Amid the lures of quick bucks are a few grads whose heads and hearts are saying, "not so fast," and then asking questions: What are the ethics of my potential employers? How are their products or services benefiting society, if at all? What is the employer's record on such issues as antitrust, health and safety, age, race, sex and gender discrimination, pollution and animal testing? In the company's theology of capitalism, is worshiping the dollar-god the sole article of faith?

The focus of these concerns on whether the work world can be a moral world has an outlet: the Graduation Pledge Alliance (GPA). As nationally organized in 1996 by the Peace Studies Institute at Manchester College in Indiana, the alliance asks graduating students to voluntarily pledge themselves to accept only conscience-friendly jobs and reject ones that are conscience-troubling. This spring, more than 30 colleges are promoting the fast-spreading pledge.

It reads: "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 organization for which I work." Professor Neil Wollman of Manchester College, a 1,000-student Church of the Brethren school that began the nation's first peace studies degree program in 1948, has seen some 60 percent of the senior classes since 1988 embrace the pledge. Students receive a wallet-sized card and a certificate on which the pledge is printed. For parents hankering for a midlife career change, the pledge is printed in the commencement program.

Wollman believes that the pledge goes to the core of a complete education: "Not only does it remind students of the ethical implications of the knowledge and training they received, but it can help lead to a socially conscious citizenry and a better world. And it can serve as a focal point for further consciousness-raising around campus."

Besides Manchester College, the nation's most vibrant program is at Harvard. Last year, 271 seniors filed past the statue of John Harvard in the commencement procession after taking the pledge 24 hours earlier during Class Day ceremonies. This spring, Sinead Walsh, '00, who will do human rights in India after graduation, was among the student leaders who organized three GPA panels for speakers whose careers are ideal-driven, not money-driven. These included workers from Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Grameen Foundation USA, Clean Water Action, and the Campus Green Vote.

To ward off dabblers and sunshine idealists, anyone taking the pledge - expected to be 10 percent of this year's graduates on June 8 - was required to attend at least one of the three panel discussions during the spring. These were titled: "Making a Difference," "Earning a Living, Sharing the Wealth" and "Building a Career, Building a Community."

Walsh, an English major who researched a pending report for Human Rights Watch on racial disparities in drug arrests, is anything but a corporation-basher chanting anti-capitalist slogans. "No matter where people work," she says, "there's so much they can do on the everyday level. I don't believe that a dichotomy exists in most careers that are not traditionally 'public service.' It's possible to be a socially concerned person in those jobs."

Evidence of that came on May 16 when the 3M Co., a pillar of the Fortune 500 with $16 billion in annual revenues, announced that it would stop making most of its Scotchgard products due to their adverse environmental effects.

A week before 3M's positive shift in ethics, the Ford Motor Co. went the other way. CEO William C. Ford Jr., a Princeton alumnus, admitted that his company's sport utility vehicles cause serious safety and environmental problems. But production will not stop. Ford's SUVs reap huge profits.

To help college graduates choose conscientiously among the nation's 3Ms and Fords, the Graduation Pledge Alliance (NJWollman@Manchester.edu) offers information ranging from questions for potential employers, to finding facts not covered in annual reports.

At American University in Washington, Mitchell Furlett, graduating as a pledge-taker, says that schools rarely address in substantial ways the ethical issue of where to work: "I realize that jobs are plentiful this year, but I've seen few that I can feel morally good about accepting. This pledge is helping change that."

It isn't surprising that Harvard students are leaders in the GPA campaign. It is the campus that Robert Coles, the child psychiatrist and prolific writer, has graced by teaching social ethics for some 30 years. Thousands of students have taken his oversubscribed courses, and he has mentored hundreds more.

In "The Call of Service: A Witness to Idealism" (Houghton Mifflin, 1993), Coles recalls a former student from Harlem who made her way to Harvard and then Harvard Law School. When the choice came between big-money lawyering and holding fast to conscience, the decision came naturally.

She tells Coles: "I was offered huge deals to join the largest law firms in the country, I told them why I wouldn't join up. They immediately offered me some more big deals to do pro bono law, to be a public service lawyer for them....I could have my cake and eat it. All right so far! The problem is, I'd be doing my flings of pro bono law for firms doing work with people and institutions I really abhor. You might say that's the way the law works, and we all have to put up with evil in this world, in our world. My answer is, yes, I can agree, but I don't have to completely surrender to that kind of realpolitik. I can recognize plenty of evil in myself. I can recognize my need to make compromises in the course of my working life - and personal life, too. But I sure don't have to hoist up the white flag in my late 20s and say all right, it's not even a struggle, it's not a tough battle ... That's when I say, no way."

For a number of years - through the 1980s and '90s - I've been taking students to one of the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality in a poor section of Washington. It was run by Michael Kirwan, who finished graduate school in 1976 with plans for a corporate or governmental career.

But one winter night he befriended a homeless person. Soon after, he opened a Catholic Worker house for the homeless and jobless. Kirwan lived with them, embracing voluntary poverty.

On field trips to his operation, Kirwan routinely introduced my students to his housemates when they wandered into our living room seminars: alcoholics, petty thieves, prostitutes, dying AIDS patients. To 17- and 18-year-olds either cynical about altruism or convinced that all adults are complete hypocrites, Michael Kirwan gripped them as someone authentic, courageous and Christlike.

I didn't fully grasp his effect on my students until after his death at 53, last November. A Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School senior girl, now a sophomore at Dartmouth, wrote a long letter after I sent her Michael Kirwan's obituary. She told of going back to Kirwan's Catholic Worker house many times by herself, long after the field trip.

Her volunteering complemented her reading of Dorothy Day's essays on poverty and structural violence of capitalism that keeps the poor down. "Mike Kirwan touched my soul in a way that I never realized until now," she wrote. In high school, "My parents, my friends and my teachers always thought anything that came from my hand or mouth was brilliant. I was an athlete, a homecoming princess and straight A student. I figured I'd come to Dartmouth and major in something typical and go on to make everyone proud in a very conventional way. When I got here, that's exactly what I set out to do."

Almost. She met a fellow student-"this guy"-who was starting a campus mentoring program for 48 kids from a low-income housing project a few towns over from Dartmouth. She signed on. "It's the most magical program," she wrote, "and it's doing more good than we ever dreamed. I can always do more. Mike Kirwan taught me that. There must be hundreds of people like me who he inspired. ... I don't want to be a CEO anymore."

If anyone is primed to take the graduation pledge in two years, she's the one.

Colman McCarthy, a former Wash ington Post columnist, directs the Center for Teaching Peace in Wash ington, and teaches courses on non violence at seven Washington-area schools.

Copyright 2000 Baltimore Sun

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