Why are you here?
I pose this question to a classroom full of wide-eyed, upturned faces. They look slightly shocked for a moment, at least as indicated by the raised eyebrows and momentarily glassy stares that are visible over their masks. They are first-semester, first-year students, in their first class for “USF 101: Expedition USF,” a course designed to help students transition into and navigate through the University of San Francisco.
Already stunned by the mere fact of sitting in a college classroom, they seem a little unsettled to be asked a question other than their names or majors. But after the usual awkward pause, they begin to offer initial answers, mostly with variations on logistical themes: the university was “close to home,” or “in San Francisco,” or “gave me a good financial aid package.” These are perfectly fine answers, but I have an agenda here, so I ask, “And what about the Jesuit part of USF? Any connections or associations with that?” One student mentions the university’s social justice mission. Another, who went to a Jesuit high school, talks about “cura personalis,” or care for the whole person. “Great start!” I say encouragingly, “and you’ll be learning a lot more — in fact, a big part of this course is understanding the value of a Jesuit education.”
But that’s where I falter a bit. Not visibly (I hope), but internally. What do I know, really, about the value of a Jesuit education?
This past fall, I became the Faculty Co-Director of USF 101, and part of my mission depended on ensuring that the 300-odd students who took the class each fall left with a substantive answer to this question. Not that I was starting from scratch — on the contrary, I took over a fantastic curriculum designed by the previous (amazing) faculty co-director and a working group of other smart, dedicated folks. But I also wanted to make it my own. I wanted to know more than the few Latin phrases I’d picked up during my previous 6 years here, for example “cura personalis,” “eloquentia perfecta,” “laudato si”. In sum, I wanted to be better than the brochure.
More worryingly, part of me was a little afraid of what I would find if I delved too deeply into the Jesuit tradition. I’m someone who grew up in a secular household, a culturally but not religiously Christian family — the kind that reads the Nativity story once a year on Christmas Eve, but never goes to church. So I felt as new to Jesuit principles and pedagogy as many of our students — and potentially as negatively inclined towards the overtly “religious.” Before taking a leadership role with USF 101, I had felt comfortably ignorant but amiably inclined towards what I saw as a cherry-picked, “San Francisco” (i.e., hippy, progressive) version of Jesuit Catholicism — extracting the social justice sauce from the rest of the stew.
Much of my reluctance to dive more deeply into the Jesuit tradition stemmed from what I saw as the doctrinaire mentality of religion writ large — antithetical to the broadmindedness, the questioning, the skepticism required by education. If I’m honest, part of me saw the unswerving “faith” required by religious tradition as an enemy — rather than an ally — of education.
That tension between my mission, as Co-Director of USF 101, and my ignorance and skepticism led me to participate in the Lane Center Fellowship this past year, a program designed for faculty eager to learn more about Jesuit history and principles. Through a series of readings and discussions, I found much of my skepticism eroding along with my ignorance. Although not every text or principle spoke to me, I found myself particularly inspired and awed by Howard J. Gray, SJ,’s chapter “Soul Education” in A Jesuit Education Reader. Framing Jesuit education as an “education of soul,” Gray further defines it as a process “of becoming more humanely alert and responsive to the world about you”.
More human, more alert, more responsive, more present in the world. What Gray articulated was not an approach of indoctrination, but rather of inquiry. Not a list of answers, but a series of questions. Further, what he helped me understand was that Jesuit pedagogy is not only interested in knowledge, but also, and perhaps primarily, in ways of knowing. How we answer a question like “why are you here” might be different if engaged with through emotion, experience, received knowledge, or logical reasoning. Here was a framework to offer to students. To help them understand that a Jesuit approach is to consider this question — and all questions — within each of those registers, and to understand that all are valuable, and necessary. Further, as I learned, the Ignatian Pedagogical Paradigm, with its cycle of context, experience, reflection, action, and evaluation, provides a structured framework for working through these ways of knowing, without prioritizing any, or leaving any out.
Through the fellowship, I found other points of connection with Jesuit pedagogy, this time through my own field: Rhetoric. In her chapter from the Reader, “Precis of Ignatian Pedagogy,” Sharon Korth writes that, “Experience for Ignatius meant to ‘taste something internally,’ which involves the whole person – mind, heart, and will – because without internal feeling joined to intellectual grasp, learning will not move a person to action.” This wedding of seeming opposites — of emotion to reason, of knowing to feeling, of thinking to action — is precisely what drew me to the field of Rhetoric, the art and science of persuasive communication.
Aristotle, a founder of the rhetorical tradition, was among the first to write of reason and emotion as allies rather than antagonists. This convergence is probably not a coincidence — rhetoric has its own disciplinary roots in the Jesuit tradition, and Ignatius himself was likely influenced by Aristotle. In turn, I began to consider a struggle shared between the two traditions — Rhetorical and Jesuit — a struggle between the agonistic and the invitational. Rhetoric has its own fraught engagement with an identity labeled from its ancient beginnings as either deeply manipulative or overtly aggressive. Which it can be – and as our current political discourse has only too often demonstrated.
While this version of rhetoric has always been countered by another, in the mid-1990s rhetorical scholars Sonja Foss and Cindy L. Griffin gave it a name: invitational rhetoric. In “Beyond Persuasion: A Proposal for an Invitational Rhetoric” from 1995, they defined it as, “an invitation to understanding as a means to create a relationship rooted in equality, immanent value, and self-determination.” Further, they write, “it constitutes an invitation to the audience to enter a rhetor’s world and to see it as the rhetor does. Thus, it is a form of communication designed to generate understanding among individuals with different perspectives.” I came to see the Jesuit tradition of education in this light, not only as a form of invitational rhetoric, but as a way to reframe education as invitation, to practice invitational rhetoric in the classroom and outside of it.
This is a potential moment of transition for USF 101, as we consider taking it beyond a “pilot” stage. What will it look like in the future? One vision is of an extended orientation seminar, where we instruct students in the ins and outs of financial aid, the regulations of Title IX, how to efficiently accrue course credits, and manage graduation requirements. That’s all critical information that students need to know about how to do USF. But it’s not really helping students understand why they are here. Another vision is informed by those Jesuit principles of inquiry through experience, such as visiting USF’s Star Route Farm, the Thacher Art Gallery, or the Community Garden.
One question I’ll be facing is how to reconcile these two visions. And it’s a question that’s bigger than one course. In her article for this issue, Kimberly Connor writes of how Richard Wilbur’s poem, “The Beautiful Changes,” reminds her to “touch back to wonder.” Beyond the question of USF 101, how do we navigate the economic pressures to professionalize the curriculum, and instead create a university that is financially feasible but also helps us “touch back to wonder”?
These are questions to which I don’t have answers. But in recognizing the Jesuit tradition as one we can build on, I’ve begun to answer the question of why I’m here.
Leigh Meredith is an Assistant Professor in the Rhetoric and Language Department at USF, and the faculty Co-Director of USF 101. She earned her PhD in Communication Studies, specializing in Rhetoric and Public Culture, from Northwestern University. Her research and teaching interests center on the relationship between changing communication technologies, practices of representation, and popular conceptions of identity and subjectivity. More specifically, she focuses on the interface between old and new media, and what that site of convergence reveals about changing ways of reading and relating to others.
