Introduction:

I am honored to be with you this evening and humbled to be following in the footsteps of the previous speakers in this series. My special congratulations to you for keeping alive the memory of a remarkable person who was a key player in a most important chapter in the history of Jesuit higher education.

I am a relative latecomer to those sharing a deep solidarity with the people and history of El Salvador, having first gone there shortly after Fr. Segundo Montes, his five Jesuit brothers and the two women co-workers were brutally murdered 12 years ago this Friday. Since then, I have returned many times and been "spoiled for life" by this special people with an often tragic history, but always undying spirit.

I knew Segundo only through his friends and colleagues. People recall his striking face with the Viking beard, and the deep dark eyes with their touch of sadness. Jesuits in the seminary with him knew his fierce competition on the soccer field; those who worked with and studied under him knew him as serious and forceful. Those who lived with him knew him as very practical. On the night of his murder, he was going around the new Jesuit quarters trying to hook up the new phones. The people in the poor neighborhood of Santa Clara where he celebrated Mass every weekend loved him because he was so simple.

Fr. Montes had earlier taught physics in the Jesuit high school ironically where one of his assassins studied. But in the 70s he thought he could serve El Salvador better as a social analyst than as a physicist, so he obtained a degree in anthropology in Spain and returned to the university to teach social anthropology and chair the department. At the time of his death, he was the director of the Human Rights Institute at the university where, with the help of students, he conducted research in the countryside and the city. Of all the Jesuits, he was the one who knew El Salvador and its people best from personal experience. He became known internationally for his work with refugees and human rights, and shortly before his death had been honored in Washington on Capitol Hill. At that time, he knew he was a marked man, and his friends pleaded with him not to return to El Salvador, but he insisted that he had to be with his people.

In memory of this great man I want to speak with you tonight on three challenges to Jesuit higher education today:

I. The Challenge of Segundo Montes and the University of Central America;

II. The Challenge of Father Peter Hans Kolvenbach;

III. The Challenge of September 11.

I. The Challenge of Segundo Montes and the UCA

Segundo Montes was part of a tale that begins in 1964 with the founding of the University of Central America in San Salvador, the UCA, as an alternative to the left-wing university of El Salvador. It was to be a safe haven for the middle- and upper-class. But all of that changed about five years later, when a recently ordained priest, Ignacio Ellacuria, heard the dramatic call of the Latin American bishops at Medellin to heed the cry of the poor. Teresa Whitfield in A Question of Conscience recounts how he led an intense debate within, and indeed a battle for the soul of the UCA and the Central American vice- province of Jesuits. He and his supporters insisted that unless the UCA changed from its comfortable role of supporting the status quo, Jesuits had no business conducting running the University.

Ellacuria and his lay colleague, Roman Mayorga, envisioned and began to develop a "new kind of university in Central America," a university that put its whole self at the service of change, but as a university. In the early seventies they began to implement the university's mission as "the critical conscience of the socially oppressive reality."

There was contagious enthusiasm among many, but not all for the mission set for the UCA by Ellacuria. It was to be:

"...a university that has a very clear idea of what it has to do. And that is more than mold students, more than carry out research, although we do these two things. What the university has to do is set about solving the unacceptable problem of injustice in countries throughout Central America."

In November, 1979, after the lay rector, Ramon Mayorga, and 19 of his staff left the university to join the ill-fated governing junta, Ellacuria became rector, the position he held until his death, ten years later, when he would be the main target of the assassins.

Ellacuria's university sought to be "one which puts itself at the service of the Kingdom of God based on an option for the poor." This was significantly different from the stereotypical Latin American university overrun by a militant left seeking political power.

The university had to know the "National Reality" thoroughly and respond to it with the full weight and influence of all the tools a university could command: analysis, research, teaching, publishing, communicating in every way possible.

Ten days before he died, Ellacuria defended his idea of a university when speaking in Barcelona:

"People tend to say a university should be impartial but we think not. A university should try to be free and objective, but objectivity and freedom can demand one to be partial. And we are freely in favor of the popular majorities because they are unjustly oppressed and because in them, negatively and positively, is the truth of our reality."

He would argue that rational, ethical, Christian intellectuals could not live in a situation as desperate as that in El Salvador without trying to change it.

The UCA had to steer a difficult course between self-preservation and self-immolation as it pursued its goals with intellectual honesty, daring to say, in the words of Ruben Zamora, what "nobody else would say and precious few wanted to hear." There was no lack of courage, but efforts were made to contain extremists in order to protect needed political space for the university. For its troubles, the university would be bombed 16 times, especially after taking a courageous stand or publishing a controversial article or editorial.

In 1985, the UCA celebrated the fifth anniversary of archbishop Romero's death, and the 20th anniversary of the UCA, by giving Romero a posthumous honorary degree. This was the first public celebration of his death. The same year saw the founding of the human rights institute under the direction of Segundo Montes, and the beginning of a new "Forum on the National Reality", a series of open symposia and discussions on the pressing issues of the day.

The pages of Estudios Centroamericanos (ECA, one of the nine periodicals published by the university), were the focus of the UCA's analysis of and projection into the Salvadoran reality. with Ellacuria as editor from 1976 until his death, ECA was the intellectual voice of the university. Its circulation of about 10,000 went to all the important players in El Salvador, and to interested parties throughout the world. Along with Ellacuria's own personal visibility, this was the "social projection" of the UCA in its most direct and effective form.

Without minimizing the contributions of any of the martyred Jesuits, two were most prominent with Ellacuria in the "social projection" of the university: Fathers Segundo Montes and Martin-Baro. (Of course, Jon Sobrino, the Jesuit closest to Ellacuria, would be included in that group, but he was lecturing in Thailand at the time of the murders.)

Segundo Montes was a social anthropologist, who had a profound knowledge of the diverse components of Salvadoran society. He wrote on social stratification, land holding, the possibilities for democracy, and the military. He studied the situation of refugees and displaced, from the viewpoint of an anthropologist, e.g., considering the new structures that these communities were developing.

Martin-Baro was a social psychologist with a doctorate from the University of Chicago and a publication portfolio that included 11 books and scores of articles. He founded the Institute of Public Opinion which provided a "social mirror" of the Salvadoran people, public opinion polls were "a way of returning a voice to the oppressed peoples. He became especially interested in the plight of refugees and displaced persons, for whom he became the leading researcher and analyst. A lectureship has been set up in his honor at the University of Chicago.

Back in 1975, after the 32nd general congregation of the Jesuits insisted that all Jesuit institutions should be deeply involved in the "struggle for faith and the promotion of justice," Father Pedro Arrupe had made the sobering point: "we shall certainly not work for the promotion of justice without paying a price." The UCA Jesuits paid that price many times over.

They suffered constant death threats and frequent denunciations from the right, and at times from the U.S. Embassy, as "subversives," "Marxists" and "the intellectual authors of the FMLN." As noted above, their campus and/or residence was bombed 16 times. Finally they met their violent death in the early morning of November 16, 1989 at the hands of the Salvadoran military.

The combination and intensity of teaching, research, pastoral concern and deep involvement with the complicated and dangerous reality all around them represents a level of work and commitment that by comparison makes even the hardest-working among us seem like we are on vacation. When Father Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Jesuits, visited them, he suggested they were working too hard. They replied that there was no alternative; this was the third world. In a real sense they were indeed driven men, driven by the reality surrounding them.

In nothing was the UCA more persistent than in its insistence on both the need and popular demand for a negotiated settlement of the war. For many years, the UCA was the only voice consistently calling for an end to the war through a negotiated settlement.

He challenged the FMLN to put aside their power struggles and open up to the "third forces," the unions, the church, the schools, small and medium businesses and popular organizations. There was much criticism of this "third force" from all sides. I recall that even months after the Jesuits had been killed, "negotiations" was a dirty word with the Government.

Dismissed as "hopelessly utopian" at the time, it would be this pressure from the people, the "third force," which finally brought about a negotiated settlement in 1991. Ruben Zamora would recognize that the Jesuits of the UCA had been the first to appreciate the importance of the popular movement.

Any of us could justifiably be jealous of the clarity, the accuracy and the tenacity of the vision of Ellacuria and his colleagues within a society in crisis. This was hardly superficial political correctness, but rather the result of hard, demanding analysis, scholarly work, and relentless courage.

More than one observer has noted the special void felt in the reconstruction process in El Salvador because of the absence of Ignacio Ellacuria, and by extension, Martin-Baro and Segundo Montes.

Inspired by the vision and the courage of those who died for what is called "the UCA model," the Jesuits who have succeeded Ellacuria sand his slain colleagues, with their lay colleagues who share their vision and courage, are hard at work constructing the new El Salvador. Lest we idealize the situation, the efforts to realize the "UCA model," even at the ICA, are not without their problems. No one has really replaced the charismatic leadership of Ellacuria or the profound knowledge of the country and its people that Segundo Montes and Martin-Baro had. Not everyone at the UCA agrees with the Ellacuria model -- as we should expect of a university, which, like any other, values freedom. The university is often preoccupied with survival questions much like our own situation in the United Sates today. But through it all, the "UCA model" lives on.

II. The Kolvenbach Challenge

Let us now fast forward to a year ago on the 25th anniversary of the Jesuit commitment to the struggle for faith and the promotion of justice, when Fr. Kolvenbach, the Superior General of the Jesuits, gave an address that has been widely read on this and every Jesuit campus throughout the world. He posed a three-fold question:

"How can Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States express faith-filled concern for justice in what they are as Christian academies of higher learning, in what their faculty do, and in what their students become?"

Father Kolvenbach further specified the context for the contemporary Jesuit university, and I quote:

Within this context, Fr. Kolvenbach suggested the ideals we should be pursuing for 1) who our students become, 2) in what our faculty do, 3) and in how our universities operate..

As for who our students become, 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":

In concluding his address, the ever realistic Fr. Kolvenbach recognized that the ideal he is expressing 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."

The 1975 Jesuit commitment to faith and justice quickly triggered a negative response from some, and in particular from some academics who saw such an emphasis as alien to and even a threat to life in the academy. Much ink has been spilled in subsequent years on both sides of the issue, and some of the criticism of those days has been resurrected following Fr. Kolvenbach's address.

Critics remind us that the central mission of the university is to seek truth not to do justice. But Joseph Daoust, S.J., (in the Spring 2001 issue of Conversations, p.13) reminds us that long before the Enlightenment, universities had been described as a community which had come together "in a common love of knowledge for the good of humanity." (Alexander IV writing to the University of Paris and cited by Daoust). Daoust makes the point that universities that are faith-based and focused on serving the good of society are in the mainstream of what universities have historically been about.

John O'Malley in The First Jesuits (1993) notes Jesuit universities themselves were born of the humanist movement that was reacting against the scholastic education of medieval universities. The humanists were especially critical of the failure to relate learning to a life of virtue and public service. They shared the Renaissance belief in the power of education to form and reform individuals and whole societies.

Daoust points out that 400 years before Fr. Arrupe spoke of educating "men and women for others," Jesuit schools were pursuing a holistic education and formation for serving society. Indeed, that is what they are being asked to do today, to educate students to an organic vision of social reality and to challenge students to serve society when they graduate.

The killing of the Jesuits at the UCA in El Salvador dramatically sharpened the focus of Jesuits on the role of the contemporary Jesuit university in society. Ignacio Ellacuria and his colleagues died in their pursuit of a "new kind of university."

The contemporary American university sets a premium on detached objectivity. Therefore, it casts a wary eye on institutional commitments like those described by Ellacuria and Kolvenbach. North American intellectuals might hesitate to take their admonition to heart. With the starkness of the poverty, oppression and violence all around him, we might say that it was easier for him to focus the attention of the university than it is for us to focus a more complex institution within a more complex surrounding reality.

But a number of years ago, the distinguished commentator on American higher education, Howard Bowen, in The State of the Nation and the Agenda for Higher Education (1982) asked whether higher education had the freedom and the nerve to influence society according to its own standards and values, or was it destined to be mainly adaptive to external pressures. Would higher education lead or be led?

Derek Bok, former president of Harvard, wrote in a similar vein in Beyond the Ivory Tower (1982):

"Universities have an obligation to serve society by making the contributions they are uniquely able to provide. In carrying out this duty, everyone concerned must try to take account of many different values: the preservation of academic freedom, the maintenance of high intellectual standards, the protection of academic pursuits from outside interference, the rights of individuals affected by the university not to be harmed in their legitimate interests, the needs of those who stand to benefit from the intellectual services that a vigorous university can perform."

More recently, Thomas Ehrlich edited a collection of essays, making essentially the same points in Civic Responsibility and Higher Education (2000).

Thus the UCA model was really not foreign to us, even before September 11. American Jesuit universities have been deeply involved in the "national reality" since John Carroll founded Georgetown to educate those who would use and appreciate the new-found freedom in the new republic. In the nineteenth century Jesuit schools were founded to address the existential realities and challenges faced by immigrant populations in need of education. Jesuit education has always been instrumental in the sense that it was meant to serve the broader society by providing an excellent education, but also by serving local, national and even international needs.

Recently, Fr. Joseph O'Hare, president of Fordham, has written on "The City as a Classroom," (also in the Spring 2001 issue of Conversations) in the context of the fact that twenty-one of the twenty-eight AJCU schools are located in metropolitan areas of one million people or more, with eleven in the eight largest population centers in the country. Some pertinent passages include:

"There has always been a vital institutional tension between the city and the university, an interaction between polis and academia that is essential for the health of each. The city reminds the university that the pursuit of knowledge and truth cannot be merely a private pleasure. The university, on the other hand, guardian of the wisdom of the past and seeking the shape of tomorrow, can serve as both the critical conscience and the creative consciousness of the city.

"For Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States, this call for the renewal of the civic mission of higher education has a distinctive resonance. All of our Jesuit works, including our institutions of higher education, should be informed by a common mission to serve faith and promote justice. No Jesuit institution could retreat into academic isolation from its community and not compromise this distinctive mission."

Some see the commitment to justice and social action as being in tension, if not conflict with the intellectual life, especially in areas that seem remote from social concerns. No one can question the scholarship of Fathers Ellacuria, Segundo Montes, Martin Baro or Jon Sobrino at the UCA in El Salvador, and many others who have distinguished themselves by responding to social issues through serious scholarship. But tensions between the demands of specialization and wider intellectual, social and moral demands are very real.

There is no doubt that the disjointedness of much of contemporary academic life, that encourages dichotomies between the academic and non-academic, the intellectual and the pastoral, and between disciplines themselves, works in opposition to the holistic thrust of what Jesuit colleges and universities are trying to do.

Scholarship in the Jesuit tradition does have its instrumental character, as Fr. Kolvenbach noted at Santa Clara: "knowledge is valuable for its own sake and at the same time is knowledge that must ask itself, 'For whom? For what?'" But Jesuits have traditionally respected the integrity of the instruments they use. For us this means that the intellectual life has its own rules that must be respected.

In any case, Jesuit universities should be places where important questions are raised, issues pursued to ultimate questions, and persons of all faiths and none at all can enter into rich dialogue. Social justice issues can draw persons of good will into academic inquiry and practical collaboration, but a Catholic and Jesuit university should deepen discussions of justice to the point where they become discussions of faith, that is, of the underlying convictions and ultimate assumptions about meaning, truth and value that ground positions on justice.

Education is clearly the primary task of the university, not social action, but, as noted above, one of the key goals of education has always been to develop good citizens, whether it be the Athenian statesman, the renaissance gentleman, or the women and men who will lead us in the 21st century. Can we truly educate those women and men without involving them experientially and reflectively in the major issues of our time?

In wartime, many of our physicists and chemists have become weapons' makers and our campuses have become military training posts. In war and peace, social scientists have and do become advisors to and members of government. Today, biologists become biotechnologists with and for pharmaceutical companies. Countless faculty consult for government, corporations, and organizations of every kind. We sponsor various institutes, some perhaps more appropriate than others. No one can deny that the American university long ago abandoned whatever ivory tower it may have occupied.

I would argue that the UCA model, with its focus on the "national reality" is quite compatible with the Jesuit tradition in education. The urgency of its implementation was perhaps unique in El Salvador, but perhaps not after September 11.

While respecting the freedom of anyone who sees otherwise, and defending the right of anyone to pursue what we call "pure" research, I would submit that the UCA model, with appropriate adaptations, is quite compatible with what many of us are trying to do. No one should in any way be coerced, but it is not inappropriate to mobilize the unique strengths of a university in pursuit of a shared goal.

III. The Challenge of September 11

It is no exaggeration to say that our lives will never be the same after September 11. The tragic events of that day pose many individual and institutional challenges for us, and, in the context of what we have said above, perhaps especially for the Jesuit college and university. Even before September 11, many colleges and universities have been talking more and more about educating for responsible citizenship and global citizenship. Carol Schneider, the president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, speaks of the "engaged academy," with its renewal of civic engagement.

As we have seen above, Jesuit schools have long been "engaged academies." The UCA model raised the ante on that engagement, and Father Kolvenbach has challenged us anew to be committed to educating for justice. But the experience of naked terrorism and fanatical hatred at the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Western Pennsylvania should convince us once and for all that we cannot be spectators as a whole new world unfolds. The "national reality" of Ellacuria has become the "global reality" that is the context for our universities today. On September 11, we responded first as faith communities turning to God to strengthen us in our convictions that evil and dealt are never the final answer, that our God is a God of life, and that we are resurrection people.

Jesuit colleges and universities re-committed themselves to the importance of international understanding and inter-religious dialogue as antidotes to hatred and stereotyping. The committed themselves to work harder against the global injustice that provides fertile ground for terrorism and violence, and to the ever more obvious need to educate persons of solidarity with the real world, since indeed, in our new vulnerability we have been brought into solidarity with the millions throughout the world who are vulnerable and powerless.

I would suggest that the UCA or Kolvenbach vision is no longer utopian, but very pragmatic. If we are to survive as a global community, we must develop and apply the best of reasoned inquiry, critical analysis, openness to differing viewpoints, interdisciplinary learning and experience to a society shaken to its depths. We are challenged to new ways of thinking and doing and to new ways for people to relate to one another.

The American flag we proudly wear and wave must be a symbol for the best and not the worst of our American values: not of arrogance but of our commitment to generosity, courage, freedom, enriching diversity and opportunity for all.

All the good things we have been trying to do on our campus to educate men and women for others, to educate for leadership and service, to educate for solidarity with the real world are now more urgent than ever. I am reminded of Ellacuria's argument that rational, Christian intellectuals could not live in a situation as desperate as that in El Salvador without trying to change it. So too with our situation today. Ellacuria's and Segundo Montes' vision was, as ours must be, hardly politically correctness, but rather the result of hard, demanding analysis, scholarly work and relentless courage.

I am reminded of Father Kolvenbach's words that "students...must let the gritty reality of the world into their lives, so they can learn to feel it, think about it critically, respond to its suffering and engage it constructively."

Kolvenbach's words, paraphrasing Ellacuria, have special relevance in a post-September 11 world:

"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 on it and to use university influence to transform it. Thus Jesuit universities have stronger and different reasons that other academic institutions, for addressing the actual world as it unjustly exists and for helping to shape it in the light of the Gospel."

Let me close with words from the recent statement of the presidents of our 28 Jesuit colleges and universities:

"As we mourn those we have lost, comfort those who mourn, pray for wisdom for our leaders, and confront our vulnerability, we are challenged to an even more expansive quest for the justice that will help remove the desperation that is the lot of far too many men and women around the globe. As never before, 'if we want peace, we need to work for justice.' "

Segundo Montes would have risen to that challenge. Please God, so will we.