If a change is as good as a holiday, then I have been on vacation lately, big time. After having made a decision to retire from my role as president of a university, I found myself called back to the role, but in a different city and context. Not as big a change as when I left Australia to return to Canada – exchanging 40-degree heat for a minus 40-degree winter – but different nonetheless. I moved from the prairies back to an ocean setting, settling in Vancouver, at the helm of the two Catholic colleges – St. Mark’s and Corpus Christi – at UBC. Despite having been an academic and administrator in universities for more decades than I want to admit, I continue to be amazed and charmed by the enthusiasm and energy that returns to a campus when students are on site.
This has perhaps been heightened by the sense of loss that COVID imposed on in-person activities. But that is only part of the story. The reality is that universities and colleges – especially smaller institutions – are established primarily to champion quality teaching and community. It stands to reason, therefore, that when the raison d’être of the institution is engaged, everything comes to life. As I attended an initial Senate meeting, the student representative was literally bouncing in her seat in excitement to be participating in this important governing committee. With no disrespect to my academic colleagues the world over, Senates are not the most riveting of places. Unless we remember the critical role of governance and the importance of decision-making to our sizeable communities. This, for the student, was why she was so over-joyed. “I have the chance to make a difference! My opinion matters.”
The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, which imbues the DNA of all our Catholic colleges and universities, reminds us precisely of one important fact: that the pursuit of knowledge and the development of critical thinkers inevitably steers us towards an engagement with our community – certainly with the issues of our day, big and small. I would like to think that it is one reason that so many students join us in initiatives supporting social justice matters.
At a start-of-semester forum with our Fellowship winners, every single award-winning student in the group had not only founded or led a major charity initiative at their Catholic high school, but also were presently engaged in volunteering of some kind. Their stated reason for choosing our colleges over secular institutions was because of our record of marrying quality education with concrete programs making a real difference in the community, in smaller class sizes where their individual contribution could be fully supported.
I am often asked to identify what I feel is the unique character of faith-based institutions, especially at a time when the non-secular world is under such intense attack, and I am always drawn to a couple of key reflections. The Catholic Intellectual Tradition that underpins the very architecture of our learning model, recognizes the importance and the power of each student to make a substantial contribution to our society, and prepares them to make that difference. And it does so recognizing that the tools a student needs to effect this change can only be forged by the marriage of faith and reason.
Archbishop J. Michael Miller, Chancellor of our colleges and Archbishop of Vancouver, pointed out in a powerful homily that Catholic institutions “readily speak about the harmony between faith and reason. Neither is to be sacrificed, one to the other. To do so would be to fall either into religious fundamentalism on the one hand or atheistic rationalism on the other.” He went on to say, “at the colleges the faculty know, and the students come to learn, that there is no solution to any social problem – and their number is numerous – if its religious and ethical dimensions are neglected.”
For some this is sometimes interpreted as meaning our students are not ready for the real world. In fact, the truth is quite the opposite. In The Idea of a University, which is somewhat of a manifesto for Catholic higher education, John Henry Newman noted that a university is a place that fits men and women of the world into the world: “We cannot possibly keep them from plunging into the world, with all its ways and principles and maxims, when their time comes; but we can prepare them against what is inevitable; and it is not the way to learn to swim in troubled waters, never to have gone into them... Today a pupil, tomorrow a member of the great world: today confined to the Lives of the Saints, tomorrow thrown upon Babel.”
This, then, is the great sea change that we should all wish for our students, and for ourselves: that we enter the world, however turbulent, with hope, energy, and a passion for the common good, armed with the very best education possible, and of course, burning enthusiasm.
Dr. Gerry Turcotte is principal of St. Mark’s College and president of Corpus Christi College at UBC.
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