Hamilton, 1987).
Shawn Hamilton, 1987 graduate of HSU and member
of Citizens for Social Responsibility
The thesis of this essay is that the Graduation Pledge of Social and Environmental
Responsibility can make a difference, a substantive difference, for the preservation and
advancement of human rights worldwide.
And while my exposition so far demonstrates the
Pledge’s potential, through its consideration and personal adoption by signers, to be a force
for those rights, unless it can be shown that pledge takers actually follow through on their
graduation oaths, then I and other pledge proponents are advocating a gesture that is moving,
certainly, but essentially hollow, and it would be socially-environmentally responsible for us
to stop spending our valuable time and energy, and the Earth’s resources, to promote it.
Fortunately, and compellingly, there is a long, documented history, going back to the
spring of 1987, of graduates whose actions, motivated by their pledge promise and sometimes
emboldened by the knowledge that they were part of a wider community of conscience, have
clearly bespoken their deeply held principles.
Let me share some of their stories.
Even before she received her diploma, HSU engineering graduate-to-be Michele Van
Hentenryck faced a hard career decision.
Michele was offered an interview for a summer
internship with renowned multinational contractor Bechtel Corporation.
Many in her
position would have jumped for the opportunity faster than you could say “plum job,” but
Michele, who happened to count as a neighbor and friend one of the students campaigning
for the first pledge, thought she should first look more closely at the company.
She wasn’t
happy about what she found; “I didn’t like that they work with the weapons industry and
that they’re not very open about their dealings,” she told one interviewer, adding, “Maybe
I’m just one person, but who knows?
If we all act as role models, it could have an effect”
(Barnett, 1987).
16
Tina Garson, another HSU student worried about doing military-funded work, checked
on levels of defense department support in each of the psychology graduate programs she
was considering (King et al, 1993), while University of California-Berkeley physics major Eric
Kostello, who “couldn’t sustain a division between a me that goes to work for money and the
me that is a citizen,” acknowledged that signing the Pledge might heighten the dilemma he
was already starting to encounter (Seligman, 1988):
So many areas of physics have applications that concern me….If you look
at who is interested in astrophysics, they are interested in developing
radiation detectors and ‘Star Wars’ weapons. That is a fascinating field,
but there is this dual nature.
Like Garson and Kostello, Harvard “pledgee” Rochelle Mackey began her investigation
of possible future career paths before leaving school, looking at “tons of different jobs because
I had no idea what I wanted to be doing” (Butler, 2001).
Finally, she settled on a job with
Booz*Allen & Hamilton, the management and technology consulting firm, that would have
her working with federal agencies.
"Government, obviously, is something that touches all of
us, and through consulting I can try to improve how it's run," she said.
reasons for choosing Booz*Allen?
And Mackey’s
"I was definitely looking for certain qualities in a
workplace: that it place priority on having some form of public service, and not be
superficially committed,” she recalled.
Rose Burkholder, a rural Indiana native who graduated from Manchester in 2004 with
degrees in finance and sociology, grew up in difficult economic circumstances, an experience
that left her with ”a lot of compassion for the underprivileged in our society” (Jacobson, 2004).
Burkholder wanted to “serve as a link between the underprivileged and the opportunities
they want to have in society – going to college, developing job skills,” and she didn’t want to
“be in a position where the organization I worked for was taking advantage of the
employees.”
Although her finance studies had conveyed the lesson that most companies
focus on “maximizing shareholder value,” frequently at the cost of employees’ jobs and
standard of living, Burkholder had her own priorities, pointing out, “Often change comes
from the bottom up, not the top down.”
Grace Yu, another of Teresa Wu’s students who signed the first CCU pledge, applied
her responsible-work thinking when confronted with an issue common in Taiwan language
schools: differing pay for foreign and local instructional staff.
“When I found that foreign
teachers got higher salaries than Taiwanese hires,” Yu said, “I took the initiative to ask my
boss why he didn’t comply with the principle of ‘equal pay for equal work,’ and he explained
it to me” (Shih, 2005).
Yu’s approaching her supervisor may not have brought about any
alteration of pay scales, but it did help her to understand and feel better about the existing
salary policy, and it may also have put the boss and her fellow employees on notice that she
was watching company activities with an eye toward fairness.
17
One of my own personal on-the-job attempts to bring about increased awareness and
positive change took place when I was working as a technician at a chemical testing
laboratory in Humboldt County, California in the early 1990s. Having heard a long series of
complaints about the company expressed by many of my fellow lab workers, I invited all
non-management staff over to my home for a meeting at which people could feel comfortable
to say what was on their minds, both criticisms of and kudos for the way our company was
being run.
We wrote up a report of the session and gave it to management, who were far
less than pleased that we’d gathered outside of the office.
In fact, we found out later that I
and several other employees who had spearheaded the unauthorized communication effort
were put on a ‘hit list’ for firing, though I quit over the owners’ treatment of my own
supervisor before they could lay me off.
The above cases, just a sampling of the sorts of personal accounts we regularly hear
from pledge signers, can serve to display some of the interesting and important aspects of
work lives lived as if they really mattered for a better world.
They show the mix of ideals,
investigation, and initiative-taking that characterizes pledge adherents.
But they also
evidence the real challenges faced when trying to harmonize one’s values with one’s
work-related decisions.
How can individuals sustain their ethical effort as they move
further and further away from the commencement-day strains of “Pomp and Circumstance”?
How can they find nourishment, shelter, and growth during their career journeys, and how
can they pass on to others some of the wisdom they’ve gained along the road?
After graduation, pledge signers have access to an extensive and ever-expanding
network of fellow pledge takers, and to a vast array of people and organizations devoted to
helping them live and work in ways that will preserve and strengthen human rights and
environmental sustainability wherever they may be employed and whatever their job
descriptions.
Among these sources of support, many are familiar – family, friends,
professional associations, religious organizations, and social-environmental change groups,
to name some – but others are more novel, including specially trained responsible-work
career counselors, personal focus groups, and cyber-communities.
Into this last category fall
some of the most exciting experiments, campus-based online networks for graduates who
make the pledge commitment.
Tufts ‘pledgeucators’ (my term) Razavi and Lin hope that
with the contact network they’re creating, pledge takers “can reach out to one another over
the years and continue to try to encourage each other to make positive contributions to the
world around us, and to sometimes make the hard decisions to follow the path that we know
is right, as opposed to the path we think we’re expected to follow in life” (Dince, 2006).
The
excellent website of the Graduation Pledge at Middlebury College (GPMC) encourages
visitors to join a moderated listserve “created exclusively for Midd grads who have signed
the Graduation Pledge” (GPMC).
“Share your ideas and hear about ways in which others
are incorporating the Pledge into their daily lives and work environments,” continues the
18
invitation.
Also highly evolved and informative is the website devoted to the UBC
Sustainability Pledge, a program of the Office of Student Development at the University of
British Columbia in Vancouver (UBC Sustainability Pledge).
All campus pledge activists
could profit by studying this stylish, user-friendly site, which introduces its multiple
offerings with the following announcement:
The importance of the Sustainability Pledge is more than to See it and Sign
it. At UBC, students, staff and faculty are encouraged to really Live the
Pledge by continuing our commitment to a better world through our everyday
actions. You can find articles, job and volunteer opportunities and information about
actions, events and other resources in the "Live it" section of this site.
The site also includes a counter to track the total number of UBC pledge signers, which, as of
March this year, was 1185.
At CCU, the campus GPA’s website is being improved to include
a discussion board allowing pledge signers to post questions, answers, and other information
for each other.
Conclusions
As more and more educational institutions make the Graduation Pledge option a part of
their school experience, the world could gain an enormous human force for the advancement
of human rights.
Since its earliest days, when it encountered excited enthusiasm and ardent
support for the Pledge among people throughout the HSU campus and surrounding
community, the Graduation Pledge Alliance has operated with firm conviction and explicit
prediction that the Pledge, “if acted on sincerely and consistently by large numbers of people,
will likely result in fundamental improvement of our global condition” (Ihne et al, 1988, 6).
This outlook is shared by numerous activists in the rapidly expanding network of pledge
schools, and by an even greater number of pledge signers.
Witness some of their statements:
As people graduate and move into the workforce, they have the power to
decide in what directions companies will move. They can decide how the
resources of the Earth are husbanded, and the type of Earth future generations
will inherit (Li, 2005).
Taipei American School senior and 2005 pledge
campaigner Yanlin Fu
Raising the level of consciousness regarding social responsibility will
empower students to make decisions in the workplace that will lead to
a better world (Mo, 2005).
Yao Chung-kun, professor and chairman,
English department, Chinese Culture University
The consequences of our occupations are profound. As we graduates
make the transition from academia to the “real” world of working and
paying bills, habits and patterns will be formed that will define our lives
for many years. If we make a commitment now – while we are in the
process of establishing our routines – to be socially and responsible
19
citizens and workers, we can build a strong moral foundation that will
help guide our future decisions (Goshen College Student Senate).
Student Senate website, Goshen College,
Goshen, Indiana
The world is in need now, and students across the country are responding.
At Evergreen, we hope that our example will mean all the difference to
the children who must inherit what we leave (Ihne et al, 1988).
Environmental Pledge Alliance, Evergreen
State College, Olympia, Washington
Though a mere gesture, this could be instrumental in helping heighten
people’s awareness of the harmful goings-on in the world. There are,
of course, too many horrible conditions on this planet, all seeming so
overwhelming that one often feels helpless….Yet, this is where it starts,
at the very basic of actions (Stewart, 1987).
Christine Stewart, junior in sociology,
Humboldt State University
By emphasizing issues of social responsibility, the graduation pledge
helps catalyze a change in the nature of an individual’s attitudes
(UPI, 1988).
Diane Honigberg, 1988 Stanford GPA
Coordinator
If…companies lose one or two of their top Harvard recruits over these
social and environmental responsibility issues…I think they would
seriously reconsider what opportunities they do provide (Pope, 2000).
Sinead Walsh, 2000 Harvard graduate and
pledge organizer
Such optimism is by no means unfounded.
Historically, the Graduation Pledge was born
and continues to sprout at a time when the confluence of numerous forces has produced
conditions – and young people – that call out for real betterment of our personal and
collective lots.
William Ihne, who was part of the Pledge’s creation and co-founded the GPA
at HSU, writes about some of those conditions, and the pledge phenomenon’s growth, in his
essay, “Starting a Campus Tradition: A Graduation Pledge of Responsibility”:
Keep in mind that in the late 1980’s, there were many issues being raised
on university campuses. We were in the middle of a nuclear arms race,
with a huge hole in the ozone. There was talk about the U.S. having
traded arms for hostages in Iran, and massive species extinctions in the
forecast. On and on continued the list of concerns: global warming,
destruction of the rain forests, nuclear testing, toxic waste, U.S. support
of wars in Latin America, apartheid in South Africa, and in our own
20
Arcata backyard, a Texas oil tycoon was quickly liquidating the largest
private holdings of ancient old growth redwood forest to pay for his
company takeover. There were a lot of issues, like today – a
mind-boggling amount for any young person. I think it’s hard, for
young people, especially, not to care or to feel something about the
world’s plight, and painfully difficult to accept that we are each a part
of the destructiveness (Ihne, 2005, 5).
The origination and popularity of the Pledge, in Ihne’s mind, came because “Somehow, the
pledge simplifies things to ground level. Having it a part of the graduation ceremony draws
attention to the fact that what you do, your actions and their resulting consequences, have an
impact on society and the environment, and that impact matters” (5).
Teresa Wu has noted that many of her CCU students “feel lost, not sure what the point
of material gain is.”
Wu senses that the Pledge “brings some meaning back into their lives,
and provides a focus for them to reorient themselves” (Li, 2005).
Father Daniel J. Bauer SVD,
who teaches English at Fujen University in Taipei and has a regular column in the China Post,
opined several weeks ago that the symptoms of “graduation-itis” which seniors may be
suffering as commencements approach, including “a slightly quickened heartbeat at
moments of contemplation, insomnia, queasy stomachs, and varying degrees of restlessness,
fear, or anxiety,” are altogether normal and have been observed among students for a long
time (Bauer, 2006).
The GPA’s remedy to “graduation-itis,” “a clear and positive focus when
graduates (or people of an age, for that matter) consider a job or career,” is just what the
doctor ordered, according to Bauer.
Concluding his article, Bauer contradicted two
perspectives about jobs that are constantly pushed on students here, that the most important
feature of a job is either salary or reputation:
Many of us have known for a long time, however, that work often
satisfies us deep inside ourselves not because of the salary or prestige
it brings, but because it is work that allows us to do something that is
good and right, work that benefits society.
One tremendously hope-giving development, trend research indicates, is that more and
more young job seekers and workers appear to agree with Father Bauer when it comes to
choosing employment.
The biannual survey of MBAs conducted by Duke University found
that between 1989, when respondents named power, prestige, and money among their
highest lifetime goals, and 1991, there was a reversal of students’ attitudes; the new most
desired objectives listed were marriage, health, and ethics (Ross, 2000).
Even back in the
mid-1980s, when America was supposedly gripped by yuppie greed, a nationwide study
showed college students rating salary fourth, behind career growth, happiness, and challenge,
as a consideration in future job choices (Seligman, 1988).
Sinead Walsh noted that many of
her Harvard classmates felt guilty taking big-money investment and consulting jobs in a Wall
Street environment where there was “this dichotomy between going into finance…and the
idea that you can be a socially and environmentally responsible person” (Pope, 2000).
21
At the
University of Virginia, sophomore organizer Lyle Solla-Yates related that everyone he had
talked to about the Pledge had been “extremely positive” about it, adding, “Social
consciousness and environmental awareness has [sic] made a comeback recently” (Duin,
2001).
Though different cultures and countries are in different situations, the globalization of
information through technology, trade, and travel has meant that developments anywhere
which are seen by many to be on the leading edge of progress are reported and quite
frequently embraced, and further advanced, by people in other parts of the world.
Changes in student perceptions, aspirations, and actions taking place in one region can
quickly be reproduced elsewhere, sometimes so widely and fast that we can’t grasp the
entirety of the shifts.
Simultaneously, computer-savvy youth, far more adept than most of
their elders at conceiving and using digital communication networks, are at the forefront of
many movements to expose and eliminate an expanding array of human rights abuses
throughout the global village.
All of the pieces are in place, and in many cases already being
put together and utilized to dramatic effect, to realize the dream of a truly decentralized,
democratic, multi-faceted, multi-focused and incredibly effective cross-borders community of
social-environmental changemakers, a web of people committed to clean and compassionate
living and concerted campaigning to end oppression and help heal the Earth’s critical
ailments.
The Pledge movement coexists with and is seen by many observers as reflective of
some of the most significant contemporary change movements, including those for
sustainability, ethical entrepreneurship, good governance, corporate accountability and
transparency, global citizenship education, community service, and personal responsibility.
All, however, is not smooth sailing to a brighter future, we must admit. Collaboration
between investigators at Claremont Graduate University, Stanford, and Harvard has, over the
past decade, been studying how individuals and institutions wanting to do “good work”,
“work that is at once excellent in technical quality and at the same time responsive to the
needs and wishes of the broader community in which it takes place,…succeed or fail at a time
when…1) material conditions are changing very quickly; 2) our sense of time and space is
being radically altered by technology; and 3) market forces are unprecedently powerful
powerful and few if any counterforces of comparable power exist” (GoodWork Project).
An
upcoming GoodWork Project book adds a fourth contextual factor into the equation, “a
rapidly shifing political landscape” (GoodWork Project).
While the GoodWork team has
found some professions in which good work is more readily accomplished, they also report
widespread belief among young workers “that they cannot afford at present to be ethical as
well as excellent,” a “discouraging finding” which “underscores the need for educational
experiences that foreground goodwork as well as for periodic booster shots, should the image
of good work become blurred” (GoodWork Project).
22
How can we not but think of the Graduation Pledge at this point?
This antidote to
gloom and complacency will, say its promoters at Rice University in Texas, “remind you to
not get too comfortable in your workplace, to keep an eye out for opportunities to improve
social and environmental responsibility, and when such opportunities are within reach, to try
your best to make the most of them” (The Graduation Pledge @ Rice).
Michelle Maslov, an
American history major set to work for a nonprofit group helping the poor after graduating
from the University of Maryland, asserted, “For those who signed the pledge, the
environment is always in the back of their minds” (Duin, 2001).
CCU graduate Nell Lee,
who first learned of the GPA when I spoke to her English class two years ago, told one
reporter that she sometimes had difficulty fulfilling her pledge commitment in the
competitive world of work but continued to try; one part of that effort was posting her pledge
card on her office desk where colleagues could see it, another was joining former classmates
to donate money to needy children (Mo, 2005).
These are the kinds of people who exemplify the beauty and the wonderful possibilities
of the Graduation Pledge, they are the kinds of people who will surely help make the world a
kinder, gentler place, and they are the kinds of people of whom there is no short supply.
With that in mind, it is easy to see why the Graduation Pledge Alliance is working so hard to
give such people at educational institutions everywhere the chance to discover and make the
Pledge central to their lives.
Acknowledgements
I want to thank William Ihne, for his useful comments and enthusiasm during the
writing of this paper, Neil Wollman, who sent many of the news reports I have cited, and
Teresa Wu, for her good work to link up graduation pledge organizing and human rights
development.
Appendix 1
Bringing social & environmental responsibility into the classroom – Learning goals for
students, by Matt Nicodemus, Graduation Pledge Alliance-Asia, Taipei, Taiwan (Nicodemus,
2005).
The following are goals for student learning about social and environmental responsibility (SER), with
an emphasis on the issues and choices students will face and/or are facing in their employment and
careers. Educators can use these goals as a guide when designing instructional activities and
assignments.
1. Students are exposed to a wide range of values and views regarding SER.
2. Students recognize that they already are operating according to a set of SER values and views, and
discover a variety of ways by which they can become more conscious of and clear about them.
3. Students learn that people's SER values and views can and often do change over time, and that
examination of one's SER values, views, and actions is a lifelong process.
4. Students see how a wide variety of issues and choices in the workplace and career face people who
have particular SER values and views, and they understand that such issues and choices may be
and interconnected. They discover how all workers at every level of an organization confront SER
23
issues on the job, and can, with their SER choices, have positive impacts on the organization and the
wider world.
5. Students understand that there is a range of options for effective action that a person can take when
confronted by an SER issue pre- or during employment.
6. Students are exposed to a wide spectrum of real-life cases where SER considerations were influential
on people's life choices in job and careers. They learn that there have been individuals and groups of
people throughout history who have faced SER-related issues and made choices to follow their
consciences in work-related decision-making.
7. Students appreciate how their SER choices, in concert with those of others, can have larger and wider
positive impacts in the world.
8. Students see that there consequences at numerous levels when someone does or doesn't act in concert
with their SER values and views.
9. Students learn that living in accordance with one's SER values and views requires significant
commitment of time, energy, and resources, and involves both risks and rewards.
10. Students come to understand what kinds of information and support they may need to more fully
live out their SER values and views.
11. Students explore how they can find information and support to make SER choices, and how they can
inform and support others to be more SER.
12. Students understand that the activities of both individuals and the organizations that employ them
are heavily contributory to the worsening of numerous social-environmental problems, and to efforts to
solve those same problems.
13. Students find that there is now a strong, evolving global trend toward SER in all aspects and
sectors of human society, with growing numbers of people trying to make their public and private life
choices more in harmony with their deeply held values and beliefs. They also learn about the
increasing number of organizations representing and/or assisting such people.
14. Students appreciate the many exciting and beneficial ways in which they can integrate their personal
exploration of SER into their school educational experience.
Appendix 2
Excerpts from a proposal for a Social and Environmental Responsibility Program (SEREP) at
the Chinese Culture University, Taipei, Taiwan , by Matt Nicodemus, Graduation Pledge
Alliance-Asia, Taipei, Taiwan (Nicodemus, 2006). Note: “PCCU” is used here to denote the
Chinese Culture University. Also, boldfacing has been added to the list of core concepts for
sake of clarity.
This proposal envisions an important role in SER education for PCCU through the creation of
a vibrant, multifaceted, schoolwide Social & Environmental Responsibility Education Program
(SEREP). SEREP will take full advantage of the total spectrum of PCCU's excellent human and
material resources and facilities to raise the levels of SER understanding and lifelong action, first and
foremost in the university's students but also in the rest of the campus community, and, excitingly, in
other parts of society in Taiwan and throughout Asia. This cutting-edge program will help provide
PCCU students with the best possible learning and will serve as a powerful model for other educational
institutions on the island and worldwide.
II. Program Goals
The primary goals of SEREP will be to:
A. Help PCCU students develop extensively their understanding of SER and empower them to make
socially and environmentally responsible choices in all aspects of their lives after graduating;
B. Provide students with the training and confidence needed to become socially and
environmental responsible leaders within their various organizations, networks, and communities;
C. Assist in building a campus-wide climate in which critical consideration of SER in making life
choices is the norm;
D. Offer a model of SER education that can inspire and be used by other institutions in Taiwan and
around the world.
24
III. Core Concepts
SEREP will base all aspects of its work on a number of core concepts. Students graduating from PCCU
who have participated in SEREP will be intimately familiar with these core concepts and will be able to
bring them to bear in facing and making choices throughout the rest of their lives. The core concepts of
SEREP will include the following principles:
** Everyone's actions, from the smallest personal acts to the largest corporate moves, have many
different social and environmental consequences in the world, influencing other people, the actors
themselves, and the rest of the environment. Having a better understanding of the extensive
interrelation and mutual influences between humans and the rest of the global environment allows us
to make better, more responsible individual and organizational choices.
** The consequences of our actions can be positive and/or negative. Everyone has the ability, through
many different channels and activities, to make improvement in their degree of SER and increase the
total positive impact of their actions on the world.
** Our choices regarding actions we take in the world are strongly influenced by a complex set of
physical and social-psychological factors, among which are our values and social-environmental
concerns and beliefs.
** Each person or organization develops and their own personal sense of what is and isn't socially
and environmentally responsible, and school can be an excellent place where people can help each
other in their individual processes of exploring SER principles and practices.
** People are happier, healthier, and more productive when they are making life choices that
harmonize with their deepest values and their social-environmental concerns and beliefs. They are
most fully alive when they understand more clearly their place and roles in the greater
social-environmental ecosystem and maximally, responsibly manifest that understanding in their daily
lives.
** More of the world's problems can be effectively addressed when more of its citizens are making
life choices that resonate with their values and social-environmental concerns and beliefs.
** Our sense of SER depends not only on having a sense of duty to act but, even before that, on
perceiving our "response-ability", the understanding of our personal and organizational contextual
positions and our ability to respond to social-environmental problems in meaningful, effective ways.
Appendix 3
Questions to Explore in Social and Environmental Responsibility (SER) Work Discussions
by Matt Nicodemus, Graduation Pledge Alliance-Asia (Nicodemus, 2005).
關於畢業生在職場中會面臨的社會及環境議題〈取自於畢業生委員會 Matt Nicodemus

What are my deepest values? What’s most important to me, for myself, for my family, for my
friends, for my organizations and for my community? For the wider world?
你個人的價值觀為何？對於自身、家庭、朋友、公司或是社區，什麼是最重要的？

What is the ideal world I’d like us all to live in? How would you describe it in detail? (Don’t let
your imagination be limited here! Pretend we can have a fantastic, ideal world to live in.) 你理
想中的世界為何？請詳盡的敘述。
〈不要侷限你的想像力，就你所能的將它描繪的盡善盡美。

What are all of the problems getting in the way of me living in complete harmony with my
deepest values? What’s blocking others from doing the same?
在現實生活中有什麼問題會與你的價值觀衝突？

What are all the kinds of social and environmental problems I can think of?
making our world not be my ideal world?
What problems are
還有什麼社會及環境問題可能會讓你的理想世界變得不完美？

How do different employers and individual workers contribute to social and environmental
problems? How do/can they contribute to solving those problems?
各行各業的雇主及員工能如何改善社會及環境上的問題？他們是如何解決的？
25

What would make an employer/job most attractive to me? Given my values and SER views,
what about an employer/job with pluses and minuses. 麼樣的雇主及工作最吸引你？試著用自我
的價值觀及對社會環境的影響來衡量它的利弊。

How can I balance the pluses and minuses when considering an employer/job?
為了實踐自我的價值觀及信念，該如何選擇職業及雇主呢？

How could I choose a career/employer/job that would allow me to more fully live out my
deepest values and SER beliefs? 工作上，面臨到對社會及環境造成影響甚至傷害的問題時，該如
何解決才能劃下完美的句點？

If I face SER issues/conflicts on the job, how can I resolve them satisfactorily?
就著對社會及環境貢獻而言，在台灣有哪些企業具有良好的形象及經營理念呢？

Which employers offering work in Taiwan are the best in terms of SER?
你知道在哪裡可以獲得有關於社會及環境議題的資訊嗎？

How can I use my educational experiences to help me explore and answer all of these different
questions? 用你本身所學及專長來改善並解決現有的問題呢？

What other questions need answering if I am to be able to successfully pursue “good work?” 還有
什麼問題是我在求職時需要知道的呢？
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