Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962

"The Jesuit Contribution to Higher Education in the United States." Some later additions penciled in.

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Ong, Walter J.
Format: Online
Language:eng
Created: Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center 1962
Online Access:http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1321
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
id sluoai_ong-1321
record_format ojs
institution Saint Louis University
collection OJS
language eng
format Online
author Ong, Walter J.
spellingShingle Ong, Walter J.
Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962
author_facet Ong, Walter J.
author_sort Ong, Walter J.
title Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962
title_short Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962
title_full Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962
title_fullStr Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962
title_full_unstemmed Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962
title_sort folder 5: personal bibliography. texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present, 1962
description "The Jesuit Contribution to Higher Education in the United States." Some later additions penciled in.
publisher Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center
publishDate 1962
url http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1321
_version_ 1798396421166071808
spelling sluoai_ong-1321 Folder 5: Personal Bibliography. Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present, 1962 Ong, Walter J. Ong, Walter J.; Jesuits -- Education; Education, Higher Lectures; Presentations (communicative events); Essays; Summaries "The Jesuit Contribution to Higher Education in the United States." Some later additions penciled in. 1962 2011 text/PDF 64 1 1 5 5_Item 0001.pdf Series 1: Scholarship, 1926-2001 Items in this folder are from Sub-sub-Series 5: Texts of Various Talks, Papers, Etc., Not Planned for Publication at Present. This sub-sub-series contains texts of various talks, papers, etc., not planned for publication at present. In addition to these, in Father Ong's "General Files" series there are copies of dozens of addresses and/or papers that have never been published, plus notes for still other unpublished addresses, lectures, etc. Many of these were eventually published in one form or another -- many, however, were not. 64 1 1 5 5 Permission to copy or publish must be obtained from the Saint Louis University, Pius XII Memorial Library, Special Collections Department Saint Louis University Libraries Digitization Center text/image eng Saint Louis University Libraries Special Collections , ... ;, NOTFOR PUBLICATION. Property of the No part of this manuscript may be p~~b1~shed without the Vlritten per-m~ ss~on of the author. author.R ev. Walter J. Ong, S. J. Saint LoUIs University Saint Louis, Missouri 63103 The Jesuit Contribution to Higher Education 'R01l61-1 in the United States 1JRAFr By \'ialter J. Ong, S.J. Dictated and transcribed around November, (w>tA ~.L",..~a.d~~;..,) 1962 It has been the misfortune of Catholic education in the United States to think of itself not 8S a creative venture but as a defens~ a stop-gap, a recovery enterprise. There are several reasons for this. One is that the Catholic educational effort grew out of the transition from the DId 'World to the Me\,. In the process of moving, one is not concerned for the moment wi t h being venturesome, but largely with not losing anything, and a great deal of the Catholic educational effort was put into preserving intact the faith and also, sometimes wisely and some-times not so wisely, the institutions in which the faith was for the moment incarnate. 'I'he Church has as one of her roles the guarding and protecting of the fai th ~ its integrity. This is not her only role with regard to the faith because she is also to teach it, to propagate it, to spread the good news to all mankind, and in doing so, to be inventive in realizing the full potentialN of the faith. Nevertheless, as the uprooted human cargoes made their way from Eur-o-.e to the United Stat es to face the massive problems of r-e a djus tmerrt , it is understand-able t hst a motter of gr88 t concern wouLd be t n-i t the immligrants '. 2 retained the "-whole. of their Catholic heritage. The ep!' eil"'li ge'1. St-_ Raphael Society in Germany was an extreme C8S~ and yet in some ways the mentality it represented was typical. Its Pa...\ leader, Peter",Cahensly, persuaded many of his compatriots in Germany that their relatives and friends who were abandoning the Fatherland were abandoning with it their language and thexr faith. The German language schools which for a while flourished in the mid-nineteenth century United States were an attempt to keep everything intact. Conservatism \1aS further enforced by the Protestantism with which American Catholics found themselves surrounded. This they felt as a threat, and an overwhelming one, Numerically far outnumbered, and outnumbered also largely in prestige, American Catholics felt they would be doing well if they could just hold the line. Their early educational institutions grew out of this mentality. It was unfortunate that this mentality, tending to regard schools as chiefly tutelary and protectionis~ was operative at a time when human knowledge was expanding at unprecedented rates, when the old rhetorical culture which had pretty well dominated :iltformalschooling from antiquity was yielding to a new culture for which we have as yet no satisfactory name, but which in America was a mixture of commercial and technological activity ·bi which intellectual activity wes both t ributar-y and beneficiary. The new culture was straining the old educational svstem at the seams, and all sorts of new educational venture~ far more democratic and widespread in their immediate benefits t: than anything in the past) were in the air. Ca~ho\\(s reacted 3 to these new ventures, often by assimilating them to their own needs and aims, but they did so without much of the analysis and theorizing which was attendant on these enterprises in the Protestant part of American culture. Literacy for all, then, high school for all, and finally, college for a large number became part of Catholic thinking as of other American thinking. Catholic secondary schools sprouted super-structures of higher education whic~ in some case~grew into universities just 8S their non-Catholic counterparts had done. But there was little Catholic leadership in these national development& As a m~nority group, Catholics simply followed as circumstances made adjustment necessary. As a matter of fact, however, Catholic education in the United State~ and most particularly Catholic higher education[ seen in its larger perspect ives is far from a purely de:Pe13sive development. It is a great achievement, unique in the history of the Church and of this country. It is a ventur~and a creative ventur~ into the unknown. In \~hat way is it un Lqu e ? In attempting to preserve the herinage of the past, Catholic educators in the United States actually found themselves doLng much more. 'The context of the heritage was chinging, and in their efforts to maintain a hold on the Catholic heritage and t~ecure a wor-k i.nggrasp on the rppidly changing intemmectual and social world within which the heritage now had its being, Catholic educators were driven to put forth effort such as in the past or in other civilizations 4 their confreres had hardly known , The build-up w~s gradual, starting from the days of Archbishop Ireland (mention other names) and reaching great intensity im the first third of the twentieth century. By the mid-twentieth century, when Ca~olics looked around, they saw that they had an educationsl system with students in elementarv schools and students in high schools and students in colleges and universities. " In the process of building up Catholic education, univers~es had somehow emerged. In ~f(~ they had emerged because this was America. American universities are historically and structurally quite different from European universities. In Europe,the university is an association of professors together with their students of( setl\as the "gown'! against the "tol-m." European university students are still gegarded more or less as apprentices, much as they were in the Middle Ages. The older hniversities have special privileges marking them off from the rest of civil life, aLt.hough the medieval arrangement whereby the university teachers and students wer-e exempt from o r-d inar-v civil law has long been in abeyance. However, until must a few decedes ago, Oxford snd Cambridge universities were stilJ represented as such in Parliament hy their own snecial M. p.'s. In America, the situation is otherwise. Universities t:nink of themselves as part of the community, more direcely integrated into the bourgeois world whic~ in Americ~ is pretty co!extensive withsociety as a who I.e, American universities were set up, not by scholars who withdrew to their books and attracted to themselves a certain number of followers but by groups of people or families woo " 5 wanted to see to it that their children were well educated. In this the universities resembled the "coll.eges" or secondary schools which were set up at the time of the Renaissance and wh i ch j bv contrast with the univerities or te~chers'· unionsI were integrated into the bourgeois life of the time. Harvard, Yale , and Princeton Were the products of community aspiration-- in the case of Princeton, of factional Asniration which was, however, the aspiration of a group. Out of these iestitutions, ,Ihich \-IerecaLLe d "colleges" not universities at the beginning, the first universities in the United States grew. It was easy for Catholic universities to follow a similar pattern and to grow up out of secondary schools. The plain fact is thaithe Catholic Church as such had had almost no experience in conducting universities. before her recent experience on the American scene. This is not so say she was unfamiliar with universities or thst she did not foster them. The first universities in the modern sense of the word,those out of which all present day universities have in one way or another grow~ ,Iere the universities of the European Middle Ages. These were the product of a Christian society and had some of their roots in the cathedral schools and other medieval scho&ls which were under more or l~ss direct Church patronage. But the Chn~ch did not found mmdieval universities in the sense that she did not work out a pattern of education and attempt to implement it. The universities formed themselves. 'I'heywere unions or guilds of professional t.eaeeie r-s who appealed) sometimes to the docal bishop, but eventually to the Pope to secure 6. sore kind of reco~nition or status. A careful reading of Father George E. Ganss's book, St. fIgnatius , a Idea of tbe Jesuit University, Hill s:how that, for the mast part, the Society of Jesus, too, had very little experience Hith universities in the full sense of the wor~~f the early Jesuit universities, so called, Bere, in effect, I b for boys of secondary school age to which theolo~y faculties had been joined, the theology being taught to students of the age of undergraduates today. It is true that in the past there were great Jesuit scholars and scientists, people such 8S Father Kircher, Father Clavius, (Klau) St. Robert BellBrmWe, Father Denis, Petau (Petavius), and hundreds of others. But the work of these men was not part of any Catholic university system such as it might be in the United States tioday. The great corporate experience of teaching which the Society of Jesus has known has, up until present day America) been largely a tradition of teaching in wna t He today wou Ld call s)condayy)schOols. The fact that these secondary schools taught what was at the time called philosophy should not mislead us. Secondary schools in France which, public as well as or-Lvat e,are still modeled in great part on earlier Jesuit schools, teach philosophy even today. But this caa hardly be philosophy in an acceptable university sense of the word. As a matter of fact, until the past t rr-eeor four generations) philosophy allover the western world meant not only wha t we today call philosoohy (s~ects such as moral science 'nd metaphysics) 7 but everything in the curriculum exclusive of the study of language, medicine, law, and theology. The age of the students is revealing. Almost entirely outside the United States)'the teaching efforh of members or the Society of Jesus have been and are devoted to students between the ages of ten and about eighteen years. There arepome exeeptions to this rule, but they are most definitely exceptions. In general, tae fi$bS, of the Church~s corporate teaching effort, even in the modern ,(orld has, at the very highest, be~~ ~ ~ ~ PA:.t:ht-,. "' these yearsJ\ To this-..remi'ghtadd that until about a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago at the very most/the Church had had no experience of teaching young girls in school, much less of teaching young women or even older women in universities. Nobody ha~had this experience. With entirely negligible exceptions, until the nineteehtb century, women and girls did not go to school. They learned what they learned at home. This frequently included reading and writing, but almost always in the vernacular. Boys studied nothing but Latin and a little~reek by way of languange in school, no vernacular. Girls were taught the vernacular at home, although~he methods of instruction WeB so hap~azard that one hesitates to say that Eng Ush was "studied." The American scene has presented the Catholic church w1.th several completely new experiences: the academic education of women, the 'recruiting of women, both religious and lay,as teachers, and the establishment and management or universities. The first two of these exneriences are not uniquely A:mericen~ jince schools for girls and teaching orders of sisters as well as lay women teachers in Catholic schools exist elseWhere in the world, although nowhere on so large a scale as in the United States. But the last expe r-Lenc e, 8 that of conducting universities, is for all practical purposes an c..t\-'ol,'c;. AmericanAspecialiy. The Catholic universities and colleges of the Unites States cannot be approximated anywhere else in the world. The twenty-eight Jesuit universities and colleges ("university l.nte •�������), collegeS;' as Europeans would clllthese."cannot be matched elsewRere ~)1g t/q'4 't'n..is ne.two •.•k,,;> either." By contrast with tb i 'of institutions, other Catholic institutions of higher learning, many of them excellent, are nevertheless scattered. To these three nove LtLes there might be added a fourth which ~i d~ is certainly uniquely American. Here in the United States, the Chnnch has had to devise courses in religion or theolo~y·for university students who are not doing degrees in these subjects. Since outside the United States university instruction is pretty completely specialized on the Whole so that a student goes to the university to study one sUbject only (mathematics, physics, geography, English literature, ps~chology) or at best a special group of subjects (mathematiCS and physics, history and geograph~, psychalogy and anthropology) the universities are simply not interested in what i", 0140(" 5~e. o~ the -teV"m, Americans call a "liberal education."A tlm. t is to aay, in the sense of a general education. Rlsewhere the Church sets up religion courses in secondary schools and theology courses for professional train~ng. And that's it, so far as academic education goes. The development of Catholic education in the United States took place, moreover, in a context of rapid and irreversible change, nuch of this connected with the amelioration of social conditions which technology was making Possible. During the late ninet:eenth and early twentieth century, literacy became virtually universal in the United States as in other countries. Child labor was abolished, 9 and the length of time the average individual soent in educational as merely a conservative process. "I'he Church's teaching had to be constantly developed, rethought, reappropriated by successive generations in real and meaningful forms, or it was dead. Hered~- 't<(!V\o! ci(O •..~ weee: part o~ a. p~o,g,y~ o~ l!>rowtl" no'/"of me.<e~ •.•.Y'i •••.•o'("a...I6't, (TO flE t,QQIl:P TO 'IliE FGRJ:5S9IN8 PftHAGMh---feflAHb 'fIll!: fllB&i£) institutions was more and more prolonged. Under the•• conditions 'in wh.e.l, -th, C!a"thol;e. Chlo(,rr~ -m~-t••.reJ W, t'..e. u.-,-t-e<I. ~1;..:t<"s. of rapid cha~BeAit became increasingly unreel to think of the work of the Church with regard to the deposit of faith, itself, At the same time that these changes were taking place, Ameriaa was emerging from a frontier society into its oresent position of international leadership, The "colonial lag" which had kept cultural developments~n Ama1ca thirty years or more behind those in EUrooe was vanishing in many fields. America was becoming to a great extent academically self-sufficient and more sophisticated in!certain ways than other countries. Early Catholic education, like other American education, had often been forced to lift itself up by its bootstraps. One recalls the Fathers of the Missouri frovince of the Society of Jesus, fleter John DeSmet, James O. Van de \l'elde(l~rf,ilh.J. PeterAVerhagen, and the rest, who, in the early nineteenth century, dLd their "t heoLogv cour-se eR-4m t 36ti@r at Florissant, Missouri, 'roY\-\;.'e.,,,...,,.al'\ As !>h<cle-..'\,,> , on al\do-it-yourself alan. 1\ they divided the whole of theology among themselves, each one studyinr a particular section, and thereby so iit..,,\ he c.o",,\~ +e,••. h becoming the expert in:itnh hi eM Ait to the others. This cia .~r-'1"".,t\f sW"1 c ;: at4¥\!! ~lan was, in fact,much ![dvanced by com-iar-i son with :It- 'f~"''''''f\"o~e.:lC OYt\fY\.e".t L"t;'II--"""; es«•.•'Pa.~e'i C•..•,.\.-#tl, -f11f ail other self-educat ional procedures on the American frontier." But hi?ado,ieV< •��••••i;, the dc..,T.:.,/ov.<>e{f pIlI') wa.$ ra.t!,c.- le$~~fv..ll1 e-.I.,f h.",.tit .~-""""'IWb.I!o:r""a;:IE!lIJ;;miqA.satisfaWcetonIejeOd to look back to these 1>0 ••• _t-. things to see how far we h~~"come. Among members of the Catholic academic community, thellllia:e:::a:: nos co-tVIe sl.w \';1 go; , ! g awarenesst\that CatholiC educat ron in the United States has in fact been a venturesome and novel experience. end experiment. 10 in which the Church has faced situations Simply unknown b eror-e, and undertaken tasks quite new to her. Bu~this awareness has hardly perme.ated the Catholic community as a whole. It is time t nat it did, and that we thought of aurselves as what we really are, a group of innovators with deep roots in the past but total commitment to the present who would do a much more effective job of innovating if we faced squarely the fact that this is one of the things /lM one 00{ tie ~ we 'na.ve be~ Jo~ tUi..~. weare called on to do~ erhaps the rrofounffest weakness of Catholic education in the United States is its still-lingering unawareness of the newness of its own achievement. 11 II • An articl~ in Commonweal 1!I:'»td;f;::t1sflB ago",. discussed the emergence of Catholic institutions of higher ec\uca\:Jo!l -e'he~'s. in the United States as "family affairs." HitA;'0int was that)for the most part"Ame~ican Catholic universities and cOlleges have been the creation of : religious "families," that is, religious orders or congregations.The thinking back of them often seems to be, "We are a congregation of one thousand members, so why shCllluldn't we have a college or un tver-a tty just as well as any other teaching congregation~oes~" A drive for funds is started, the properly ~ented individuals ~re launched on programs of studies calculated to terminate in the properfcademic degrees, and the college is under vay. Under favorab~e circumstances, it is soon transmuted (Lvrl ~ into a university. But it remains a familya:'ffair belonging to the v:»:~: ~~~ligiOUS institute, largely s:.taffedby it, and governed in all P~ its discernible policies by the corporate thinking of the ~~'~fr ~~~\religioUS, themselves. ~~~;;~' Although the Society of Jesus is numerically very la~ge in M' ~} ~)I,the Unived States and has a longer tradition of educational work ~ 7~~" ~hanmmy other religious institutes, its colleges and universities @,~';~ ~n the United States startedJlike the others, as "family affairs." ~ ~ ,Many of the crises of '\ v; Jesuit education t oday turn around the ~~ problem of how to make a family affa~r as open and meaningful to ~~ others as possible While preserving the advantages which any family has, not merely for itself, but for societ~as a whole. Every university is a family a ffal.i:',insofar has it has a special ~'~ ~ maintained by the fact that it provides a special environment in which young people can mature. The problem in a Catholic university or college is to make sure that the 12 family spirit of the religious ord~r or congregation involved implements and does not interfere with this larger college or univers 1ty family spirit. 5,.::0':' "'~_j; 13 ii5~L:.~ $ ;;;:~,.e4 ~ h~$M- ~he efial'l~wehmhas b~lfil'l~.twhat can bes.,;,,£dtt..,. Je-~~d.L~? Wha-r';; ., () ABS4<d 'II be distIDctive of the Jesuit educational tradition? It will of course be nothing that is not distinctive of the Catholic church's owh educational tradition. Religious orders and congregations differ..,,:from one another not in terms of ideals which a re uniquely thelr own but in terms of what they emphasize within the common tradition of the Chuvch. The Jesuit tradition, I should say, emphasizes ~mmitment and adaptiab ILfty wi thin a context of love. The commitment at core is commitment to Jesus Christ and to His Church. Such commitment stands, even in the face of the <).. fact thae~large number. of students in many Jesuit institutions of higher education are nGt Catholics. In my own university, St. Louis University, approximately one-fourth of the students are not, and about the same number of faculty members are not CatholiCS, either. Nevertheless, the fact stands evident to !(.llmen that this is a university administered by a group of men who have given them-selves to God through Jesus Christ and His C~h, through stri\ent personal commitment in a particu~ tradition. At the center of this tradition stand the Spiritual Exercises of St. a""~ ess ••"tta\\y Ignatius Loyola. The Spiritual ExercisesAan aid to making a deciSion, one which will be free, and totally free, because it -tl-.e real state. ~ a«air'S anJ "';1th is mader _ not under illusions, but in accord w ith;\God'swill. In the words of their own title, the Spiritual Exercises are aeen as an aid 0 onquer oneself and regulate one's life, and to avoid coming to a'ldetermination through any inordinate affe.()on." They are anplicable throughout life but apply at their maximum Where decision is most crucial, that is to say, where one is making up ome's mind what to do with one's whole life, and they come to a 14 kind of special fruition in the case of those who opt for a life of total dedication to God through the .,-;religious vows of poverty, Chastity~a.d obedience. An educational ';;H'", tradition with this kind of cOl!llllitmeant its core can today attract others than those wit hi. the Catholic faith because it is not an exclusive commitmeDt, that is to say, to by commiting oneself, personally, i!:)IlN:W God through Je8Us Christ and His Ch~voh, o.e does not commit oneaelf less to on~a fellow me_ and to what is authentic and valuable in the seeu:lar world, but rather, commits oneself to these other peBsons and values all the ~ more.j1Jesuit educatio~~rticiPates in the opening up of the Catholic mind to the genuine values of therecular world which has Q~.,.,."itN\eT\ot'IA~ ~'''''''~~~~~' "EV6-n~~''';'''/,;j--~ marked our daY'A A sense of the value of the secular oreative wor ~ is implid}t in thi historical fact of the incarnation of Christ. • In the second person of the Blessed Trinity, God took part of this world to Himself, personally. But the sense of value which the incarnation gives t. the secular has had to contend, through Christian history, with a residual Manic..Vleism. Weakened b\Jt not: eliminated by St. AugustinEin his personal life and in his writings, this M.c~\lehe;s."", was much more enfeebled by the validation of c.eni.\..trr'e.s;, reason in the Middle A~es and subsequent~v1 o~t it has received its most telling set-back with the discovery of oosmic evolution. See•• in i;"e"""s 1I-f1he. \\e.b reo-Ch .•.i~ti_n \;raelit'il;>l'l, _"evolving universe is obviously one with \hich God in some sense . '$+\\1 £vol",tion ,; how:; ,""'''ire.,..,. - - not -t.iolr\·~"'es~. l>...t-."er~~\ pngl'ess. 1s",working posit1Yely." An awareness of the facts of evolution makes , ' c.o.-.s e,",w.;.I'1 0 r $••b••cOn~.io~I::t,-I-h..t-it less and less plausible to thin!) OIIJ the material world __ \ls", in itaelf bad. _1I.elon8l" liP 8\180IlR881.1I1i81,.. 15 The Churoh has of course always been interested in the seeular world, but the increasing explicitness and effectiveness of its in terest is evident in such ihings as the sooial enc,!c, \ ica\"$ of Leo XIII and Pius XI, the many allocutions of Pius XII oonoerned the?h-j~~1 with teohnology and other ourrent oonoerns of a seoular sort, lind••• -it.. I,.tz- ~uIb i?~ f"aML "I "Pope John XXIII~'2ig CP5:i: e a to the oonoerns, both secular and religious, of all mankind. The open nature of the Jesuit's oommitment in Catholio higher eduoation in the United States is shown by the surprisingly high number of Jesuits in seou?~lar fields of learning. In faot, one of Am.eY'iCCIn the c[reat problems inAJesuit higher eduoation is the faot thCt, as oompared with Jesuits elsewhere in the world, Iimuoh smliller proportion of m en are set Oide for soholarly work in theological fields, with~he result tha~merican theologYJfor which members .f the Sooiety of Jesus are by no means entirely, but, nevertheless, to a considerable desree responsible, is in great part deriv:ative from front line work done elsewhere. These ~e problems whioh we have to face, and I think no one is more aware of them than the members of the Society of Jeus in American colleges and universities today. The hope lies in the deep-grained adeptabi~ity of the Jesuit tradition. A kind of myth ( ..about Jesuit eduoation~ioh was .('or current in the United States'the past few generations has thought of the early tradition of Jesuit schools to which European eduoation, French, in partioulAr, owes so muoh even today, has a tradition ~ p~7~ ~.e.:) of csmmsR.od~ertain special gimmioka enabling it to surpass other educational procedures. Recent soholarly work has shown how little this is true was simply a very devoted, well thought out,an IDI!I~ use of the pedagogical aims, ideals, and methods current at the It vvol'""l:ed beca",~e~t pooled -th~-e:ffo\'"ts of' Ma""11",tell~'t 20M c\e• .teJ -te ••.c.~~ "ve.- iI.e 'f•••• ~. t11me. I\.M.u.ch of the scholarship which has revealed these facts a.:..u/t the early Jesuit educational activity has been the work of American Jes~its. I~1s reasonable to hope that this increased consciousness of the essential adapttbility of the Jesuit educational effort will bear the right kind of fruit. Today Jesuit institutes of higher learning,like other Catholtc higher educational institution~ are engaged in a round of self criticism. The impulse runs from top to bottom, or from botbm to top, and generally, both w;;ays. Outspoken student newspapers, whose criticism is heIprf'u1 and we Icome, if not ~A~\WYj "r"dt 3 c: perceptive or well informed, are matched by outspoken reports from self-study committees egged on by the administration. It is evident to those who watch the student newspaper" the self-study reports, and talk to recent graduates around the country, that the situation is far from the same in everyone of the twenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. One of the common complaints in some places is too much reg-imentation in all its forms--from the structure of the curriculum to the check-out hours for resident students on campus. Such complaints are much more common in s ornepl'aces than in others. So are the complaints about an excessive rationalism due to a stress on a highly formalized type of ph}losophy with relatively less at4:: ••~it>\"\ :J. to theology. Another comp IaIrrt is that teaching is sometimes too doctrinaire and not exploratory enough. This complaint, again, is unevenly distributed. Universities such as 17 S~. Louis University or Fordham, which have well developed honors courses, are much less the object of such criticism than are other institutions. ~ Jesuit higher education will always be subject t~riticism, and very serious criticism,for all human activity is so sugject, and,most particularl~ educational activity is. If an educational system does not teach its products how to criticize itself, it is a failure. Judged on this principle, Jesuit higher education in the United States, and Catholic education generally here, is a resounding success. We are proud of our critics because we have produced them--most of them anyhow, and because we feel that on the whole, something is being done about the things they criticize. We have faith in them too because of the f' anaL point which we have mentioned as distinctive of the Jesuit tradition, and this is that one's commitment be a co~~itment in love. Among the hundreds of thousands of JeSuitrlum:pi in the United States today, many of them in very high places, many of them in places less distinguished, we know that we can rely on the kind of affection which makes for real understanding and which in the long run produces results. Jesuit educational institutions a~e the product not only of their administration and faculty but of theIr alumni and students as well. .. ' •,. !JIS/'INC/IVE Orr-J£SUI'T el)~C/l1iv~,l' . I, ~,...f (of ~) z:;-~ (]/v;or~t?!:h; c.hwd,/:n k<. :;:Pttnvu~~~tF"~~ w~~( ~ t;-ad~ ~ ~ ~ !p~illl n. ~t..,v-#tt-.~·r.JI-.'PAU"- C?/J7..e~~ .~td.., 4. r h t/5 nnn<.J~~ 5bc'i;:~1 ~ ;-.,,.;:t£....f·rto~· 8/.,., ,,~~~;t-.~.t;e.~. http://cdm17321.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/ong/id/1321

Similar Items