Charles Currie AJCU

1 TRAINING FOR THE UNIVERSITY MISSION: THE SPECIFICITY OF THE JESUIT IDENTITY AND ITS DEVELOPMENT ON THE LEADERSHIP AND ACADEMIC STYLES THAT IT PROMOTES. (THE U.S. EXPERIENCE) Charles L. Currie, S.J. Introduction It is an honor and a great pleasure to participate with you in this discussion linking three of the most important issues/challenges facing Jesuit higher education today: a sense of identity and mission; leadership in the pursuit of that mission; and the linkage of justice to both mission and leadership. All three of these issues have been critical components of Jesuit higher education in the United States for the past 40 years and are priority issues today. I speak to you from the perspective of the Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States, but I hope you will see something of your own perspective in what I have to say. It is clear that we pursue all three in ways that are somewhat similar and somewhat different throughout the world, and that we can learn much from one another.

Let me speak to each of the three in themselves and then cite some very practical ways they are pursued today in the United States.

Identity and Mission Overall institutional identity (who we are) and mission (what we are trying to do), concerns are increasingly important today as higher education is trying to respond to multiple, complex stimuli in a fast-moving, globalizing world. As best we can, we need to be determining our own future rather than being swept along by whatever current comes our way.

Discussions on specifically Catholic identity and mission date long before the appearance of the Apostolic Constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae in 1990, and indeed go back to the early universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford, and Cambridge, including St. Thomas Aquinas and his troubles with the Archbishop of Paris.

More recently, we can cite 1949 and the establishment of the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU), and its tensions with the Vatican Congregation on Catholic Education over control, foreshadowing the tensions accompanying the development of Ex corde Ecclesiae. Meeting in Tokyo in 1965, IFCU decided to develop a document on the distinctive character of a Catholic university in the context of the recently published Vatican II document, The Church in the Modern World.

A caucus of American delegates to the 1968 IFCU meeting in Kinshasa met earlier at Land O’Lakes, Wisconsin to develop the famous (or infamous, to its critics) Land O’Lakes Statement: The Nature of the Contemporary Catholic University which helped frame the issues that have been the basis for tensions between Church authorities and Catholic higher education for over 40 years, especially its insistence that …the Catholic university must be a university in the full modern sense of the word, with a strong commitment to and concern for academic freedom, and that this institutional autonomy and academic freedom are essential conditions of life and growth, and indeed of survival for Catholic universities, as for all universities.

In 1972, after years of negotiation between Cardinal Garrone, the Prefect of the Congregation on Catholic Education, and IFCU, the document, The Catholic University in the Modern World appeared. The document had the reluctant approval of the Congregation, which was wary of “university institutions without statutory bonds linking them to ecclesiastical authorities.” This issue of a juridical connection between universities and the Church as essential to a Catholic university would later be a neuralgic issue in the discussions of Ex corde.

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By 1985, a draft of a Schema on Higher Education appeared, and vigorous discussions on what would become Ex corde Ecclesiae had begun. Significant consultation in the next five years led to a final version of Ex corde, issued in August, 1990.

“Part I: Identity and Mission” presented a magnanimous vision of the Catholic university which included many of the ideas from the Land O’Lakes statement and the 1972 document, The Catholic University in the Modern World. “Part II: General Norms” reflected the concern for control dating back to 1949, and laid the basis for complementary specific ordinances to be developed by local bishops’ conferences to fit regional circumstances.

Readers would recognize in Ex corde that the characteristics cited for a Catholic university were almost the same as those described in the 1972 document, The Catholic University in the Modern World: 1.

2.

3.

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A Christian inspiration not only of individuals but of the university community as such; A continuing reflection in the light of the Catholic faith upon the growing treasury of human knowledge, to which it seeks to contribute by its own research; Fidelity to the Christian message as it comes to us through the Church; An institutional commitment to the service of the people of God and of the human family in their pilgrimage to the transcendent goal which gives meaning to life. (Ex corde, Part 1, A, 1, #13)

Part I presents a magnanimous vision for the Catholic University: (a Catholic university) is …a primary and privileged place for a fruitful dialogue between the Gospel and culture….A faith that places itself at the margin of what is human, of what is therefore culture, would be a faith unfaithful to the fullness of what the Word of God manifests and reveals, a decapitated faith, worse still, a faith in the process of self-annihilation. (#44) A Catholic university must become more attentive to the cultures of the world of today, and to the various cultural traditions existing within the Church in a way that will promote a continuous and profitable dialogue between the Gospel and modern society. (#45) Unfortunately, for the next nine years, much of the conversation focused on Part II and the norms developed by the U.S. bishops, especially the requirement of a mandatum for theologians, while the grand vision of Part I, which had met widespread and even enthusiastic acceptance by many, receded into the background. Colleges and universities spent time and energy on the defensive, distracting them from the more important task of trying to realize Ex corde’s magnanimous ideals of a Catholic University in rich dialogue with culture, and the place where the Church does its thinking. Interestingly, Pope Benedict XVI, in his affirming and encouraging address to Catholic educators, did not mention Ex corde, but did offer a similar positive and challenging role for the Catholic university to related faith and reason, Gospel and culture.

Other Stimuli Concurrently with the origins and then the development of the issue of Catholic identity, Catholic colleges and universities in the United States were undergoing massive and sweeping changes in response to a whole range of other stimuli. Let me cite three: 1. Dramatic efforts to improve the academic and institutional quality of Jesuit and Catholic colleges and universities in the U.S.

3 2. The Second Vatican Council. The Council’s document, Gaudium et Spes, on the Church in the Modern World, proposed a whole new ecclesiology moving the Church from the serene, lordly mountaintop of certitude and clarity down into the messy valley of human challenges, risks and ambiguities,. The council also created new opportunities for lay leadership by emphasizing the responsibility identified with one’s baptism, and celebrated a new openness to dialogue, ecumenism and diversity.

3. Colleges and universities grew dramatically in size, complexity and diversity, a growth encouraged by readily available federal dollars for construction and for student financial aid.

Responding to all of these challenges and opportunities, Catholic, and specifically Jesuit colleges and universities have made dramatic strides in the past 40 years in academic and institutional quality, professionalism, and lay leadership that have led to new respect among their peer institutions. Our most severe critics would claim that, in the process of making this very obvious progress, our colleges and universities have lost or are losing their identity as Jesuit and Catholic. Other observers, seeing very different colleges and universities from the ones they had known, simply ask the honest question, “How are we still Jesuit and Catholic?” I would argue that our colleges and universities are more intentionally Jesuit and Catholic than ever before.

The Jesuit Dimension of This History Jesuit colleges and universities were very much part of the same realties and pressures affecting their peer Catholic institutions. In 1969, Jesuits and their colleagues gathered at Regis University in Denver for discussions on Jesuit identity, with many of the issues still relevant today.

Not only institutions, but also Jesuit provincials were concerned about identity in the midst of change. In 1974-75, the inaugural project of the newly-established Jesuit Conference of Provincials, “Project One,” as it was called, was an attempt to develop a national rationale for Jesuit higher education. After long and widespread consultation that seemed to be going nowhere, the effort was abandoned in favor of a letter from the American Provincials, entitled The Jesuit Mission in Higher Education, and individual Jesuit communities were encouraged to develop rationales in collaboration with their lay colleagues. These rationales can be seen as the predecessors of today’s mission statements.

The 32nd General Congregation of the Jesuits in 1975 created a major new agenda for Jesuit colleges and universities when, in its Decree 4, it stated that “The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement,” emphasizing that every Jesuit and every Jesuit institution had to be committed to a faith that does justice, a commitment that has been restated and clarified in each succeeding General Congregation.

In the eighties, there were various efforts to explore what today we call our Jesuit, Catholic identity, including a meeting on Jesuit-Lay Collaboration at Creighton University in 1988. Assembly 1989: Jesuit Ministry in Higher Education at Georgetown brought together the largest ever group of Jesuits and colleagues engaged in higher education, with Fr. Kolvenbach delivering the keynote address. The very successful “Assembly ‘89” led not only to the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education and its publication, Conversations, but to subsequent gatherings of campus representatives engaged in “identity and mission” activities. In 1993, Mission and Identity Coordinators formed an AJCU Conference that meets annually to share ideas, concerns and best practices. In June 1999, St. Joseph’s University sponsored a major conference, “Jesuit Education 21: A Conference on the Future of Jesuit Higher Education.”

One of the great influences on contemporary Jesuit colleges and universities was the brutal murder of six Jesuits and their two co-workers at the Universidad Centroamericana, the UCA in El Salvador on November 16, 1989. This was an attack on university people and on a Jesuit university committed to

4 what Fr. Ignacio Ellacuria, the rector and main target of the assassins, called a “new kind of university.”

His university was trying to reflect the Jesuit commitment to a faith that does justice and was deeply committed to the “national reality” of poverty and oppression. This commitment was made as a university, engaged in teaching, research and “social projection.” Evidence of the impact on our campuses of what happened that night is seen not only in memorials, but more importantly in the ways in which that event has influenced how our universities operate, and in particular, engage society.

Despite the many differences in history, culture and location, there is an impressive consistency and coherence in the Jesuit characteristics found in the mission statements of the 28 AJCU schools.

With all appropriate reservations about using a mission statement to reflect the dynamic reality of an institution, it is interesting to see how ten descriptors appear repeatedly in those statements, especially when comparing these statements with the statements of other Catholic, church-related, and non-sectarian institutions. The minimum number of times the following ten descriptors were found in 28 AJCU mission statements was 16. Seven of the descriptors were found in more than 20 mission statements. The ten descriptors are: • • • • • • • • • •

“Jesuit/Catholic” (28) “Liberal Arts” (17) “Academic Excellence” (21) “Service” (23) “Fostering/Promoting Justice” ( 22) “Educating the Whole Person” (25) “Ethical/Moral Concern” (21) “Care for the Individual Person” (16) “Leadership” (18) “International/Global” (23).

Practical Steps to foster Jesuit, Catholic Identity and Mission The Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU) has conducted regular reports on identity and mission activity on our campuses (see the AJCU website www.ajcunet.edu/mission-and-identity). These reviews show an obvious and significant development in the sophistication and effectiveness of this activity on each of our 28 campuses.

The early and very basic orientation and educational programs have developed into a whole range of strategies that now include: • The development of more ambitious mission statements with greater clarity on the Jesuit, Catholic component of the institutional mission; • Programs to acquaint boards of trustees to their responsibility for identity and mission and to help them discharge that responsibility; • More extensive and effective orientation programs for new faculty and staff, as well as ongoing educational programs, discussions, seminars, etc.

• Increasing integration of identity and mission issues into the curriculum and co-curriculum; e.g., in the promotion of Ignatian Pedagogy, curricular changes, living-learning courses, immersion experiences and justice programs; • Increasingly widespread experiences of the Spiritual Exercises by faculty, staff, students, trustees and alumni; • Vastly improved resources including: printed, audiovisual, and online materials made available e.g., by Boston College, St. Louis, Creighton and Xavier, and most recently in George Traub’s two volumes on Jesuit education and Jesuit spirituality.

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Hiring for mission initiatives that are sensitive to the particular campus culture, while helping to recruit women and men who are both fully qualified and committed to the identity and mission of the institution; Increasingly effective and multi-dimensional campus ministry programs, as campus ministry, mission and identity, and Jesuit community initiatives work more collaboratively.

The intent of all these efforts is to develop a critical mass, a sufficient number of effective people strategically placed and capable of influencing the institution, who are committed to the identity and mission of the college or university. A number of doctoral dissertations have contributed to the increased sophistication of these efforts. One of these, by Fr. Timothy Lannon, explored the role of the president in fostering identity and mission. The importance of this leadership in increasingly obvious.

In addition to the programs tailored for individual campuses, a number of collaborative efforts are underway to foster our Jesuit, Catholic identity. They include national and regional conferences, “Faculty Conversations,” on-line materials and websites (see, e.g., Xavier University’s site, www.Jesuitresources.org) All of this activity reflects a seriousness about fostering the Jesuit, Catholic dimension of our colleges that refutes our critics who claim that we have lost, or are losing our identity and sense of mission. The range of activities and how they are practiced on different campuses also demonstrate how they have to be tailored to fit different situations and circumstances.

Finally, it is important to evaluate the success and effectiveness of these efforts to protect, foster and promote the Jesuit, Catholic identity. To this end, the U.S. presidents and provincials have just jointly issued Some Characteristics of Jesuit Colleges and Universities: a Self-Evaluation Instrument.

Of course, not only our critics, but we ourselves can ask whether all of this is enough now and into the future. Considering the reality that more and more of our new faculty and staff arrive on our campuses with little or no experience of “Jesuit” or “Catholic,” and that many of our lay colleagues most familiar with these traditions are retiring, we clearly have a formidable task ahead.

Our colleague, Monika Hellwig, would often point out that we are not trying to recover something that has been lost, some neatly packaged, precisely described and circumscribed identity. Rather, we are trying to create something that has never existed: a Jesuit, Catholic identity combining Ignatian spirituality, the Catholic intellectual tradition and Catholic social teaching, all forged with diverse colleagues, in a pluralistic, postmodern university setting, while facing all of the challenges of a globalizing world.

Leadership The effective functioning of any organization is highly dependent on the quality of leadership at all levels, starting at the top. With all the challenges facing institutions and their leaders today, efforts to identify, train and support leaders, Jesuit and lay, are a top priority in the contemporary Society of Jesus -- at the Roman Curia, in individual assistancies and provinces, and at each institution. The Jesuit concern to develop leaders goes back to Ignatius. The widely-read Heroic Leadership by Chris Lowney celebrates the Ignatian qualities of leadership in contemporary terms: self-awareness, ingenuity, love and heroism.

In Jesuit colleges and universities, leadership begins with the board of trustees, for whom workshops have been designed to assist board members in their responsibility for the identity and mission of the institution. It is not uncommon to speak of the “mission bottom line” as well as the “financial bottom line,” and the best boards carefully monitor both.

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Fr. Tim Lannon’s dissertation on how different presidents lead identity and mission efforts emphasizes both how essential such leadership is and how it takes different forms, reflecting both different environments and different personalities of individual presidents. There is more than one path to success (and failure).

It is obvious that leadership is important at every level throughout the institution. Hence the need to identify, develop, and support such leadership. In the U.S., two complementary leadership development programs focus on developing effective leaders willing and able to foster our Jesuit, Catholic identity as an essential component of their overall leadership.

The AJCU Leadership Development Seminar has for the past ten years developed over 300 women and men committed to Ignatian leadership through a program that develops administrative skills within a mission-driven perspective.

An Ignatian Colleagues Program offers a more in-depth experience of mission through four components: an experience of the Spiritual Exercises; an immersion experience; an online course on the history and spirituality of Jesuit higher education; and a practicum implementing what has been learned in the program.

Lay leadership is not a fall-back strategy to address the decline in the number of Jesuits, but is described in many Jesuit documents as a great grace. Vatican II re-emphasized baptism as the foundation of the mission of every Christian. The 34th General Congregation in 1995, in its Decree on Cooperation with the Laity in Mission, described this millennium as “The Church of the Laity.” It is a “grace of our day” and the “hope for the future” that laity take an active, constructive and responsible role in the mission of the Church. Jesuits are challenged to respond to the grace by putting ourselves at the service of the full realization of the mission of the laity. Leadership development for Jesuits must include this role.

Jesuits describe themselves as “men for and with others,” to emphasize that they are in partnership with colleagues. The history of the last 40-50 years in U.S. higher education can be documented as a success story of lay leadership at all levels, and including women and men of different faith traditions. Today, eight of the twenty-eight AJCU presidents are lay. Unfortunately, at this point none are women.

Without in any way putting down other traditions, I happen to think that we have a distinctive strength in Ignatian spirituality, a spirituality developed by a layman for lay women and men. It is a spirituality that resonates not only with lay colleagues, including our ecumenical and interreligious sisters and brothers, but also with life on our campuses, with its o o o o o o

World-affirming emphasis on seeking God in all things Restless and magnanimous pursuit of the magis Special concern for the individual person as the focus of attention Focus on Christ as the contagious model for our adulthood Commitment to partnerships.

Linking faith with the pursuit of justice.

Because this vision will be necessary to keep alive the Jesuit or Ignatian identity in our schools, it is especially encouraging to see the increasing numbers of colleagues participating in the Spiritual Exercises, from which this vision derives.

7 Fr. Arrupe first addressed collaboration with lay colleagues 1976. Collaboration was a frequent theme of Fr. Kolvenbach, his successor. And now, Fr. Nicolas, our current Superior General, has spoken eloquently of collaboration with some new and helpful ideas: He prefers the term “co-workers” and “companions” in preference to partners to stress clearly a 2-way relationship. He notes that from the beginning Jesuits saw being “co-workers” in the Lord’s vineyard as something other than always being in control or command of the mission. He points out that the metaphor signals clearly that Jesuits never thought they controlled any ministry, or could fully shape it on their own.

The second term, “companions” relates to Ignatius’ mystical experience at La Storta, outside Rome, when the Father placed him and his first co-workers next to His Son as companions in the mission and work of Jesus. Fr. Nicolas writes: We Jesuits need to be not only friends and companions of the Lord and each other; we must be friends and companions of our partners in mission. This reciprocity of persons is central to our identity as Jesuits.

He notes that the decrees of GC35 avoid the use of the words “lay” and “clerical” so as to reflect ecumenical and inter-religious sensitivity I am confident that, based on the strong institutional foundations in place, the spiritual traditions we share, and the increasing sense of being co-workers, companions, colleagues and partners, we can and hopefully will be ready for the opportunities and challenges we face now and into the future.

Education for Justice In 1971, the Synod of Bishops issued what might be called the Magna Carta for our commitment to justice: Action on behalf of justice and participation in the transformation of the world fully appear to us as a constitutive dimension of the preaching of the Gospel, or, in other words, of the Church's mission for the redemption of the human race and its liberation from every oppressive situation.

Two years later, the charismatic Fr. Pedro Arrupe spoke to the 10th International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe, in Valencia, Spain, using the words that now are on banners on every Jesuit campus: “persons for others”: Today our prime educational objective must be to form persons -for-others who will live not for themselves but for God and his Christ -- for the God-man who lived and died for all the world; persons who cannot even conceive of love of God which does not include love for the least of our neighbors; persons completely convinced that the love of God which does not issue in justice for men and women is a farce.

His address offered both a critique of what we had not been doing in educating for justice and suggestions for how we could do better.

In 1975, the Jesuit General Congregation built on both the Synod and Arrupe in its Decree Four: The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.

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This linkage of faith and justice was welcomed by many, but questioned by others. Soon it became one of the descriptors of what Jesuits were trying to do, even though there were different interpretations of what the linkage meant and how it should be practiced.

In November, 1989, the linkage became very real on the campus of the University of Central America in El Salvador when six Jesuits and their two co-workers were gunned down by the Salvadoran military precisely because they were committed to bringing justice to the people of El Salvador. People remembered Fr. Arrupe’s words that Jesuits would pay a price for their commitment to a faith that does justice. Since 1975 more than 40 Jesuits have given their lives pursuing justice.

Fr. Ignacio Ellacuria wanted the University of Central America to be “new kind of university,” one committed to the “national reality “of poverty and oppression, and to being a voice for the voiceless and power for the powerless. I dare say every Jesuit university has been influenced by what happened in El Salvador that early morning in November, 1989 when Ellacuria and his colleagues died violent deaths in pursuit of that vision.

On the 25th anniversary of the 1975 commitment to a faith that does justice, Fr. Kolvenbach, Fr. Arrupe’s successor as superior general of the Jesuits, updated the Jesuit commitment in a moving address at Santa Clara University that has led to an often dramatically increased commitment to justice on our campuses.

Kolvenbach expanded the notion of educating the “whole person” to “educate the whole person of solidarity for the real world,” with that solidarity being learned through “contact” rather than through “concepts.” “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.”

He paraphrased Ignacio Ellacuria in describing the challenge for the contemporary Jesuit university: …it is the nature of every University to be a social force, and it is the calling of every Jesuit university to take conscious responsibility for being a force for faith and justice. Every Jesuit academy of higher learning is called to live in a social reality…and to live for that social reality, to shed university intelligence upon it and to use university influence to transform it.

In concluding his address, the ever realistic Fr. Kolvenbach recognized that the ideal is not accomplished once and for all, but is rather ..an ideal to keep taking up and working at, a cluster of characteristics to keep exploring and implementing, a conversion to keep praying for.

Practical Steps The Kolvenbach address raised the commitment to justice to a new level of seriousness and clarity. It has led to a number of important initiatives. Following the Santa Clara Conference on the Commitment to Justice, campus delegations returned to their campuses to develop action agendas for justice in response to the Kolvenbach talk. Faculty and academic administrators have had a number of subsequent conferences, each focused on how to bring justice into the curriculum and into faculty research.

Students from all 28 Jesuit colleges and universities have been gathering annually for an Ignatian Family Teach-In for Justice. For over ten years, the Teach-In brought over 2000 students to Ft. Benning, Georgia, the site of the School of Americas where the soldiers who killed the Jesuits had recently undergone training. The agenda for the Teach-In has been broader than the School of the Americas, but that site focused attention on the Salvadoran martyrs. The Teach-In is currently being held in Washington, DC to allow students to advocate with Congress on justice issues.

9 The Teach-In has led to the formation of an increasingly active Ignatian Solidarity Network, linking the Ignatian family on a whole range of justice issues and providing opportunities for advocacy.

Every Jesuit campus today has a Faith-Justice, or Peace-and-Justice Program or Center, some more effective than others, but each doing good work. Sustainability issues are increasingly popular with students and faculty. A website (www.loyola.edu/justice) includes information on Justice programs in Jesuit schools, including resources, courses, and projects on the different campuses.

There has been a significant increase in national and international immersion experiences whereby not only students, but faculty, administrators, and trustees learn the difference between “concept” and “contact,” and engage the “gritty reality” of the “real world of solidarity.” The Casa de Solidaridad in El Salvador (and most recently in the Philippines) has been a life-transforming experience for students.

There are a number of important examples of institutional outreach whereby our colleges and universities address their national and international reality, from Georgetown’s recent initiative with the women of Afghanistan, to Loyola Chicago’s sustainability initiatives, to Wheeling Jesuit’s involvement with Appalachia, and many others.

About a dozen AJCU schools are involved in the new initiative, the Jesuit Commons, an international effort to link Jesuit higher education worldwide resources with the needy and marginalized people Jesuits serve worldwide. The first successful projects provide online education to refugees in Kenya, Malawi and Jordan. The Commons has great potential to realize some of the possibilities for the worldwide Jsuit network that Fr. Nicolas spoke so eloquently about in Mexico City in April 2010.

Summary We have made great progress in each of the three areas of identity and mission, leadership development, and the commitment to justice, but, in the spirit of the magis, and considering the opportunities and challenges to each, we can hardly be satisfied. We can however face the future with confidence we have made a good start.

I look forward to hearing how all of this resonates with your own experience so that we can learn from one another.

Thank you.