Our world is a dangerous, unforgiving place. In the last five years most countries have experienced economic shocks not seen in many decades. Whole cohorts of youth are facing poor job prospects. Home ownership in the US is at historic lows. Violence disrupts day-to-day life in too many countries. Growing competition for nonrenewable energy sources among countries complicates international affairs. Increasing income inequality across the globe spawns disunity. People are hurting worldwide.
These problems are the challenge of the generation now pursuing their university degrees. What do they need to know to meet these challenges?
As human knowledge in each discipline has evolved, we know more deeply about the inner workings of the human body and mind, complex economies, the arts, literature, mathematics, and all of the sciences. Developments in technology have transformed communication, collaborative work arrangements, and data resources for decision-making.
To solve each of the world’s big problems we need such knowledge, in one way or another. But all the disciplines put together don’t have the solutions by themselves. What many of the solutions require is a selflessness of approach, a concern for the welfare of all, a set of values that that guide the tough tradeoffs that are required.
I’m new at Georgetown, but compared to many other universities, it seems there’s something different about this place. Not the devotion to academic excellence and cutting-edge scholarship and research – that I’ve seen on many campuses. What’s different is an openness to talk about what values underlie action. This is an uncommon culture at a US research university.
And this is where Georgetown graduates can have an edge in the competition for solutions to the world’s problems. Many of these thorny issues require the guidance of values and the genuine ability to take another’s viewpoint. They require a devotion to service to others. The Catholic and Jesuit foundation of Georgetown provides our students the edge.
With its emphasis on inter-faith and inter-group dialogue, Georgetown students have a safe environment to enhance their skills in understanding and serving others very different from themselves. With such understanding Georgetown graduates can tackle these global challenges in ways that effectively use the expanding base of human knowledge.
We have the privilege of being embedded in an environment capable of giving us the wisdom and growth to serve the world better. We all need to take from Georgetown this gift that it offers us.
The world doesn’t have to be a dangerous, unforgiving place.
I am truly enjoying these posts, especially those which place values front and center. In response to this latest post, I would like to share an experience I had teaching in Georgetown’s SFS-Q program in Qatar. The subject was ” effective strategies for good public speaking ” and I quickly discovered that leading my new charges to diversify their viewpoints in debate would be a major challenge. I therefore, for every debate topic, structured the work in the following way : Step One was devoted to examining all the possible meanings of key words in the phraseology of the topic as formulated, a seemingly fastidious task which quickly produced epistemic surprises. Step Two had students ” agreeing ” enthusiastically with the debate statement and looking for all possible arguments to convince a skeptical audience of its validity. Step Three, narurally, had them doing the opposite. The final step consisted of general discussion of the various conceptual paradigms which the process had uncovered and the freedom for each subgroup to eventually draw its own conclusions. For many students, this approach created a dynamic stress which forced them to relinquish their comfort zone and renounce the temptation — which we all share — of binary thinking, which is, as we know, the path which can lead to social deafness, discursive alienation and potentially to violence.