(Editor’s Note: This On the Record was originally published in the Sept. 10, 1999, issue of The Maroon.)
Voltaire said,”The best years of my life have been spent in the schools of the Jesuits, and while I was there I have never listened to any teaching but what was good nor seen any conduct but what was exemplary.”
I recently met a Loyola graduate now working downtown in a law firm who echoed this sentiment. I do not know if it was for the same reasons.
And one asks: Is that the purpose of Loyola’s college education – to make these the best years of one’s life? And granted the affirmative, to ask what exactly makes them the best years?
Is it because they were years filled with fun and entertainment? Years without responsibility? Years when one has near-absolute freedom? Years of friendship? Years of academic growth? Years of expansion and deepening one’s values? Years of growing maturity? Years of service to God and our fellow men and women?
Will Loyola be memorable because of the basketball games we watched and cheered? Or because we strengthened our bodies by playing intramural basketball? Will it be because we found a friendly faculty and staff who wore badges saying, “Here to help” – and did so? Or because we took the initiative and learned how to help ourselves? Will Loyola be memorable for providing us with living accommodations that lived up to or bourgeois dreams? Or because we worked with LUCAP to help those who have not had and probably will never have the “American dream?”
Will it be because Loyola has given us courses that challenge us academically and make us grow into persons of wisdom and knowledge, capable of analysis, criticism, and clear and forceful communication? Or as a place where we could get by with a minimum of academic labor and still get good grades? Will it be a place to develop true friendships based upon shared values which may last a lifetime? Or a four-year soap opera of ecstatic liaison? Will it be a period in which our values continue to be or grow to be in accord with those of the Loyola’s mission statement? Or will they become totally relativistic, individual, eudaemonistic?
Some years ago, Joseph Fichter, S.J., surveyed incoming freshman and four years later, outgoing seniors. His conclusion – disputed by some members of the Loyola community – was that the Christian values of the graduates had definitely declined. Let us hope that he was wrong and if not that we are doing a better job today.
In a little ferverino I gave to the incoming faculty this year, I intimated that Loyola seeks to form incoming freshmen into graduates who are educated, informed, committed, goal-oriented, tolerant, grateful, reverent, critical, creative, compassionate, generous and loving. And I probably left out a number of others.
Loyola has the faculty, staff and administration (and not to mention the high-quality student body) to achieve many, perhaps all, of Loyola’s goals. Loyola continues to provide the opportunities for a superb academic education. But Loyola needs to train its students better in oral communication. It needs a debate team more than intercollegiate sports.
Loyola needs to convince more students to immerge themselves in demanding common curriculum courses which communicate a vision of this universe as God’s creation, of this world as God’s history which we navigate, not by amassing material possessions, but by loving and serving each other to God’s greater glory. Loyola needs its Voltaires but with the heart of the Chilean social apostolate the Rev. Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga, S.J.
The best years of our lives are those lived according to values that are taught at Loyola and at that Jesuit college in Lisbon in the 16th century where a student begged his father to refrain from taking the customary revenge on a fellow student who had injured him, pleading that it was “against what I have been taught.”
The Rev. Leo Nicoll, S.J., is an
associate professor in the history
department.
