Santa Clara University

Fall Convocation 1997

Integrated Education at Santa Clara University:
Sunday in the Park with Seurat's Dot
University Convocation
September 19, 1997
Paul Locatelli, S.J.

Introduction

This morning, I wish to reflect on what we do as a community of scholars. Specifically, I want to explore the meaning of integrated education, our second strategic initiative. What does it mean when we say we educate the whole person in a learning environment that enables people to make connections among different forms of knowledge, understanding and experience? What would such an environment look like? How will we know that our students can make connections between learning and living, between knowing and acting?

Integrated education is grounded both in a rich 450-year Jesuit tradition and innovations demanded by contemporary society. Professor Pierson well described for us at the Faculty Recognition Dinner last April, how the early Jesuits pulled together the elements of Renaissance humanism into the first integrated curriculum in Western Europe; they incorporated what was new: science, mathematics, theater and vernacular literature into the traditional curriculum of Latin and Greek classics with theology as the integrating discipline. In today's even more complicated world, where knowledge expands almost exponentially, our task is still to pull together diverse elements of learning.

Santa Clara's integrated education is shaped by both intellectual inquiry common to all universities and a Christian humanism particular to our Jesuit identity. It links reflection on the transcendent with a commitment to the pragmatic. Integration means combining separate elements into a harmonious, interrelated whole. The Jesuit tradition has tried to integrate different aspects of life into a living harmony, as reflected in the phrases "contemplative in action" and "finding God in all things." This tradition has tried to be "catholic" in the root sense of the term: holistic -- concerned about the whole person and the person in relation to society, nature and God.

It means that our faculty, students and staff constantly try to connect knowledge and life. The ultimate aim is a person of integrity, someone whose life hangs together because she has made the connections between learning and appreciating, imagination and action, personal well-being and the common good. Or, in Ignatian language, she is able to integrate the love for learning with living a life that promotes the good of society for God's greater glory. No university can make someone a person of integrity, but a genuine community of scholars can raise the questions, impart the sensitivities and skills, and inspire the commitment to seek such a life of integrity.

A Metaphor for Integrated Education

Consider as a metaphor for integrated education the artist who is creating an impressionist painting. On a white canvas, the painter begins with brush strokes of complementary, pure colors to design a brightly hued composition. The challenge is to place the elements on the canvas in such a way that the eye of the viewer composes the scene. The unity of impressionist painting emerges from the interaction of eye and color, unlike the clear line and forms of traditional painting.

If you stand too close to a Renoir or a Monet, you see only a group of blurred brush strokes, mere blotches of color. You have to step back for the design to emerge, for your eye to compose those blotches into living, richly textured tones, alive with light and shadow. Now you see the Cathedral at Rouen glowing at sunset, or the haystacks, washed in a cold winter twilight. The eye is no longer treated as a camera that merely reproduces visual data. The impressionist eye is a creative blend of vision and imagination that forms the data into coherent wholes.

The nineteenth century neo-impressionists (pointillists) carried this technique to its most minute points. They often used tiny brush strokes, individual dots of pure color, a balanced composition, and a sketch to form a painting -- for the eye to connect into shape and texture.

At the opening of Stephen Sondheim's play, Sunday in the Park with George, the French painter, Georges Seurat, says:
White. A blank page or canvas.
The challenge: bring order to the whole.
Through design. Composition. Balance. Light. And harmony.

Then on a fresh canvas, Seurat begins to paint, first, the landscape and, then, the woman he loves, whose name, somewhat ironically, is Dot. On that blank surface through thousands of minute brush strokes, Seurat forms a whole scene. He has to maintain a double perspective with every stroke. He sees it up close but also as it will be seen from the viewer's standpoint, several feet back from the canvas. His design emerges gradually into a composition of balance, light and harmony.

The university presents an even more difficult challenge. We don't begin with a blank canvas. We begin with bright students who come from a variety of backgrounds, experiences and interests. There are many resources on our pallet: library and lab, classroom discussions and residence hall conversations, a diverse faculty and staff, campus liturgies and off campus involvements such as SCCAP. Like brush strokes, these gradually fill up the canvas of a university education. The challenge, however, is not just to fill up the canvas but to have design and harmony emerge.

At the end of Sunday in the Park with George, Dot, looking at the blank canvas, says: "So many possibilities...." Like the artist, we have so many possibilities in bringing harmony to the whole. But, when we step back, will all the elements merge into a living composition of grace and beauty or will it be a chaos, a blur? This is our challenge. How do we make the connections between all the different elements of learning so that each person begins to achieve the integrity that he or she sees is possible?

Our challenge is two-fold: to encourage faculty specialization and staff professionalism -- namely, for faculty and staff to be their scholarly and professional best -- and then to use their skills for the integrated education of the whole person. If we do so, then academic specialties will not become isolating but integrating. And, professional skills and services will be person-centered rather than task-oriented.

Making these connections means drawing on the best of our Jesuit tradition. Frank Rhodes, the former president of Cornell University, warned "some wonder whether there will continue to be distinctively Jesuit institutions or simply secularized institutions that could trace their founding to the Jesuits." His warning is for us not to go the way of other religiously founded American universities -- not to work meticulously on our small part of the canvas with no thought of the whole. Rhodes then exhorts us to a new renaissance in Jesuit, Catholic education that will be the means for grappling with new scholarship and the issues of contemporary society. So, with Rhodes, I believe that strengthening our Jesuit and Catholic identity is the direct way to enhance academic quality.

Integrated Education

Let me turn specifically to the topic of integrated education. How do we design and offer a curriculum that will help students make the connections between understanding and life? Is it possible to have a shared, comprehensive vision, appropriate to Santa Clara's tradition and mission, that unites all of the various intellectual issues and methods of inquiry?

Like Seurat, we face "so many possibilities" filling in the canvas of a Santa Clara education. The metaphor suggests two dimensions. The first addresses the emerging design within the painting itself. Each brush stroke, each portion of the painting derives its meaning only in relation to other parts of the whole. Each course has to be taught with a sense of how it relates to other parts of the curriculum. The curriculum -- the pattern of courses and related experiences -- leads to acquiring knowledge and understanding.

The second dimension looks beyond the painting to a broader vision. Every great piece of art becomes a new way of looking at the world. If we have truly entered into Joseph Turner's painting of the magic light of Venice, we will be able to see sunsets with a different eye; we will be able to see a world charged with God's grandeur. Once we have contemplated Picasso's "Guernica," the appalling portrait of slaughter in the Spanish Civil War, we can never forget the cruelty and human misery of twentieth century warfare.

Hence, I suggest that the test of a university education is not only what we know, but also what we care about. This leads the graduate to engage the world, to broaden sensitivities and sharpen commitment to life beyond the curriculum and the campus.

I. Design of the Integrated Curriculum: Pattern and Content

In the first dimension, the possibilities relate to the content or pattern of the curriculum which combines the intellectual quest for meaning with the development of professional skills. Let me say a few words about educational content for both undergraduate and graduate programs.

Undergraduate: At the undergraduate level, the Core Curriculum is an essential, but only one aspect, of integrated education. Such an education includes, for example, coherence and balance within the major and across majors, connections between the core and the school/college and the major -- which all include broader learning experiences.

But the Core sets a framework within which the courses of the major are located. The Core places questions of value and meaning at the center of the student's education, just as Seurat located Dot at the center of his painting. Every other element in the painting comes to life in connection to, and in tension with, this central figure.

Most students come to college with the belief that the major they choose will be the integrating center of their education.

But the Core is not a warm-up for later specializing in management, theatre or biology. Rather it is central to a Santa Clara education because it sets a framework of history, culture, science, faith and expression that can give meaning to whatever major the student chooses. This liberal arts dimension of a Jesuit education builds on a genuine humanism that is both Christian and social, interacting with the specific calling of each individual that the major helps shape.  In an intellectually rigorous manner, our graduates should be able to raise questions about how their talents contribute to the common good.

The integration of what we learn will combine quiet pond and water lilies of Monet with the fiery statements on the human condition of Van Gogh or Picasso.

This poses a particular challenge to the faculty. Many universities staff their required lower division courses with graduate students or part-time faculty. The College is committed to reduce further the level of part-time teaching in the Core. We want our best faculty in these courses because this is where the design and unity of the undergraduate experience emerge. We want our most senior teaching scholars raising the questions of meaning and integration. Education is a conversation between generations. The young, for whom the world is just opening up, may not yet be concerned about integration. They need faculty and staff who have come to realize what a challenge it is to find balance and wholeness in life.

Genuine integration includes experiential learning as well as internships and interdisciplinary courses. Linking course work closely with real life experience enhances academic quality. The Freshman Residential Community and the East Side Project are two examples of academic programs by which students integrate their experience. The institutes -- like the recent one on Justice and the Arts -- are ways of linking interdisciplinary learning with contemporary questions facing our society.

Studies have shown that gains in knowledge acquisition and application positively correlate with academic theme residential life, with peer tutoring and peer interaction focused on course content around racial issues. Research studies also confirm that co-curricular experiences -- living on campus, a sense of community, involvement in community service -- positively correlate with improvement in learning and understanding subject matter. And for Santa Clara, meaningful campus liturgies would contribute to a positive learning environment. From these findings, it is reasonable to hypothesize that learning which directly connects academic and experiential learning make connections among different forms of knowledge, understanding and experience. I suggest that these aspects of learning be connected throughout the entire curriculum -- undergraduate and graduate.

Graduate Business as an Example: Let me now turn to our graduate programs. In them, we must also ask, what does integrated education in the Jesuit tradition mean? I will use graduate business as an example. Serving on the Accounting Education Change Commission, a body appointed by the American Accounting Association, gave me the opportunity for an in-depth look at current expectations and directions in accounting and business education. From 1989 through 1996, members of the Commission participated in dialogues that led to broader objectives in accounting education and to the most recent accreditation standards for The American Association of Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

The new accreditation standards shifted the evaluation process. They moved from knowledge based standards to development of a broad set of skills -- intellectual, ethical, communication and interpersonal. To give you a flavor of the shift, let me paraphrase two Standards on graduate business education:

In the environment of strong and growing global economic forces, conflicting values, changing technologies...and demographic diversity, management education must prepare students to contribute to their organizations and the larger society and to grow personally and professionally [AACSB, 1].

Graduates are expected to understand ethical and global issues, environmental and technological issues, and the impact of demographic diversity [AACSB, 17].

These new standards mirror the design we want in a Santa Clara education. Graduates must be able to do more than analyze an investment offering or develop a marketing plan. They should develop skills for living and interpersonal relations and for the marketplace of ideas and work. So Jesuit education, properly understood, means the MBA will enhance the development of the whole person. In particular, the ideal graduates will integrate a Christian humanism that values the person, a commitment to ethical decision-making, and a firm belief that professional decisions must further the common good.

II. Beyond the Design of the Curriculum: Broader Vision

The second dimension of a Santa Clara education leads us and our students to ask what we value and care about. This integration goes beyond the curriculum into the whole of life.

Seurat's painting draws us into the world within its frame. We can experience a richness and fullness within the world that he has evoked. But it is not an escape from the world. Every important work of art moves us through itself to an enhanced appreciation of life. By participating deeply in the work of art, we are integrated more deeply in the world beyond the art. For example, watching King Lear's tragedy unfold broadens our sympathies so that we appreciate the reality of human aging, betrayal and blindness. Shakespeare's tragedy opens us to the tragic in ordinary life.

I am not saying that the Santa Clara curriculum is either tragedy or comedy, only that it cannot be an end in itself. The discovery of knowledge is not only for its application. At its best, the design of the curriculum should broaden the students' horizon to engage the world with the generous humanism that the Christian tradition endorses.

Competence, Conscience and Compassion: Santa Clara's vision states that we seek to educate students of "competence, conscience and compassion." Many of us have heard these words often but they cannot become a cliche. Adding "conscience" and "compassion" to "competence" makes a bold statement about what is distinctive to Santa Clara. We are a university with a religious and humanistic purpose not found at public or most private universities. Conscience and compassion are measures of whether we are living up to our Jesuit and Catholic identity.

These values signify that we seek an education that will be integrated with life in an empathetic and committed way. This integration applies most especially to graduate and professional education, because most of our graduate students are already making the kinds of decisions that a Santa Clara education is meant to influence.

The question is how does a person of competence, conscience and compassion act? How does this person of integrity move from caring to acting? Let us admit that most of us in the academy are not activists by temperament or training. We know the typical temptation of the intellectual: Once we have spoken about a problem it is 90 percent solved. The rest can be handled by the committee on implementation!

We cannot be detached from the world for which we prepare our students. Discourse needs to be transformed into deeds -- habits of heart that act on the problems of inequity, indifference and cruelty. In this world, no person of integrity has the luxury of being a pure spectator. As one scholar wrote: "We dare not feel at home in a world like this; where one third of the people live abundantly, and two thirds live in scarcity." And, does not Picasso's Guernica, move us, if the time comes again, to speak out and work against the killing fields of Cambodia or the mine fields and ethnic cleansing of Bosnia or the World War II internment of Japanese-American citizens?

Unifying thinking and acting with integrity is found in the Jesuit theme of "faith and justice," a formulation that is by now familiar to those of you who have been working at Santa Clara over the past few years. Christian faith that is unconcerned about the suffering caused by oppression and injustice around the world is hollow indeed. Christian faith unconcerned about the person you work with is lacking as well. Integrated education means that "faith and justice" be understood not as a curricular tack-on, an obligatory rhetorical flourish, or a mode of volunteerism, but rather as an essential dimension of understanding, belief and action.

This integration of conviction and conduct also works the other way: the right conduct can spark the insight that leads us to change our convictions. The service of faith and the promotion of justice are based on the conviction that God is to be found in the very deeds of solidarity, and the god who might be found without them is not worth worshiping. Doing the right thing can lead us to insights about justice, which in turn will make it easier to do the right thing the next time. For instance, treating each other with respect on this campus should be the source of insight into what justice means in society at large.

By our acting as persons of integrity we equip our graduates with the ability to raise questions within their specialty against a larger horizon. For example:

While the entire curriculum should help students engage these broader questions, some specific programs are designed for this: the University Core Curriculum, the Ethics Center, the Bannan Institute for Jesuit Education, and our new Catholic Studies minor.

Preparing for life beyond campus, the student should not be a consumer of knowledge, shopping around for job skills and a little cultural polish. With the faculty, students achieve a life focus by integrating "rigorous inquiry, creative imagination, reflective engagement with society, and a commitment to fashioning a more humane and just world." This is an ambitious project. Now, what about integrated education and us?

Integration: Seeing the Whole

As teaching scholars and professionals we are already contributing to an integrated education. We may be up too close to see how our individual brush strokes contribute to the whole, but you do. We may need more dialogue with colleagues across the university to harmonize our brush stokes for an education of the whole person. We may need to reevaluate how our courses or our work contributes to educating for scholarly competence, conscience and compassion.

We are a community of scholars who need to let our eye compose those blotches into living, richly textured tones, alive with light and shadow. Like the impressionist eye, our creative blend of vision and imagination will gather the learning from our academic courses or administrative services into a coherent whole.

How do we know that we are achieving an integrated education? Let us begin by looking at some of our best graduates.

These stories illustrate that we are offering an education that stretches beyond career specialization.

I have been talking about the challenges we face as a community of scholars striving to provide an integrated education. I want to pose another challenge: as a community of scholars, we have some obligations that other kinds of communities do not have.

One of these obligations is to examine what we do in a scholarly fashion. A scholar is someone who asks probing questions, seeks to answer those questions through rigorous inquiry, and bases conclusions on evidence. We are all used to doing this within a particular discipline. We must also learn to do this more effectively in other arenas: within the University as a whole and within each of the programs to which we contribute.

Santa Clara has proclaimed its commitment to "excel in educating men and women of competence, conscience, and compassion" and to further this goal by fostering an integrated learning environment. We need to challenge ourselves with some scholarly questions:

Similar questions -- in some cases focusing on service outcomes rather than learning outcomes -- can be asked in every area of the University.

This is assessment: the collection and analysis of evidence about goals. As many of you already know, one of the University's most important projects over the next two years will be to weave together our ongoing planning efforts and our self-study for reaffirmation of accreditation by the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC). Our next accreditation visit has been postponed until Fall 1999. Assessment will be at the heart of this combined planning and accreditation process.

What I am calling for is not easy. There is no standard template we can use. We must -- and I trust we will -- avoid any simplistic or mechanistic approach. The questions worth asking are intellectually stimulating and call for creativity and imagination as well as rigor in the attempt to answer them.

The University Planning Day on October 20 will give all of us, with the help of various consultants, the opportunity to begin the long-term process of asking such questions, figuring out what evidence we need, designing ways to obtain that evidence, analyzing the data, and making improvements in what we do based on what we learn. As we do this, we will be building a culture of inquiry, a culture of evidence, and a culture of action.

Conclusion

Let me conclude by briefly mentioning some evidence and some actions of the past year that we all can celebrate.

Provost Model: Last February's decision to move to the Provost model was a mission-driven decision to have our organizational structures reflect the quality of the educational experience we want for our undergraduates. With that in mind, we pulled Academic Affairs and the former Student Affairs into one administrative unit that could more effectively support and supplement student learning in and out of the classroom. With lots of collaborative effort and good will, the merger is coming along nicely.

Master Plan: We are planning to move forward on a number of projects that will strengthening our learning environment. At this moment we waiting for approval from the City Council.

Endowment: We continue to increase our endowment. Thanks to the generosity of our friends and a favorable market, our endowment has increased significantly over the past two years. The focus for growth will be new academic chairs, student scholarships, improved facilities and other programs that advance our distinctive mission.

150^th Celebration: In the year 2000/2001, we have a major celebration on our sesquicentennial as a the community of scholars offering the kind of education we can envision as person of integrity.

I look forward to another good year. I hope that you each will approach your part of our educational canvas with the creativity and imagination that is your custom and that you regularly step back to view the whole picture and appreciate its "so many possibilities."

Thank you.