Dear Wormwood:

If you're the type of person who has a burning interest in social justice, a determination that life's unfairnesses should be bludgeoned out on the anvil of law, or a desire to take up arms and journey into the raging havocs of identity politics, then Columbia University offers something for you: a mandatory 40 hours of pro bono work that you must do to complete your degree. In the past few weeks, I've received emails inviting me to help battered immigrant women, work studying 1st amendment restrictions since 9/11, or campaign for prisoners' rights, among other ideas for the great and worthy. It this is your cup of tea, I can't recommend the program more highly.

If it isn't, I recommend you keep reading this blog. This requirement is likely to be a recurring theme for Letters to Wormwood, and I'll give you every bit of my help on getting through, and even enjoying, this requirement. If nothing else, you'll get to learn from my mistakes.

The topic comes to my mind because of a conversation I had during the Dean's drinks reception last night (a beautiful event, incidentally), with a young lady whose path to law school was preceded by a great deal of human rights work. Obviously, our views differed over the efficacy of the pro bono requirement: to her, this was a part of the law that we should all know about, like contracts or torts; whereas I tend to look at it as a sort of tax, wherein I give forty hours of my time to some cause I probably don't believe in for the receipt of a degree. My charitable work will be done elsewhere, in areas that probably don't involve law, as befits someone who thinks law is a poor tool for social change.

The argument for this requirement is always that it does a lot of good, and that certainly everyone can find something to do that doesn't clash too badly with their beliefs. And perhaps that's true, although I've already mentioned how The Center for Public Interest Law is not always the most welcoming place to members of my political persuasion. But being forced to do forty hours of public service takes much of the joy, and all of the virtue, out of tasks that I might choose to pursue anyway. Near as I can tell, a 'public service program' here is pretty much defined as 'opposing a monied or conservative interest.'

But I must confess to a certain excitement about the requirement, keeping in mind G. K. Chesterton's axiom that "an inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered." As my companion last night pointed out, the requirement will force me to do something I wouldn't otherwise consider. I'm sorely tempted to sign up for something like prisoners' rights or anti-death penalty work, simply because it gives me a chance to test my beliefs while in the line of fire. Obviously were I (or you, dear Wormwood) to choose to do so, it's incumbent upon me to give every bit of my effort to whatever cause it is, but that's a challenge that should not prove insurmountable. And armchair faith is tepid in comparison to something proven.

I have to pause and smile, however, when I consider that those who say one should challenge ones faith are very rarely those who actually do so themselves. One of my friends here confessed to the fact that before Columbia they'd never really had a friend who was Republican. Nor do I expect to see those who are reflexively anti-Christian signing up to spend time in a missionary soup kitchen. Those who most advocate sleeping with the enemy seem to do so only at the suggestion that it is their bedchambers to be opened.

Take heart, though, dear Wormwood: at least metaphorically, it suggests that we're better in bed.