Confessions of a Greek Gun-Runner’s Grandson: Finding the Edge of Jesuit Education

The topic for this morning’s panel, “Finding the Edge of Jesuit Education,” is ambiguous, since “finding” and “edge” are open to multiple interpretations. However, I think it offers a productive ambiguity in giving me license to develop my own reading. Therefore, I shall follow the advice offered by my philosophy professor, Mr. Yandell, as I entered the room to write my doctoral comprehensive exams: “When in doubt define.” Thus, I take “finding” to have the hermeneutical turn of “disclosing,” as an interpretive accomplishment. “Edge” I take to mean “frontier,” as in the new country beyond the borders of the known and mapped terrain. I trust Mr. Cushman, my college debate coach, will approve. I begin with the wording of the topic because I’d like to focus on my own experiences as a student and graduate of Canisius College, in which the “edge” of Jesuit education was something to be found.

I invite you to imagine how confusing it was for this grandson of a Greek gun runner to be a first generation college student at a private Jesuit college, how this quintessential American experience colored what it meant to attend college in terms of family pride and expectations absent an understanding of what attending college meant other than a public claim to be among the educated class and the expectation that this would lead to a profession. The sustaining expressions of pride and support by my parents, aunts, and uncles gave me status in the family, although cousins who thought my celebrity was casting the cloud of pressure on their devil-may-care high school days did not always appreciate its gravitas. As for me, my family’s attitude, which might best be described as omne ignotum pro magnifico (whatever is unknown is held to be magnificent), occasionally gave my matriculation the disconcerting aura of a novelty act. There is more. I am also the only member of my family to have received a Jesuit education. I was able to attend Canisius only because I had qualified for a Regents Scholarship awarded to high school graduates in New York State on the basis of a competitive exam. For my siblings, the economic realities of a blue-collar family made such an opportunity beyond their means, if not beyond their dreams.

Still, in the absence of a relevant reference point, the dream of attending Canisius was largely in the realm of the mysterious. I was embarked on a journey to a new country with images from the good Friars of St. Francis, who had tended to my high school education, and the barest help from conventional wisdom of the street about what to expect from the Jesuits, whose reputation for intellectual acumen and, shall we say, ingenuity in crafting public arguments, had preceded them.

Certainly, I should acknowledge that not all was mysterious, as I soon became aware of certain mental habits that were expected of us. How to read and critically analyze a text, the importance of making distinctions and establishing logical relations, how to make an academic argument, how to write an academic paper, how to use the English language with precision, and most importantly, the centrality of intellectual integrity to all of the above were stressed in every course. These are enduring habits that, sadly, are not inculcated everywhere, certainly not in the large public institutions where I have taught. There they are regarded as skills, such as critical thinking to be learned by taking a required critical thinking course. Such curricular requirements treat intellectual virtues as if they were techniques to be mastered, much like how to multiply and divide, rather than the product of intellectual habits one acquires from the experiences of living in a particular sort of intellectual culture. The more elusive edge, which I had to discover and which is tremendously powerful and important in our society, didn’t come clear to me for another two decades.

I matriculated at Canisius in a pre-engineering program linked to the University of Detroit. The game plan was to transfer after my sophomore year, become an engineer, and enjoy the good things of life that children of working class families read about but seldom experience. Dr. Tidd began the first day of calculus 101, by asking us to look at the person seated to our right and then our left. He then imparted the sobering news that two of the three would not be here by the end of the semester. He was certainly prescient in my case, at least. Finding the edge started out with me on the dull side of whatever blade the College was using, which left me wondering “What next” for most of my freshman year. As June arrived, I faced reality. I was not cut out to be an engineer. And while I was going great guns in Mr. Starr’s Chemistry 101, I realized my heart wasn’t in it. My developing interest was in rhetoric, the way humans use language to construct social reality, and the closest major to that pursuit was English.

The English department was on the fourth floor of Old Main, aka the attic, and I still remember trudging up four flights of stairs on a beastly hot June day to the office of Dr. Lovering, department chairman, to have him sign my declaration of major. Papers signed, Dr. Lovering welcomed me to the major with, and I quote: “Mr. Hauser, I hope you are not choosing the English major because you think it will lead to a career. Our purpose is not to prepare you for gainful employment but to cultivate in you a sense of taste.” Oh, great. How will I ever explain this to my parents? Little did I realize that this was my first conscious encounter with the edge of Jesuit education.

Fast forward to Fall semester, 1988. I am now Dr. Gerard Hauser, Professor of Speech Communication and Director of Penn State University’s University Scholars Program. The program houses the academic elite among Penn State’s undergraduates, about 1300 students at the main campus and another 250 at the branch campuses across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Its students are sublimely gifted, with SAT scores on average around 1360, many at 1400 and above. About 90 percent graduated the top 5 percent of their high school classes. About 90 percent of its graduates pursue advanced degrees, most at top 10 programs in their respective disciplines. I had spent the better part of the Spring meeting with prospective students and their parents, telling them our story and recruiting them to our university. It was a remarkable albeit daunting experience. Day after day I listened to fathers ask about what income their precocious children might anticipate were they to earn the prestigious honors degree we offered. In the presence of their sons or daughters, they did not speak of their intellectual well-being, their character, their moral values, their social development, or their spirit; they spoke of them in terms of the bottom line. I was stunned by the obscenity of such displays.

That Fall, when I greeted our new students, I spoke to them of a different calculus for gauging their education. I reminded them of their good fortune, among the world’s population, to live in the United States, where the world’s strongest economy rewarded talented and educated people with opportunities for interesting careers that offered financial security. The question in their lives was not whether they’d earn a living but whether they’d make a difference. Would they be sensitive to questions of social justice and human rights, would they be champions of equal opportunity, how would they repay the public trust represented by its support of the public university where they were pursuing their degrees, would they use their talents for more than personal gain? Over the next five years the Program emphasized our students’ contributions to the campus and the community, it opened the formerly closed doors of an elite program to join hands in common cause with as many student groups as possible, it initiated a model leadership program based on leader as servant, we were proactive to secure racial inclusion in the Program and initiated cooperative ventures to enhance scholarship opportunities for men and women of color and to systematically provide public recognition for academic achievement to inner city youths in Philadelphia. And it actively involved its students in each of these efforts. The University’s public character meant that it could not espouse an ideal such as ad maiorum Dei gloriam to inform its academic mission, but that did not mean its students were unaware of the call to be responsible citizens who used their talents in pursuit of a world of amity and hope.

What has this to do with Lovering’s benediction to taste and finding the edge of Jesuit education? I think I can answer that with a representative anecdote from the spring of 1964—I think I have my date correct—when a group of students from Canisius, who had traveled by bus to Alabama to participate in a freedom march and voter registration, met with the other students in a public assembly to share their experience. Men we had come to know and whose political register was no secret publicly shared what they had experienced and how it had transformed their lives by making excruciatingly concrete the evil of segregation, the challenge it posed to everything we had studied and debated, the values we cherished most and the hopes we shared for the future—ours and our society’s. It was a signal moment that merged the critical habits of mind basic to Jesuit education, the emphasis on informed dialogue to reach a considered and sound judgment, the relationship between knowing and doing that are a hallmark of the Society of Jesus, the commitment to social justice with the decidedly pragmatic turn of using the means at your disposal to accomplish a good end, the responsibility to use one’s gifts for the service of others.

The intellectual traits that are often celebrated about Jesuit education are contextualized by the larger frame of the Jesuit model of situating its colleges in relation to the needs of the urban centers they serve. My college, as is true of Jesuit colleges and universities generally, saw its mission as preparing educated men and women to become members of the city’s professional class, to aspire to leadership, and to lead ethically informed public, professional, and private lives. It is an admirable model, and empowering one, that rests on educating the whole person. The point, as Dr. Lovering informed me, although I did not realize it at the time, is not to squander your education on techniques for getting ahead at the expense of cultivating exquisite sensitivity to the world as you find it, of knowing what you believe and why you believe it, of articulating and defending your own thoughts, of bringing an informed moral register to your life, and of using these as your informing platform from which to engage the community in which you live in order to help shape it as a better place.

If we aspire to a new generation of college graduates who have a commitment to use their education for the advancement of the public good as well as private gain; if we aspire to a generation engaged with their communities to insure social justice, provide economic opportunity, safeguard the environment, and promote civility and mutual respect, then as faculty members we will have to be active at the departmental level of instituting a curriculum that makes this possible. These are educational goals that are often discussed and occasionally espoused as part of the learning environment in higher education, although, in my experience they are extremely difficult goals to achieve, at least in large public universities.

The homepage of my college announces itself thusly: Canisius—where leaders are made. Its mission statement offers a clear understanding of what leadership means:

Canisius espouses the ideal of academic excellence along with a sense of responsibility to use one's gifts for the service of others and the benefit of society. It seeks to promote the intellectual and ethical life of its students, helping to prepare them for productive careers as well as for meaningful personal lives and positive contributions to human progress. Its curricular and co-curricular programs are designed to educate the whole person through development of intellectual, moral, spiritual, and social qualities. It aims to promote the contemporary Jesuit mission of the service of faith and the promotion of justice.

If my alma mater is representative, then the Jesuit edge is that they actually have a sense of the culture in which these qualities are lived and the border we must cross to acquire them.

Gerard A. Hauser

AJCU-CC

Regis College

July 18, 2002