First, I want to thank the executive team for meeting in a town hall
format with the faculty and staff. I was
particularly appreciative of the opening prayer and its call for us to think
about life over property, especially at a time like this; not an easy thing to
do. I also appreciate that we are all
concerned about property – meaning compensation and the continued financial
well-being of the campus. Certainly the
questions were focused on them and therefore channeled the conversation in that
direction. But I was struck at the
contrast between the prayer’s calling us to reflect on the marginalized and on
living in a stratified culture long after the need for that has disappeared while, in the meeting proper, we focused on preserving the source of our collective livelihood.
A Jesuit education accomplishes many goals – some of which
are internally contradictory. We are
educating men and women for and with others while we simultaneously elevate
them to being able to be employed in ways that will let them join the upper
middle class (or maintain their privileged position in that class). I fear that those we would elevate are often
saddled with debt that will prevent them from crawling out from a lower class
and instead will plunge them deeper into it.
As a society, we have moved, in my lifetime, from seeing
higher education as a bare bones means of helping society train their future
leaders and investing in training those leaders because that is good for
society, to charging students (generally by putting them deeply in debt) because
of the benefits that they as individuals will reap from that education. And providing cushy seats for them while they
do it. In the process, we have moved
from a society that supports service for others to one that supports
entitlement of the individual because they have “suffered” (in luxury) and thus
deserve the disproportionate income they will one day achieve.
One writer, the gifted novelist Marilynne Robinson, has
posited that this
is ultimately based on a shared experience of scarcity, which she finds
remarkable in the richest nation the world has ever produced. Her thesis, and I agree with it, is that we are
prey to anxieties about survival and therefore lose track of what it means to
embrace the all too brief life that we have been given on this earth. I think this was on ample display in this
town hall – and I think we all shared in the creation of a general experience
of that anxiety.
This COVID-19 thing is a bump in the road. We don’t know how big it is – but it will be
something that we will address. While we
are addressing it, other issues emerge.
Certainly the second health crisis – the crisis of racial and class
inequality and its consequent health (including mental health) sequelae has
exploded into our collective consciousness.
But so has the third issue of the health of the planet. The wisdom of creating climate change and the other consequences of continuing
to be a fossil fuel dependent and blindly hurtling forward let’s consolidate wealth
for the wealthy society we are is becoming clearer (I’m a deeply
invested player in this game, btw – please don’t hear me as being above any of
this).
But the silver lining to all of this – if we don’t spend every single freaking second of our time trying to fix it - is that it gives us
an opportunity to pause. To realize the
brevity of our existence. To evaluate
our values. What do we care about? As a University, as individuals, as spiritual
and religious people, and as a society as a whole, we care about many
internally contradictory things. And
this moment is pregnant with all of those contradictions and difficulties.
So, as we are attending to the things that we are worrying
about and trying to fix them, please also let’s spend some time remembering
that we are being given a big, ugly, difficult and unwanted gift. Melanie Klein, a notoriously cranky but
prescient psychoanalyst once observed that there is nothing more aggressive
that we can do than give someone a gift.
The Universe (God?) has given us a gift.
A complex difficult, multilayered gift. And we are in a relatively privileged
position from which to engage with it – or should be. If we can lift our heads up from all of the
dross – we may be able to recognize that we are being confronted with the kinds
of issues that can shape our souls and our futures. We should be thinking
not just about how to balance the budget (and build in a surplus at these
times? If this isn’t a time to tap into
our rainy day fund, I would hate to see the storm that will empower us to do
that…), but to balance ourselves. To
figure out how to surf on the waves that this storm has produced, using the
board that we have been waxing throughout our lives as a means of conveying not
just ourselves, but each other through these treacherous tides.
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