Padberg, S.J., John W.

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Conversations on Jesuit Higher EducationVolume 1 Article 24-1-1992Who Are These People and What Are They Doingand Why?John W. Padberg, S.J.Follow this and additional works at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversationsRecommended CitationPadberg, S.J., John W. (1992) "Who Are These People and What Are They Doing and Why?," Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education:Vol. 1, Article 2.Available at: http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol1/iss1/2Spain with nearly a half-million students and approximately 14,000teachers. Six hundred members of the Society of Jesus administer andFebruary 1992farflung and diverse beyond the United States isthis work in which we participate. Statistics give us a place from which tostart our conversations. We in Jesuit colleges and universities are a part ofa group of 177 such institutions throughout the world. They in turn arepart of a total network of 665 Jesuit schools, including 356 secondary orhigh schools, and 132 specialized and even primary schools. The sum ofall these institutions engages the efforts of about 70,000 teachers.Somewhat more than ninety percent of them (63,800) are laymen andlaywomen and members of other religious orders, and 6,200 are membersof the Society of Jesus. All in all, these Jesuit schools educate about oneand one-half million students. Then add to that total almost another fivehundred education centers and non-traditional schools in Latin Americaand IS the scope otthat conversation, how  wldespread EducatmnIt is important to know how broad, how  Hghrr Jowt  r?m which we participate.WhatTo do so most successfully we might startby looking at the overall context of Jesuit edu-cation. In the United States the twenty-eightJesuit colleges and universities span the conti-nent. You will find more details about them inthe article “Complex Simplicity,” in this sameissue of Conversations.. . .  450-year-old  history of theJesuits, has there been such a group of higher education in-stitutions. This first issue of Con-versations is meant to begin exactly that, a con-versation with you, its readers, about thateducational enterprise  S]Institute of Jesuit Sources, Saint Louis, MissouriA 11 of the thousands of us men and women who are part ofthe American Jesuit colleges and universities are involved inan extraordinary enterprise. Nowhere else in the world isthere today or, at any time in the  Pa&erg  W ]ohn Who Are These People andWhat Are They Doingand why?1Padberg, S.J.: Who Are These People and What Are They Doing and Why?Published by e-Publications@Marquette, 1992con-m hospitals and prisons and among thepoor and destitute, in conversing familiarly with othersabout the things of God, especially about God’s love foreach and every one of us, in assisting men and women tomake the Spiritual Exercises, that program of prayer andmeditation and discernment whereby a person mightseek the inner freedom to choose the ways to best loveand serve God and other men and women individuallyand societallyVery quickly those first Jesuits experienced the last-ing good that formal education in well-establishedschools could bring to individuals and to society. In1547-48 they established in Messina in Sicily the firstJesuit school set up specifically for lay students. WhenIgnatius Loyola sent the first group of ten Jesuits from astill very small organization to found that school, he  - In The PastSeven university students, united in an experience ofunderstanding and affection, agreed in 1534 to spendtheir lives together in the service of others as a way oftheir wholeheartedly serving God. They were all to be-come graduates of the University of Paris, arguably thebest such institution in the world in the 1500s. Theyranged in age from one in his early forties to five in theirtwenties and one who was nineteen. Their leader, aSpanish Basque, was Ignatius of Loyola. In 1540, thisgroup, by now ten “friends in the Lord” as they termedthemselves, became a religious order in the CatholicChurch. They called that order the Society of Jesus be-cause they wanted to acknowledge Jesus Christ as theirmodel and their master. Originally their service of othersconsisted especially in preaching, in teaching the rudi-ments of the Christian faith to children and the unlet-tered, in working  ences, distinctiveness, failures, successes. Twice a year allthe faculty members and administrators and professionalpersonnel of those twenty-eight schools will receive, per-sonally addressed as is this present issue, a copy ofConversations, one of the results of the deliberations of theSeminar. The Seminar members hope you will engage inthis ongoing conversation, with them, among yourselves,and across and beyond disciplinary and professional andinstitutional boundaries.All of those involved in Jesuit education have theirown personal experiences of that enterprise. All of thoseexperiences contribute to its variety and richness and dis-tinctiveness. Indeed, Jesuit education began with experi-ence and at its best it returns to the bedrock of experi-ence when it thinks about itself.Who incoher-offree and frank discussion on any and every facet of Jesuithigher education, its opportunities, problems,  D.C., in the summer of1989. That assembly was jointly sponsored by thetwenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities and by theSociety of Jesus itself in the United States. Its participants,laymen and laywomen, Jesuits and members of other reli-gious congregations, faculty members and administratorsand personnel from every facet of this enterprise, togethertook stock of the present situation of a work now twohundred years old in this country and looked to its futurefor the years to come. As one of the results of that meet-ing, those twenty-eight colleges and universities and theten “provinces” or geographical and administrative areasof the Society of Jesus in the United States are jointlysponsoring this National Seminar on Jesuit HigherEducation and this journal, Conversations.Eleven men and women who themselves are engagedin the work of Jesuit higher education make up the mem-bership of this Seminar. They come from the various seg-ments of that work and will usually serve a three yearterm on the Seminar. At present five are faculty members,one is a former president of a Jesuit university, two areadministrators, one is the religious superior of the Jesuitcommunity at a university, one is the chairman of theSeminar and director of the Institute of Jesuit Sources,another is the vice president of the Association of JesuitColleges and Universities, You will find the names andthe current responsibilities of all eleven members at theCONVERSATIONSinside of the front cover of this issue of Conversations.They meet on three long weekends a year for sessions  - At PresentTurn now from quantity to quality when we considerthe people who are the personnel of the Jesuit institu-tions. They, the thousands of intelligent, committed,hardworking women and men are the truly most impor-tant factor in maintaining the existence, the identity andthe excellence of those schools,This publication, Conversations, the first of them froma new National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education,comes from and is addressed to that personnel of thetwenty-eight Jesuit colleges and universities of the UnitedStates. It is personally addressed to each man and womanwho makes American Jesuit higher education the flour-ishing enterprise that it is. The venture is one of the re-sults of the national meeting on Jesuit higher educationwhich took place in Washington,  1,900,OOO  students inabout 1,300 Jesuit institutions in 65 countries. It is per-fectly obvious that “Jesuit schools” or ‘Jesuit education”are possible only in the partnership of laymen and lay-women and Jesuits and members of other religious or-ders, who make up the faculty and staff and administra-tion of these institutions.Who teach in those institutions in cooperation with other reli-gious congregations. So, to add up all of it briefly andthen go on: a total of 6,800 Jesuits and almost 80,000other persons educate almost  2Conversations on Jesuit Higher Education, Vol. 1, Iss. 1 [1992], Art. 2http://epublications.marquette.edu/conversations/vol1/iss1/2ofLiberal  Education, Milwaukee: Bruce, 1938, p. 171TheJesuit CodeSJ,  Allan P. Farrell Jesu, Madrid,1901, p. 345, as quoted in Societatis  Paedagogica  Romani  in Monumenta  CollegliOrdine Studiorum in Ratione  et SJ,  De ’ Diego Ledesma itself.and who continue to shape Jesuit education. Our variety,too, might be the subject of a later issue of Conversations.Personal, day by day, engagement in that enterprise willdetermine what Jesuit education will be in the future. TheSeminar on Jesuit Higher Education hopes to fosteramong ourselves in partnership the kind of conversationsthat will broaden our knowledge, diversify our view-points, enhance our insights and deepen our convictionsabout who we are and what we are doing in this most ex-traordinary enterprise, and why we are engaged in it.For a long period in the history of Jesuit colleges anduniversities the answer to the first question in the title ofthis essay, “Who Are These People and What Are TheyDoing and Why?” may have been “The Jesuits.” Now theanswer is, quite simply, “All of us.” And what we aredoing and why depends on all of us too.bedY0ch of experiencewhen it thinksabout COG-lege. Each of them, too,may well be the subject offuture issues of Conversa-tions and surely the sub-ject of your conversationsat your school. What doyou think of these reasonsfor Jesuit higher educa-tion? How would you ex-press a rationale for suchschools, for your school?The American Jesuitcolleges and universities ofwhich we are all a part arein the twentieth centurymuch more complicated asinstitutions than their ear-lier counterparts. But in alltheir variety of locale andhistory and programs theystill draw their characternow and for the futurefrom the men and womenwho make up their ongo-ing personnel. We all arethat body of men andwomen who have shapedJesuit educationbegan with experience,and at its bestit returns to the, they guide man most trulyand easily to the achievement of his last end.“’ To putthose four reasons in more contemporary terms: Theseschools help their students, first, to achieve the knowl-edge and skills necessary for a productive career. Second,they help foster social and political responsibility Third,they contribute to the development of the totally humanperson in the humanities and the sciences and to the abil-ity to communicate to others the results of that develop-ment. And lastly, they point explicitly to a vision and adestiny for humankind that goes beyond the simplyhuman, to a destiny to be sons and daughters of God.Each of those reasons becomes concrete and particu-lar in the particular American Jesuit university and  WhYBut why are there Jesuit institutions of higher educa-tion? Each of the twenty-eight colleges or universities inthe United States has prepared its own mission statement,of course, responding to its own particular circumstances.In all likelihood, however, all of those institutions wouldfind familiar and congenial one of the very earliest state-ments of purpose for Jesuit education. It was written a lit-tle more than four hundred years ago by Diego Ledesma,among the most experienced practitioners and first theo-rists of that enterprise. Ledesma said that there were fourreasons for which Jesuits conducted schools. First, “theysupply people with many advantages for practical living;secondly, they contribute to the right government of pub-lic affairs and to the proper making of laws; third, theygive ornament, splendor and perfection to the rationalnature of man; and fourth  Goa in India. Shortly be-fore the French Revolution there were more than 700such Jesuit schools for lay students and 175 seminaries orhouses of study for those preparing for ministry in thechurch. In 1773, when several of the European absolutistrulers threatened schism in the church unless the popeabolished the Society of Jesus, all of those schools weredestroyed in the temporary suppression of the Jesuits.They began all over again at the restoration in 1814 afterthe French Revolution.The story of the American Jesuit colleges and univer-sities, and how they became what is briefly described inthe essay “Simple Complexity” in this issue, demands itsown story. It may, perhaps, be the subject of an essay in alater issue of Conversations. In any case, on that subject, ason others, we hope to give suggestions for further readingfor all who are interested.brief overview to note that by 1600, a littlemore than fifty years after the founding of that firstschool, there were almost two hundred and fifty Jesuitschools all over the world, from Cuzco in Peru to Cracowin Poland, from Milan in Italy to  fidently told them, “If we live ten years, we shall see greatthings in the Society of Jesus.” Nine years later, when hedied in 1556, there were forty Jesuit colleges spreadthroughout Europe and already in parts of the new world,in Asia and in Africa. The fuller story of Jesuit educationcould be the subject of a later issue of Conversations. It isenough in this  3Padberg, S.J.: Who Are These People and What Are They Doing and Why?Published by e-Publications@Ma que te, 1992

Who Are These People and What Are They Doing and Why?

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