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Opening Address
By Stephen A. Privett, S.J., President
University of San Francisco
Jesuit Service-Learning Directors Conference
University of San Francisco - University Center Room 400
Friday, November 21, 2003
Thank you for this opportunity to speak to you about what I regard as perhaps the University's most important learning experience - service-learning. Our Jesuit tradition of humanistic education look to both the process and the outcome. The process is basically exposure to the best expressions of the human spirit in hopes that such exposure will enlarge and focus our own spirits through some kind of process of osmosis. The outcome of a humanistic education is, quite simply and profoundly, a human being.
We all realize that "Human being" describes a way of being in the world that is distinctively human. There are human, less human and even inhumane ways of being in the world. In my mind the underlying question for the curriculum at a Jesuit humanistic education is, "how does one be humanly in the world as it is today." Or, to turn the question into a statement, the overarching purpose of the curriculum is to prepare our students to live humane lives in world as it is.
In seeking to know the world as it is today, I recall that Archbishop Romero, reflecting on the Gospel story of the Good Samaritan, asked himself what one does where the vast majority of people are lying in the ditch off to the side of the road. We live in a world where 75 % of the world is lying in a ditch out of sight from the road that most of us travel. Theologian Jon Sobrino likes to say that we educated and well-fed individuals in the United States are the footnotes in the story of the contemporary world. The text of the story is the 75% of the world that does not keep its food in a fridge, its clothes in a closet, have a roof over its head or a bed to sleep in. In our world, 35,000 children die every day from hunger or hunger related causes; 3 billion people live on less than the two dollars that we pay for a bottle of designer water; and the 2 billion people who cannot read anything at all. Ours is a world where the assets of the 385 richest people exceed the combined annual income of countries with 45% of the world's entire population. Ours is a world where redirecting just 5% of military expenditures over ten years would guarantee basic education, health care, nutrition, potable water and sanitation to all of the world's poor.
As it is today, the world is a cruel, sad and threatening place for the vast majority of its inhabitants. It is not all that easy to figure out how to be humanly in this world, but that is the overarching purpose of a Jesuit education. I suggest that the least human way to be in the world is in isolation from one another, much less to prosper at the expense of another. The most radical violation of our humanity is to live as though each of us is "an island entire of itself" rather than "a piece of the continent, a part of the main" such that any "man's death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind"[John Donne]. We are inextricably linked to one another by the bonds of a common humanity. We are integral parts of the human family.
All of us, by virtue of being at a university in the United States, stand on a very privileged "piece of the continent." Everyone knows by now that reducing the whole world to a village of a hundred people leaves only one person in the village with a college education. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are and we work with the elite of this world. The ethical question that permeates all that we do in Jesuit universities is more about the ninety-nine people in the village who are not here, than it is about the one person who is here. Does Jesuit undergraduate education offer any hope to those ninety-nine people in the village who will never go to college? Harvey Milk is quoted in Emil Mann's play Execution of Justice, to the effect that hope is not everything but we cannot live without it. What hope does Jesuit education offer the poor and marginalized?
I suggest an exercise that you may already have practiced? Imagine a group of illiterate hungry persons from an underdeveloped country - slum dwellers in Brazil, residents of a black township in South Africa, women workers in the border maquilas — looking closely at your university. How would they assess the quality of the education that you offer? Is their reaction an important consideration in structuring the curriculum? Should those ninety-nine have any voice in shaping the education of that one person from their village that you and I are educating? If so, how does that voice find its way into deliberations at our respective institutions?
Fr. General, Peter Hans Kolvenbach, has challenged Jesuit colleges to educate what he calls, "whole persons of solidarity for the real world." He argues that faculty and students must let "the gritty reality of this world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively. They should learn to perceive, think, judge, choose and act for the rights of others, especially the disadvantaged and the oppressed."[SCU talk] This kind of learning - this sense of human solidarity — comes through contact rather than through concepts; but concepts enrich, clarify and contextualize the contact. At this point, it would be difficult for me to accept a set of required courses at a Jesuit university that do not include opportunities for personal involvement with the innocent suffering of the poor and the marginalized among us. These experiences are the catalyst for the solidarity that gives rise to intellectual inquiry and moral reflection that characterize a humane way of being in the world. This is where and how the academy "hears the cries of the poor." It is these direct experiences that bring together head and heart, thought and action, knowing and loving - in short, these experiences call forth the "whole person" we feature so prominently in our promotional materials.
One of our USF students spent several weeks in Tijuana as part of a course on the border and immigration. She wrote, "it is not until we spend some part of the day talking with the managers of a factory and the rest of the day talking with the women who work there that we truly get a taste for the contradictions. This experience has changed my perspective." Another student in a course on the Sociology of Gender wrote to her teacher, "thank you for giving all of us the opportunity to take part in the reality tour of the sweatshops. It's funny how one incident can truly be life changing, but it was and I am truly indebted to you for giving me the chance to change." Another students wrote of his experience, "knowing that 'fresh' water was yellow and came from a well of flies and tires, knowing that homes were lucky if they had four walls or sides, and knowing that families were struggling to have enough food to provide for everyone, I lost and gained a little of my humanity." The above examples - and you have many of your own — illustrate the truth of the Brazilian proverb, "our head thinks from where our feet are planted." One responsibility of the curriculum at a Jesuit university, given the humanistic character of our education and the state of our world, is to plant students' feet in the lives of the poor and the vulnerable, at least metaphorically.
Experiences such as those I have cited above offer us insight into what Robert Bellah called in a talk at USF the "practical syllogism."
If the major premise is that human rights are to be respected and the minor premise is that in some situations human rights are being violated, then the logical conclusion is not just about knowledge but about action. What is the just thing to do about it? The practical syllogism does not tell us what to do about the situation. For that we need all the wisdom and all the knowledge and all the judgment we can bring to bear on it. But the practical syllogism tells us that we cannot just stand idly by. Often the reality is that we cannot do much; but the obligation to do what we can remains. [Bellah, May 2002]
The challenge of Jesuit education - one that each of you understands and has responded to — is to nurture that sense of obligation which calls us to a humane way of being in the world as it is, while also offering the knowledge, wisdom and judgment that enable us to meet our obligation to do what we can, even when there is not much that we can do. Here is where head and heart, intelligence and compassion, faith and justice, knowledge and love, grace and nature come together and only when these complimentary qualities come together do we have the fullness of our humanity and realize a humane way of being in the world as it is.
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