Coles said he is ecstatic about the public service project.

"Right now, it's been a mainstay of my life and been the most exciting kind of teaching and challenging teaching I've ever done," he said.

Under the program, about 100 Harvard undergraduates work in Boston and Cambridge public housing projects and "operate schools and cultural enrichment programs for children between ages of seven and 13, and PBH Executive Director Gregory A. Johnson '72.

Coles said he has spent the last two summers working with undergraduates involved in the community work and performing "reflective sessions," according to Johnson.

These sessions help undergraduates "reflect on the reasons they are engaged in this public service and helps them provide context for what they are doing in ethical and sociological terms," Johnson said.

"I attended some of the sessions myself and they were not only practical and very moving, but they were more intellectually engaging than what I've seen in more formal contexts," Johnson said.

Coles said he wants professors to join the program and participate in weekly seminars with undergraduates. He said he went to Rudenstine with his proposal because "[faculty] will need the support of the University.

"We hope to have weekly seminars with the students to take place on site where they are living." Coles said. "The discussion will center on the experience they are having and reading they are doing--short stories, poems, essays, with the kind of issues they are living firsthand."

Johnson said University backing would be a significant help to the program.

"We are hoping that he doesn't leave," Johnson said. "We have some of the most sophisticated human service programs in the nation presently in operation and we understand quite specifically how to enrich them with this type of reflective component and how to enrich undergraduate education with this type of marriage."

"It would be supreme irony not to take advantage of this moment upon us and it would also be a terribly missed opportunity," Johnson said.

Service Learning

Coles has been perhaps Harvard's strongest advocate of service learning. The professor has twice proposed core classes that would have required community service, according to Johnson. Each proposal was rejected by a faculty committee.

Coles has been the "main person trying to push for service learning," said John B. King Jr. '96-'95, president of PBHA. "If he leaves, there won't be very many people trying to make it happen."

While he has been rebuffed here, Coles has been welcomed at Brown University. He is currently working to develop a partnership at Brown between the Swearer Center for Public Service and the School of Medicine, according to Peter C. Hocking, the Swearer Center's director.