A 5-year-old boy named Mason fell off a swing in the Seward neighborhood Tuesday afternoon and hit his head. Within seconds, a muscular young man in a gray T-shirt scooped him up, asked him where it hurt, and brought the conversation around to the important stuff -- baseball.
"You like Joe Mauer?" Brandon Johnson asked as he stepped into the neighboring school building to find some ice. Mason nodded.
Across Minneapolis, hundreds more Augsburg College students sporting the same gray T-shirts -- "I'm an Auggie," they read -- cleaned churches, painted low-income medical clinics and performed other service work. Just as hundreds of Hamline University students had earlier that day. Just as thousands of University of Minnesota students had earlier that week.
The three schools are among a growing number of colleges and universities that now start the semester by throwing all freshmen into community projects -- before they've set foot in a classroom.
Augsburg College in Minneapolis and Macalester College in St. Paul have been starting students off with service since the 1990s. Hamline started doing so earlier this decade. The U began its requirement as part of the new Welcome Week, now in its third year.
Augsburg President Paul Pribbenow admitted that City Service Day could be seen as "a show at some level." But he emphasized that Augsburg considers the day "simply the beginning of what is the integrated way service is connected to all we do."
Augsburg sees its neighbors as "part of our faculty," he said.
So students aren't simply giving back to the community. They're learning from it.
"Some people even fight off the word 'service,'" Pribbenow said. "It's very important to us that we talk to our students about mutuality and say, 'We will gain as much as we give.'"
The colleges also try to place students in service groups with links to their academic experience. At Hamline, students go out with the same students who will be in their first-year seminars, "so they'll be spending the entire semester with these people," said Marc Skjervem, Hamline's director of orientation and first-year programs.
At Augsburg, a group of students in a theater seminar might end up cleaning at the Bedlam Theatre in Minneapolis. Music students might show up at the Cedar Cultural Center.
Johnson, the Augsburg freshman who came to Mason's rescue on Tuesday, was helping at Matthews Community Center in the Seward neighborhood because he's taking a seminar on health and physical education. He's from Hopkins and went to school in Roseville but had never seen that neighborhood in Minneapolis.
"I do agree with giving back to the city," he said, as he iced Mason's head. "I've always liked kids, though, so this one doesn't really feel like a service project to me. It's fun."
