Serve verve

Last September the University opened its Serving to Learn project, in which the entire freshmen class (some 730 this year), and some 160 other students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends spent the first Saturday in September sweating all over the city — yanking ivy in Forest Park, cleaning and gardening at Portsmouth Middle School, arborial editing down below The Bluff on what might become the University’s new lower campus in years to come, fixing bikes at the Community Cycling Center, weeding and gardening at the Oregon Sustain­able Agricultural Land Trust, laboring mightily at the Oregon Food Bank, and attacking weeds and such at Arbor Lodge park, the Peninsula Greenway Trail, and in the village of Saint Johns, just north of campus. Eight hours each times nearly a thousand folks equals ... hilarity, active prayer, and about a million tons of blackberry brambles. The project, we note, was invented by former Army colonel Regina Largent, who just retired as director of the Shepard Freshman Resource Center, and who leaves campus with the respect and affection of very many people in the community.