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The University News

The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

The Student News Site of Saint Louis University

The University News

Knowledge Touches Whose Lives?

“What is it to be a companion of Jesus today? It is to engage, under the standard of the Cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes. Faith and justice are the focus that identifies in our time what [we] are and do” (General Congregation 32, 1975).

These words were part of the Society of Jesus’ response to the post-Vatican II Church, and they have become the focus of the Jesuits and their educational institutions over the past 30 years. I am grateful to attend a Jesuit institution of higher learning, a place where words like “cross,” “struggle,” “faith” and “justice” are spoken and written and talked about unabashedly; they mean something to us all at Saint Louis University. But I wonder: Do they carry as much weight as we think?

Our University’s motto proudly reads, “Where Knowledge Touches Lives.” Whose lives are we talking about here, and just what kind of knowledge is this?

First, it is not only our lives that are included in this statement. It is easy to read our motto in a narrow way, to contrive it as a relationship between student and knowledge, where it is just our lives being touched by the knowledge the University imparts. However, this motto of the Jesuit university is broader than that, and it should be read and understood to include all human lives: my life, yours, the woman in North St. Louis, unborn lives, the man in SLU Hospital, the Iraqi child, maquila (sweatshop) workers in Guatemala or El Salvador. All lives.

This is a little overwhelming at first. This, then, is where the knowledge part of our motto begins to touch lives and open eyes. The spit and dirt mixed into mud, which Christ uses to open the eyes of the blind, ought to be applied to our eyes here at SLU. Spit and mud: the nit and grit of the world. Reality is the knowledge that we pursue here. Professors communicate their intellectual specialties, making us more aware of the reality of the world surrounding us, locally and globally. However, such a view of this world we inhabit is incomplete.

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Knowledge is not students passively receiving facts, stories and analysis of the world. It must not stop with analyzing, talking and writing (perhaps a fault of intellectual institutions). The creativity, ingenuity and power of the university community must be put at the service of all lives. Our knowledge touches all lives, all of humanity.

The majority of those lives-from here to New Orleans or El Salvador or Iraq-are poor. Our professors, our professionals, our students, if we are all truly “women and men for others,” should live and share the struggles of the poor in solidarity, to the extent that we can, and then direct our intellectual and financial resources to the service of the poor, for whom the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition expresses a special preference throughout our Sacred Scriptures.

As Ignacio EllacurA-a, one of the Jesuits martyred in 1989 in El Salvador, said in a address to one of our sister Jesuit schools, Santa Clara University, in 1982, “The university should be present intellectually where it is needed: to provide science for those without science; to provide skills for those without skills; to be a voice for those without voices; to give intellectual support for those who do not possess the academic qualifications to make their rights legitimate.” This is why Jesuits run 28 universities in the United States and hundreds more around the globe. Jesuit institutions are expected to be forces for change in the world, not just academic ivory towers.

This brings us back to those words we began with: “Cross,” “struggle,” “faith” and “justice”-words that are important but challenging at a place like SLU. To be fair, SLU in many ways lives up to its motto and to EllacurA-a’s vision of a university. You need only look through our brochures or browse our Web site to see all the good things SLU does. However, when an institution engages under the Cross, as agents of change, they will always meet with resistance from unjust systems they seek to change. They may even suffer.

The University of Central America (UCA), where EllacurA-a taught, was bombed 10 times, students were beaten up and even killed, faculty disappeared or were forced to leave the country and, in the end, EllacurA-a was killed for encouraging the university to always be a social force that sided with the poor.

“If the University had not suffered, we would not have performed our duty,” Ellacuria once said. “In a world where injustice reigns, a university that fights for justice must necessarily be persecuted.”

Our University does not suffer for what it publishes, for the projects it engages in, for the students it chooses to admit or for the curriculum and pedagogy it chooses to pursue. Rather, in many cases we students live comfortable lives for four or five years; in other cases, as professors and professionals, we lead comfortable careers for 10, 15, or 20 years.

Are we struggling for justice? I do not suggest some form of institutional masochism; however, in a country and world where there is so much suffering, we need to begin to do some good old-fashioned Ignatian discernment concerning our role in the world as a Jesuit university, a community bound by a commitment to faith, and the commitment to justice that faith entails.

This kind of commitment leads to some revealing questions. Should a Jesuit university in an urban setting like St. Louis, where more than half of the population is African American, make an attempt to reflect at least partially that reality in its enrollment? And if academic excellence is an issue, then why isn’t SLU working in the very community it’s a member of to strengthen elementary and secondary education?

After a century where more than 300 Jesuits were violently martyred in conflicts across the globe, as their faith called them to stand for justice, why does our University still prepare students to fight in and prepare for wars in the Air Force ROTC program? Our University would suffer financially if it asked the United States Air Force to leave campus, because it would still be required to continue providing scholarships for ROTC students who want to stay at SLU.

But what else can we do? How can we continue to be a part of an industrial-military complex that revels in war-making as a means to profit? When did we trade our mission as an institution that touches lives through a faith that does justice, to one that touches lives with death in the form of militarism? Other aspects and departments of the University-more than just ROTC and admissions-need to examine how we as a community live out our Jesuit ideals.

I hope in this Jubilee year of the Society of Jesus that we, a University community, can examine our perceptions of ourselves, act on those examinations and begin to honestly become a place “Where Knowledge Touches Lives.”

Dan Nemes is a senior studying theology and English

[email protected]

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