Santa Clara University

Convocation 2003-04

Achieving Excellence: The Education of the Whole Person

Paul Locatelli, S.J.

University Convocation

Sept. 16, 2003

A Living Tradition

People often ask whether Santa Clara will be a Catholic and Jesuit university in the future. Although there is not enough time for me to address all the layers of that question, it does give us the opportunity to reflect on how our present programs line up with our fundamental commitments and aspirations. And also, how our diverse and pluralistic community shapes a distinctive educational mission that comes from a Christian tradition.

At its best, that faith tradition treasures the search for truth and the pursuit of human wisdom since these are avenues that lead to God who is the source of meaning. That tradition honors life's mystery, a question that drives the intellectual curiosity that creates a university. It believes that God's spirit evokes our hunger for the life of the mind and for a just and humane world.

If the Christian tradition is only a settled body of knowledge, it might inspire reverence, but not excitement and wonder. The tradition is alive and growing when it is wrestling with the present world. Particularly, then, Jesuit education in 2003 cannot be the same as it was in the 16th century. Likewise, a Santa Clara education in 2003 cannot be the same as it was in 1851, or in 1951, or even 1993. Is Santa Clara living up to the best of its tradition? The following reflections are offered in that spirit

In the 1990 apostolic constitution, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II insists that Catholic universities have the same dedication to research, teaching, and the education of students that every genuine university has. Holding up one of the great scholars of Western culture, he writes that student and teacher share in the common love of knowledge that was "so precious to Saint Augustine, gaudium et veritate, namely, the joy of searching for, discovering and communicating truth in every field of knowledge."1

Santa Clara shares this dedication through the particular lens of Jesuit education. To this end, it shares a vision common with all other Jesuit universities around the world. One of those universities is the Jesuit university of Cental America in El Salvador that the deans, vice presidents, a few faculty and staff, and I visited during the first week of September. I was reminded once again of Ignacio Ellacuria, the Jesuit philosopher and president of the UCA. Through social scientific research the UCA exposed the structures of injustice in El Salvador. And, Ellacuria was deeply committed to academic excellence which was important in articulating a vision and plan to build new political and economic structures for his country.

He was martyred because he was an intellectual, threatening the status quo by speaking to the truth of his country. Seven years earlier in 1982 when Salvador was torn by civil war, he gave our commencement address. I am struck by how current his address continues to be and how frequently it is still cited. He challenged Santa Clara to a distinctive excellence when he said:

Ellacuria's words are haunting because they express the conscience of a Jesuit university in our world today, namely, it must be grounded in academic excellence to achieve its end. Certainly Santa Clara is in a different time and culture than the UCA, but his words call us to examine, as a university, who we are and what we are educating our students to become.

The Education of the Whole Person

In our statement of purpose, we begin, "Inspired by the love of God to serve society through education, continuing the commitment of the Franciscans who founded Mission Santa Clara in 1777 and the Jesuits who opened the College in 1851, Santa Clara University declares its purpose to be the education of the whole person within the Catholic and Jesuit tradition."

The education of the whole person has been the ideal of Jesuit colleges and universities from the time of Ignatius of Loyola in the 1500s. Over the centuries, however, the meaning of educating the whole person has changed. For Ignatius, the concept of the whole person was satisfied by considering intellectual, moral, spiritual and physical formation. But, thirty years ago, Father Pedro Arrupe, S.J., the late Superior General of the Jesuits, stressed that the whole person had to be "a person for others." Self-development will not make a person whole unless that person is committed to others. Being related to God must lead to an involvement in social justice that would benefit others as much as oneself.

To keynote our sesquicentennial celebration, Father Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, the current Superior General, brought a new scope to the meaning of educating the whole person. Keeping the student at center stage, he said:

To have a well-educated solidarity endorses the customary academic inquiry learned through studying intellectuals like Aquinas, Kant, Rawls, Amartya Sen, Stephen Gould as well as to have an experience of our broken world. Both are necessary to best know how to use knowledge to leaven the world for good, for example, by calling for new political and legal structures that advance each person's civil and human rights and a system of economic development that can integrate the entire world population.

Solidarity is captured in the beautiful phrase from Jewish spirituality: "to heal the world." Genuine solidarity brings the intellectual, professional, psychological, physical, moral and spiritual aspects of the person into coherence and leads to the constructive use of knowledge to make the world more humane and just. The educational question shifts, then, from "how ought I to live" to "how ought all of us live together in this time and place?"

The Aims of a Jesuit Education for the Whole Person

At Santa Clara, students have the opportunity to answer that question through three interwoven aspirations: (1) an integrated humanism grounded in academic excellence, (2) faith grounded by scholarly inquiry, and (3) engagement with the world in pursuit of justice. Let me begin with the first aim.

(1) Integrated Humanism and Academic Excellence. The aim of Jesuit education has always been through an integrated humanism that is well grounded in academic excellence.

Santa Clara does not fit the stereotype of the large research university where the generation of knowledge in highly specialized departments takes precedence over almost everything else, including effective teaching. Nor does it fit the small college that places greater emphasis on teaching the liberal arts to a much smaller student body than on research.

Santa Clara lies between the two types and aspires to incorporate the best of both - integrating excellence in research and teaching as teaching scholars - which today also means integrating the latest learning technologies in a humanistic education.

The early Jesuits, graduates of the University of Paris, the leading institution of Europe, combined the two competing forms of higher education in the sixteenth century to inaugurate a distinctive educational tradition. As the Jesuit historian John O'Malley wrote, the early Jesuits "appropriated both scholastic and humanistic learning and tried to relate these two cultures to one another."4

The humanistic model, championed by Erasmus, emphasized classical languages and literature, eloquent expression and the arts, as the ways to shape the moral character and religious development of students. The scholastic model typical of universities, depended more on lecturing and disputation that developed the analytical skills of students in law, medicine, philosophy and theology.

Their Renaissance humanism led them to pioneering work in literary education, theater, ballet, and Baroque architecture. Then, with the emergence of the New Science in the 17th century, Jesuits became physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers as well as linguists and ethnographers of distant cultures. Natural philosophy and science became mainstays of their curriculum.

O'Malley notes that for the early Jesuits "the study of the humanities helps the understanding of Scriptures, is a traditional propaedeutic to philosophy, provides a pedagogically sound entrance into other subjects," promotes eloquence and erudition, and "develops facility in different languages that the international character of the Society demands."

Today, Jesuit education retains its humanistic orientation by also incorporating the study of areas such as cultures, ecology, gender, globalization, international human rights. It retains great confidence that human reason and actions can be the media of divine grace. This tradition shares common ground with people of other faiths and secular academics in valuing the pursuit of truth and the generation of knowledge, as well as in a common commitment to develop the humanity of their students.

Today Jesuit education should aspire for the kind of innovation that the original Jesuits had. Those educators expanded the understanding of liberals arts from the humane letters to include the arts, sciences, and mathematics. Theology gave the university and education its ultimate purpose. 5

A Santa Clara education retains the orientation of an ethical education found in the Renaissance humanist schools as well as in nineteenth and early twentieth centuries American colleges. At the same time, it strives for the intellectual rigor, critical thinking, and scholarly and professional excellence represented in the American research university, because academic excellence in research and teaching are critical to solving the complex problems this world faces.

(2) Faith and Scholarly Inquiry. The second aim of Jesuit education is the place of faith in an integrated humanism. From its origins, the Christian community valued learning and dialogue with culture. The Catholic Church founded the great medieval universities. Santa Clara stands in continuity with this commitment to learning, rooting itself in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, Catholic intellectual and social teachings, evolving expressions of worship and prayer, and human wisdom.

There are many factors important for a Catholic university, but no single one of them makes the university or its education specifically Catholic. The presence of Jesuits, quality Catholic theology and ethics courses, and pastoral and liturgical ministries are important, but no one of them solely makes Santa Clara Catholic. Collectively they have critical roles, but the new innovation for Jesuit education is faith in relationship to justice in the search for truth and meaning in all areas of learning and life.

Our tradition insists that education of the whole person must include exploring the life of faith. Both in theology courses and the practices of religion, students, faculty and staff have the opportunities to find the transcendent goodness of God intimately involved in healing the world. We should raise probing and constructive questions about the beliefs and practices of students. Our education appreciates that reflective faith can free a person to search for ultimate meaning in every area of knowledge.

Genuine faith, then, is not an enemy of reason, but its complement. The Catholic tradition is at home in the university because of its radical confidence that reason will not contradict faith. It needs the university's intellectual resources to produce a deeper, more critical self-understanding and open faith to the riches of other ways of life.

While the Catholic tradition gives Santa Clara its identity, the Second Vatican Council punctured the myth that "Catholicism" has a uniform, fixed essence, existing apart from history and cultures. Responding to the invitation of Pope John XXIII, Catholics continue to rediscover the meaning of "catholic" as universal and holistic, and not uniform and sectarian. And, at best, they better appreciate the value of Catholic within the plurality of cultures and voices.

What does this tradition of faith offer to the American university like Santa Clara? I think it raises a unique range of issues and it also inquires about the fundamental presuppositions of academic disciplines.

First, an intellectually critical faith will raise questions of depth and meaning that are not often discussed in secular universities. Questions, for example, about the mystery of God and creation, the meaning and purpose of life, the meaning of suffering, the call to universal reconciliation, and responsibility for stewardship of the world and intelligent service to others. And, in exploring our ultimate origin and destiny, faith seeks understanding by taking every argument to its logical conclusion in every discipline from physics to art, economics to engineering, law to psychology, and from finance to language.

The well-known sociologist Robert Bellah, himself an Episcopalian, writes, "It is my belief that this is a Catholic moment in American cultural history and that Protestants and Catholics alike badly need an infusion of the analogical imagination to help us overcome the cultural confusion in which we have fallen."6 Bellah believes that the Catholic propensity to see analogies between the transcendent reality of God and ordinary human experience offers a way beyond the sterile division of the sacred and the secular, of science and belief.

The presence of a faith tradition, then, should inspire excellence by opening up more space for rigorous inquiry and free discussion about the presuppositions behind every position. What are its assumptions about knowledge and its limits? What does it consider a genuinely humane life? How does it locate human persons and communities in the broader ecosystem? When fundamental positions are assumed but not open for critical examination, it cuts short the dialogue that is the life of the university.

The Second Vatican Council, and again the Jesuit order in 1996,7 urged genuine, respectful dialogue with other religious traditions and a contemporary world that often finds faith superfluous. Other religions and even nonbelievers have much to offer this community of faith. The university should be a place in a pluralistic society where genuine dialogue takes place with the sort of conversation where all parties are open to illumination.

September 11 taught us the importance of multiracial, multinational and interreligious dialogue. Dialogue, in short, is one path to knowing, believing and valuing what is most human. The alternative is uncritical ideology and distorted uses of religion which lead to hate and conflict.

(3) Engagement with the World. The third aim of Jesuit education brings a commitment to engage the world through a faith that does justice. Solidarity adds a new breadth and engagement to this humanism by integrating it into the larger world. While appreciating the value of critical thinking and knowledge as intrinsically worthwhile, a well-educated solidarity also asks, "Who benefits from this knowledge? How does it contribute to healing the world?"

And so, we have turned scholarly attention to the most prominent issue of our day, namely the poverty and injustice that burden over half of humanity and also global ecology, international human rights, migration and immigration, and the rights of women.

The Jesuit commitment to "the faith that does justice" has sparked critical theological and social analysis, research in ethics, and new approaches to theology, literature, and the arts. It has challenged the professions of business, law, engineering and medicine to deal with critical ethical dilemmas and to use professional competence not primarily for personal gain but to heal the world. The commitment to justice has also prodded the institutional Church to adopt the preferential option for the poor and to examine the justice of its own internal procedures.

How does this Jesuit pedagogy of engagement and solidarity with the world happen? The virtue of solidarity is no intruder into the university but should drive intellectual probing and creative imagination. Students do not learn solidarity by concepts alone but especially by direct contact, direct experience of people of different cultures, classes, and ethnic groups.

As Father Kolvenbach recently told the alumni of Jesuit education: "When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change. Personal involvement with innocent suffering, with the injustice others suffer, is the catalyst for solidarity which then gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection."8 In turn, that reflection leads to a desire to make a difference.

Solidarity then, which is one window into understanding more about justice, assumes there is a fundamental human capacity to recognize our deep connection with others, a recognition that sparks compassion. It is more than listening and learning from others, it's about tasting the joys and suffering of another person.

Compassion is not about pity nor about merely feeling bad about the suffering of another person. It is having empathy for the troubles of another person and the urgent desire to change that person's condition. It's about having the sensitivity to make the world more humane and just for every person, not merely your one's own enclave, gated community, and friends.

Philosopher Ronald Dworkin makes an important distinction between "equal treatment" and "treatment as an equal."9 To paraphrase Dworkin, the right to "equal treatment" is the right to an equal distribution of some opportunity or resource or burden. Every citizen, for example, has a right to vote and to be included in global economic development, which means that different economic arrangements are needed for our globalizing world that is leaving out the vast majority of our world population.

But, the right to treatment as an equal was best understood by an aboriginal woman in Australia when she heard some U.S. college students were coming to her village for an immersion experience: "If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your life and your liberation are bound up with mine...then let us work together."

Persons with a well-educated solidarity would understand how their liberation is bound to this woman. Solidarity should give them a window into globalization, and an aspiration, for example, to ensure international human rights and to promote the common good.

Well-educated persons are intellectually curious, ready to explore new ideas and to ask how they can contribute to a more just and humane world. Their contact with people of different cultures and classes raises serious questions about the world that will inspire them to deepen their analytical skills. They realize that critical thinking is necessary to live as socially responsible citizens in their local and global communities.

As many students learned through last year's Institute on Globalization, business decisions and economic policies fashioned in Silicon Valley and Washington directly impact the family next door and the poor in places like Salvador, China, and Malaysia. Education for character that ignores the world's suffering is narcissistic; professional training that ignores the ethical significance of institutions and policies is inhumane.

Conclusion

A Santa Clara education seeks to prepare students to take on the responsibility for their own learning. Staff have a critical teaching role in their development as whole persons. And, the teaching scholars who make up the faculty serve as mentors and advisors but even more importantly as examples of what we hope our students will become, people of well-educated solidarity using their considerable talents to heal the world. They do this by being excellent teachers and researchers in their own discipline but also by looking beyond the discipline to how it can be used to make the world more just.

We see another angle on the education of the whole person in Jesuit education at Santa Clara from some reflections attributed to Sir Francis Drake:

  Disturb us, Lord, when // We are too well pleased with ourselves,

  When our dreams have come true // Because we have dreamed too little,

  When we arrived safely // Because we sailed to close to the shore.

  Disturb us, Lord, when // With the abundance of things we possess

  We have lost our thirst // For the waters of life;

  Having fallen in love with life, // We have ceased to dream of eternity

  And in our efforts to build a new earth, // We have allowed our vision // Of the new Heaven to dim.

  Disturb us, Lord, to dare more boldly, // To venture on wider seas // Where storms will show your mastery;

  Where losing sight of land, // We shall find the stars.

  We ask You to push back, // The horizons of our hope;

  And to push into the future,

  In strength, courage, hope and love.

Yes. Santa Clara will continue as a Catholic and Jesuit university with the same dedication to research, teaching, and the education of students as every other genuine university.

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1. Pope John Paul II, 1990 Apostolic Constitution: "On Catholic Universities," Ex Corde Ecclesiae, United States Catholic Conference, Washington, D.C., November 2000, pp. 3.

2. Ignacio Ellacuria, 1982 Commencement Address to Santa Clara University.

3. Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, S.J., "The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Jusitice in America Jesuit Higher Education." Santa Clara Lecture, Santa Clara University, October 6, 2000, pp. 10.

4. John W. O'Malley, The First Jesuits, (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 1993), Chapter 6, 200ff.

5. Michael J. Buckley, S.J., The Catholic University as Promise and Project, (Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C.)

6. Robert Bellah, May 2000 Commencement Address to Loyola Marymount University.

7. Jesuits Today, decress 5 Our Mission and Interreligious Dialogue.

8. Peter Hans-Kolvenbach, S.J., January 2003 Address to Alumni on Jesuit Education at Santa Clara University.

9. Ronald Dworkin, "DeFunia vs. Sweatt" in Equality and Preferential Treatment, Princeton, 1977, pp. 67-8.