SCS staff greet admitted students and introduce them to the Spirit of Georgetown
When SCS opened its doors to admitted students in late spring for a series of special events, future Hoyas experienced the distinctiveness of a Georgetown education. Upon entering 640 Massachusetts Avenue, a team of friendly staff welcomed prospective students with signature Hoya hospitality. Some were probably not expecting the nature of their welcome to the downtown campus. Just outside of the main auditorium, staff enthusiastically introduced the “Spirit of Georgetown,” the nine values that Georgetown aspires to animate in its community. These values, grounded in the university’s Jesuit heritage, like People for Others, Cura Personalis, and Community in Diversity, come alive for students, staff, and faculty in unique ways across the university.
Admitted students spin the wheel of Jesuit values!
The SCS staff team, who came together in order to plan
outreach and events that more deeply engage the student community, helped admitted
students appreciate how to make these values their own by posting notes to
publically displayed poster boards. By the end of the night, these boards were
filled with a colorful arrangement of personal testimonies reflecting the
inclusive and invitational way that Georgetown integrates its mission. To spark
the imagination of future students, staff shared their own perspectives on the
meaning of the Jesuit values along with printed statements from the student members
of the Hoya Professional 30, an annual cohort of students selected in recognition
of their outstanding accomplishments inside and outside of the classroom.
SCS students and alumni reflect on their Georgetown experience
Framed as “Start Your Student Story,” the introduction to Georgetown’s distinctive values-based education continued that evening during a panel discussion. Led by Global Hospitality Leadership Faculty Director Dr. Erinn Tucker, students and alumni from across the SCS degree programs reflected on how Georgetown inspired them to pursue holistic personal transformation in the course of study. While individual alumni perspectives reflected the differences of professional discipline and personal experience, the alumni all expressed a similar idea: education at Georgetown SCS is about more than taking classes, earning grades, and growing as a professional. As a Jesuit institution of higher education, Georgetown is committed to purposeful and transformational learning that inspires students to seek justice, pursue the common good, and grow as whole persons attentive to their intellectual, spiritual, and emotional lives. Panelists described how their foundational course in Ethics, professionally-relevant Capstone project, program-organized community gatherings, service projects, and friendships all shaped a deeper experience of professional and continuing education. This well-rounded approach to the student experience was on full display during a joyful and spirited networking reception that followed the panel.
Admitted students enjoy each other’s company at a post-panel reception
All of us at Georgetown are invited to make our Jesuit heritage a meaningful part of our work. So what do the Jesuit values in the Spirit of Georgetown mean to you?
Experts convene for SCS panel discussion: “Global Citizenship in Higher Education”
Earlier this year SCS convened an expert panel to
explore how higher education professionals have a responsibility to promote
global mindedness and prepare future global citizens. Titled “Global
Citizenship in Higher Education,” the panel looked in depth at pressing issues
that impact the ability of universities to effectively extend their mission to
the global community. In particular, turbulent politics, nationalistic
rhetoric, and the tightening of national borders all challenge the promise of
educating students to become global citizens. The panel included global
education leaders from Georgetown, including SCS Dean Dr. Kelly Otter, Dr.
Stephanie Kim, Faculty Director for the Master’s in Higher Education
Administration, and Amol Dani, Vice President and Chief Financial Officer of
Georgetown’s Main Campus. Additional experts, Dr. John Lucas, President and
Chief Executive Officer for International Student Exchange Programs, and Dr.
Alfred Boll, Branch Chief for EducationUSA of the U.S. Department of State, provided
educational perspectives from outside of Georgetown.
The discussion addressed some
of the ways in which encouraging the formation of globally active citizens is a
unique and defining feature of Jesuit educational institutions. Dean Otter
called direct attention to this connection with Jesuit values in her remarks
about how SCS approaches global education. Otter focused on four areas: global
humanity, global society, global economy, and global workforces and the need
for integration of these categories. Otter noted that effectively serving
global education goals requires an awareness and sensitivity to the diversity
of local contexts in which students learn. This awareness, which stems from a Jesuit
worldview, invites educators to be conscious of their own biases, and
inevitably leads to more complexity in the delivery of globally focused
education programs. Otter welcomed the complexity as a responsibility of Jesuit
education: “We need to listen, we need to observe, and we need to be willing to
take on the challenges of those students, those faculty, those communities,
those complex issues in various parts of the world.” SCS has committed to such
locally sensitive global awareness, evident in a range of global programs and in
a student body that is almost 13 percent international, representing approximately
90 countries.
The conversation became truly global in the post-panel reception thanks to this traveling band from Spain
The Jesuits as a global order have articulated a vision of global citizenship that links closely to some of the ideas that emerged in the panel. In a July 2018 meeting in Spain to inaugurate a new international body, the International Association of Jesuit Universities, Jesuit Superior General Arturo Sosa described the Jesuit university as a “source of reconciled life.” Sosa went on to describe global citizenship as a core component of Jesuit education, leading students to greater understanding of human diversity and commitment to the service of others:
Educating people for world citizenship involves recognizing diversity as a constitutive dimension of a full human life. This means experiencing cultural diversity as an opportunity for the enrichment of human beings … [Global citizenship] is one of the constituting dimensions of the individual, which we seek to foment and support during the educational process. It is also necessary in order to lay down the conditions to be able to listen to the call to provide a public service as a personal commitment.
Fr. Arturo Sosa, Superior General of the Jesuits
Sosa reinforced the Jesuits’
centuries-old commitment to global education, which Georgetown manifests in its
own globally-engaged tradition of education. This long-standing commitment now
entertains new challenges in light of the complexities of modern life. In the
midst of a technologically-enabled digital revolution around the world, how do
we remain focused on the local and global mission of Jesuit universities? As
the panel conversation made clear, this question will continue to animate the
work of SCS.
For the inaugural post of Mission in Motion, a blog dedicated to reflections about efforts to animate Jesuit values at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies, Jamie Kralovec, Associate Director for Mission Integration, offers a reflection about his experience on the U.S.-Mexico border through Georgetown’s Magis Kino Immersion.
“I will do anything to get
back to my children.”
Photo of the Georgetown group walking along the Mexican side of the wall across from Nogales, Arizona
Hearing Ariel’s words firsthand forever changed my understanding of the issues surrounding migration on the border between the United States and Mexico. Ariel lived for years in the U.S. without legal documentation, before being apprehended by law enforcement, sentenced to 1.5 years in a federal detention facility, and then deported to Mexico, a country where she has no family or friends. She left behind two children in the U.S. and a career in health care as a Certified Nursing Assistant. Ariel shared her story with me and a group of other Georgetown faculty and staff at Casa Nazareth, a shelter in Nogales, Mexico run by the Kino Border Initiative (KBI) that provides safety, healing, and micro-enterprise opportunities for migrant women. We were in Mexico and southern Arizona in January 2019 through Georgetown’s Magis Kino Border Immersion, an intensive experiential trip with three goals: 1) grow and learn together about the reality of migration issues on the U.S. – Mexico border; 2) consider the implications of this reality for our individual and collective spheres of influence; and 3) reflect together on our roles and responsibilities as faculty and staff at Georgetown relative to the issue of migration.
Each woman at Casa Nazareth
had a unique story, but all have been broken in some way by the immigration
system, some crossing hundreds of miles of treacherous, uninhabitable desert in
the hope of securing a better life. In painful and uncomfortable moments seated
around an intimate circle, I ceased to be a distant and passive observer of a
complicated policy issue. The unpleasant emotions I was feeling during Ariel’s
retelling: sadness, anger, and shame, helped lead me into a deeper, more
personal engagement with the persons and events of the immersion experience. With
resilience and vulnerability, Ariel invited me into an intimate encounter with
her as a person with a story that compels a personal response. As a father of
three young children, I suddenly found myself grappling with the personally unimaginable:
a life separated from my wife and children by a structure that imposes legal
and physical barriers to family unification. This movement: from detached,
rational analysis to growing in reverence and relationship with persons our
society relegates to the margins, embodies our mission at Georgetown as a
Jesuit educational institution committed to social justice. Fr. Greg Boyle,
well-known Jesuit author of Tattoos on
the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, describes the mutuality that happens
in these encounters as kinship:
Soon we imagine, with God, this circle of compassion. Then we imagine no one standing outside of that circle, moving ourselves closer to the margins so that the margins themselves will be erased. We stand there with those whose dignity has been denied.
Facilitated by Georgetown’s Office of Campus Ministry and the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching, and Service, Magis Kino models Jesuit education and its interplay of experience, reflection, and action by asking participants to make a sustained commitment to justice as a result of engaging directly with the issues of migration. This approach to learning only works if groups make room for continuous reflection before, during, and after the experience. Reflection helps us make meaning of our experiences by getting in touch with the deeper sources of our sensations, allowing ourselves “to be challenged to change” in the words of former Jesuit Superior General Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach. KBI’s approach to immersion trips, designed so that participants humanize, accompany, and complicate their experiences, helped spur our group’s deep reflections at the end of each day. In keeping with its commitment to complicate the issues, KBI also introduced us to a diversity of stakeholders, including law enforcement, the court system, and property owners and ranchers along the border.
Fr. Peter Neeley of the Kino Border Initiative sharing “holy relics,” objects left behind by migrants along a trail frequently used by migrants near Arivaca, Arizona
One of the
trip’s most poignant and physically demanding experiences was a two-hour guided
walk of a portion of the migrant trail in Arivaca, Arizona. Jesuit Fr. Peter
Neeley led the hike and encouraged us not to reproduce, but to visualize the
immigrant experience. It was here that Fr. Neeley presented us with goods he has
collected over time left behind by migrants on their arduous journeys.
Referring to these objects as “holy relics,” Neeley invited us to grow in
solidarity and love for migrants by imagining the people who had once held
these objects. The baby bottle for a nursing infant stirred strong emotions and
again, like Ariel‘s story, crashed my internal defensive barriers that deceive
me into believing that migration does not concern me personally. It pulled me
to recognize and affirm the inherent human dignity that I share with the mother
and the child who had passed the trail beneath my feet. I will keep these holy
relics in mind as I continue to discern the most effective ways that I am
called to respond to this experience.
Georgetown faculty and staff eating with parishioners of St. Ferdinand church in Arivaca, Arizona
Pope Francis has encouraged the world to “show some concrete solidarity” with migrants and my immersion experience leads to me to consider ways to express such real solidarity. Four days in Nogales left me with many questions for which I do not pretend to have the answers. I am especially aware after this experience of my own privilege. I will never live on a daily basis with the regular fear and anxiety that migrants carry, or that of our own undocumented students at Georgetown. In spite of this privilege, I cannot proceed without acknowledging that my time in Arizona and Mexico claimed me in a significant way. While there are no perfect solutions to the multi-faceted issues of migration, the complexity does not excuse meaningful action. How might we respond to the needs of migrants and to the social justice implications as individuals and as university community? In the months that follow I will discern this question along with my colleagues at Georgetown. Mindful that individuals are called to respond in their own unique ways, I offer some suggested action steps for anyone interested in humanizing the issue of migration while recognizing its complexity and emphasizing accompaniment of people on their journey:
Support KBI’s critical work of education, humanitarian assistance, and advocacy with a financial donation. The organization especially needs in-kind donations of clothing, toiletries, and home goods.
The Georgetown group of faculty and staff on the Kino Border Immersion with hosts from St. Ferdinand and the Kino Border Initiative
The word Magis, rooted in the Jesuit virtue of magnanimity, invites all of
us involved in educational endeavors at Georgetown to respond to the gifts of
our own lives with gratitude and generosity for others. My brief time on the U.S.
– Mexico border moved me to deeper sensitivity and awareness of the suffering
experienced by migrants. Jesuit education inspires us at Georgetown to use all
of our gifts, including our intellectual inquiry, to engage constructively with
the suffering of persons on the margins. I will continue to discern my response
to Ariel’s sacred story and her invitation to a deeper solidarity.
Please reach out to Jamie at pjk34@georgetown.edu with any questions or reactions to the post.
