FACULTY CONVOCATION 2007
Paul Locatelli, S.J.
Sept. 11, 2007
In December, Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, sent a letter to all Jesuit superiors around the world notifying them that he appointed me as secretary for higher education for all Jesuit colleges and universities globally. I’ve been asked: What is the job? How will I be able to fulfill this international role and handle the job of Santa Clara University’s president? How or why did I get appointed? And the list goes on.
The answer to why is a mystery. I first heard about it on October 9, when an email from Father John McGarry, the Provincial of California, unexpectedly popped up. Since Jesuits receive routine notices from the Provincial, I did not think much about it until I read the subject line: “the future.” It began:
Dear Paul,
I hope you are well. . . . I am currently in Detroit at the Jesuit Conference Board meeting. Fr. General is here with us, and I had a meeting with him this morning. . . . He was quite clear with me . . . that he would like you to be available to serve the universal Society [as] Secretary for Higher Education [and the General Curia].
The email went on to describe a bit more of the conversation, the contemplated next steps, and ended with:
There you have it, Paul! I know this news puts some pressure on you. . . . I look forward to meeting with you. . . . Thank you for your generosity and availability as a Jesuit.
Gratefully in the Lord,
John
You have just witnessed the Jesuit vow of obedience in action. After two face-to-face discussions with Father Kolvenbach in late October and December, I understood that he wanted this new position first to emphasize the importance of higher education globally and, second, to facilitate cooperation across our international network of roughly 150 colleges and universities as well as 50 theologates and other kinds of higher education institutions. These institutions are located in about 50 countries.
The position differs from the other seven secretariats residing full-time in Rome insofar as I remain president here and assume new responsibilities elsewhere. Father Kolvenbach wanted to capitalize on my experience as president, my service for the last dozen or so years on the International Committee on Jesuit Higher Education, and my recent service on an international commission on justice in a globalizing world. As a newly created position, it’s an experiment, and the role will develop over time.
To date, in addition to spending a few weeks in Rome following graduation, I have attended meetings with presidents and colleagues of Jesuit higher education institutions in Latin America and in East Asia; I have also participated in a Washington, D.C., ad hoc committee looking at ways to develop a virtual, global Jesuit university. In addition, I have been gathering reflections from Jesuit institutions world-wide on what they perceive as the major challenges and priorities we may face over the next decade.
From the diverse responses, regardless of culture and location, three clear ideals emerge.
The first is the Ignatian ideal of the Magis. Magis is the Latin word for more. It means that freedom to choose the greater good for one’s own personal development and the betterment of society. And, these give glory to God.
Magis is judged, not by some quantitative measure, but by the greater good in personal development and in all endeavors. It was a goal of Ignatius and his companions, and in that pursuit they studied at the best universities in Europe, for they believed that a person needed a quality education to improve oneself, to help others, and to improve the world. It’s a compelling principle: Ignatius insisted that, whatever we do, we must strive to do it exceptionally well.
To this day, the quest for the Magis is the sine qua non for all Jesuit ministries, including universities. When Father Kolvenbach said the measure of our universities is “who our students become,” he was confirming the two-fold excellence of the Magis in Jesuit education: first, the human and moral perfection of students who will also better serve society and, second, and the academic excellence of the university.
The second consistent ideal from the Jesuits across the globe is that an integrated, humanistic formation of the whole person must characterize Jesuit education if it is to benefit and accommodate “people, place, and time.” To this end, Ignatius anticipated that graduates from Jesuit colleges would become socially responsible, ethical, and moral citizens who would aspire to leaven the community with wisdom, faith, knowledge, and virtue. Both they and their community would benefit.
The third Jesuit ideal underscored by these world-wide respondents is that a commitment to understanding and integrating faith with justice is essential to a humanistic education, an education with an in-depth knowledge in at least one discipline and with a foundation in the arts, humanities, and sciences. Such a curriculum embraces professional education as well, because it also improves the life of the person and society as well as the integration of global understanding, reflective experience of learning with and from the poor, and an aspiration to construct a more just, sustainable, and humane world order.
From the perspective of these principles, I’d like to touch on three points:
I: Globalization as the New Reality for Higher Education
II: Globalization and Its Changing Importance for Education
III: Globalization and Jesuit Education at Santa Clara
I: Globalization as the New Reality for Higher Education Globalization is not new to this century or even to the 20th century. What is new is the rapidity of change, together with increased interconnectedness, complexity, and expansiveness. Some of its aspects touch all people and the earth itself, sometimes in beneficial ways and other times in detrimental ways.
Globalization presents us with a paradox: on the one hand, the Magis principle requires high quality, often cloistered, scholarly research to understand fully globalization and its effects; but on the other hand, the Magis principle requires in-depth learning that comes only from the experience of what Father Kolvenbach calls the “gritty reality”1 that the poor and vulnerable experience.
Among our guiding principles for a Santa Clara education is the creation of a learning environment that integrates imagination and inquiry within and across disciplines, along with reflective engagement with society and a commitment to fashion a more humane, sustainable world.
In listening to Jesuit educators in East Asia and Latin America, where they live face-to-face with severe poverty almost daily, I see that too often the idea of globalization centers on the market economy and the role of technology, when it should conjure up a vast array of diverse issues, including international relations and war, religion and fundamentalism, technology and culture, legal systems and international human rights, development and inequality, consumerism and ecology, and depletion of world resources and climate change. Because every academic discipline is changing as a result of globalization, so too must research and learning change to understand our world.
II: Globalization and Its Changing Importance for Education
I want to offer two examples that exemplify the changing importance of globalization.
Example 1: Is the World Flat?
A group of students, through a faculty member, asked if we could read and discuss a few books over the course of the year. The first book we read was Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat. It captured their imagination as it has for so many others. The Flat World becomes his image for the short history of the 21st century. The world, according to Friedman, became flat, primarily because technology helped to create a new global capitalism.2 We know his thesis. Using intriguing stories about young entrepreneurs who have “made it” by creating or using a new technology, he posited that technical innovations have formed a global open system so that every person now lives in a wide-reaching world without boundaries.
Our reading group was having a very lively discussion of the Flat World idea. Most were enthusiastic about Friedman’s argument, and I agreed up to a point – but then asked them: Is the world really flat for all people? Or for few people? I asked what would have happened if Friedman had interviewed others – for example, ethicists, college students like them, or the poor who have little or no access to education or technology. Had he done that, would his thesis and arguments have shifted?
The conversation halted and then took a turn, with one student from India and another from China leading the discussion. The Chinese student, who had been fairly quiet, said that if the conversation had been taking place in China, someone would have noted that many were still very poor and now they were also losing something of their local culture. Some of the students recognized that, with unfettered economic growth, there is also a high price paid in terms of migration, climate change, the depletion of natural resources, the violations of human rights in general and children and women’s rights in particular, and the consequences of growing inequality between the haves and the have-nots.
As Friedman acknowledges in the last few chapters of his book, for a large number of people, the world is not flat. We must address the problem that a substantial proportion of the global population still live in grinding poverty, including many in China and India but especially Africa. The consequences are devastating to those living in poverty not only physically but spiritually and morally.
Broader questions came up, and the student discussion shifted from technology for making money to technology for educating people to improve the quality of their lives. Wanting them to realize how fortunate they are and what they should do with their education, I gave them some statistics about the world’s gritty reality: that 1.3 billion people live on less than a $1 per day, and another 1.5 billion live on less than $2 per day.
Some argue that with globalization these roughly 3 billion people are being added to the labor force and to the population of consumers. But with income averaging less than $2 per day, are they are really part of the flat world – do they truly have the resources to afford healthy food, health care, clean water, education, and decent clothes?
Consider that more than one billion people still have unsafe sources of drinking water, and as a result, thousands of children die every day from diarrhea and other water and sanitation-related diseases. Consider also that more than 30 million children in the world are not immunized against treatable or preventable diseases, so that measles, malaria, and diarrhea have become three of the biggest killers of children, and 95 percent of all the people who now get polio are under the age of 5. HIV/AIDS has created more than 14 million orphans – 92 percent of them live in Africa. 134 million children between the ages of 7 to 18 have never been to school. In the last decade, more than 2 million children have died as a direct result of armed conflicts – and the same number, 2 million children, are believed to be exploited through the commercial sex trade.
These complex realities make a claim on us as educators, especially as educators at a Jesuit university.
Example 2: The Best of Times: Is peace or tolerance possible?
The terrorists’ attack on 9/11, six years ago today, changed how we live in ways we could not have previously imagined. Not only did hijacked commercial aircraft become lethal bombs, but communication technology was used to plan and orchestrate the destruction of innocent lives and property, and to wage an attack on cultural values and wealth.
Haynes Johnson, in his book – The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years – presents us with what one reviewer described as a “portrait of the booming, self-indulgent, technologically stunning and culturally brutish 1990's.”3 It was also the time when those in the millennial generation who are now in college were growing up. It was a decade of unprecedented prosperity and peace for America.
Yet Haynes Johnson ends this history of the 90's by listing a series of concerns that, he asserts, will confront America’s citizens and policy makers. Written prior to 9/11/2001, his concerns were prophetic:
...at the millennium, the world faces rising tensions between its have and have-not components, growing threats of terrorism accelerated by the dispersal of weapons of mass destruction, and grievously divided fundamentalist and Western industrial societies. The fanaticism of extremist elements in some of those societies was demonstrated shockingly by a mindless act of historical destructiveness in Afghanistan in March 2001. [p.560/1]4
The conflict that radical Islam has with the West is as much about cultural values, which emanate from religious values, as it is about poverty. Religious fundamentalism has distorted the tenets of faith for political purposes, a distortion which has caused only conflicts and violence. We need to recognize and acknowledge that radical Islam’s understanding of the world and of globalization differs greatly from ours.
Research and teaching can address the practices and strategies for overcoming division by promoting reconciliation and building peace if – and only if – we understand and respect the culture of those in dialogue. Recognition, understanding, and respect also take face-to-face meetings and imagining a world of peace, not of division and fear.
While violence and war remain the main causes of displacement of people, just as important are poverty, inequality, and unsustainable development, conditions that force people to migrate both within their native countries and outside, externally to other lands. Education is a key step to addressing these complex realities.
So what does that mean for Jesuit education at Santa Clara? That is a question that I hope will stimulate many conversations in the coming year and beyond.
III: Globalization and Jesuit Education at Santa Clara.
I find my new job both exciting and daunting. I foresee my involvement in the global network of Jesuit higher education as a help for us in re-imagining a Santa Clara education, generating interest in cooperation with other Jesuit colleges and universities around the world, and educating our students as leaders and citizens of competence, conscience and compassion for the emerging global realities.
Through the conversations with our colleagues in Jesuit universities in South America and East Asia, I have already expanded and changed my understanding of globalization and raised questions of how a university education should address it.
Common to all Jesuit institutions is the commitment to excellence in teaching and research, enhanced by incorporating an analysis of ethical and social justice questions. Social justice is rooted in a faith tradition that, importantly, respects and develops through dialogue among religious traditions.
Common also is the realization that globalization has become the new horizon, or reality, facing our world, and, hence, the many dimensions and effects of globalization need to become educational priorities for our universities.
The over-arching challenge is this: How do we make globalization and global problems more explicit, as a part of the university’s research and within students’ learning, in every department and program?
As a Jesuit university, Santa Clara should focus its research and teaching on efforts to discover the roots causes of the critical problems of our time, paying special attention to their ethical and religious dimensions.5 Such research must be deeply rooted within and across each discipline.
Justice, in general and as a foundation of Jesuit education, unites the sacred and the social. Justice inspires an understanding of our responsibility to each other, for in justice we respect the dignity of each person and the good that is common to all. Understanding the justice of social sacredness is key to understanding the well-educated solidarity that Father Kolvenbach articulated for us in October 2000, in his talk in the Mission Church.6
More specifically, I want to challenge us to search for cross-disciplinary understanding to help formulate policies, among them, First, of economic development to overcome global poverty; next, of market capital structures to achieve equality; third, of human rights to moderate the quest for economic or political power; fourth, of geopolitical systems to provide safety nets of education, health, usable water, and healthy food;fifth, of laws and legal systems to ensure justice and a peaceful civil society; sixth, of the development of technology, science and engineering to benefit the well-being of the poor and those normally excluded from access.
I am happy to see that many programs in our three centers of distinction, and the human rights program in the law school, do address such issues.
I also want to challenge us to search for cross-disciplinary understanding and for expansion of our horizons in terms of language, culture, and religion as a means of overcoming war and conflict, living at peace, and learning to respect different cultures and faith traditions. With this challenge in mind, I am happy to see that our Modern Languages department embraces the dual aim of learning language and culture. And I am happy to see our Religious Studies department not only helps our students understand their faith but engages them and the broader community in Interreligious dialogue, respect, and understanding.
Another excellent example of addressing global concerns is the new International Studies Minor and its African studies emphasis to which faculty from a number of departments, such as Economics, Political Science, English, Religious Studies, Mathematics, and History, will be contributing. This minor will also include an experience of learning with and from people from different cultures. That experiential learning component may be fulfilled abroad or locally.
I am proud of the campus community for its support for the new University Core, which will promote the kinds of changes the globalizing world needs. I want to acknowledge the superb work of the members of the Core Revision Committee. The new University Core is a model for fulfilling the ideal of the Magis and for providing an integrated, humanistic education of the whole person of solidarity for the world. I would challenge the deans and faculty of all our graduate programs to consider how they might incorporate the underlying principles and themes of the new University Core for undergraduates.
I want to challenge all programs, graduate and undergraduate alike, to consider how each of their students could take community-based learning courses. These courses employ a pedagogy of engaged learning that research shows enables students to learn the subject matter extremely well and to learn also how best to respect the dignity of other people and cultures and how to use knowledge to make their lives and those of others better.
I would like us to think about the opportunities that our new Learning Commons, Technology Center, and Library will offer us. It will create a focal space for faculty and students to research and to learn about the “emerging global reality, with its great possibilities and deep contradictions.” Ideally, the university community will learn further how to participate in constructing a better world for all, especially those without access to education...
I am confident that you will, as always, meet these and other educational challenges. Returning now to the topic of my new position within the Society of Jesus, I believe it is because of you, at the forefront of research and of educating our students for the world, that Father Kolvenbach appointed me to the new role as secretary for Jesuit higher education. Likewise, because of you, our valedictorians the past few years have been articulate in telling their parents and the world that their Santa Clara education has prepared them and their classmates to be ethical citizens who will leaven the world with knowledge, justice, virtue, and wisdom.
For that and all that you do, I thank you.
******
Notes:
- Rev. Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, S.J., "The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice in American, Jesuit Higher Education," address to Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, California, October 6, 2000."
- Thomas L. Friedman, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century, New York, NY, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Publishers, 2005.
- Haynes Johnson, The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years, Orlando, FL, Harcourt, Inc., 2001
- Johnson, The Best of Times.
- Pope John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Apostolic Constitution, n 32.
- Kolvenbach, The Service of Faith.
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