Not Just an Education, A Way of Life

Every once in a while — usually while I am talking with students in class or in my office — I find myself grappling with an age-old question: What is the purpose of a Jesuit university?

Last week, the grappling was prompted by a Google search. I was tracking down information on Stanley Fish, a scholar who has made a career out of being an educational gadfly. That search unearthed a statement that caught my attention and reminded me of my students and of Georgetown’s role in their lives.

In 1994, when he was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, Fish asserted to his faculty that when it comes to having an effect on students, “You might just make them into good researchers. You can’t make them into good people, and you shouldn’t try.”

Google didn’t tell me whether the faculty cheered or jeered, but my heart skipped a beat when I thought of what it might be like to look at the vocation of university teaching through such an impoverished lens. Thin gruel for the soul indeed.

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against research or researchers. I’m a Jesuit; some of my best friends are researchers. But Fish’s advice reduces the work of a university to something solely or even primarily aimed at making young people nothing more than good researchers; at least according to Georgetown’s living tradition, this is like saying that marriage exists solely or even primarily to help people increase their liquid assets.

The more I thought about Fish’s assertion, the more I found myself reflecting on the project that is Georgetown. What are we doing here, and why are we doing it? The shifting trends and values of American higher education — “the Academy,” as its denizens like to call it — provide one answer to that question, an answer that is often informed by presuppositions like Fish’s. Our Hilltop project is, of course, connected to the endeavors of American higher education, but we are animated by a deeper and broader tradition, the global project of Jesuit education.

Our tradition tells us that what we do here on the Hilltop, the choices we make as an institution, the programs we develop, the community we form, the courses we offer and the way we teach can help our students choose to become good people, better people, the people they were created to be. We have always been and always will be — as long as we hope to merit the adjective “Jesuit” — committed not simply to training our students as scholars or researchers, but to forming them as human beings.

In 1989, as Georgetown celebrated its bicentennial, Fr. Timothy Healy, S.J., then-president of the university, penned a reflection on what it means for Georgetown to be Georgetown. In it, he asserted the following very Jesuit and un-Fish-like conviction: “Undergraduate teaching, with its dream of making citizens for the City of Man and the City of God, has always been first in Georgetown’s time and heart. For two centuries on this good ground, the faculty has labored to help [the] young achieve themselves as citizens, husbands and wives, parents and friends. ‘Liberal education’ has always had those aims and only those.”

Citizens, husbands and wives, parents, and friends. Our glance of purpose looks forward through lenses like these, toward ends that are measured in the quality and content of relationships. In that context, careers matter, advanced degrees matter, income matters, research matters — but only in that context.

Other kinds of schools live out of different convictions, measure themselves by different criteria born of different values and different understandings of what a human being is. We steer by our own distinctive lights — Catholic and Jesuit lights, Georgetown lights.

The ability of a place like Georgetown to sustain the guiding spirit that brought us into being and urges us onward depends very much on the decisions we make here and now based on the living tradition that has been entrusted to us. Nothing guarantees that Georgetown will remain true to its best self. Looking up and down the East Coast, it’s easy to find other schools that have traded their founding’s rich, nourishing banquet of Christian humanism for the thin Fish stew that accommodates them to the anorexic humanism of modern academic culture. We choose another way.

As Jesuit Superior General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach noted in a speech at Santa Clara University in 2000, “The real measure of Jesuit universities lies in who our students become.” Citizens, husbands and wives, parents, and friends. That is a truth that is older than Georgetown. Here’s hoping that it’s a truth that remains fully Georgetown, forever.

Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., is an assistant dean for Georgetown College. He can be reached at rjm27@georgetown.edu. As This Jesuit Sees It … appears every other Friday, with Fr. Maher, Fr. O’Brien and Fr. Schall alternating as writers.

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