Monday, September 19, 2016

Bernie's Blog Week 4: Fordham Futures: Jesuit Education

"Jesuit education unfolds against the backdrop of what Jesuits call cura personalis - a care for the individual person and are for the whole person. Within this context of reverential love and concern, students are challenged. Challenged, they awaken to their real potential. Awakened, they are transformed. Transformed they are empowered. Empowered, they emerge from the experience on campus as recognizable Jesuit graduates: they are men and women of competence, conscience, compassion, and commitment to the cause of the human family."
President Joseph J. McShane S.J.
Inaugural Address October 2003

      Father McShane knows that at the heart of your awakening and transformation is what you find in your studies and the care that you receive from your teachers. You learn with your hearts and minds that life is a gift filled with meaning and value that needs to be both cherished and protected.
      Experience lives at the epicenter of a Jesuit education, where students are encouraged to embrace the world with a restless curiosity, which values the importance that experience play in the life of the heart and mind. As a Jesuit university, Fordham believes that education is equal parts action and reflection, theory and practice, where students are challenged to balance their subjective experience with the ever-changing objective realities of the world around them. Students are encourages to balance their careers through a lifelong pursuit for spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and physical well-being.
      Jesuit education is focused on the kind of thinking and feeling that inspires critical analysis, cognitive curiosity, and eloquent presentation. An educational approach that brings together academic learning and professional life where every student's experience is celebrated in the convergence of ideas and practices from a wide-range of social and physical sciences. Jesuit education seeks to construct an academic framework which allows students to develop intellectual passions, probing questions, and personal interests that will last them a lifetime.
      Fordham students are reminded that the wisdom in the core curriculum that they study is in search of a difference that leads to a diversity of thought, time, and place. The core is designed to create new intellectual vistas and new ways of 'knowing' within the academic disciplines, as well as, the many connections that exist between and among the disciplines.
      Jesuit education creates a learning context designed to nurture a love of learning that better prepares students for the uncertainties and ambiguities that their futures hold. As students enhance and expand their academic horizons they identify, analyze, synthesize, and bring together the wisdom and practice of the ancient arts of listening, thinking, speaking, writing, reading, reflecting, measuring, calculating, estimating, and dreaming.
      The heart and genesis of Jesuit education finds its place in The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius Loyola, that describes his personal journey toward personal and spiritual awareness. Ignatius took note not only of what he learned, he also recorded the reflective practices that led him to those insights. He distilled the most effective of these practices into what might be called the first self-awareness book. Self-awareness not by reading how someone else achieved it but through focused reflection on one's own experience.
      The Exercises were designed to help individuals choose or confirm a life direction. Loyola called them Spiritual Exercises for a reason - they were to be done, not rules to be read or studied: "For as just as taking a walk, traveling on foot, and running are physical exercises, so is the name of spiritual exercises given to any means of preparation and disposing our soul to rid itself of all its disordered affections."
      Ironically, a former Jesuit, Chris Lowney provides Fordham students with a twenty-first view and application of Ignatius' wisdom in his 2003 text, Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company that Changed the World. Lowney believes that Jesuit education's enduring success rests upon four core leadership principles: Self-Awareness, Ingenuity, Love, and Heroism. These four unique values serve as both form and function of a life-long journey into the essence of leadership in the 21st century:

  • Self-Awareness: Leaders thrive by understanding who they are and what they value, by becoming aware of unhealthy blind spots or weaknesses that can derail them, and by cultivating the habit of continuous self-reflection and learning.
  • Ingenuity: Leaders make themselves and others comfortable in a changing world. They eagerly explore new ideas, approaches,and cultures rather than shrink defensively from what lurks around life's next corner.
  • Love: Leaders face the world with a confident, healthy sense of themselves as endowed with talent, dignity, and potential to lead. They find exactly these same attributes in others and passionately commit to honoring and unlocking the potential they find in themselves and in others. They create environments bound and energized by loyalty, affection, and mutual support.
  • Heroism: Leaders imagine an inspiring future and strive to shape it rather than passively watching the future happen around them. Heroes extract gold from the opportunities at hand rather than waiting for the golden opportunities to be hand to them.

      Jesuit education brings together the elements of a leader's life as you figure out what you are good at, what you stand for, and what you want in life. When you selected Fordham you accepted the challenge to lead, a leader that understands that her or his values and style of work must form an integrated, self-reinforcing whole. Your work and life values of self-awareness, ingenuity, love, and heroism reinforce one another in a virtuous circle: better self-awareness made for greater ingenuity. Ingenuity driven Jesuits embraced change, and they would have drifted aimlessly without anchoring self-awareness.
      Chris Lowney's vision of Jesuit leadership examines leadership from four leadership distinctions:

  •  We're all leaders, and we're leading all the time.
  •  Leadership springs from within.
  • Leadership is not an act. It is a way of living.
  • We never complete the task of becoming a leader. It's an ongoing process.

No comments:

Post a Comment