Civil Service

My favorite dis­cus­sion this year in my Pub­lic Admin­is­tra­tion class cen­tered around whether civ­il ser­vice was a call­ing [or not]. This led me to think about why I get so much sat­is­fac­tion out of my gov­ern­ment web design gig. The answer I usu­al­ly shell out is because every day I get a chance to improve the way gov­ern­ment inter­acts with its cit­i­zens. Despite this being true and the most imme­di­ate reward of my job, I fig­ured there has to be more. It’s my fam­i­ly, and Catholic school.

My grand­pa fought in World War II and then was was a mail car­ri­er with a rur­al route for the Post Office for years. My moth­er taught spe­cial edu­ca­tion her whole life. The Holy Cross broth­ers at Notre Dame also empha­sized ser­vice. After awhile it gets ingrained. I enjoy work­ing for the gov­ern­ment because it is ser­vice-dri­ven, not prof­it-moti­vat­ed. When­ev­er I get a call for­ward­ed to me from the help desk, I always make sure I don’t send them around on anoth­er bout of trans­fer-tag. If I can’t answer their ques­tion or help them out, I make sure that if I do have to trans­fer them, they get sent to the exact­ly cor­rect per­son, not just the cor­rect office. The reward is their grat­i­tude.

So, I guess it is easy to see where I fall on the argu­ment. I feel called to civ­il ser­vice, so I think it is a call­ing.

It might seem like an excep­tion, but the Selec­tive Ser­vice (a fas­ci­nat­ing Wikipedia arti­cle), and the fact that I had to reg­is­ter for the [non-exis­tent] draft in order to receive fed­er­al stu­dent loans is a big rea­son why I nev­er signed up for the Armed Forces. I’m non-com­bat­ive by nature, but I’m also stub­born as hell when some­one tries to force me to do some­thing. It is fit­ting then, that I would resent sign­ing up for the draft; it is an enforced civ­il ser­vice (among oth­er things), and there­fore incon­sis­tent with my opin­ion that civ­il ser­vice is a call­ing.

3 thoughts on “Civil Service”

  1. I know that the gov­ern­ment helps out some, but when you work for a non-prof­it, or for a gov­ern­ment enti­ty after grad­u­a­tion, you real­ly should get *all* of your stu­dent loans can­celled on some sort of year for year (or maybe 2 years of ser­vice for 1 year of school) basis. I think that would encour­age more stu­dents to con­sid­er spend­ing some of their ear­ly years out of col­lege doing some good in the world. Who knows they might like it enough to stay at it and change the world.

    The sec­ond part of that is that it would allow those with mas­sive stu­dent loans to actu­al­ly do the ser­vice or take the job they would rather do than to have to “sell out to the man” in order to pay off those loans.

  2. How did oth­er peo­ple respond in your class dis­cus­sion?

    I went into pub­lic ser­vice orig­i­nal­ly because I felt the same way as you. I always had a high opin­ion of pub­lic ser­vice agen­cies, so I want­ed in on that. I was kind of sur­prised to find that oth­er peo­ple did­n’t — that there were peo­ple who equat­ed “pub­lic ser­vant” to “dirty slave,” and who would trot out the old, “my tax­es pay your salary,” which almost always meant, “I expect you to break the rules for me.” This was­n’t a big part of the pop­u­la­tion, but they were loud and *mean*.

    I should­n’t have let it bruise me like it did. But then again when I asked my dad (30 years with the VA) how he dealt with it, he thought about it for a minute and then said, “I smoked a lot!”

  3. jmay, I agree about the loan for­give­ness. The cur­rent pro­gram is nice, but too lit­tle too late in the long run, I think.

    Chris­tine, what was inter­est­ing to me was that the old­er folks in the class, those that had been out of school for awhile seemed more inclined to think that civ­il ser­vice is a call­ing. The stu­dents who were fresh into grad­u­ate school from under­grad did­n’t seem to have much to say on the mat­ter.

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