Where Is Knowing Going?

The Horizons of the Knowing Subject

John C. Haughey, SJ, John C. Haughey

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781589014862
• eBook ISBN: 9781589016217
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Higher Education

Catholic institutions of higher learning are at a crossroads: How can they remain true to their roots while recognizing that many of their administrations, faculties, and student bodies have little connection with the tradition? How can these institutions remain competitive while maintaining a relationship to the Church?

During the past several years Catholic theologian John C. Haughey, SJ, has conducted groundbreaking research on these questions. He has done this in tandem with a team of Catholic scholars from around the United States. Haughey has also conducted numerous workshops with faculty at a dozen Catholic colleges and universities to learn firsthand about their research and teaching aspirations. Those relationships and conversations provide the foundation for this book’s many insights.

In Where Is Knowing Going? Haughey explores what constitutes the Catholic identity of Catholic colleges and universities. Going beyond a doctrinal understanding of Catholic identity to one that engages and is engaged by the intellectual tradition of Catholicism, Haughey does not find that the issue of Catholic identity is adequately dealt with by marketing the distinctive identities of institutions in terms of their founding religious orders or saints. He provides a sure-handed process whereby the pursuits of individual faculty can be better aligned with the formal mission of the institution.

CHAPTER 1
What the Mission Looks Like from Below

I HAVE ALWAYS ENJOYED and benefited from the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. His sensitivity to words—in this case, the word behold—introduces the theme of this chapter. I don’t think I would have noticed this word if Fr. Michael Himes, who teaches theology at Boston College, had not pointed it out to me. And after doing so, he commented that maybe a Catholic education is at its essence a training in beholding. I think this is true also of any education. The poem we were reading is called “Hurrahing in Harvest.”¹ Hopkins wrote it looking down one autumn day on the long expanse of the Clwyd Valley in North Wales from St. Beuno’s, a Jesuit house of study. I have lived in the same house, so the scene was very familiar to me. The occasion of the poem had Hopkins somewhat disconsolate because winter was coming and the delightful Welsh summer was over. He was not looking forward to a winter in North Wales.

But then he begins to become more attentive to what is before him: “… what wind-walks! What lovely behaviour of silk-sack clouds …” Though the leaves have fallen, he begins to appreciate their effect on “the azurous hung hills.” Then he notices “the stooks,” or sheaves of corn and wheat, that were being gathered and piled by the boisterous harvesters in the valley, which extends out all the way to the Irish sea. Hopkins is then struck that “these things, these things were here but the beholder—wanting.” It is this line that has been so fruitful for me. As a beholder, how wanting I have been in what is there to be beheld! If the reader can identify with this, we will proceed.

WHAT I BEHELD

For the last few years I have worked with the faculties of many of our Catholic colleges and universities. In any number of workshops, about twenty-one as of this writing, the topic has been the good that each faculty member is attempting to achieve in his or her work at the school. I learned a few years before that if I had asked them about their research, though that is a major aspect of the good they do, the answer would get more complex, and the simple goodness of their academic intentions and achievements would get lost on me and their colleagues in the workshop. The attention span of listeners is much shorter if the sharings are centered on intellectual endeavors, especially when these endeavors are outside the faculty member’s field.² “The good” is easier to grasp than “the true.”

These workshops have been exercises in beholding the “other.” I will describe one recent workshop so that the reader might be able to get a sense of these kinds of events. I typically first ask the participants to pair up, and one describe to the other the particular good he or she is attempting to do at the school in and through their service, teaching, or research. Then, they reverse the process. When we come back together as a group, each person shares what he or she has heard from the other. Since the specific question the individual has addressed is the good he or she is seeking to accomplish, the listener’s beholding is more attentive and their narrative about what they heard from the other is more engaging. Even when participants know each other, which isn’t often, they learn what few of their everyday colleagues have ever heard about them.

One example of these privileged beholdings follows. This has no pretense of formal research, just what went on in the most recent workshop I conducted with faculty.

There happened to be twelve participants; no symbolism here. I will leave out the name of the university lest it distract the reader with his or her own associations about the university, and also because it was representative of many of the groups I have worked with in eight different colleges and universities. All were invited randomly and were convoked only to learn more about each other and to deepen a sense of their connection to the mission of the university.

Paul, the first of these faculty members, spent time in his early studies at Oxford in a student hostel with devout Muslims, whose fidelity to Islam reawakened him to his own Christian faith. He went on to do doctoral work in Islam and teaches students with the intention not only of informing them, but of forming them with a reverence for “the Muslim other” that they meet on and off campus and whom they are likely to encounter in various situations for the rest of their lives. The good he seeks to do is to make evident to his classes that the more visible world of Islam is only half of the story, and that the inner world of Muslims’ faith can often be precious.

Dorothy’s conversion, if I can call it that, came about from the work she did and saw being done in the Philippines, where she worked in a clinic as a nurse with the indigent sick. Her experience made her passionate about health care, in particular international health care. She now sacrifices both her leisure time and much of her research time to accompany her nursing students on immersion trips to countries in Africa and Latin America. She is deeply disturbed about the great disparities in health care around the world.

Elise has been attracted to dovetailing the life stories of people in prison with those of us, the innocent or at least uncaught, who have not been incarcerated. She does this work as a member of the English department, and through it seeks to show how the prisoners’ humanity is the same as or at least very similar to ours. Between us and them, a connectedness is experienced that would not otherwise happen, had their stories not been known and told in greater depth at her behest.

George’s story is more autobiographical. After a stint in graduate studies in math, he found that his questions were more philosophical than mathematical in nature, so he switched to studies in that field. His initial dissertation topic was “a philosophy of possibility.” Gradually and unexpectedly, this developed into the question of the possibility of theism or of God. The result was a conversion to belief in God and to Christianity. His subsequent writings and courses show this linkage between philosophy and theology. He promotes an interaction between these two bodies of knowledge about which many in each of these fields are indifferent.

Barbara, whose field is nursing, has developed a program that enables forty of her nursing students to work in inner city Catholic schools. Nursing education entails learning skills to manage health and illness, while growing in knowledge about each. She has been inspired to connect her students’ growth in these skills with attention to and personal care of a specific population whose behavior and worldviews are radically different from their own. The nursing students learn to deal with their own nascent or cultural racism, while encountering at times a certain prejudice against them on the part of some of the children in the schools. Since racism is divisive, its alleviation is Barbara’s passion.

Alvaro, who is in the English department, had a very specific perspective on the good he seeks to do through his work: “What am I doing in and with the field of literature, to which I am devoting so much of my life?” This was the question that he had wrestled with in the early stages of his professorial career. His answer was simple and refreshingly succinct: “I seek out the Word in the course of savoring and teaching so many elegant words of the many literary artists of our time and those who have preceded them.”

Just a pause at this point to name what I beheld in these sharings. The good these six people are doing is to link different elements, forming wholes that would otherwise remain disconnected: Muslims and non-Muslims, first- and third-world medical teams, prisoners and the free, philosophy and God, nursing students and the inner city, the words of literature and the Word. I will say more about what I mean by “wholes” in this book. Suffice it to say here that it was not what I was expecting when I launched these workshops, but it is what I found, with few exceptions.

Elizabeth’s interviewer was balking at the assignment. He told us he didn’t want to speak of her like she was a poster that could be described (a point that is well taken), since her distinctiveness was not something he could capture in words. But while he was distancing himself from the task, he actually furthered my agenda for the workshop by narrating the details of her decision to exit academia after the birth of her first child. This was still another angle of the good: the parenting and nurturing of life, in particular that of those most dependent. Now that her family is raised, she is back in academia and pursuing the peculiar good it makes possible.

Dennis, who specializes in foreign languages, goes about the good in a way that is more focused on the efficacy of prayer than is usual in the politically correct agora of modern university life. He begins his classes with a prayer. He is a proponent and devotee of a center on campus that emphasizes the nurturing of prayer for students and faculty on campus. He lets his students know the importance of prayer for both their present and future choices. Dennis’s efforts help students discern through prayer how they will best serve others in their future lives.

JoAnn’s specialty is history, so this matter of memory is in her bones. It speaks to and from another side of the good, that of institutional memory. To know what we are to become as an institution, we must be able to recollect the representative stories of which we are a part. Although the metaphor was not original to her, she is sure that better knowledge of the tracks that were laid out behind us, that brought us to where we are, will continue to guide us. Though the tracks before us are not yet laid, we will not lose our way unless there is amnesia about where we have come from as an institution.

Philip, who specializes in Asian studies, left a prestigious position in a state university because he felt an emptiness at the center of it. He came to this Catholic university hoping that he would find more of an atmosphere of contemplation in action, and apparently has not been disappointed. His scholarly way of going about this is to take the particular, secular matter that is the specific object of his research and splay it out on a larger canvas, one that is more attentive to the transcendent beliefs that guide his own spiritual journey.

Maxine, a language studies expert, had long suffered from the sexism that kept her institution unhealthy as far as gender fairness was concerned. As chair she found herself able to deal with this bias better than as a mere member of her department. Instead of acquiescing to it she forged ahead and broke as many glass ceilings as she could reach. She rose higher than chair with the same result, according to her interviewer, who was independently aware of Maxine’s record at the university. Consequently, it is a much less sexist institution now than it would have been, had she accepted the unwholeness of sexism she experienced in her early career there.

Matthew, an expert in one of biology’s many specializations, has a deeper challenge facing him and his department in this matter of the good than do the other eleven. Money in the form of grants threatens to erode whatever degree of collegiality there is among them. There is increasing competition within the sciences for scarce amounts of funding. Furthermore, there is a noncreative tension between research going in two very different directions—microbiology and cell biology. Matthew seeks to promote, with other members of the department, a research environment focused on the good of the group rather than the individual.

Again, this does not purport to be quantitative or qualitative research in any formal sense. It is an exercise in beholding, provoked by the question: “What is the good you are seeking to accomplish in your academic career?” I continue to behold wholes in these last six sharings similar to the previous six about the good. Wholes begin at home, are abetted by prayer, need to access memory, and are easier to fashion if there is a contemplative spirit within those forging them. Equality of gender is part of what is necessary for a team or an institution to be whole. Competition for money is a most unhelpful ingredient, and can be quite detrimental to a team’s unity.

A THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION

What to make of all this? Granted, these twelve might seem too small a sample from which to cull any conclusions, except that their sharings were similar to those of faculty members at eight other Catholic universities where I have invited participants into the same process. The surprise I got from all of these was how often the question about the good was answered in terms of particular wholes, whether actual or aspirational, that the participants were seeking. I had the sense that there was something significant here, but what was it? Is there a larger pattern that might be operating here, one that is largely unnoticed by educators, Catholic or not, as far as I know? If these wholes—some distinct, some inchoate—are already operative in the school, they should be considered as building blocks for understanding and implementing the mission of the school. Not to notice them leaves something wanting in our beholding. I will focus my reflection on how these wholes might be interpreted.

There is some important work on the meaning of education being done “on the ground” in these colleges and universities. It is operating below the radar of those concerned with Catholic identity, but its implications are important for understanding both that identity and the identity of any institution of higher education, come to think of it.

Wholes do not arrive in a consciousness as such; one has to fashion them. There is an appetite for wholes that is built into human consciousness, and which accompanies its desire to know what is so or could be good. It is an appetite that is never satisfied. Whatever a school’s Catholic identity, if these connections between truth-seeking and whole-making and the ethos of the school aren’t pursued, its Catholic identity will always seem like an add-on, and remain extrinsic to its personnel. I will develop this whole-making drive further in chapter 4.

There are many people who are concerned that Catholic colleges and universities are losing their religious identity. Some parents, some priests, many bishops, some administrators, and some alumni can be counted among the concerned. There are many more for whom the loss of Catholic identity at these schools is not a particularly important issue. The majority of faculty and students could probably be counted in these ranks. But I am not at all sure that the Catholic identity of the Church’s higher education institutions is the right problem to be focused on or the right question to ask. What is? The right problem might be how to understand the particular aspirations of the worker-bees of these institutions, which is how many faculty describe themselves. To approach the problem that way would be to think about Catholic identity differently than has been done in the past. It will have one think differently about Catholicism’s presence or absence in a place. This approach could also be helpful for professional educators and the identity of educational efforts that do not have to deal with the question of Catholic identity.

It is a given that a school has plural disciplines in its curriculum, and that its faculty are developing something distinctive from their experiences, data banks, interests, and judgments. It is a given that each faculty member is playing host to the data for which they presumably have particular competence and responsibility. Their intelligence has been sufficiently trusted to employ them. But a denominationally Catholic school is not merely playing host to these pluralisms through its personnel who are intelligent about the intelligible. The wholes being sought by each of the players warrant closer attention, not to correct them as much as to connect them.

Typically, there are periodic spasms of concern followed by spasmodic efforts to shore up the identity of Catholic schools. While such efforts are admirable, the task would be easier if attention were given to the wholes being formed on the ground in these sites. Unmistakably, there is “the good under construction” going on, as Flannery O’Connor liked to describe it.³ There are in these institutions any number of wholes being made at any given time, and the good can be seen in each of them. These should be recognized, prolonged, deepened, extended, shared, and named. To what end? To at least one end: that what is ungathered might be noticed and gathered, since it is grist for the mill of any effort to name the school’s mission or its Catholic identity.

My own theological reflection is that an ongoing, self-giving action on behalf of the good is inexplicable if God is not its cause. Of ourselves we are morally and intellectually impotent to do the good in a sustained way, though we may be totally unaware of this. What explains why many people—in particular, academics like those described above—persevere and remain dedicated in doing the good and making wholes over many years? Granted, all are recompensed for the good that they do, and derive meaning from it and purpose and salary and maybe even appreciation, but does the accumulation of these benefits sufficiently explain the altruism needed for them to persevere? Granted, too, the experiential side of this perseverance—usually “love of the subject” or “love of my students” or “the thrill of the chase that knowledge incites”—is a further explanation. These sentiments are the most tangible evidence that there is indeed a built-in eros operating in the consciousness of those who continue to seek the good.

There are two theological poverties in some of us that keep us from being aware of how much we miss, from seeing that “these things were here but the beholder—wanting.”⁴ One of these poverties is a lack of insight, not into the good, but into its source. There seems to be an almost universal inability to see that the source of a persevering intention about the good is not self-evident. The conviction that finite good comes from infinite goodness can neither be proven nor argued to, but it has been attested to for centuries. It can be seen more easily in a colleague whose life and work demonstrate such remarkable goodness that one has a sense that this goodness does not originate with the colleague alone. Who among us has not experienced the impact on our lives of embodied good?

At this point I could pursue the theological route to examine the point of origination of the good, or leave that for the moment and go the cognitional route. How are this goodness and these wholes fashioned in one’s intentionality? In the structures of consciousness there must be both the experiences and understandings that ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 What the Mission Looks Like from Below
• 2 A Further Beholding
• 3 Engaging Otherness
• 4 Catholicity: Its Scope and Contents
• 5 The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Part I
• 6 The Catholic Intellectual Tradition: Part II
• 7 An Invitation
• 8 Where Is Knowing Going?
• 9 Worship and the Catholic Identity of the Campus
• 10 Ex corde ecclesiae, Its Strengths and Limitations
• Afterword
• Appendixes
• Bibliography
• Index