Interviewer 1: First of all, thank you, president, for taking the time to talk with us today. We wanted to really explore with you a bit, your perceptions in terms of the underlying ideas and how it plays into action of Ignatian Pedagogy. Really, just to get the ball rolling, I know different people define and conceptualize Ignatian Pedagogy in slightly different ways. Just so we're on the same wavelength, if you could just tell us a bit about what you see as the essence of Ignatian Pedagogy for you.
President Paul Fitzgerald: I have to do so. In some ways, the greatest contributions that Jesuits made to education was in the 1600s and most of those things have been picked up and have just become good education around the world. Having an academic calendar, having a sequence of courses, having courses that build upon each other, integrating the humanities and the arts, then grammar, rhetoric, mathematics.
The idea of education as-- Well, Jesuits started with the beginning of the early modern era. As I say, most of our really good ideas have been generalized. I think nowadays when we try to distinguish what's unique and special about Jesuit education, even there we don't have a monopoly on this stuff, but it's an education that has as the horizon of meaning, that ours is about transformative education so that every one of our students, no matter what degree program, they're moving through, they become persons of freedom. They have real inner freedom. They are persons who've found their own inner voice and their voice of truth, their voice of moral courage.
They are people who have been able to move beyond their superficial desires to really own and name their deeper desires. The deeper desires of any human person in any religious tradition or any philosophical stance, but that our deepest desires are for our good. Therefore, building up other people, therefore, peace, and justice, and goodness, and mercy, and truth, all those things that that human beings value. Again, nothing unique about Jesuit education.
Perhaps, these days when higher education in the United States is being commodified, commercialized, and reduced to what Hannah Arendt would call [foreign language], Education that's really just pre-professional training for job skills. Education, which is really very utilitarian and education which in some ways inadvertently aids and abets this cheapening of the public discourse, so everything becomes utilitarian and individualistic.
Whereas Jesuit education is about naming us as a radically inclusive us. When it's not the us of the tribe, it's the us of the human race and so Jesuit education is we want to awaken in our students a sense of great responsibility. If they have been given great gifts and talents, much is expected of them, but the much is not going to be necessarily that they amass the largest fortune. The us, the more, the magis that we hope for them is that they'll find a way that's the most apt, the most holy, the most peaceful, the right way for them to their deep happiness, to their joy and to their success, but they'll be able to define success as a wise person and not as a confused person.
There are some pieces about Jesuit education that are more technical. Those are pieces about intellectual rigor and creative imagination. We want to help students bridge the brain and the heart and their intuitive side, that side that can make a leap of faith, is wonderful. It needs to be nourished, but it also needs to be brought into deep conversation with the rational.
Was it religion without science can lead people to fly airplanes into buildings? Science without religion or faith or some kind of a moral superstructure can lead to just more sophisticated ways of controlling people's minds and manipulating them to do stuff. We really do want the ethical and the intellectual to be in a mutually correcting and corrective conversation.
It's about educating students, again, to find their own inner voice and to find that pathway forward for them that's going to lead them to a life of meaning and a life of generosity. Which then leads to the last big chunk of it, which is a education for civic responsibility and for social engagement and social justice.
1% of 20-year olds on the planet's surface are in college. It's an incredible privilege to be able to get-- Then, USF is like the 1% of the 1%. This is individual attention by high-quality faculty who are here out of love for the mission and share it deeply and so the small classes and the mentoring.
If we're going to give students that level of a quality of education, we want to be intentional that we're graduating people who are going to be change agents for better, more sustainable, more humane social orders. Whether it's in for profit, not for profit worlds.
Interviewer 1: Fantastic. Thank you so much.
Interviewer 2: You started to hint at some of these issues, but we wondered what you see as valuable about Ignatian Pedagogy in 2014, specifically.
President Paul Fitzgerald A Jesuit way of educating people-- I love that word, education, and I issue the word training. Animals are trained, human beings are educated.
Interviewer 1: Except for the cats who seem to train us.
[laughter]
President Paul Fitzgerald Yes, cats have learned how to train us even as we educate them by showing them our weaknesses. I think a big part of Ignatian Pedagogy is experiential learning and so community-engaged learning for example or learning that involves a lab where the students really are experimenting, or a studio where they are performing.
That experiential piece is the more transformative piece because that's where students will find their voice. I love this whole idea of flipped classrooms so that the in-class time, the students are actively engaged in conversation with each other guided by the faculty member, rather than the faculty member lecturing the whole time.
Fortunately, we can capture those lectures and that can be a text that the students can really immerse themselves in. For our international students or students for whom English is a second language or a third or a fifth language, they can go back so they really understand, but then the in-class time can be this marvelously transformative conversation where even the faculty member will allow herself to enter into the conversation and gain insights and grow intellectually.
It's education that's going to lead students to be, not only lifelong learners but lifelong questioners and critics. Students who are going to be comfortable asking the really difficult questions and students who are going to be brave enough to enter into uncomfortable conversations. We just had this Got privilege campaign on campus.
It's interesting that given our demographics right now, it would be a fairly small minority of people on campus who would be able to check every box of privilege on those t-shirts, which is marvelous. Now that people who did end up checking every box. It's not to make them feel bad and not to make them feel guilty, it's to allow them to begin to ask the question of what is white privilege and what is the experience of someone who doesn't have every single one of these privileges?
Interviewer 1: It's almost a reflective prompt.
President Paul Fitzgerald It is, it is a reflective prompt. It only works because over time we've created a safe space. We've created a safe environment for people to ask difficult questions and to venture tentative answers. That safe space is created particularly by faculty.
There's another piece of Ignatian Pedagogy. Again, it's generalized so we don't own this, but we can talk about it explicitly that teaching, mentoring, and guiding students and helping them to learn, is a form of love. It's Agape. It's a disinterested love where your desire as the faculty member is that your student becomes free. They may become free by becoming intelligent and reasonable and imaginative and having courage. Every faculty member knows this, you glow when one of your students just does incredibly well when they really learn and you can see them going to deeper and deeper levels of understanding. That brings us a great sense of joy.
It's funny at a Catholic University you'd think, but here at this Catholic University, there's more academic freedom perhaps than you'd find at a state university, because here the professors are free to profess what it is that they most deeply believe in without making that the litmus test or the moral framework that the students have to fit through to succeed. Again, creating that place where people can bring their own best self to the conversation and to the educational process.
Interviewer 1: Well, thanks so much. I've heard a rumor, I don't know that this is true directly, but I've heard the rumor that you've stated at different times that you thought the location of Jesuit universities was really important. I'm not going to go through all of them, Santa Clara and Fairfield, all this, but just from a realistic perspective working on that notion, what makes being located in San Francisco special for this particular Jesuit university, what's the function of a location in terms of making what we do somehow unique or special?
President Paul Fitzgerald: I forget the quote exactly, but it's something like, Bernard loved the valleys and Benedict the hilltops, Frances the small towns and Ignatius the big cities. Jesuits Tom Lucas, formerly of USF, he has done some great research around this, but Jesuits we've been an urban order from the beginning and we liked cities because that's where everything was happening. That was the place of encounter of people coming from different cultures and different professions.
San Francisco is a world city in every sense of the word. If you think about the demographics of the United States of America generally, we are becoming a minority-majority country. There are big chunks of the country where everyone is white. There are chunks of cities, especially back East, where everyone is black. There is a resegregation of schools happening in the South.
As the federal oversight is being lifted of these schools, cities are Tuscaloosa and others, they're resegregating their public schools. You come to the University of San Francisco and you see the diversity of our students, our faculty, our staff, you see the diversification of our pedagogy. You see the diversification of our curriculum. We are where any good university wants to get to in the future. We're already there now in being able to be inclusively excellent and have a centered diversity where people bring their gifts, the gifts that differ, and to a place where there's common ground, where there's higher ground, where we can really share with each other.
There is no dominant culture on the campus in terms of an ethnic group or religious group. Therefore, people don't feel like they're in an excluded minority there, and people are free to be themselves and they feel supported and welcomed and then challenged to own the best of their tradition and to bring the best of their tradition to share with others and even to borrow them from other people's traditions, they pick and choose a bit what Mexicans call, mestizaje, and mestizaje, Mexico itself is not simply Aztec, Mayan and Spanish mixed together. It's something a new thing came to be with the best of these cultures, and unfortunately an awful lot of pain and suffering and loss, but something good came out of it, which was new.
San Francisco as a city is that. USF as a university is that. We can be much more than the sum of our parts, but what is the common ground? Well, the common ground then comes out of this Jesuit tradition of education. It comes out of an articulation of the dignity and worth of every human person, and the dignity and worth of every human culture where in Catholic language, we would say each person child of God, each culture a place where the Holy Spirit is at work.
The city of San Francisco has still social tensions, class tensions, ethnic tensions, we can be an agent to help the city be its best, but the city does model I think for the country and for the world, it models how much better a civilization is which is inclusive. Then of course the tech industry, that gives our students marvelous internship opportunities and employment opportunities.
The arts scene remains something really vibrant. The habitual questions of social justice that are woven into the political life of the city model for our students, how they might in the future be part of a conversation and they can already begin that on campus. Students are not shy about telling me ways in which the university could be better towards them. [laughs] I'm glad that students would feel like, again, this is a safe enough place for them to tell the president of university ways in which we could be better.
Interviewer 2: Now we're going to switch directions. I know that you're really passionate about your teaching. We wondered have you found that you could recommend or suggest particular practices that would help students develop their capacity for reflection? Our students are so busy and the world is so busy. It's very hard to promote student reflection.
President Paul Fitzgerald: When I was still teaching at Santa Clara, two of the six classes I taught every year was an undergraduate class, which I actually had inherited from Steve Provet when he left full-time teaching and went into administrative work, he handed off a class to me called Faith, Justice, and Poverty. It was on the quarter system, so eight weeks of two hours, three hours, four hours a week at an agency, somewhere in San Jose in direct service to the poor, poverty broadly defined.
Then we read scripture, we read theology, we read spirituality, mostly Judaeo-Christian stuff and at the end we'd read Gandhi and jump to a completely new religious culture, but to see the incredible overlap and the coherence of the whole thing. It was community-based learning, community-engaged learning, and the students over time would allow the texts to suggest ways in which they should understand their experience in the community.
The community would give them questions to ask the text and then the class time would be the way where we could allow that back and forth to be played out in a larger conversation. About week seven or eight into the quarter when the students had really gotten comfortable at this homeless shelter or at this place for a family shelter or an immigrant-serving organization or whatever it was, we do this exercise and I'd hand out a sheet of paper and it had a little text. I said, well, but it's all folded and half, don't look at the text yet.
Now on the folded sheet on the outside, I want you to, okay. Thinking your mind, think of someone at the placement whom you've gotten to know a bit. Okay. Now assign that person in alias and write the alias down on the piece of paper. Now, think a bit about what you know about that person that wouldn't be obvious the first time. Oh, before that was, just write down if that person walked into the room, what would people's first emotional impression and experience be. What would the person's appearance be on a first encounter? Now write down what much more deeply about that person that wouldn't be obvious. Now, write down what you don't know about the person.
Take a minute. We'll just sit with that a minute. Now, unfold the piece of paper and read the text as if you were that person, and now, we'll have a conversation where you are that person having read that text. It was like, the text was usually one of those gospel passages where blessed are the poor in spirit or the poor are entering in while the rich are being cast out. It was one of those texts where if you are an upper-middle-class white person you've somehow managed to turn that around so it's not threatening to you over time and you always thought of it, oh, it's just, but now all of a sudden, if you're looking at it as a veteran, a homeless person with a drug problem and you're reading that text and it's talking about you being in the privileged position to understand what God is doing in the world, the text becomes something very different.
That shifting of place and being a different person, that I think really helps to lead to a much more reflective person because now they're going to begin to say, okay, I don't speak English normally, and everyone else has an accent. I have an accent. I don't have an objective view of reality. I have a point of view. I don't know the truth. I have biases and oftentimes we think, well, of course, everyone understands that.
As a matter of fact, so many people don't, and that's what higher education is really especially about, is helping people to understand that they do have a particular place but we can help them to now sit in several different places and begin to look at reality from different vantage points to gain a more small C, Catholic, understanding of reality that is manifold, but, Manheim Ideology and Utopia, great book. It is social class, social standing really does affect how we view reality and how we read even what we think are normative texts. That kind of an exercise I find is a real high impact. It's a real teaching moment. It's a great learning moment for students.
Interviewer 1: Well, and I can easily imagine that because it seems part of the art of teaching is because you could say what you just said, not describing the whole exercise, but the culmination of that. You could just say, and it's just words. The art is how do you choose, how do you create those mini experiences that are going to be powerful enough to create some sort of shift? Another, go live as a homeless person for a semester, but that's not going to happen for all reasons that we understand, but being able to set it up, so they have that many powerful experience that creates a shift.
I think that's something that-- This is a great example that you've given, but that's something that we always struggle with about how to make it more powerful for our students. It's not just the words. It's how do you create that experience? It's a really wonderful example. We didn't want to take all day with you. That's a key thing, we want to be respectful of your time. What we've tried to do is ask the best questions we could in the moment, but obviously, we might be leaving out something that's important.
We were wondering if you had any other issues, thinking, reflections on Ignatian Pedagogy and its relationship to life at USF that we really haven't in some way addressed already that you think would be important to share.
President Paul Fitzgerald: In the summer of 1989, I lived in Xavier hall and I was doing my masters in divinity degree in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but it was the summer between my first and second year. I came out here. I lived at USF in the Jesuit community and I was working at Peter Klaver, which was an, it is still, but it was a hospice run by Catholic charities for people with AIDS and ARC, AIDS-related Complex and 89. It was early on still. Peter Klaver at the time was the last chance hospice. These were people who'd been rejected by pretty much every other hospice in the city. There are people with active substance abuse problems, a history of homelessness, and some mental health issues.
My job was adult daycare. I did a day programming, recreational programming. I took the guys to fly Shakar and we go swimming and you have the really warm water pools. They felt good. I took a bunch of them to, we'd go to the de Young museum or to go to all kinds of things. One guy, Juan, had a problem with his phone bill. No, this cable TV. We went to this office of this cable TV company, South of market in 1989 a rundown part of town. He got his stuff straightened out and that was about noontime and he said, "Do you want to have lunch?" I said, sure. I can spring for lunch.
He said, "No, no, no, there's a place over here where we can free lunch." So, we're walking along and he's pointing out the dumpster behind this grocery store. They always have dented cans. You can get all kinds of good food there. That church right there, every Tuesday, they have a dinner and this place. He was just like giving me this tour of San Francisco about all of the free stuff that if you were homeless or that you could get and then we go in, we walk into a soup kitchen and we get in line and then we go through the line.
Now I had worked in soup kitchens dishing out the food. I had never walked into a soup kitchen as a client. I could see these young kids, it might've been USF students volunteering behind the line and they're looking at me and they're like, what do you think of him? I know he looks a little sketchy.
[laughter]
I think it's important for our faculty, especially because our faculty are smart, they're dedicated, they're recognized. They have a lot of power. They have a lot of authority. It's good for us once in a while to put ourselves in the position of powerlessness, to put ourselves in the position of vulnerability, to put ourselves in the position of marginalization. Of course, the easiest way for a faculty member to do this is to go to a place of where you don't speak the language well.
Pretty much the only way we can feel poor is if we're marginalized from the conversation, because we don't have the language skills and just to sit in that place of vulnerability for a little while and then to bring that back with you into your teaching. It just refreshes and recharges your compassion battery. [laughs] It refreshes and recharges your hunger to educate students for justice.
Just every once in a while to step back from our position of relative privilege, not to feel guilty, not to feel anything other than a renewed sense of urgency for the education we want to offer so that we can graduate the alumni that we're proud than to send out into the next step of their lives. Education is not preparation for life. It is life, we're already alive, we're already living our lives and they get their degree. They're going to continue to learn going forward. Maybe without as much structure and without as many wisdom figures day-to-day.
We need to continue then, and also just as a community to continue to treat each other not just with respect, but with tenderness and care and what happens in terms of the peer review of teaching or peer mentoring for better teaching. If we share with each other on best insights, if we share with each other our struggles, we're reinforcing the fabric of our community, which we then communicate to our students. So, we give what we have and we give who we are.
Interviewer 2: Thank you. What a perfect place to end.
[laughter]
Just to this spirit of quiet and reflection on how far we've come, it's such a long journey to be a faculty member at a university.
Interviewer 1: Thank you very much for the generosity of your time. This is really wonderful, and this will actually be perfect for our purposes, not just for faculty to listen to in general, but this will be a perfect piece for people to be able to listen to before engaging in a teaching retreat for mid-career faculty seeking renewal and tweaking themselves to do things in a more vigorous or slightly different way. We really, really appreciate your contribution.
President Paul Fitzgerald: Thank you very much.
[00:28:36] [END OF AUDIO]


File name: President Paul Fitzgerald.mp3
1