Convocation inaugurates academic year

 Father Ed Glynn, SJ
Address to Academic Convocation
August 24, 2001 

New beginnings and fresh starts are times of new commitment and fresh enthusiasm. Annually this academic convocation is for us at John Carroll University a formal celebration inaugurating a new academic year. By its repetition year after year this academic convocation is for us a ritual renewal of commitment and dedication to the University and to successful fulfillment of the University’s mission. Through its annual repetition we celebrate with new enthusiasm our dedication to the individual students already enrolled and our fresh start with the hundreds of students newly enrolled in our undergraduate and graduate programs. Through its annual repetition we also renew our commitment to one another and to working together to preserve and make better the environment we have created and that each day we continue to create for ourselves and for our students. Individual students are at the heart of what we do at John Carroll.

The University’s tradition of individual attention and personal concern has assisted thousands upon thousands of individual students with new beginnings and fresh starts. This tradition of individual attention and personal care has assisted these individual men and women to grow personally, to acquire new skills, to expand their vision of the possible, to clarify their basis of hope and to attain a degree of wisdom about their own personal live and about the responsibilities that they have to themselves, to other individuals, to their families and to society. Personal care and individual attention are constitutive characteristics of the University.

There are outcomes that empirically verify our excellence in this matter. Among Midwestern comprehensive regional universities we have the highest first year retention rate and the highest graduation rate. As educators, we rightly take great pride in this achievement.

As I have mentioned to you before and as I have publically proclaimed within the state of Ohio and around our nation, you–the faculty, administration and staff of John Carroll University–have created an environment most conducive to teaching and learning. You deserve great praise and congratulations for this achievement of educational excellence. I congratulate you and thank you for this achievement. While praising, congratulating and thanking you, I also remind you of something you already know. We cannot, more accurately, we can but we must not become complacent. The environment that you have created here, an environment most conducive to teaching and learning, is like all human environments. It is precarious and thus precious. It does not have to be. This environment does not necessarily exist. Like all human environments it can be polluted and can diminish in the quality of its excellence. It is the grave responsibility of each of us to protect and promote by our individual words, by our individual actions and by our individual attitudes this environment of educational excellence. Individually and collectively we have here at John Carroll much to be proud of and much to protect and promote.

This annual academic convocation with its new beginnings and its fresh starts provides us each year the opportunity to remember what we have achieved together in the past and to recommit ourselves with new enthusiasm and renewed dedication to working together to preserve and promote the excellence of this environment for present and future students. In speaking about environments I believe it is important at the beginning of this academic year to say something about our physical environment. When parents and students and strangers first come to John Carroll they are greatly impressed by the beauty of our campus. Architecturally and aesthetically the campus is beautiful and this beauty greatly contributes to the excellence of our educational environment.

Regarding our physical facilities, in order to remain not simply competitive with other institutions but to stay out in front of them, we are in the midst of much construction and renovation on campus. During the summer I have jokingly been telling people to be careful when walking around the campus. If you stop and momentarily remain stationary, you are apt to be renovated or repaired. I thank all of you for your patience and understanding during all this construction and renovation. I especially ask that you be patient and understanding during the two years required for completion of the Dolan Center for Science and Technology. There will be moments of frustration and annoyance because of the serious inconvenience of all the equipment and personal coming onto campus. The Big Dig in Boston–the largest public works project in the history of the United States--has a huge conspicuous sign as you approach it. The sign reads: “Remember: Rome was not built in a day.” Our own not quite as big dig will not be built in a day. When The Dolan Center for Science and Technology is complete, John Carroll will be a greater educational institution and a far more attractive university to prospective students and faculty members.

I have some brief comments regarding the process for seeking reaffirmation of John Carroll’s institutional accreditation from the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Universities. Institutional accreditation evaluates the institution as a whole and accredits the institution as a whole. “An institutional accrediting body evaluates more than the formal educational activities of an institution; it assesses as well, such characteristics as governance and administration, financial stability, admissions and student personnel services, institutional resources, student academic achievement, institutional effectiveness, and relations with constituencies outside the institution”(Handbook of Accreditation, second edition, North Central Association of Colleges and Schools, Chicago, 1997, p.1). Institutional accreditation by a regional accrediting association is obviously most important. Among other reasons such accreditation is the basis of an institution’s eligibility for its students to receive federal tuition assistance and its faculty to receive federal research grants. In 1994, after completion of our own two-year institutional self-study and following a visit from a North Central Association evaluation team that came to campus in March 1994, the Higher Learning Commission, then called the Commission on Institutions of Higher Education, reaffirmed the University’s accreditation. 

We are scheduled for another such review In preparation for an evaluation team visit to John Carroll sometime in the academic year 2003-04, we need to put in place a self study committee to lead our institutional self study. The North Central Association’s Higher Learning Commission requires, as does the other regional accrediting bodies, the president of the institution being reviewed to appoint the Self-Study Coordinator and the members of the Self-Study Steering Committee. Since self-study is of the entire institution, the self study process needs to have broad based participation and the Steering Committee needs in its composition to be representative of the entire institution. From my own personal experience serving as a member of the Commission on Higher Education of the Middles States Association of Colleges and Univerities and from my experience of chairing during the last twenty years many visiting evaluation teams for the Middle States Association, most recently at Duquesne University in 1997 and Loyola College in Baltimore in 1999, I know how beneficial for an institution these cyclical reviews can be. 

The accreditation process is based on the premise that Plato had Socrates express in the Apology: “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Consequently we should look upon this institutional self-study process in preparation for the evaluation team’s visit in 2003-04 not as a task that is burdensome and comparable to a bureaucratic steeplechase competition. Rather we should look upon this up-coming institutional wide self-study as a great educational opportunity for John Carroll, an opportunity to examine how well we are succeeding in what by our mission and goals statement we say we are attempting to do. The self-study process will be a great opportunity to identify institutional weaknesses and strengths and also a great opportunity with the self knowledge we gain to make John Carroll an even more excellent educational institution and community than it is today. 

Let me now move to some reflections regarding the future and specifically about how our mission precisely as a Jesuit university helps us to prepare for and to shape John Carroll’s future. I often speak with audiences both internal and external to the University about our mission as a Jesuit institution. I do so out of a profound conviction, a deep appreciation and a great pride regarding the intrinsic worth and excellence of the academic tradition that shapes both the institution and the education that bear the name John Carroll. I also offer these reflections for pragmatic reasons. The vision and values that shape John Carroll, precisely as a Jesuit institution, also powerfully motivate and enable us to adjust institutionally to the ever more rapidly changing world in which we exist. The vision and values that shape John Carroll, precisely as a Jesuit institution, also powerfully motivate and enable us to address institutionally the greater needs of that world by doing the greater, more lasting and more universally good. 

The world external to the University is ever more rapidly changing. Thus there are many forces of change that are affecting all of higher education both in the United States and abroad. There are many examples of these forces of change affecting higher education but I shall mention only two. These I take from a discussion we had at the July national board meeting of the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE), on which board I sit. The two are the changing student population and the globalization of education. The student population is obviously more racially and ethnically diverse than ever. The global economy makes it more imperative that the United States better educate its citizenry about the rest of the world. One participant in our FIPSE discussion mentioned as aspects of the globalization of education: its massification (There are 500,000 international students studying in the United States.) and its egalitarianism (“The fall of elitism resulted from the increase of wide body airplanes in the 1970's.”). 

How do the vision and values that shape John Carroll precisely as a Jesuit university powerfully motivate and enable us to adjust institutionally to these two examples of the forces of change affecting higher education? How do the vision and values that shape John Carroll precisely as a Jesuit institution motivate and enable us to serve the greater needs of the larger world by doing the greater, more lasting good? When in 1998 I first addressed this convocation, I mentioned that the mission of John Carroll, although it is not identical with, does share in and is shaped by the world wide mission of the Society of Jesus. The international mission of the Jesuits has been succinctly expressed. It is a mission in service of a faith that promotes justice and inseparably promotes conversation with every culture and inseparably promotes conversation with every religious tradition. This vision and practice are to shape every Jesuit institution and all Jesuit education. 

Consequently at John Carroll, precisely because of our mission as a Jesuit university, we are institutionally and educationally to promote between individuals, between groups, between cultures and between religions relations that reflect the love story of God’s steadfast presence and transforming labor in human history. John Carroll also thus shares in the worldwide mission of the Society of Jesus to promote the conversations that are necessary for successfully achieving such relations of respect and reverence between individuals, groups, cultures and religions. This world wide mission of the Society of Jesus to serve a faith that promotes justice and inseparably promotes conversation with every culture and with every religion is obviously rooted religiously and theologically in a profound faith in God’s active and abiding presence and action in human lives and human history. 

Pragmatically and significantly such a faith also addresses two of the greatest and most immediate needs of our world, i.e., to rid the world of cultural intolerance and to rid the world of religious intolerance. No species of animal directly and intentionally kills as many of its own kind as we humans do. We don’t have to look as far back as the great world wars of the 20th century to discover evidence of this. We need look back only at the last decade of that century. During the 1990's the fact that people were culturally and religiously different provided the motivation and justification for wars and slaughters in Eastern Europe, in Africa, in the Middle East and in Northern Ireland. Sadly this decade repeats the dark side of human history. Human history is filled with such examples of individuals and communities justifying their killing of other individuals and communities because culturally and religiously they were different. 

Promoting conversations between peoples of different cultures and religions is educationally necessary in order to achieve successfully relations of respect and reverence between individuals and groups that are culturally and religiously different. Obviously the mission of John Carroll, precisely as a Jesuit university, can powerfully motivate and enable us to successfully adjust institutionally and educationally to forces of change. With regard to the changing student population that is ever more diverse racially and ethnically, if our mission as a Jesuit institution is not adequate to motivate and enable us to change, then enlightened economic self interest should powerfully motivate and enable us. By the year 2040 the majority of students coming out of high school and entering college will be what we now call minorities. I believe that we need to and are able to do a much better job of recruiting minority students and of course recruiting more persons of color to the faculty, administration and staff. I also believe that increasingly, as long as we don’t do better in this area, we are doing our students a positive educational disservice. Perpetuating an environment that does not educationally, culturally and socially prepare students for the work force and the communities into which locally, nationally and internationally they shall be moving upon graduation is a positive educational disservice. 

Let me conclude. Today we ritually celebrate a new beginning. We celebrate with new enthusiasm our dedication to the individual students already enrolled and our fresh start with those newly enrolled. We also renew our commitment to one another and to working together to preserve and make better the environment that we have created and that each day we continue to create for ourselves and for our students. We have here at John Carroll University an institution and an education of excellence. We rightly are proud of this. We also have here at John Carroll University the potential and commitment to become an even more excellent Jesuit university. With great confidence, grand cooperation and good cheer let us, on the foundation of excellence we each have inherited, proceed together to build an even greater and more excellent John Carroll–that will more excellently serve the greater glory of God.

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