Dr. Alice Bourke Hayes
HEARTLAND-DELTA IV
Marquette University
Hope for the Future Companions in Mission
Alice B. Hayes
May 27, 2004
Thank you for inviting me to be part of this Heartland conference on Hope for the Future, as companions in mission.
It is always fun to talk about the future, since we know that whatever we say cannot yet be proven wrong. We know that we haven't seen everything yet in Catholic higher education, so our predictions can be ambitious, but founded in the reality of today's experiences.
Over the past 7 years, I have frequently participated in the Forum on the Future of Higher Education at the Aspen Institute. The participants included university presidents, financial officers, and research scholars. The discussions were more pragmatic than utopian, rather hard-headed finance and technology-driven looks at what the future would bring, but one conclusion that could be drawn from the research reports presented at these meetings is that we can prepare for the changes that we can anticipate. Another conclusion is that, if we take strategic action, we can shape the desired future.
So, a starting point would be to visualize the future, to try to describe what we would like our universities to be in 2020. I chose 2020 because it's easy to remember, it's good vision, it's far enough away to allow some dreaming, but close enough to be within our eyesight. The students who will be enrolling in 2020 are already born. Those of us with an administrative bent begin by visualizing what kind of enrollment we'd like to see, how big the endowment should be, how many faculty we would like to have, what facilities we would have brought on line; while those with an academic bent begin by thinking about what scholarly projects will be completed, and what our departments and schools will be like if they have fulfilled their curriculum goals. These are all good things to think about and suitable targets for planning. I suggest, though, that we should go further than that, and think about what kind of impact on society we hope to have in the next 15 years. How will our scholarly work produce good for others? How will our graduates affect the world? What kind of people will they be, and what kind of people will we have in our campus community? What progress can we hope to make towards shaping a culture with Ignatian values and principles? As a university president, I frequently became involved in programs for alumni, and was continually inspired by their work in their communities. Right now, my university has 35,000 living alumni. By 2020, there will be over 50,000. That's a lot of people. Add up the living alumni of all of the universities present here, and you should have over half a million Jesuit alumni. That's enough to change the world. Last year my sister gave me one of the best books I have ever owned, Poetry Speaks, which includes a CD of recordings of poets reciting their own works, from Tennyson to Plath. One of the poets recorded was Ezra Pound, chanting his Cantico de Sole, criticizing a judicial ruling that obscenity is OK in the classics because the audience is so small.
In the recording, he almost sang his words,
The thought of what America would be like; the thought of what America would be like; the thought of what America would be like, if the Classics had a wide circulation, Troubles my sleep.
The poem is satiric and silly, but the refrain is compelling. To paraphrase, The thought of what America would be like, The thought of what America would be like, if Ignatian principles had a wide circulation, gives me hope. We don't really need a new vision for the future. We have a very good vision in Jesuit education. The vision is of a university campus which embodies the knowledge that God is present in all of creation, all the things we study; the vision is of an intellectual community, teaching and doing research to contribute to the good of humanity; and the vision is of a society in which thousands of Catholic university students and alumni, of all faiths, through their work in the world give service to others and to building the reign of God. That's a vision of hope. It is what Pope John Paul II was talking about in his book, Crossing the Threshold of Hope, in which he speaks as a shepherd who wants to shout from the rooftops that there is hope, and that it has been confirmed, and that it is offered to whoever wants to accept it.
How can we make that future happen? The topic I was originally assigned for today was creative responses to our opportunities and challenges for the future. So, I organized my hopes for the future according to our opportunities, then the inherent challenges, and then a call on you for creativity in responding. Let me make a few comments about creativity first, and then talk about our opportunities and challenges. I used to give summer workshops on creativity for incoming freshmen honors students at Loyola University Chicago. Although you can't literally teach creativity, you can help students learn how to release their own ability to innovate and produce new insights and approaches. Students often think that new ideas just bubble up and spring forth, but creativity research shows that there are things that make the generation of new approaches more likely than luck. The first of these is a broad knowledge foundation. The well-furnished mind contains a lot of information and experience, and these become resources for our creativity. These inputs incubate and get sorted out and rearranged in new ways in the unconscious. But before they can sort themselves out, the thoughts must be in your mind. Then they can become not just a cluster of facts and a picture of the past, but also a framework for dealing with the unknown.
When helping students learn how to generate ideas, we usually begin with some brainstorming exercises. An easy game is to take a word and see how many other words you can find in it. If you do this alone, you can often come up with dozens of words with the letters provided. If you do this in a team, you come up with many more, and you generate them much faster because your thoughts are triggered by the thoughts of others. It's always very powerful for students, particularly bright students who usually work alone, to realize what a team can do. I think this conference brings together that wealth of knowledge and experience from which we can generate creative responses to our challenges. We can look for that power to emerge from your discussions this week when you bounce ideas off one another here and then on your home campuses when you return.
To help students promote originality and spontaneity, in another game we give a word and ask for a related one. I say black, you say white. But how much more interesting if — when I say black — you say telephone or velvet. In thinking of the future, the creative person will look for and see new and unexpected relationships. We are free to consider many different approaches to addressing our future challenges, not just the expected responses, not just the way we've always done things. Most of us find that it becomes stale and boring to do the same things the same way over and over. To keep enjoying something, you need to increase its complexity or introduce new elements. A very enjoyable thing about creativity exercises is that they sanction daydreaming. Innovation is usually preverbal, so a nice nap or just letting our thoughts idly roll by can be quite productive. I encourage students to ask themselves questions when they are daydreaming about something. Does it have to be this way? What else could it be? What would disprove that idea? What is this like? What is this not like? What could you do with — a mayonnaise jar; a brick; a dollar bill? With a different student body? With a new kind of pedagogy? With new resources? What would you do with a $50 million bequest? With a different organizational structure? Ask a lot of questions. Important questions create a silence and in that silence creativity grows.
The most frequent stimulus for creativity is a strong need or an urgent problem. I hope you don't wait until you have a crisis or disaster. Creativity is also triggered, more benevolently, by change. Change calls for our creative response. It is an exciting time, and that sense of change is powered by the sense of historic transition that accompanies the first decade of a new millennium. So, let's look at some of the changes we can reasonably anticipate in the future. I see significant changes in several areas pertaining to mission:
(1) in the leadership of Catholic higher education;
(2) in how we share Catholic identity with our students; and
(3) how we can use various methodologies of learning to enhance mission.
Each of these areas holds opportunities and challenges that I will try to look at from my experiences as a teacher, scholar, and administrator.
(1) New Leadership
There is no question but that the leadership of Catholic higher education is changing from predominantly religious to predominantly lay. After Saint Louis University and Notre Dame University introduced lay boards of trustees in the 1960s, most other Catholic colleges and universities followed suit, and now, even institutions with cumbersome tiers of lay and religious boards are primarily governed by lay people. The vast majority of the faculty, administration and staff at Catholic universities are lay people. Just look around this room. A recent study by Melanie Morey and Dennis Holtschneider found that the majority of the presidents of Catholic universities are now lay people. Even a Jesuit university now has a lay president. It does not strain our predictive powers to propose that in the future, Catholic Jesuit universities will be governed, led, and taught by lay people. How are universities changing with this new leadership, and will we keep the faith?
Opportunities:
As anxious as this development makes some people, there are opportunities in this. The most dramatic opportunity is the significant increase in the pool of potential leaders, both in size and diversity. In some religiously affiliated institutions today, if the next president or provost or dean must be chosen from the founding order, there is a very small choice of potential leadership. Open up that position to the laity, and there are suddenly over 100 names in the applicant pool.
I remember my own thinking ten years ago when people began to approach me for presidencies. At that point I had been in Jesuit universities for over 30 years, and I am grateful for the foundation I received. I was inspired by and responsive to the spirituality and philosophy of Jesuit education, but I knew that if I was going to be a president, it would not be at a Jesuit university. I know many other educators who felt that they had to leave Catholic higher education in order to achieve a leadership role, that their talents were only wanted in certain roles and up to a certain level by their own institutions. In some cases, there was the painful awareness that the sponsoring religious community may not even have had anybody with a strong background for the leadership position, but the board of trustees or others in search roles felt that a lay person just could not be seriously considered. That world is now changing. I was lucky in that I had an opportunity for leadership in a Catholic university that had been successfully led by a lay president for over 20 years. Today and tomorrow, there will be many lay people, men and women of many races and ethnic backgrounds, ready and eager to make a commitment to leadership in Catholic universities. And if there aren't — if the Jesuit universities and other Catholic universities under religious leaders did not educate and develop lay leaders — then perhaps it really is time for a change. I believe that many leaders are available. So, the first opportunity is for a greatly enlarged and diversified pool of candidates for leadership, both lay and religious, with all of the benefits that come from greater choice. The second opportunity of new leadership is access to the experiences that these new leaders will bring. They will come from a variety of academic and professional backgrounds, and an array of states of life, lay and religious, single and married people, men and women, with families and networks of contacts. A university has many constituencies, and these new leaders will relate to some of them very well. The intersection between public life and faith can become more visible to our students and communities. Lay leaders are involved in parish life, in family life, in community organizations, in civic groups, in a way that religious, living in their own communities, often are not. Lay leaders can be role models in ways that religious are not. As women number more of our students, it should be helpful to have them see leaders who are wives and mothers. I know that it was helpful for me to attend Mundelein College for women where nearly all of the faculty and administrators were women.
Challenges:
However, while recognizing that the transition to lay leadership brings tremendous opportunities, it also brings challenges. The first challenge is that, unlike many religious, most lay people have not studied theology extensively. They will be leading Catholic universities and may not know much about the teachings of the Catholic Church. In the Morey and Holtschneider study, lay leaders reported that they generally had not had the spiritual formative experiences that religious leaders have had. There were concerns about continuing the charism of the founding order. Where the tradition has been leadership by a religious, the lay person can feel like an outsider. While I don't believe that a university president needs to be a theologian or a member of the founding religious order, there is a need for a strong enough foundation in the faith to be able to lead the institution in Catholic identity with confidence. There is an obvious need for a sense of authenticity as the leader of a university with a distinctive history and charism. We need to be companions in mission. For example, I can't imagine how somebody could be a leader in a Jesuit university without some knowledge and appreciation of the Spiritual Exercises and the principles and traditions of Jesuit education. Yet that is not a universal experience base. Fr. Gray points out in the "In All Things" article that somebody who wants to become intimately involved in an Ignatian enterprise has to have a desire to link that work to the ongoing work of the Kingdom preached by Jesus to help people to love God and to love their neighbor. The desire will be there, but we are going to have to develop programs to help lay leaders learn how to do that and not leave it to chance. The second challenge may come from the professional mindset of the laity. We naturally have a strong sense of the authority of our disciplines and the traditions of academe, and may have less of a sense of the authority and traditions of the Church. This can lead to unintended and unanticipated conflicts. I have had an opportunity to see this in my recent work on the National Review Board for the USCCB on clerical sexual abuse. In trying to understand how this tragedy developed, we considered the role of the laity in Church governance and decision-making. It is usually claimed (be lay people) that, if there were more lay people involved in Church leadership and governance, we would not have had this crisis. Actually, if we look at where the bishops went wrong and there are many answers to that question one of the problems derived from their dependence on lay professionals. For example, when a family brought a case of abuse to the attention of the diocese, the diocesan lawyer gave advice rooted in what he or she saw as the best legal counsel for somebody accused of a crime. So, the Church was advised to make no admission of guilt and not contact the alleged victim. That was good legal advice, but it was obviously experienced as a cover-up and a lack of compassion and a lack of integrity with the mission of the Church. Similarly, when the diocese sought psychological advice about a priest accused of abuse, in some cases they were told that, after a period of counseling, the best thing for the priest involved was to put him back to work. This may have been good psychological advice, but it was disastrous for the community in which these priests were released. This was thinking from the discipline, not from the mission. There are many similar challenges in higher education. For example, when the norms for implementing Ex Corde Ecclesiae were published, for many lay people, the whole idea of canonical requirements for an independent institution was alien and unknown, and we worried about threats to institutional autonomy and academic freedom. In student affairs, many administrators had their professional training in state universities and are not prepared to deal with homosexuality, or women's issues, from the perspective of Catholic teaching. Their professional instincts may be at variance with their responsibilities at a Catholic institution. As we have more lay people in leadership roles, we have a deeper need to come to terms with religious identity and its relationship to professional responsibility. We have to learn to think from the mission and give the mission our fidelity while also preserving the values of our professional vocation. We cannot just hope that these challenges will resolve themselves in the future. Instead, we need to look for some creative responses.
Creative Responses:
1. Catholic universities should develop formation programs for their leaders. We have already begun this with the ACCU/AGB/AJCU program for trustees, and most universities have some kind of program for new faculty. There is a program for administrators at Boston College, and additional formation programs are needed to prepare administrators and leaders for their roles in Catholic universities. The Spiritual Exercises are not easily available as an experience for lay people or people who are not Christian. From my perspective, the language expresses a very masculine mystique, with references to soldiers, kings, battlefields, the enemy, and so on. This is not how I think. There are negative comments about women. Yet, although at first contact the exercises may not seem inviting, it is out of these exercises that we learn the selflessness that leads to service to others; we see the tender relationship between teacher and student; and the concept that the value of knowledge rests in its potential to serve God and humanity, the insight that God is at work in the world and we can share in that work. The exercises can be a valuable experience, although I doubt that many of us could arrange for the full 30-day retreat format. Some years ago I was able to participate in a shorter one week version, and it was a very important experience for me. It really opened up my understanding and appreciation of the Spiritual Exercises. In one of the readings for this conference, Fr. Gray suggests that we need to create adaptations of the Exercises to fit the schedules and resources of lay women and men who want to be more intimately involved in Jesuit apostolic work.
2. Another topic for creative response is to develop methods of accountability. This is very sensitive, because we must respect freedom of conscience and religious liberty of individuals, while at the same time assuring that our leaders will preserve and enhance the Catholic identity of the institution. Some observers have suggested something like an accreditation process for Catholic identity, but that idea poses problems in an environment where there are widely different ideas about what Catholic teaching requires. I think of the divergence between the views of members of the Cardinal Newman Society and members of many of our more liberal faculties, and wonder how we could decide on accreditation standards. However, some kind of accountability is needed. In the past, under the leadership of the founding religious orders, it was assumed that the mission would be assured, but those assumptions are no longer a given. Ex Corde Ecclesiae gives us a framework for self-evaluation, and that could be a good starting point. Or, an institution could develop a mission-compliance audit. At USD, we surveyed all of our faculty, students, administrators and staff about our ethics across the campus. While we were pleased with the general response and commitment to ethics that we found, we also found some areas for concern that might not have been recognized if we had not undertaken the accountability initiative. We cannot claim that we are doing a good job of understanding and implementing our Catholic identity if we have not chosen some method to demonstrate accountability. This is certainly a subject for a creative response. In summary, the trend to leadership by lay people offers us tremendous opportunities to have greater choices and experiential resources in selecting our leaders, but also includes a challenge of assuring that our leaders will be faithful and capable of guiding our Catholic identity; and, creative responses will be needed to develop formation programs and methods of accountability.
(2) Sharing Catholic identity with our students
As we look ahead to 2020 and beyond, we can see that our students will still come to us seeking an intellectually stimulating experience and an opportunity to prepare themselves for a well-lived life. When I look back at the students I taught at Loyola Chicago when I started in higher education in the 1960s, I remember that they were mostly Roman Catholic, mostly white, mostly male, and mostly traditional age undergraduates. Today, in our student body in San Diego, the majority are female, there are many ethnic and racial groups represented, and about 1/3 profess faiths other than Catholic. I'm sure that is true here in the Midwest as well. Looking ahead, I see this trend of diversification continuing. In San Diego, for example, there is now no ethnic majority in the city. Within the next 10 years, there will once again be an ethnic majority, and it will be Hispanic. In the Midwest also, religious and ethnic diversity is projected to increase, and this will surely be reflected in our student populations. How much more difficult it will be to express and share Catholic identity in a more religiously pluralistic student body, and yet, what richness of experiences we will be able to explore!.
Opportunities:
Anybody who has worked with college students learns quickly that, although they do not usually articulate it, they have a deep need and longing for spiritual development. Catholic education promises to meet those needs. They come to us at their most idealistic age. I remember giving a talk at our neighboring university, UCSD, a few years ago, about prayer and a scientist
s view of faith. The auditorium was crammed with students, and they stayed afterwards for nearly another hour asking questions. The lecture was then replayed on the university's television station for a few months, and I got many more calls and e-mails. These students were at a wonderful university, but a chance to talk about prayer was something that they didn't often get.
Our students do have that opportunity. We have a special environment, and we can do things our colleagues in public universities cannot do. We can pray publicly. We can freely discuss the moral significance of facts and issues and be taken seriously. In times of sorrow, such as the death or illness of a member of the university community, we can gather and be healed in a liturgical service. In times of celebration, we have special Masses and prayers. We enjoy great religious art and music. Whatever faith a member of the community holds, that faith is respected and can be expressed. Historically, Catholic professional schools admitted African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims, in times when other schools openly enforced quotas. We have partners in the local Church, in agencies like Catholic Charities, in other Catholic institutions, in ecumenical groups. These privileges can build a distinctive culture. Another opportunity is the growing presence on our campuses of graduate and professional programs. Even though the enrollment of graduate students may be smaller than that of undergraduates, Catholic universities often have a larger market share of graduate and professional students than we have of undergraduates. Here is a real target of opportunity for the future. Most of the programs we offer that express our religious affiliation are planned for undergraduate students. Looking forward, we have an opportunity to provide a distinctive experience for our graduate and professional students.
Challenges:
Many of our students come to us from public high schools and most have had little instruction in the Catholic faith. Studies such as the CIRP surveys show us again and again that they have come to us primarily because of our academic reputations rather than our Catholic identity. There is a joke about a conversation between a bishop and a college president. The bishop said,
Dr. Smith, you're not producing good Catholics.
And the President replied, No, your excellency, and neither are you.
In a recent article, Fr. Michael Sheeran of Regis University observed that
with the loss after Vatican II of nuns from grade school and high school education, basic instruction in the fundamentals of Catholic belief declined markedly.
He observed, I am still amazed each fall by how many Regis University freshmen who are Catholics show up on our Denver doorstep and know nothing about what a sacrament is, or about the basic categories used by the Church to analyze moral questions, or even [what] the letters INRI at the top of a crucifix.
He notes that in many instances their parents are equally uninformed. It is easy to let that level of ignorance permeate the campus. Greg Beaubout at St. Louis U. observed that on the day the encyclical Fides et Ratio was issued, it was front page news in the New York Times, but was not even mentioned in the student newspaper at his Catholic university. Although some students come with strong, narrowly orthodox convictions, most students arrive at our universities with little knowledge of the traditions and philosophy of the Church, and both groups lack theological depth or sophistication. They have great consciousness of the limitations of human leadership revealed in the clerical sexual abuse scandal and also a lack of commitment to some Church teachings particularly those related to sexuality. They see the Church and its leaders as out of step with contemporary thought and they do not trust them.
Creative Responses:
So, how can we respond to the needs of our students in a creative way? Cura personalis is one of the trademarks of a Jesuit education and calls for attention to the personal and intellectual development of each individual student. We need to find a way to develop religious instruction programs that provide the information students need to become adults in their faith, and to do this without proselytizing, in a way that is consistent with our intellectual responsibilities as a university. It is probably not the task of the theology department. It's more like the work of a parish. Perhaps university ministry could provide this kind of background so that students would then be able to approach their theology courses and their lives with more of a foundation in the teachings of the Church. We could work into the presentation on Catholic identity in student and faculty orientations a section about the basic teachings of the Church. For the broader community of those of many different faiths or no faith commitment, perhaps Catholic Studies programs could provide courses on the cultural impact of the Catholic Church on art, literature, music and history. Graduates of Catholic universities should know something about Catholicism, and we can no longer assume that they have that information when they enroll. Next challenge, we need a new sense of cura personalis that includes graduate and professional students, whose spiritual development is often neglected. Graduate students come to us seeking the life of the mind, and our programs should help them find the integral relationship between the life of the mind and faith. The life of the mind is celebrated in scholarly work, and in our research programs we have an opportunity to explore the integration of knowledge and faith. In a recent article in the Journal of Catholic Education, Patrick Byrne of Boston College presented a wonderful view of the research vocation of a Catholic university, seeing human history as a good under construction, and scholarly work as the university's contribution to that good. It is a very thoughtful paper, using some of the ideas of Lonergan, suggesting that this approach may once again give us the intellectual coherence that Catholic universities previously enjoyed with the integrating vision of neoscholasticism. Scholarly work is a university's way of participating in God's creative work. I would encourage every faculty member to write a one page summary of how their scholarly work contributes to the good of humanity and share this with their students and colleagues. However esoteric the titles of research projects may seem, this is something that all faculty members, of every faith commitment, should be able to do. If the connections are not specifically made, students can become lost in measurements and citations and not recognize the spiritual significance of their work and its contribution to the good of humanity. Some years ago I had an opportunity to address this in a symposium at Georgetown in which I discussed my work in plant physiology as it related to justice and world hunger. Working alone in the lab seems a long way from working in volunteer social service projects in impoverished regions with the poor and the hungry. Yet, I noted that Norman Borlaug, whose work with wheat was recognized with the Nobel Prize, fed more people from his laboratory bench than he could ever have hoped to help by financial contributions or by volunteering in a soup kitchen. [Volunteer service is important, but it is certainly not the only way of addressing the needs of others, and for scholars their work is often a more powerful way.] In other fields, the relationship of research to hunger may be less obvious, but it is real. Surely the scholar who studies economics and considers the international agricultural market, or explores the price of commodities and international tariffs is developing knowledge that can be used to address hunger. The legal scholar who works in international law and helps to write constitutions and agreements creates the climate in which the hungry are fed. Creative scholars who write books or poems can clarify the human reality of hunger. The rock stars who held the Food-Aid concerts used their music to feed the hungry. The journalists who focused our eyes through their lenses when they photographed starving children have helped feed the hungry. I think we can do more by contributing our professional resources than we could ever hope to do with our limited financial resources.
Scholarly work is intellectually satisfying, but it is more than that. It can be a contribution to the good of humanity. Remember that scholarly work, teaching and research, was the first public work of Jesus. While still a boy, long before He fed the hungry and cured the sick, Jesus was found by His parents in the temple in Jerusalem, teaching and asking questions of the scholars. He told Mary and Joseph that He was doing His Father's business. We follow in His footseps when we ask questions and teach. Surely our research programs will contribute to making the world a better place, and our graduate students can share in that enthusiasm and hope for the future. Professional students come to us seeking to prepare for a career, but from the perspective of mission, our programs should prepare them for a vocation. We are reminded by Whitehead that distribution of information is not a sufficient rationale for a university education. He said,
So far as the mere imparting of information is concerned, no university has had any justification for existence since the popularization of printing in the fifteenth century.
Emphasis on ethics, on honor, on the dignity and integrity of professional standards, will give these graduate students the something extra that they expect from a Catholic university, and that we expect from them. The professions are truly ways of life in which knowledge is used to serve humanity. If we are serious about our desire to change the world, to affect the future, our graduates in medicine, nursing, law, education, and business, are men and women who will be in positions to influence others, to make our society a place of values and principles. We cannot afford to let our professional programs be simply about knowledge and techniques. The deeper dimension of ethics and moral principles of the profession should be required features of the curriculum. We can help our professional students realize that they will find purpose and meaning in their lives through devoting themselves to others, that this is not only their job but also their calling.
We can also be more deliberate about including graduate and professional students in the formative activities planned by Student Affairs and Ministry
the retreats, service activities, discussion groups. Of course, dealing with these busy students, we have special challenges of finding time, place, calendar, and delivery modes. In summary, we have the opportunity to support both graduate and undergraduate students in developing their spirituality and the understanding of faith, but we have the challenge of doing this when they have little religious preparation. We need to find creative ways to meet religious needs without proselytizing or changing the intellectual expectations of our programs. In our graduate and professional programs, we work to integrate the life of the mind with the good of humanity, and prepare our students for the vocation of serving others.
(3) New ways of learning
In the years ahead, we can use a variety of methodologies of teaching and learning in order to implement our mission. These methodologies are already in place, and they promise to become more important. They do not replace traditional lectures, labs, discussions and seminars, but they add another arrow to our bow when we seek to hit our target.
Opportunities:
Among these opportunities are service learning, interdisciplinary learning, and the learning created by new technologies. Most of our universities have introduced service learning courses or have structured opportunities for connecting community service to academic work. The contemporary Jesuit orientation is towards social justice, the education of persons who will live their lives in service to others. The late Father General, Fr. Pedro Arrupe first expressed this thought when we spoke of men for others, which was quickly rephrased men and women for others, persons for others.
I have often entertained myself by rephrasing documents written in the majestic masculine by substituting every place where it says...
The results are often powerful. Reread Rerun Novarum that way and you'll see what I mean. In this case, however, when that switch to politically correct language occurred, it struck me that if he had originally said women for others people might not have appreciated how countercultural Jesuit education intended to be. Women's lives traditionally have been devoted to serving others, and not always through choice. It is not even noticed if a woman serves others. Yet Father Arrupe presented this as a challenge to men as well as women. You must be strong to put the needs of others ahead of your own, to be selfless. Service is recognized as valid and valuable and a natural expression of Jesuit education of persons for others. In service learning courses, students leave the classroom to complete assigned activities in carefully selected agencies, schools, clinics, and other real world settings to address such issues as illiteracy, homelessness, hunger, health care, drug abuse, or other community concerns. In addition to the good they do, this is also an interesting intellectual experience. Service learning changes not only how teachers teach but also how students learn. There is no textbook with all of the answers and important lessons set forth. Instead of going from principles to their application in real world settings, service learning challenges the student to discover the principles from their experiences. The service learning environment shows students that knowledge must be actively constructed, interpreted and applied. The task is not just to identify correct answers, but to synthesize meaning from the information and experiences. Students who have learned in this way should be able to face the complex tasks of everyday life more readily: how to make a decision on a jury; how to initiate social reform, how to deal with problems and make decisions when the answers are not set forth in a textbook. More importantly, students become aware of their own values and appreciate the importance and necessity of civic participation. They learn more about themselves and about their own strengths and limitations. Their experiences challenge simplistic notions, and they become aware of the complexity of contemporary moral problems. It becomes impossible to persist in stereotypical thinking about people. This is a wonderful methodology for helping students learn how to relate their knowledge to the needs of others.
Our challenge is assuring that service learning courses have the same academic rigor that more traditional courses have, that the service component is effective and genuinely helps others, and that the contributions of faculty who make the extra effort to develop and implement these courses are appropriately recognized and rewarded. Discussing each of these challenges could be a workshop in itself. A second opportunity is interdisciplinary learning. This also is not new, but it still is an area of opportunity for shaping the future. Fr. Kolvenbach reminded Jesuit educators that in a university, each science is seen to be insufficient in itself to explain the fullness of creation. Thus a qualitative integration of inquiry is sought, which can lead to an appreciation of more comprehensive truth.
A university becomes an exciting place if we talk with each other about the things that are important. These are obvious vehicles for the implementation of mission. For example, interdisciplinary courses linking ethics with professional training are naturals for our campuses. Sociology courses that link with theology courses on the social teaching of the Church would be very rich. Courses in music and the arts that link with Church history would provide great meaning for all participants. Genetics courses that deal with bioethics, and chemistry courses that look at environmental issues provide experiences that could characterize Catholic education. The whole area of education for peace and justice provides many opportunities for interdisciplinary study. At the University of San Diego, our Institute for Peace and Justice links law, political science, theology, cultural studies, and international affairs. The Ignatian precept of finding God in all things can be expressed in new courses that try to do just that, find God in all things. In a letter of advice to a Portuguese Jesuit, Ignatius wrote,
...the scholastics canot engage in long meditations...[but] they can practise seeking the presence of our Lord in everything; their dealing with other people, their walking, seeing, tasting, hearing, understanding, and all our activities. For his Divine Majesty is truly in everything by his presence, power and essence. This kind of meditation, finding God in everything, is easier than lifting ourselves up and laboriously making ourselves present to more abstract divine realities.
With much the same thought, Elizabeth Barrett Browning in her poem,
"Aurora Leigh"
Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.
Our courses provide rich fruit, but they could do more. Why settle for just the fruit when you can also see the fire? Interdisciplinary studies are natural vehicles for the creativity which is triggered by the recognition of new relationships and interactions. I think of the basic or core curriculum as the vertical framework of learning, the interdisciplinary connections as adding a horizontal dimension, and the spiritual and apostolic insights as bringing a dimension of depth to that learning. There are also going to be new learning opportunities created by new technologies.
Technology is introducing new areas of study. I note, for example, that the students who used to be pre-meds are now often interested in biotech. TV programs like CSI Miami have generated tremendous interest in forensic science and technology. The advent of wireless technology is also generating new subject emphases. Our students will be studying different subjects in different ways in the future. I can't predict what these will be, but we can get a feeling for the impact of change when we look at the opportunities created by distance learning. American colleges and universities have devoted literally hundreds of millions of dollars to the development of online learning, and I know that the Jesuit universities offer programs through Jesuit.com. While I am anxious about the potential loss of the traditional interpersonal relationships and campus community threatened by online study, I am also encouraged by the possibilities for new interactions. Online courses can develop a sense of community when they require active participation and collaborative assignments. I was very intrigued with the results of putting one of our ethics courses on line. When the students discussed an ethics case, it was put on the ethics web page. Our ethics web page gets over 10,000 hits a day. The resulting discussion group was so much broader than the 20 students in the classroom and their teacher. It included other teachers and students around the world as well as scholars who happened to log on. The richness of that discussion, sorting out the challenges and insights, were not only memorable for the students but also the teacher. The course was an unforgettable experience. I think of an education course in which half the students were our laid-back southernÐCalifornia student teachers, and the other half were eastern urban New Yorkers from Pace University. How much they brought each other in those video classrooms. I have encouraged colleagues to reconceptualize distance learning as connected learning, and place the emphasis on the connections between learners rather than the distance between them. We can use technology to bring us together. The creative responses will involve knowing how to use these new tools to restructure the learning experience and how to bring our educational values to a larger student body. All these things — service learning, interdisciplinary programs, web-based connections — will change the environment and can help us deliver our mission in the future. The hope of the future is inherent in the young people we teach. Pope John Paul II has made that his theme of hope. Whenever he finds young people gathered together, he says, as he did at his inauguration in St. Peter's Square,
You are the hope of the Church and of the world. You are my hope.
He notes that the most fundamental characteristic of youth is that he [or she] searches for answers to basic questions; not only for the meaning of life, but also for a concrete way to go about living his life. And if at every stage of his life man desires to be his own person, to find love, during his youth he desires it even more strongly.
The pope advises that every mentor, beginning with parents, must be aware of this characteristic, and must love this fundamental aspect of youth. Colleges are inherently hopeful because they are places where the young pursue their futures. Jesuit colleges and universities have a special opportunity to create a culture and an environment in which that search is satisfied. Our vision of a campus and alumni community that serves God and each other draws us to the future. A final quote, from St. Ignatius,
From among those who are now merely students, in time some will emerge to play diverse roles — some to preach and carry on the care of souls, others to the government of the land and the administration of justice, and others to other responsible occupations.
Finally, since the children of today become the adults of tomorrow, their good education in life and doctrine will be beneficial to many others, with the fruit expanding more widely every day.
I end with the refrain,
The thought of what America could be like...The thought of what America could be like...
if Ignatian principles had a wide circulation, if we truly become companions in mission, gives me hope for the future.
REFERENCES CITED
Beabout, Greg, ed. A Celebration of the Thought of John Paul II. St. Louis: St. Louis University Press, 1998, p. 163.
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Aurora Leigh. The Brownings: Letters and Poetry. Garden City: International Collectors Library, 1970.
Byrne, Patrick. "The Good Under Construction and the Reseach Vocation of a Catholic University." Journal of Catholic Education 7 (3):320-338.
Ganss, George E., S.J., Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works. NY: Paulist Press, 1991, p. 353.
Gray, Howard, S.J. "The Ignatius Mission." In All Things. Summer, 2003.
John Paul II. Crossing the Threshold of Hope. NY: Random House, 1994.
Morey, M. and Holtschneider, D. Unpublished manuscript; Lay Leadership in Catholic Higher Education. ACCU Conference, Sacred Heart University, 2003.
Paschen, E. and Mosby, R.P. Poetry Speaks. Naperville: Sourcebooks, Inc., 2001, p. 77.
Sheeran, Michael, S.J. "Church Governance and the Educated Laity." Human Development 24(3): 69, 2003.
Wilcox, John and Ebbs, Susan. "Promoting an Ethical Campus Culture: The Values Audit." In: Wilcox,J. and King, I. Enhancing Religious Identity. Best Practices from Catholic Campuses. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown U. Press, 2000, pp. 355-363.