Santa Clara University

Where Does Educating for Solidarity Leave Us?

 

Solidarity becomes a virtue that, for believers of any faith tradition and for non-believers, shapes our personality, character, and relationships; that transforms our perspective; that evokes ethical, compassionate actions.

 

• First, solidarity improves the quality of education and forms contemplatives in action for the new century. 

Universities play a unique, ethical role in society.  Evidence shows that education, combined with stable political, corporate, and legal systems, and the infusion of workable technology, is key both to enhancing the quality of life and to integrating people into their communities. 

Solidarity brings all of reality, good and bad, into sharp focus and makes us aware of our obligation as educators, an obligation that I believe is even greater for us than it is for corporate, civic, and community leaders.  Only education is able to address the greater questions of our time and our global society, and solidarity opens our horizons to include gritty reality and the preference for the poor in preparing students to be ethical, socially responsible citizens.

 

Consider poverty and power.  The 2000 Millennium Development Goals of the United Nations, with its commitment to cutting in half the proportion of the world’s population living in poverty by 2015, is laudable.  But despite global progress, the 2005 Human Development Reports questioned whether the power brokers of the 189 governments who signed on will make the necessary investments or have the political will to achieve the goals.[27]

 

Communities are not just becoming poor in fact, but poor in spirit, for the hostility of poverty shapes lives in a perverse and pervasive way.  Gustavo Gutierrez, a Peruvian priest who has lived in the barrios of Lima for years, summarizes poverty’s effects:

 

Food shortages, housing shortages, the impossibility of attending adequately to health and educational needs, the exploitation of labor, chronic unemployment, disrespect for human worth and dignity, unjust restrictions on freedom of expression (in politics and religion alike) are the daily plight of the poor.  The lot of the poor, in a word, is suffering.  Theirs is a situation that destroys people, families, and individuals. . .Equally unacceptable is the terrorism and repressive violence with which they are surrounded.[28]

 

We  give priority to the poor because their needs are greater.  We learn much more when we learn with and from them.  We can be enriched by them.  Jesus called them “blessed” in the Beatitudes;[29] often they have richer, deeper spirituality that offers them hope in the midst of conflict and disease, courage in the face of unjust systems and societies that neglect them, and a capacity to love even in a world that discriminates against them.

 

With poverty and its intertwined problems of race, ethnicity, and class increasing in the United States, we need to ask what is going wrong with our democracy, and our economic, educational, and legal systems.  Similar questions must be asked about the process of globalization.  This is not about eradicating governing systems, but developing the knowledge to change them, freeing them, where needed, of structural flaws, corruption, and injustice.

 

Because of the rapid pace of change and the complexities of globalization, and because reducing poverty while addressing the attendant problems of illness, instability, and illiteracy require sophisticated analysis for ethical actions, universities, especially Catholic, Jesuit universities, must play an increasingly important role in preparing reflective – contemplative – graduates who will seek to fashion a more humane and just global society.  In this context, the model of insulated and detached research and learning is not enough.

 

• Second, solidarity transforms our point of view by placing the common good and the dignity of each person at the center, as the highest values.

We all begin with our own point of view.  We all begin with presuppositions about life and the world, about individuals and communities.  We all have individual value systems.  When we question our presuppositions and see life as others do, especially as the poor do, our learning, research, and teaching will be changed.

 

Most of our students will never have direct contact with great tragedies like Hurricane Katrina or the adversities of those suffering from HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa.  However, immersion trips and community-based courses that include post-experience intellectual reflection on global realities such as poverty and alienation, discrimination and illiteracy, inequality and global warming will influence their perspectives and presuppositions about life. 

 

Consider globalization.  Globalization contributes to the progress of the world through economic development, international “communication, financial markets and trade, exchange of culture, migration, and dissemination of knowledge including science and technology,”[30] and, for some, greater understanding of religions.  But globalization also puts indigenous people and cultures in jeopardy.  It can also hasten social dislocation by shifts of populations in search of economic opportunities or to escape wars and violence.  How many of us know of a person who, in search of economic opportunities, has left family behind in Central America, Africa, or Haiti, only to have their hopes dashed? 

 

Solidarity challenges the case for, and even the language of, globalization as primarily an economic system or process.  Many believe that the centrality and connectedness of our humanity is found not in the transcendence of communion, but rather in the global liberal economic system.  For example, in “Why Globalization Works,” Martin Wolf argues raising the standard of living would solve all problems; that the impoverished countries in Africa bear witness to the limits of globalization only because they are outside of the global economic system.  His reductionist argument never considers the transcendence and sacredness of the person and community.[31]

           

First outlining many benefits of globalization, Fr. Kolvenbach also noted some “perverse connection” between globalization and markets:

 

Traffic in human beings and arms, drugs, exploitation of women and sex, child labor, manipulation of the media, mafia of all types, terrorism, war, and the debasement of the value of human life.  How can we not in this moment think of Africa, the paradigm for all the negative faces that the globalization of the market can offer?[32]

 

Some negative effects of global economic development are too easily overlooked, even avoided. The assumption that native peoples want only a better economic life dismisses the fact that globalization often marginalizes them and destroys their cultural heritage.  One person in the Philippines remarked, “Much talk of markets, but in reality very little access; much talk of jobs, but they were somewhere else; and much talk of a better life, but for others.”  And another commented, “There is no point to a globalization that reduces the price of a child’s shoes, but costs the father his job.”[33]

 

To be beneficial, globalization must favor poor and rich alike.  It must ensure the human dignity and rights of each and the common good of all by advancing equality, economic prosperity, cultural integrity, and enhanced communication.  We as educators, understanding both the positive dimensions of globalization and addressing its underside, must be an integral part of the research, teaching, and learning on the subject. 

 

At the 32nd General Congregation of 1975, representatives of the Society of Jesus asked whether we really were willing to pay the price for a more humane and just world.[34]  Thirty years later that question still has resonance and forces us to recognize that, absent the justice of solidarity and that pursuit of the common good rooted in agape, globalization can easily degenerate into a dehumanizing process.

 

• Third, solidarity leads to equality in relationships and in community.[35]

Solidarity challenges the illusions of privilege and isolated individualism, binding us emotionally and functionally to others and the earth – not only in periods of disaster and crisis but in all times and for all people and places.  Because solidarity is both a theological and social virtue it inspires a holistic view of the world, recognizing that a person’s greatest potential is realized in community.

 

Solidarity, then, with its pedagogy of both engagement and accompaniment, calls for an active disposition and an eagerness to participate with all who make up the one human family, not merely those who hold an established or dominant point of view or who have acquired power by position or wealth.

 

An Aboriginal Australian made this point beautifully when she reminded a student from the United States, “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”

 

Julio Perez, who works in the Casa program in El Salvador, put it this way:  “Solidarity isn’t only realizing what is happening in the world and giving money in response.  It is about asking why are these things happening?  Why are there so many people living in poverty?  And asking what we may do together to eradicate social injustice.”

 

• And finally, solidarity leads to moral action.[36]

Solidarity vitalizes learning for students as they discover they can make a difference in their world and institute systemic change in societies.  It helps students inculcate the habit of acting in the constant hope of fashioning a more humane and just world, with equality, freedom, and human dignity.

 

If education is about developing the habit of the heart to choose the greater good, as Ignatius and Kolvenbach would have it, then the justice of solidarity, as both a theological and social virtue, is choosing to be morally responsible for all of humanity and creation, regardless of one’s academic discipline. 

 

One notable piece of evidence that our students are understanding a well-educated solidarity can be found in remarks by Chris Wahl, Santa Clara University’s valedictorian of last June:  

 

A wise teacher once said, “You have to have one foot in the library and one foot in the gutter.”  During an immersion trip to Immokalee, Florida, my friends and I joined the farm workers in their struggle for justice.  During the trip we witnessed the inhumane conditions in which migrant workers live.  I realized that my happiness is bound up in the happiness of these farmers.  When we encounter real people, we can no longer treat them as statistics and numbers. 

 

We begin to understand that there are human beings living in these situations who have families and dreams and hopes.  Only in solidarity can we hope to find any real justice, and only in justice can we find real peace. 

 

After we returned from Immokalee, I was inspired to study all the more fervently, because I knew the faces behind the statistics and numbers.  Analyzing the situation from numerous academic perspectives meant looking at social psychology, economics and ethics.  My friends and I organized a teach-in and a rally in order to raise awareness. . .we knew that as people of compassion we could not remain silent while our fellow humans suffered.

 

Chris remarkably summarized the meaning of “a well-educated solidarity.”  He understood that solidarity invites and demands that we give the poor and the vulnerable a stake in conceptualizing and structuring our local and global moral ecology, while not ignoring our responsibility nor that of those who hold civic or community offices.  A just and humane world demands that we act together.

 

Ed Schaefer, a professor of mathematics at Santa Clara whose specialty is cryptography, provides us with another example of educating for solidarity.  Ed is currently writing a textbook in this highly technical field while on sabbatical in the southern African country of Malawi.  He is spending the year at Mzuzu University to help its math department set up a new graduate program in Information Theory, Coding Theory, and Cryptography.  Malawi is one of the ten poorest nations in the world, with a per capita income of $160 and a life expectancy of 37 years.  Why would a cryptographer choose to spend a year there? 

Ed answered that question in his sabbatical application:

 

I am going to Mzuzu University for a year in order to learn.  I will learn about the lives of people living in Malawi.  Undoubtedly they will have things to teach me about how to live and I expect to mature as a person and community member as a result of this.  When I return, I will share what I learn with the SCU community and will look for opportunities. . .to share this knowledge.

 

The intuition of Ed and Chris is that learning from and with the poor will make them better persons, as scholars, teachers, students, as citizens, as members of communities, and better at whatever they will do.  Both have been inspired to take responsibility for the social realities of this world.

 

I end with a query and a suggestion:  universities must be places of open and exacting discernment and debate.  They must be effective at preserving a humanistic orientation in the quest for intellectual, ethical, and theological excellence.  But if we believe intelligent inquiry and reflection on experience happens best with the guidance of mentors, teachers, and researchers, what obligation do we have for an education of solidarity?

 

And, for the next conference on our commitment to justice, I suggest that we change the line: “engaging the world” to “transforming the world.”

 

Thank you.

           

 

 

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