Sharing Challenges, Treasuring Unique Tools to Address Them

Summer is the time when various meetings of professional associations and gatherings of university administrators occur. It is always refreshing to interact with others working in the same area. It’s useful to be reminded that the puzzles and challenges one faces at their home institution are shared by others in similar roles elsewhere.

Recently, at a gathering of leaders of higher education institutions we quite naturally fell into sharing thoughts about the current political climate affecting universities; the mental health challenges faculty, staff, and students are facing; the lack of tolerance of speech acts of various sorts; the role of social media in harming interpersonal communication among students; and the apparent lack of social cohesion as campuses return from the shock of the pandemic.

The stories shared were familiar and repeated for all the campuses of those in the conversation. Of course, each school had slightly different contexts, but it was clear that macro-social forces were creating new problems at universities and colleges.

At one point, a leader familiar with Jesuit institutions turned and said, “But you have a set of animating values and a language that lets you talk about these things. We don’t have that.” After more talk about their own state university, it became clearer what contrasts they were drawing.

These features of today’s campus are difficult to navigate. While they are arguably more diverse than decades ago, they struggle with building shared senses of community.

The Jesuit notion of the “presupposition” is that understanding and acceptance of an other can be assisted if we by default assume that they are acting in good will. Assume their intentions are positive. Encounter them as if they are honest with their feelings and benign in their intent. Of course, knowing the notion of the presupposition doesn’t make it easy to practice it in everyday life. But it does give one a language to use in addressing potential interpersonal conflict. It does prompt thinking about seeing the world from another perspective.

Many in the meeting commented at the pressures on university leadership at this time. While the opportunities facing universities have never been greater, the diverse stakeholder groups affecting universities have never been more complicated. The Jesuit paired concepts of “magnanimity and humility” seem complete apt at the moment. Of course, leaders need to inspire collective action to achieve the highest ambitions possible, but effective leaders, those in touch with the concerns of opposing groups, need to do so with humility. While there are moral and ethical reasons for this, others observe that these two apparently-opposing attributes were deeply needed during the COVID epidemic. One could easily make the case that they are also perfectly suited to re-establishing a sense of community in this time of teleworking and hybrid work arrangements, a new type of “community in diversity.”

Of course, the Ignatian pedagogical role of reflection in learning is a strength at this time. It can be a tool for all of the above, a vehicle to re-engage with one’s self, to re-integrate all of the stimuli of this noisy time, to separate the trivial from the important, and to separate the true from the rest.

These attributes that Georgetown seeks to nurture in all give us a language to discuss the concerns we face and a set of cognitive and interpersonal tools to achieve our mission. Not all universities have these. We’ve fortunate we do.