This past weekend my alma mater, Creighton University, welcomed some 900 first year students to its campus in Omaha, Nebraska. First year students arrive a week before upperclassmen and about ten days before term actually begins for what we called Welcome Week. While this week is filled with ice-breakers, name games, community trips to the supermarket and to Ikea, and even our own freshman mixer foam party, it is more importantly a week that begins the process of intentionally forming community. As cliché as it may sound, Creighton sees this notion of community as absolutely essential to its identity as an institution. This is a quality we are severely lacking in the universities of the British Isles.
Here at Queen's, freshers will arrive about a week before term begins and will be greeted by the regular routine of the Clubs and Societies Fair, the Physical Education Centre Fitness week, and the RAG pub crawl. All of these are designed to build community, but something is not quite clicking; the sort of community the university seeks to foster is not actually forming. It's not that any of these activities or the others that the university offer are not good; it's that they're not enough. They're not enough because the university does not see its mission in terms of cultivating community.
At Creighton and any of the twenty-seven other members of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States, phrases like 'community', 'Men and Women for and with Others', and 'Cura Personalis' are repeated like a meditative mantra. But it's not just that these phrases are repeated; it's that they are the raison d'être for these institutions, which include Boston College, Georgetown, and Loyola Chicago. Fundamentally, the role of the university, according to these schools, is to form 'Men and Women for and with Others'. This phrase comes from a speech (http://onlineministries.creighton.edu/CollaborativeMinistry/men-for-others.html) Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J., a former Superior of the Jesuit Order, gave to the Tenth International Congress of Jesuit Alumni of Europe in Valencia, Spain in 1973.
The dual emphasis on being both for others and with others is essential, and warrants a few words of explanation. It is easy to be with others, especially in a city like Belfast or London where we constantly are surrounded by others. But Arrupe's call is for a self-conscious choice to be with others, to recognise their humanness. Only once we are with others, only when we see ourselves in others, can we be for others. Only once we see our shared humanity in others, can we work to increase the dignity of those around us.
How, then, does this concept change the role and the image of the University? Wholly and absolutely. No longer is the University a place simply of learning, separate from accommodation, from the gym and the pitch, and from the pubs and the city. The University plays an integral role in challenging its students to identify with each other and with the broader community in all of these spaces. It challenges us, as undergraduates, postgraduates, researchers, lecturers, and administrators, to rethink our goals and our priorities.
So as we begin to pack up our belongings and move to universities and colleges across these islands, I think increased consciousness about our decision to form community, to be with and for others would serve the entire university community well. To end with the clarion call of Fr. Arrupe, think how different our university experience can be if only each of us decides our 'primary educational objective must be to form men-and-women-for-others'.