"What we teachers do and why we do it"

By Rev. Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J.

Rev. Anthony J. Kuzniewski, S.J., is the recipient of the this year’s Distinguished Teaching Award presented by Holy Cross to a faculty member who demonstrates the College’s commitment to teaching and personalized instruction. The following is Fr. Kuzniewski’s addresses delivered at the fall convocation at which he received the award.

I accept this award with gratitude to the committee and appreciation for all of you. It is a joy to be a member of this faculty, whose distinction in teaching is a matter of reputation and of record. Even so, I have to admit that I have always felt distinguished within this group by the fact that some of my colleagues and students cannot pronounce my name. I realize, of course, that in a world rich in linguistic variety, I do not stand alone. Earlier this summer, I listened to a radio announcer describing the state visit of the president of Poland, Aleksander Kwa?niewski. He concluded the story with this line: "Tomorrow President Bush will be traveling to Michigan with ‘President ‘Kuzniewski.’" Well, not quite; though I enjoyed the unintended compliment, and appreciate the difficulty for Anglophile tongues to come to terms with Slavic consonant clusters. "Father K." has become a name I answer to; I’m old enough to smile at being designated by a single initial, and to appreciate a nickname as a form of acceptance.

Like others who have received this award, I have experienced a summer with moments of concentrated reflection about what we teachers do and why we do it. Notice the "we." The more I have thought about it, the more I realize that I don’t stand here alone. So many people have invested themselves in me by way of instruction, encouragement, and correction that whatever recognition falls my way rightly credits them. Needless to say, part of that group is yourselves—colleagues and friends whose partnership in this enterprise makes every one of us better than we would be if we worked among people who were less dedicated or less good. The rest of those who belong here are not in view. One segment is the long line of Holy Cross Jesuits whose achievement I am bound to salute as the first Jesuit recipient of this award. Their spirit, and their confidence that they could plant a college "in the midst of the Yankees," as they put it, and then keep the enterprise going, makes all of us their beneficiaries. Another segment of the unseen crowd is my students—not all of them have made me better; but many have, through honest criticism and genuine affirmation that have been a real grace. Finally, there are the teachers who taught me how to teach by mentoring me so well that I was able at last to believe in myself as a college professor.

My special trio of undergraduate teachers at Marquette University included a woman who happened to be Protestant, a Catholic layman, and a Jesuit. (This isn’t a weak stab at political correctness; it really worked out that way for me.) Frank Klement came first—I took five classes with him: he enhanced my love for history, used classroom methods that I adopted, and had me deliver a paper at a scholarly meeting during senior year. Father Paul Prucha came next, a Jesuit who has received an honorary degree from Holy Cross. I’d heard that he was good and that he was hard. He lived up to his reputation—meticulous presentations, research assignments with no secondary sources, and in senior year, the challenge to get over my silly fear of languages by doing most of the research in French for his honors seminar. Several years later, I was a grad student torn between a good job offer and thoughts of joining the Jesuits. He was on sabbatical in Cambridge and walked twice with me around Walden Pond while we talked the matter through.

Then there was Barbara Hoyt—Frau Hoyt, my German teacher in senior year. When she walked into the classroom the first day, I thought she was one of the most beautiful women I had ever seen, starting with her great smile. A few classes later, we were practicing our umlauts—the two dots that go over vowels in German to alter the pronunciation. After taking my turn, I looked up from the textbook. She was beaming. "Anton," she said, "I just love your umlaut. You must come to Germany this summer." Who could resist? I took the summer program she organized each year in the Rhine Valley. She promised us that we’d never be the same if we immersed ourselves in another culture. And she was right, though her enthusiasm made all the difference. For several years after graduation, we stayed in touch, especially through her New Year’s Eve party. She had real candles on the Tannenbaum, herring to eat for good luck, and, at midnight, instead of singing Auld Lang Syne, we stood around the tree happily absorbing the "Ode to Joy" from Beethoven’s Ninth. Before I knew it, I was about to become a teaching fellow at Harvard and felt insecure about being on even the bottom rung of so distinguished a faculty. So I turned to Frau Hoyt for advice. After hearing me out, she smiled and said: "Anton, you have something even more important than formal education and lengthy study to bring to your students. You have your Christianity." Her response has stayed in my heart, an invitation to integrity that is as compelling now as it was over 30 years ago.

If it is possible for any of us to teach well, it is partly because we have been well taught—challenged to develop and stretch our minds, and invited to engage our hearts in the process by being true to our values. That certainly was the point the Jesuits’ founder, Ignatius of Loyola, picked up when he attended the University of Paris in the 1530s. Researching his pedagogical insight—and its institutional expression through time—was one of the hardest parts of writing the Holy Cross history. Explaining it to others was even more difficult. When I was writing the preliminary chapter on the Jesuit background of Holy Cross, Lorraine Attreed agreed to offer a critique. She filled the draft with marginal notes that challenged me as a product of Roman Catholic culture to clarify it for others. One comment I particularly remember, asked in oversized writing that suggested her all-too-understandable impatience: "TONY, WHAT IN THE WORLD IS A SULPICIAN?" Her question encapsulates the advantage of using our diversity to enhance our ability to communicate and understand.

The point is, that it’s not enough just to express our gratitude to those upon whose shoulders we stand by repeating what they did. We won’t stand at all on their shoulders at all, nor will we achieve their stature or serve our students well, unless we understand and assert our institutional identity here and now. Teaching excellence includes a commitment to be intentional about our common efforts and clear about our goals. The outcome of the process may well be a "struggled success," to borrow a phrase coined by Father Ciampi to describe the rebuilding of Holy Cross after the fire in 1852—but there’s not much hope of being genuinely helpful to our students, if we avoid the inevitable controversies regarding institutional identity, ways and means.

If you’ll indulge the historian in me, I’ll raise the question of what we might learn from history—our past experience here on the slopes of Pakachoag. In the crystal ball of the past, I can see Holy Cross in the generation between 1930 and 1960. On the surface, all was well: enrollments were encouraging; new buildings were rising at a gratifying pace; discipline and religious practice justified the buzzword that Holy Cross was "The Catholic West Point"; the old curriculum, replete with philosophy, religion, and classics was largely in place; there was the Orange Bowl in 1946, followed shortly by basketball triumphs at the NCAA and NIT; graduates were loyal, and grateful for what they had received. So much of what was going on was good—academically, spiritually, socially, athletically. But there were problems beneath the surface. Administrators worried about the unevenness of academic quality—Economics, for instance, was called the "lumber room" of the College (presumably because so much academic dead wood was lodged there). Students were increasingly resisting the study of classical languages; they gave the lowest ratings to courses in philosophy and religion—the very subjects that were supposed to constitute the heart of the Jesuit, Catholic curriculum. Compulsory daily Mass was falling victim to passive resistance on the part of some students. Many of the brighter applicants were being lost to competing schools. It was difficult to motivate the faculty to engage in serious scholarship; for years, the percentage of faculty with Ph.D.s was stuck below 30 percent. Meanwhile, in 1961, when the Jesuit community reached its peak membership of 105, the proportion of lay faculty members had already risen to 45 percent. Father William Donaghy worried about these trends during his presidency from 1953 to 1960. His successor, Father Raymond Swords, set out to address them because he was impatient with mediocrity and because he found the academic requirements to be too rigid. He thought Holy Cross could do better.

Between about 1965 and 1975, Father Swords and his successor, Father John Brooks, re-fashioned Holy Cross: co–education; the transfer of responsibility to lay trustees; the separate incorporation of the Jesuit community as a charitable enterprise formally linked to the College; the accretion of responsibility and power to the Faculty-Student Assembly; the opening up of the curriculum; hiring persons from outside the Roman Catholic tradition to teach religious studies; working out the meaning of collaboration during a period in which Jesuits were a declining minority; the transfer of responsibility for student life from in loco parentis assumptions to individual responsibility; the resolution of student protests in a reasonably orderly way. Of course, not everybody appreciated the change. The Worcester newspaper could be harshly critical. And despite a survey that showed an approval rating of about 70 percent among the alumni, Father Swords was stung by attacks from unhappy, outspoken graduates. After eight years in office, he told a friend: The opposition has become more and more vocal, to the point where one sometimes wonders whether it is worth undergoing the strain. This pattern may seem familiar. At Holy Cross, where graduates really do care about the school, the discussion can become intense.

In altering Holy Cross, did Father Swords and his collaborators enhance or weaken the character of the school? The answer very much depends on grasping the essentials in Jesuit education—the means and ends set in place over 450 years ago by Ignatius of Loyola. Ignatius led his first Jesuit companions through a discernment process that led them to become the first Roman Catholic religious order to adopt schools as a primary characteristic of their work. These early Jesuits acted with a clarity of purpose that was the fruit of high ideals, practical thinking, and the application of trial and error. For Ignatius, the primary goal was always to help souls; and schools were to be a primary means. He wanted his companions to operate with the conviction that God is laboring now in the world, that schools are a human means of cooperating with that divine initiative, and that persons of good will could be partners in the enterprise. Shortly before he died in 1556, Ignatius put it this way in a letter to Philip II of Spain: Everyday experience shows how difficult it is for those who have grown old in vice and in evil habits to rid themselves of these deep-grained ways of acting and to dedicate themselves to God as new men. We can also see to what a great degree all of Christendom and all of society depend on good education given to youth. Because young people are as impressionable as wax, they can be more easily formed. At the same time there are too few teachers who combine the virtue and learning needed for this task. (cited in Dainville, 200) Virtue and learning: that partnership was the key to authentic pedagogy in the mind of Ignatius. Commenting on this point, historian John O’Malley asserts that the Jesuits tried to influence their students more by their example than by their words. They repeatedly inculcated in one another the importance of loving their students, of knowing them as individuals, of enjoying a respectful familiaritas with them. (O’Malley, 227) Mentoring relationships—serving as role models of a principled and integrated life—lay at the heart of the enterprise. Thus, the academic enterprise was also moral—discovering and developing individual gifts, and assisting students and graduates through example and encouragement to utilize their talents justly, for others, in service of God. But there was more. Ignatius was insistent that the entire Jesuit enterprise should be adapted to places, times, and persons. (Constitutions, Pt. IV, c. 13, n. 2) That presupposed an engagement with the contemporary culture in all its scientific and artistic manifestations, including music, theatre, and architecture. O’Malley calls this involvement with the secular culture a hallmark of Jesuit schools. (O’Malley, 242) Jesuit educators attempted to incorporate both the spiritual and the secular realms of human experience into the educational process. Inevitably, there was a certain tension between an appreciative openness to contemporary culture and the need to challenge it in an authentically prophetic manner.

Then, over several decades, with the best of intentions, the Jesuit educational approach was codified, and published in 1599 as the Ratio Studiorum or Plan of Studies, a highly structured curricular and pedagogical system that was revised somewhat in 1832. In this way, over time, a brilliant educational response to the European world of the late 16th century, acquired an intrinsic authority that was inimical to Ignatius’ spirit of adaptation.

In the United States, the individual who understood the issue most clearly was George Ganss, a Jesuit whose book, St. Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University (first published in 1954), rocked the world of Jesuit education by insisting that the principle of adaptation, and not the designated content of the old Plan of Studies, had to be the rudder that steered the educational enterprise. His dedication page gave away the central thesis: To the American Jesuits—Laboring to Adapt Ignatius’ Vision to the Needs of this Young Nation. Ganss wrote: Universities can be understood aright only when viewed against the background of their contemporary social and cultural environment. Their task is to preserve and transmit the elements of permanent value in the cultural heritage of the past. Yet it is as important for them to discard the obsolete as to add the timely; and they must so discard the obsolete as not to lose with it that which has perennial worth. If they fail to do this trasmitting, discarding, and adding in such a way that they adapt themselves to the emerging needs and interests of … their own day, they will become fossilized and then they will soon decay …. It is to the glory of St. Ignatius that he was just such a leader of vision and initiative in his own day. (Ganss, 115) This vision of adaptation is still a key to our institutional authenticity. It commits us irrevocably to the process of "transmitting, discarding, and adding" at a time when strong issues are stirring a world transformed by 9.11 and a Church troubled with scandal.

It’s axiomatic to remark that we make better choices when we base them on an accurate and realistic sense of who we are and where we are coming from. Personal history teaches all of us that the significant people are those who have presented us with good choices by naming our gifts and challenging us to have the courage of our convictions. We are called to provide that service for our students—to model good habits of mind and heart for them, to take stands for their potential, to live up to the privilege of being engaged with young people who are still "impressionable like wax." But we function also institutionally, as a college. We are colleagues in this endeavor, and our choices about curriculum and standards, programs, and priorities will influence the manner in which our students come to appreciate and utilize their talents and ideals. Sooner or later, if we are doing our job, we will come up bloody-nosed against the challenge of which choices to make for their sake—how Holy Cross can be appropriately engaged with contemporary culture; how to preserve the best of our tradition and let go of the stultifying part, how to integrate the dynamics of faith and reason—in short: how "to help souls" in our times. The task is both noble and gritty: to avoid ossification and the dead hand of the past at one extreme, and to avert a long, slow process of neutralization and secularization at the other. That challenge lies, now as ever, at the heart of Jesuit education; it serves the Catholic Church and the wider world; it animates our Mission Statement; it illuminates the history of our school. It also helps explain the people who once stood in our places, promoted scholarship, mentored students, struggled with adaptation, and engaged the critics because the authenticity of Holy Cross was at stake.

My colleagues, in the name of us all, I accept this award and the privileges and the challenges it carries.

Sources

Ignatius of Loyola, The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus. Edited by George E. Ganss, S.J. St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970.

Dainville, François de, S.J.. "Saint Ignatius and Humanism," in Jesuit Educational Quarterly, 21 (March,1959), 189-208.

Ganss, George E., S.J. Saint Ignatius’ Idea of a Jesuit University. Second edition; Milwaukee: The Marquette University Press, 1956.

Kuzniewski, Anthony J., S.J. Thy Honored Name: A History of the College of the Holy Cross, 1843-1994. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1999.

O’Malley, John W., S.J. The First Jesuits. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.