In recent years, student volunteering in higher education (HE) has been gaining increasing attention. Current discussions emphasize that contemporary manifestations of voluntarism complement the neo-liberal climate and the redrawing of the boundaries of the welfare state (Holdsworth & Brewis, 2014). In particular, studies on volunteering in HE environments show a shift in HE policy towards a skills-and-employability agenda (Holdsworth & Quinn, 2010), a shift in universities towards formalization of volunteering activities (Holmes et al. 2020), and a shift among students towards adoption of utilitarian motives for volunteering, such as personal development or career progression (Barton, Bates, & O'Donovan, 2019).

Yet, student volunteering is not a recent phenomenon. It has distinct historical foundations, which have a considerable role in shaping contemporary discourse and institutional frameworks (Brewis, 2010). This study draws on a critical historical perspective (Alridge, 2015; Durepos et al., 2019) to explore how universities have been setting the agenda and organizational structures for student volunteering in the context of the Israeli HE field. The study is based on archival material from two leading Israeli universities' historical archives, spanning the 1970s-2000s.

The findings reveal three major debates surrounding the historical development and shaping of student volunteering:

(1) What is the purpose of student volunteering? In the early 1970s, a strong discourse of social action and involvement in the lives of marginalized communities emerged “from below”, initiated by students and faculty members. This discourse was decoupled from mainstream volunteering activities a decade later, when a national volunteering program was widely adopted by Israel’s HE institutions, and volunteering activities began to adhere to the model it promoted. This model, which was informed by an altruistic ethos and a notion of charity work addressing individuals' needs, involved one-on-one tutoring of children from underprivileged backgrounds, in exchange for scholarships. The discourse of social action gained renewed prominence in the late 1990s, as students and lecturers increasingly began to initiate unorganized—and later, organized—volunteering activities.

 (2) Should volunteering be mandatory? The historical records reveal how students’ free choice in relation to volunteering became entangled with socio-economic vulnerability. While universities’ managers strongly opposed initiatives for mandatory volunteering for all students, they embraced the idea of obligating students who receive financial aid scholarships to volunteer. This policy was introduced in the late 1970s, and was motivated by the principle that students who receive scholarships should “give something back”. The discourses of “education”, “moral obligation” and “empowerment” were used to reason, mediate and justify the resulting tensions, and the obligation to volunteer in exchange for financial aid ultimately became neutralized and taken for granted in the Israeli HE field.

(3) Should extracurricular volunteering activities be accredited? The apparatus of student volunteering, carried for several decades at the margins of academic institutions, began in the 2000s to pose a threat to universities’ autonomy to govern their accreditation systems. The National Students Association led an effective campaign for the provision of academic credit points in exchange for participation in organized voluntary activities. Universities’ vigorous resistance centered on the definition of volunteering, the threat of dilution of academic standards, and the potential breach of academic autonomy.

I argue that these debates about student volunteering embody critical tensions about the meanings of “volunteering” itself, and its guiding principles, definition, and boundaries. Furthermore, these debates resonate with wider discussions concerning universities' mission, unequal power relations within universities, academic autonomy and students’ freedom of choice, and the role of universities in society. The outcomes of each debate have implications for the conceptual and organizational configurations of students’ volunteering in present-day HE.

This study utilizes a critical historical perspective to explore the emergence, development and framing of student volunteering in the Israeli HE field. In developing this perspective, I build on several related streams of critical historical research. The first is critical history of education—which, according to Alridge (2015), is characterized by the use of critical theoretical interpretive frames to (i) challenge dominant historical narratives, (ii) investigate how power relations shape education to the advantage and disadvantage of certain social groups, and (iii) produce historical studies that speak to current social and political debates. The second stream is critical organizational history, defined by Durepos et al. (2019) as “a theoretically informed, historicized approach to understanding how and why we come to be where we are in contemporary organized societies” (p. 16). Critical approaches to organizational histories stress the significance of historiographically reflexive research as a means of challenging unreflexive, unhistorical accounts of organizations, as well as denaturalizing organizational phenomena by historicizing. A third stream is critical policy history. When scholars in this stream examine policy issues in specific periods, they aim to unpack the self-evident and consensual depictions of these policy narratives, and the transition from one policy framework to another as a consequence of “progress” (Gale, 2011). My critical historical study is based on archival research and is part of a larger project on the historical development of social engagement in the Israeli HE field. I analyze archival documents that relate to students’ volunteering from the historical archives of two elite universities: The Hebrew University and Tel Aviv University, between the 1970s and the 2000s. Archival sources represent “fragments or incomplete accounts that were produced by authors with personal or institutional perspectives that may not be readily apparent” (Kipping, Wadhwani, & Bucheli, 2014: 312), and the process of analysis includes a close and critical examination of a large number of documents, comparison of sources produced by various actors (e.g. universities’ management, administrative staff, academic faculty, students), and interpretation of these sources in the framework of the socio-historical context in which they were produced.

This study explores the history of student volunteering in Israeli HE, and is grounded in the assumption that understanding this historical context can inform our understanding of present beliefs, structures and future choices. The findings, obtained through analysis of archival materials spanning four decades, demonstrate that current configurations of organized student volunteering are based on, and shaped by, past debates. Critical literature on student volunteering focuses on tensions embedded in the current neo-liberal climate. The use of a historical lens shows that significant characteristics of volunteering, such as the logic of individualization, the organizational structure of monitoring and control, and the demands for benefits for those who volunteer, were part of universities’ policy agenda since the 1970s. Furthermore, the three historical debates discussed in this study, debates that concern the boundaries of volunteering—its purposes and guiding logics, nature of activities, and potential rewards—are also debates about the shifting boundaries of academic mission, student equity, and academic autonomy.

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