My university was recently named to the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll for the sixth consecutive year. This honor roll is an initiative of the Corporation for National & Community Service. The website of that organization describes it as follows:
The President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll, launched in 2006, annually highlights the role colleges and universities play in solving community problems and placing more students on a lifelong path of civic engagement by recognizing institutions that achieve meaningful, measureable outcomes in the communities they serve.
I confess that I am discomfited rather than honored by this government recognition. While I agree that colleges and universities should serve the larger interests of our nation, I believe that higher education today is in serious danger of confusing those larger national interests with the officially approved programs and directives of a governmental organization. Mussolini, if I remember correctly, once defined fascism as the merging of corporations and the state, and here we have a state corporation encouraging the corporate entities of higher education to shape and direct the civic involvement of individuals. Surely individuals in a free society should be able to decide for themselves, without all the corporate-state controls, what kinds of "outcomes" they want in their communities. "Higher education community service" pushes a politicization of education far worse than telling students what positions they should take on specific issues (although modern universities do plenty of that) because it is a far-reaching effort at organizational control of how the students (and faculty) define "community problems" and their own citizenship. 
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