An anticipated annual production, which involves a lot of careful planning and execution from a dedicated team of staff, is the release of the SCS Dean’s Report. This year’s effort, which covers 2023-2024, sheds an important light throughout the document on the central place of Georgetown’s Jesuit mission and values in how SCS engages in curriculum, partnership development, student life, and service to the world. A quick glance at this year’s article titles makes this connection to mission abundantly clear. As Dean Otter notes in her introduction to this year’s report, mission animates the entire enterprise:
“Our School is rooted in a 500-year-old tradition of Catholic and Jesuit education that compels each and everyone of us to ask tough questions of themselves and of their professions, rethink traditional solutions, and ultimately seek something greater than themselves.”
This year’s report shows how SCS students, faculty, and staff have done these things with an orientation to realizing justice and the common good.
The inspiration of Jesuit mission at SCS comes through several articles in an explicit and intentional way. In “Empowering Veterans from Service to Scholarship,” Miranda Mahmud describes how the example of St. Ignatius, himself a wounded warrior, guides the School’s efforts to meet the needs of military-connected students. We learn in this piece about how military-connected students bring many of the Spirit of Georgetown values to life, including being People for Others and helping realize a Community in Diversity. These students find Georgetown’s emphasis on life-calling, mission, and purpose in academic programs to resonate with their military experience.
Another article in the report, “Georgetown Explores Ethical Uses of Artificial Intelligence,” demonstrates how Jesuit education’s humanistic origins, including a heavy emphasis on ethical reflection, are being integrated into curricula that address the most pressing contemporary challenges presented by machine learning. Lawrence Hardy shows how SCS has embraced artificial intelligence as critical subject matter and has begun offering an array of courses and other learning experiences that challenge SCS students to grapple deeply with the moral and ethical implications of these new technologies.
In “Caring for our Common Home: Advancing Sustainability and Faith-Based Community Development,” I share a few concrete ways that SCS is helping put into practice a distinctly Ignatian urban vision modeled on the ideas of Pope Francis. Through particular efforts by the Master’s in Urban & Regional Planning and Master’s in Real Estate, as well as a volunteer program coordinated by SCS staff, the School is supporting environmentally sustainable approaches to meeting global challenges, like the affordable housing crisis. These novel efforts, which include an academic partnership with area churches to support the development of affordable housing on underutilized land as well as mapping the environmental performance of faith-based organizations’ global real estate, bring to life the value of Care for Our Common Home. SCS is innovatively engaging these pressing issues with programs that are flexibly designed to meet the world’s greatest needs.
There are many more mission-aligned accomplishments in this year’s Dean’s Report to share, but I think you should read them for yourself! I hope this annual publication helps readers better appreciate the intentional care with which the SCS community preserves and animates Georgetown’s Jesuit mission and values.