Moral character and the civic mission of American universities: The Catholic,Jesuit vision of justice education

Abstract

The formation of students’ moral character is a critical part of civic engagement programs in US higher education. This is especially evident in Catholic, Jesuit education, which emphasizes pedagogical practices at the intersection of faith and justice. Advances in the fields of moral psychology and civic education, particularly service-learning, further clarify the vision of justice found in both the Jesuit tradition and the emancipatory ideals of American democracy. The influence of the Center for Service and Community Engagement at Saint Louis University, a mid-sized Jesuit institution in the Midwestern United States, signals a way for making this vision a reality through “social projection.”

Keywords

democratic engagement Jesuit education justice moral character social projection

The topography of contemporary higher education in the United States has been shaped by multiple traditions and diverging cultural forces, including the liberal arts tradition originating in ancient Greece and Rome, the research-intensive priorities of German universities emerging in the early 19th century, and the ever-expanding business interests of modern corporate America (Berube and Berube, 2010). The impact of these incongruent forces on US institutions of higher education has generated no small share of upheaval and debate over the purposes of college education (Delbanco, 2014), leading some to question whether the formation of students’ moral character should be a priority at all. As educators and administrators at a Catholic, Jesuit university with a Christian, Gospel-inspired mission to “form men and women for others” (Arrupe, 2004), we rarely question the importance of educating the moral character of our students. Nevertheless, we acknowledge there are other compelling sources, beyond the Christian tradition, that lend support to the ideals of moral education. One of these, at least in the context of the United States, is the civic narrative of American democracy.

The civic learning and community engagement agendas of hundreds of colleges and universities across the country, regardless of an institution’s size, affiliation, or curricular framework (e.g. see the long list of varied schools holding the Carnegie Foundation’s elective classification for Community Engagement), gather much of their inspiration from the moral principles and emancipatory ideals embedded deep in the “American Story.” In what follows, we seek to illustrate just how tightly intertwined civic learning and the formation of students’ moral character really are and to show how much further American institutions could go in strengthening this connection. Although we sketch some part of the ideological backdrop for American education, the bulk of our analysis explores the fields of civic education and the psychology of moral education. The scholarship from each of these areas, we contend, coalesces around a vision of “justice education” (Bergman, 2011) that not only aligns with the Jesuit-inspired mission of the 27 US institutions belonging to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities—including our own, Saint Louis University (SLU)—but also signals important ways to enrich institutional commitments to promoting civic virtue and the common good among the 215,000 students (National Center for Education Statistics, n.d.) enrolled at these schools. We draw particularly on the notion of “social projection” described by Father Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ, a theologian, Jesuit priest, and martyred president of the University of Central America (UCA) in El Salvador (see Gandolfo, 2014: 163–164), as well as the growth and influence of SLU’s Center for Service and Community Engagement (CSCE), to provide practical examples of these commitments.

Ideological context and history

The character formation and moral education priorities of the liberal arts model inherited from European institutions have become, in the American context, part of a broader civic narrative of liberal democracy. The emancipatory principles of freedom and personal agency represented in the liberal arts tradition are often reframed in American institutions as democratic participation and civic engagement. The seeds of this transition are sown in the ideals of the American founding fathers and their beliefs about education. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, argued that a central purpose of American colleges and universities was to ensure that strong democratic values and governance persist.

[N]othing is of more importance to the public weal[th], than to form and train up youth in wisdom and truth. Wise and good [people] are, in my opinion the strength of a state: much more so than riches or arms, which under the management of ignorance and wickedness, often draw on destruction … (Franklin, 1750, in Harkavy and Hartley, 2008: 13)

Franklin’s prescient insight into the significance of social and human capital to bolster good governance was also recognized by outside interests. Alexis de Tocqueville, commenting on the qualities of citizenship that Franklin insisted be fostered in US colleges, observed in 1831 that Americans took a particularly active responsibility for the well-being of their neighbors and communities, at least by comparison to other countries he had experienced (de Tocqueville, 2000).

The sentiments of both de Tocqueville and Franklin are echoed in the Morrill Act of 1862, which established public “land-grant” universities in every state. The Act’s purpose was to:

… endow, support, and maintain at least one college [in each state] where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies … to teach such branches of learning as are relegated to agriculture and the mechanic arts … in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes … (Morrill Act, 1862)

This important piece of federal legislation provided new educational opportunities for a wider spectrum of Americans from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. The form of citizenship that land-grant institutions were designed to promote was rooted in the personal, intellectual, and spiritual development espoused throughout the history of American higher education—but channeled outward, especially in service-oriented scholarship and research. Peters (2015: 44) noted that land-grant colleges were known as “democracy’s colleges” because they “engaged people in public work in everyday places—work that at its best was not only for but also of and by the people.”

The early 20th century brought the evolution of character-based “liberal arts education,” or at least one major strand of it, into what is now known in many American schools as “general education.” By 1946, the Journal of General Education was born, and its inaugural editor Earl McGrath defined general education as “introduc(ing) the student to the moral problems which have perplexed men through the ages and acquaint(ing) him with the solutions they have devised … General education seeks to instill attitudes and understandings which form the essence of good citizenship” (McGrath, 1946: 3). The democratic fabric of American society is woven throughout the curricular elements of US education, even as institutions have changed in other significant ways to meet the diverse needs and interests of their students. Although aspects of general education continue to evolve, Miller’s (1988) comprehensive review has indicated that the spirit of democratic progress and innovation persists: “general education, founded on instrumentalist [American Pragmatist] assumptions, oriented toward existentialism, and based in psychological methods, is concerned with experimentation and problem solving for individual and social action … ” (p. 182).

Underscoring “psychological methods,” as Miller (1988) has, speaks to a need for the social sciences to contribute scholarly guidance in the direction that democratic education is taking in American institutions. While the intertwining of character and citizenship formation has been a remarkable constant throughout the history of American higher education, there have been significant changes in the scholarly discourse about each that, we believe, illuminate a bold moral vision for transforming American universities and colleges. Both character and citizenship have emerged as distinctive areas of scholarly inquiry, particularly within the psychological and educational sciences (Althof and Berkowitz, 2006). Accordingly, we turn our attention in the next section to highlighting some of the critical advances in the study of moral psychology and civic education that support this educational vision—one that intersects with the faith-informed understanding of justice education that is central to the Catholic, Jesuit missions of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities, even if other dimensions of Jesuit schooling diverge from secular models of general education.

Moral psychology and civic virtue

The history of the psychological study of character is dotted with notable high and low points. At the lowest, the very concept of character was treated as an unscientific and misguided way of qualifying human moral behavior. Hartshorne and May’s (1930) seminal work on the relation between character and moral conduct was widely seen, at least in psychological quarters, to debunk the very idea of stable, unified character traits (Power et al., 1989: 127). Their research was generally accepted as demonstrating that young people’s “conduct in any situation is determined more by the circumstances that attend the situation than by any mysterious entity [i.e., character traits] residing in the child” (Hartshorne and May, 1930: 610). Subsequent findings in social psychology with other age groups (e.g. Asch, 1952; Bandura and McDonald, 1963; Milgram, 1963; Mischel, 1968) further supported this conclusion, showing that so-called character traits, especially those identified as moral virtues, proved to be only modest and fleeting predictors of individuals’ actual moral behavior. If these research findings were not convincing, then Lawrence Kohlberg’s influential approach to studying moral reasoning and development left very little appeal for further psychological investigation of character. Kohlberg, a prominent Harvard developmental psychologist, argued that virtue-based accounts of morality fell victim to ethical relativism. Specifically, he claimed that “labeling a set of behaviors displayed by a child with positive or negative trait terms … represents an appeal [only] to particular community conventions … ” (Kohlberg and Mayer, 1972: 479). Kohlberg’s universalist position was in contrast to what he disparagingly characterized as a conventionalist “bag of virtues” approach to morality (Kohlberg, 1971), seemingly striking a death knell for character psychology and education.

The psychology of character, as it happened, was far from dead however, and especially in the last two decades has seen a resurgence of interest among psychologists and educators alike (Lapsley and Narvaez, 2006; Nucci and Narvaez, 2008). At its current high point, character has ascended to become a more holistic way to study morality and is treated as a unifying construct for multiple psychological processes that relate to human moral behavior. With the eclipse of Kohlberg’s narrow emphasis on moral reasoning, psychological investigations of moral character have branched out to diverse areas, resembling John Dewey’s early understanding that “moral science is not something with a separate province. It is physical, biological, and historic knowledge placed in a humane context where it will illuminate and guide … [human] activities” (Dewey, 1922: 296). The study of character, insofar as it has emerged as such a “moral science,” draws from a broad range of sub-domains within psychology, from neuroscience to cultural research, that are in turn situated within a humanistic, integrative framework. Sokol et al. (2010: 583) defined moral character as “the composite of psychological characteristics that serve to promote moral agency,” including biophysical, psychosocial, and sociocultural dimensions of psychological science as a whole (Sokol et al., 2015). Many contemporary contributors to moral psychology (e.g. Berkowitz, 2002; Blasi, 2005; Lapsley and Narvaez, 2006) have recognized that Kohlberg’s original claims about the arbitrariness of virtue were a function of his narrow approach to studying moral cognition. By “psychologizing” character (Blasi, 2005), and adopting a more holistic view (Berkowitz, 2002), the field has the means to show the order, or system of relationships, that both motivate and enable moral conduct (Lerner and Callina, 2014; Sokol et al., 2010).

Character in education

Consider Martin Luther King, Jr’s (1992) well-known claim of “intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” King elaborated that the “most dangerous criminal may be gifted with reason, but with no morals” (1992: 124). This distinction between intelligence and character parallels what some psychology researchers understand as the difference between “performance character,” which emphasizes intra-personal excellence, and “moral character,” which focuses on inter-personal forms of excellence (Lickona and Davidson, 2005). That is, performance character, like intelligence more generally, does not necessarily implicate moral or ethical concerns. A character trait such as honor, for instance, may be equally shared by a band of chivalrous knights and a band of murderous thieves. Performance-related forms of character involve skills and qualities that allow individuals to better regulate their thoughts and actions, exert self-control under challenging conditions, and achieve personal standards of excellence in their conduct (e.g. achieving one’s “personal best” in a running race). Moral character, by contrast, refers to interpersonal ethical imperatives, or social prescriptions, that guide human relationships, establish conditions for fair treatment, and set standards for preserving human dignity and well-being. Moral character is embodied in such virtues as justice and compassion.

Even with such important conceptual distinctions within character research, most social scientists have recognized that character as a whole, just like human life, is fundamentally social. As Fowers (2005: 104) argued:

… virtue is inextricably communal. Humans gain an appreciation of character from others, learn the virtues from others, engage in virtuous activity with others, pursue goods we can only hold in common with others … the context, meaning, import, and recognition of fine actions is profoundly social.

In the field of moral psychology, such a “profoundly social” basis for character development is seeded throughout Jean Piaget’s influential book, The Moral Judgment of the Child (Piaget, 1965 [1932]), a critical touchstone for reinvigorating the psychological study of morality in North America. Although sometimes overlooked, Piaget’s motivation for the book was to counter Emile Durkheim’s (1961 [1925]) views on social conformity and compliance, which Piaget saw as stripping away individuals’ personal autonomy and agency (Sokol and Chandler, 2004; see also Piaget, 1995 [1965]). In Piaget’s more constructivist perspective, he argued that the principle aim of moral education was to lead children to “the reconstruction of knowledge rather than [its] social transmission” (Duveen and Psaltis, 2008: 183). Vidal (1998) has argued that Piaget wrote his critique in a spirit of promoting autonomy, democracy, and freedom, opposing Durkheim’s more autocratic views about conformity and discipline. Reinforcing this “democratic spirit,” Piaget introduced key ideas concerning the social-relational basis for moral autonomy that still shape the study of moral character.

Piaget divided moral development into heteronomous, or other-controlled, and autonomous, or self-controlled, levels or stages. Counter to the cognitivist framework that is usually associated with Piaget (Carpendale, 2000; Sokol and Chandler, 2004), The Moral Judgment of the Child characterized these two moral stages in terms of the main social spheres that children inhabited. For heteronomous morality, Piaget noted the asymmetrical and hierarchical power relations between adult caregivers and children. He illustrated how moral reasoning in such relationships took an absolutistic form—rules mandated by parents seemed inviolable and, from the child’s perspective, required unilateral respect. By contrast, autonomous morality emerged in democratic, or symmetrical, peer relationships involving more balanced forms of reciprocity and bi-lateral respect (Carpendale, 2009; Sokol and Hammond, 2009). In these contexts, children’s understanding about moral rules was adjusted to ease social interactions and construct a greater sense of fairness.

Piaget’s contrast between heteronomous and autonomous social spheres maps onto the tension between traditional (e.g. Wynne and Ryan, 1993) and progressive (e.g. DeVries et al., 2002) approaches to character education. The former focus on hierarchical methods of teaching and socialization (didactic instruction, strict behavioral management), whereas the latter emphasize pedagogies of empowerment and liberation (democratic classrooms, moral dilemma discussions; see Power et al., 1989). In higher education contexts, these differing approaches to teaching and learning are perhaps best known through the influential work of Paulo Freire and his distinction, described in Pedagogy of the Oppressed (2000), of “banking models” and “problem-posing models” of education, respectively. So-called banking educational practices are built around the assumption that teachers hold a wealth of information to be deposited in the empty memory banks of students’ minds. Teaching and learning in this approach resemble indoctrination, the imposing of particular ways of thinking and doing. Problem-posing education, on the other hand, involves balanced communication between students and teachers who are together engaged in critical reflection and action—what Freire called conscientization and praxis—often directed at a deeper understanding of social realities that obscure oppression, including traditional didactic classroom practices. Freire, of course, shared many of Piaget’s constructivist leanings but extended their emancipatory implications by critically analyzing the traditional power dynamics of teacher–student relationships (Brandenberger, 2006). They both believed that a liberating education aims to develop autonomous learners and moral agents who embrace social-relational values of justice and community, civic virtues needed for thriving democracies.

Civic education and service-learning

The attention given to social relationships and power dynamics, seen in both Piaget’s account of moral development and Freire’s analysis of educational contexts, has influenced approaches to civic education and community engagement, especially in the practice of service-learning. Service-learning is typically characterized as an instructional tool which utilizes volunteer activities outside of the classroom to guide students’ understanding of academic concepts (Bringle and Hatcher, 1995). Many recognize the civic value of service-learning and also recommend working to integrate moral character development with the academic components of the experience (Colby et al., 2003; Lerner, 2004; Sokol and Kuebli, 2011; Youniss and Yates, 1997). On the surface, such educational practices intended to shape students’ moral character and instill a habit of serving communities appear to be inherently good. Still, critical approaches (e.g. Mitchell, 2008; Stoecker, 2016) exploring the implicit power dynamics of service-learning relationships—that is, the relations between the server and the served—have shown how power imbalances in hierarchical structures (i.e. “power over” others) and relational asymmetries (e.g. more skilled or competent, more financially stable, more social capital vs. less … ) can inadvertently perpetuate unjust disparities, reinforce negative stereotypes, and disempower others from making positive changes in themselves and their communities.

In the research literature on community-based inquiry and learning, just as within character education, there is a tension between traditional and critical service-learning approaches (Mitchell, 2008). The former claims to remain politically “neutral” and narrowly honed on academic content. The latter, while often no less academically focused, promotes an agenda of social change which potentially disrupts the status quo, often by challenging unequal power structures and unfair distribution of resources. According to Mitchell (2008), critical service-learning encourages students to “see themselves as agents of social change, and use the experience of service to address and respond to injustice in communities” (p. 51). Insofar as service-learning is frequently characterized as a transformational, high-impact practice in higher education (Kuh, 2008), the critical approach extends the potential impact and transformation beyond the individual learner to include others, to a transformed society. Personal and social, or individual and structural, changes can be a powerfully coupled outcome associated with service-learning, especially if students and teachers frame their shared experience of learning as fellow citizens, growing in their social and political engagement to better their communities (Boyte and Mehaffy, 2008). Personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented forms of democratic participation are three of the general citizenship outcomes observed in service-learning research (Westheimer and Kahne, 2004). In the next section, we will focus on justice-oriented citizenship, and especially how Jesuit education aims to promote it by connecting personal and social transformation to the Christian Gospel and explicitly linking spiritual growth to seeking justice in the world (Sokol et al., 2020).

Justice education and the Jesuit tradition

Although historically American education has remained wary of comingling matters of church and state, many Christian schools have met the goals of citizenship education, not by making democracy their sole focus but by emphasizing that God’s love manifests through humanity’s pursuit of justice (Sullivan and Post, 2011). As Laboe and Nass (2012: 2) claimed: “Faith traditions and communities are uniquely positioned to offer insights, experiences, and practices that contribute significantly to critical reflection on society’s values, thus helping to shape and broaden higher education’s search for a ‘core of integrity’ …” Such core integrity in the tradition of Catholic, Jesuit education is often expressed in vocational terms as forming men and women who are committed to building a just and equitable society (Sweetman et al., in press). While this goal has been central to the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, since being founded by Ignatius of Loyola in 1540 (Bergman, 2011), it was explicitly reaffirmed by Jesuit leadership in a landmark General Congregation meeting of 1975, announcing unequivocally that “The mission of the Society of Jesus today is the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement” (General Congregation 32, 1975, in Bergman, 2011: 22). This declaration followed from remarks offered several years earlier by the then-Superior General of the worldwide religious order, Father Pedro Arrupe, SJ, who claimed: “Today our prime educational objective must be to form men-and-women-for-others … men and women completely convinced that love of God which does not issue in justice for others is a farce” (Arrupe, 2004: 173).

This message of God’s love, and particularly its connection to justice, has been amplified by members of the Jesuit order around the globe, many serving in academic contexts confronted by extreme social, political, and economic challenges and disparities. Jesuit education has come to prioritize immersing students in “the gritty reality of this world,” as another former Superior General, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, SJ (1983–2008), once stated, for the purpose of learning “to perceive, think, judge, choose, and act for the rights of others … ” (Kolvenbach, 2008). In this way, the purposes of Jesuit education align closely to what Peters (2015), referencing land-grant universities, understood as being critical to “the democracy’s college tradition.” That is, American educational institutions must stress “public work that addresses gritty, real-world problems in ways that advance not only people’s economic and material needs … but also … their agency as citizens” (Peters, 2015: 45). Jesuit-inspired educators would add to this description that such commitment to social responsibility, justice, and democratic participation also becomes an engine for spiritual growth, or as the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States (2020: 9) has remarked: “we try to find God in all things—including politics.”

Personal and societal transformation are at the heart of Jesuit-inspired education. Civic engagement and political participation begin from the foundation of recognizing the inherent dignity of all human beings, each of whom is created in God’s image (Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States, 2020). Justice, from this perspective, follows from Catholic Social Teaching (Himes, 2005) as a process—arising from both individual and collective actions—that bring humanity closer to experiencing such God-given dignity. Importantly, this includes the shared responsibility, expressed very early in Catholic writings by St Augustine, of “providing material, social, cultural, and moral conditions which are needed to bring [all people] to full development” (Clark, 1963: 88; see also Sokol et al., 2020). Service-learning and community service, curricular and cocurricular staples at Jesuit schools, create these “moral conditions” for flourishing. In doing so, they are important vehicles by which moral and civic education are cultivated, often by creating authentic moments of “encounter,” as Pope Francis would say (Allen, 2013), between students and marginalized individuals. Freire also advocated for an education in solidarity that embeds students in community with the oppressed and fosters individual relationships that recognize and promote human dignity. As Gandolfo (2008) noted, Freire decried the fact that “the university tends to form us at a distance from reality. The concepts we study in the university can work to amputate us from the concrete reality [the faculty] are supposedly referring to” (p. 22).

Father Arrupe, SJ, who is credited with reinvigorating the Jesuit order’s commitment to solidarity and accompaniment with the poor and marginalized, was convinced that personal change was necessary to sustain social change, and he connected the two accordingly. He understood collegiate community service as transforming, at the individual, micro-level, “those attitudes and habits which beget injustice and foster the structures of oppression” (Sokol et al., 2020: 47). Arrupe also saw a direct connection between individual personal failings, or sin, and the “structures of this world—our customs; our social, economic, and political systems; our commercial relations; in general, the institutions we have created for ourselves … [which] have injustice built into them … [as] the consequences of our sins throughout history” (Arrupe, 2004).

Inspired by Arrupe, other Jesuit educational leaders have argued that macro-level, structural change can and should be advanced even more directly by universities—not just indirectly, via the graduation of transformed individuals who fight for the marginalized. Perhaps the most outspoken and influential was Father Ignacio Ellacuría, SJ, a theologian and president of the UCA in El Salvador. Ellacuría was one of six Jesuit scholars brutally murdered in San Salvador in 1989 by an elite squad of the Salvadoran military (Agren, 2020) for advancing the call for structural societal change in favor of those historically oppressed. The UCA Jesuits were slain, as generally acknowledged in academic circles, “because of the role they played as intellectuals, researchers, writers, and teachers in expressing their solidarity with the poor” (Hassett and Lacey, 1991: 1). They were scholars who applied their knowledge to the social, political, and economic issues that plagued El Salvador and whose critical voices challenged the oppressive social order of the country, including the government. In addition to Ellacuría, another Jesuit scholar among those who were murdered was Ignacio Martín-Baró, a psychologist credited with launching the “liberation psychology” movement (Montero and Sonn, 2009). Martín-Baró’s views, much like Ellacuría’s, drew together emancipatory themes that were growing in momentum across various quadrants of Latin American scholarship at the time, such as those offered by Fals Borda (1969) in sociology, Dussel (1985) in philosophy, Gutiérrez (1988) in theology, and especially Paulo Freire (2000) in education.

Father Ellacuría consolidated many of these views from his Latin American counterparts in his educational vision and leadership as the president of the UCA, creating a model for other Jesuit institutions of higher education to follow in their collective mission to promote justice. His notion of “social projection” (Gandolfo, 2014: 163–164) was a critical part of this model. For Ellacuría, social projection proposed a framework of institutional purpose and practice “concerned with the social reality—precisely because a university is inescapably a social force: it must transform and enlighten the society in which it lives” (Ellacuría, 1982). Gandolfo (2014) described Ellacuría’s concept of social projection as:

mov[ing] in two directions at once: (a) the university’s recognition of its need and responsibility to insert itself (its knowledge, its research, its teaching) effectively into society; and (b) the university’s recognition of its need and responsibility to allow the needs of society to penetrate and permeate the university, determining its curriculum and research agendas … Social projection makes explicit the university’s commitment to respond to the real needs of the socio-historical location within which it exists (p. 163).

In the traditionally understood “three-legged stool” of university faculty responsibilities—teaching, research, and service—service is nearly always a distant third, valued the least and far less influential on institutional direction than teaching or research. Likening social projection to service, Ellacuría called for a recalibrated relationship among the stool’s legs for a reconstituted institutional purpose. “Social projection … is not something apart from the [teaching and research]. It presupposes teaching as its basis of support; likewise, it presupposes research as the fundamental illuminator of its task. But [social projection] becomes the regulator of these” (Gandolfo, 2014: 164). Dean Brackley, a Jesuit scholar who voluntarily left Fordham University to substitute for one of the slain Jesuits, tied social projection to Ex Corde Ecclesiae, an apostolic constitution of the Roman Catholic Church intended to guide the mission and identity of Catholic higher education (Brackley, 2006). Ex Corde explicitly states that “the promotion of justice for all” should drive university research activity to uncover the “roots and causes” and means for overcoming injustice (see also Brandenberger, 2020: 8–10).

The UCA that Ellacuría led—populated with leaders and faculty fundamentally committed to social projection—embodied his moral vision from the top-down and throughout the institution. Reading, as it were, the “sign of the times” (John XXIII, 1961), Ellacuría and his Jesuit colleagues were greatly influenced by the intersection of scholarly interests, teachings of the Roman Catholic faith, and the broader social upheaval of Latin American communities (Burke, 2000). Ellacuría’s vision also drew from the classic Aristotelian notion of praxis, but elevated the urgency of seeking a “unity of theory and practice” (Montero et al., 2017: 153) in his university’s commitment to justice. Given the complexities, competing priorities, and differing social contexts of many American institutions, a consistent organizational structure and commitment like the kind of praxis that Ellacuría labored to create through his leadership at the UCA is not likely to develop (Gandolfo, 2014), or at least not in the same way, in the United States.

Still, at the heart—and often at the start—of any such institution-wide commitment to social projection are smaller scale programs, centers, and institutes within the university. From these, a recalibration of the relationships among the “legs of the stool” can begin to transform an entire institution. At SLU—a Catholic, Jesuit university founded in 1818 that today serves nearly 13,000 graduate and undergraduate students in St Louis, Missouri—the seeds of recalibration are being sown. Pockets of cocurricular programming and outreach work are conducted in various clinics throughout SLU’s 12 colleges, but two related initiatives embodying SLU’s incarnation of social projection illustrate how they can extend their influence institution-wide and serve as a model for other schools.

Social projection in practice

The CSCE was created in 2009 as SLU’s permanent expression of programming originally funded by a Lilly Endowment Program for the Theological Exploration of Vocation grant. The CSCE brings together students, faculty, staff, and community partners through service, community-based learning, and research (Sweetman et al., in press). Beyond those formally defined boundaries, though, the CSCE has become an influential force for building momentum behind related embodiments of social projection across campus. One example of such momentum is the contribution made by the CSCE to shape the Cura Personalis and Reflection-in-Action requirements of SLU’s newly adopted university-wide “core,” or general education curriculum, which officially launches for all entering undergraduates in Fall 2022 (UUCC, 2020). Although the Cura Personalis and Reflection-in-Action requirements represent signature elements of Jesuit education overall (Geger, 2014; Nowacek and Mountin, 2012), in the 200-plus years of SLU’s existence these curricular elements have never been formalized expectations and systematized across the institution (indeed, since at least 1858, a consistent set of university-wide general educational requirements, as a whole, had not existed at SLU). These new curricular elements and the CSCE are addressed below, as we document in more concrete ways how civic and moral education coalesce and strengthen each other and, in turn, support students’ learning at the intersection of faith and justice.

Center for Service and Community Engagement

SLU created the CSCE to forge stronger and more effective learning partnerships and service opportunities between the university and the communities that surround it. The CSCE’s programmatic goals have evolved over time to challenge students to imagine and experience their community involvement in increasingly robust and deeply personal ways, including as a catalyst for spiritual meaning-making and growth (Sokol and Marle, 2019). At SLU, like many other Jesuit schools, this has meant pushing students along a trajectory that typically begins from a relatively impersonal place of charitable giving, or philanthropy. Common forms of SLU student philanthropic activity include such events as Relay-For-Life, Dance Marathon, and the Annual School Supply Drive. These activities focus on providing direct financial or in-kind support for organizations in the St Louis community and beyond. But as important as fundraising efforts are for sustaining the financial reserves of community organizations, student-driven philanthropy tends to be primarily transactional, and typically does not bring students into deeper personal interaction with the people they are serving, nor promote an authentic experience of solidarity.

To have deeper contact—or that “personal encounter” that Pope Francis has framed as a spiritual connection—requires encouraging students to move beyond philanthropy to more community-based forms of participation (see Figure 1). One popular community activity among SLU students involves singular, or “one-off,” volunteer events that usually manifest as a large “service day.” At least at SLU, such volunteering activities have involved hundreds of students, faculty, and staff engaged in multiple projects around the St Louis area. “Make-A-Difference-Day,” a 20-year SLU tradition that recently ended, was a prime example of simple volunteerism on a large scale: thousands of students engaged in a set of specific projects on a specific day, meeting specific community partners’ needs. While the CSCE encouraged students to continue in longer term volunteer experiences, and grow more involved with a particular community group, most volunteers at these one-off events have not contributed their time and skills in more sustained ways.

The CSCE aims to bring the majority of SLU students to a place well beyond one-off instances of volunteering and into consistent, regular engagement with an ongoing community partner over the course of their collegiate career. Accordingly, standing at the other end of the trajectory from philanthropy is a point of “true service” and what Father Kolvenbach, SJ, has called a “well-educated solidarity” (Kolvenbach, 2008: 155). Tutoring youth in an after-school program, making dinner once a week in a homeless shelter, or assisting medical professionals at a health clinic are instances of true service. That is, truly service-minded students are less focused on completing a short-term, specific task (as with volunteerism) and more invested in developing lasting and supportive relationships with people and communities.

With this programmatic emphasis on directing students’ activities toward those that increasingly resembled true service, the CSCE has also seen a subsequent shift in students’ learning and educational objectives. In collaboration with the University’s Office of Institutional Research, the CSCE conducted a series of interviews with undergraduates that were used to create a typology of student service profiles (Saint Louis University, Office of Institutional Research, 2012). We learned that SLU students fell into one of three categories, which appeared to be developmentally linked: (1) service-doers, (2) service-learners, and (3) service-transformers. The “doers,” generally speaking, had a shallow view of their service experiences. They typically volunteered for either external reward or accolade. Notably, service-doers mentioned philanthropic activities and one-off volunteer events as social experiences that reinforced their friendships. The “learners,” by contrast, gathered significant meaning from their service activities, and they often linked this meaning to bigger ideas from their courses, cocurricular experiences, and developing spiritual lives. Service became a window onto the “gritty reality” of the world, opening their eyes to serious issues of social concern, shaping their values, and motivating them to deeper commitment and action. Or, to cite again former Superior General, Father Kolvenbach, SJ (2008): “When the heart is touched by direct experience, the mind may be challenged to change.” Finally, service “transformers” characterized the students, usually the most senior, who had committed to particular vocational pathways as a direct result of sustained community-based involvement. These students typically expressed a clear vision, or “calling” (Sweetman et al., in press), of the kind of futures they planned to pursue in which service-oriented values were deeply integrated into their lifestyles. In many ways, these young people chose a path of “service living”—their identities as individuals were utterly transformed in and through service, so much so that they had difficulty calling their actions service at all: it was simply who they were as people and the lives they were living (Bergman, 2002).

Inspired by seeing such transformation among SLU students, the CSCE has broadened its scope of programming to include not just acts of charity (philanthropy or volunteerism) but also acts of justice that encourage students to challenge the social and economic causes of inequality and poverty in their communities. Specifically, the CSCE has added staffing that supports students in organizing forms of political advocacy and social action. This shift was, in part, influenced by Catholic Social Teaching (United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2012), showing how charity and justice are complementary frameworks for merciful, loving action. In the words of Pope Francis (2013), addressing the Jesuit Refugee Service:

It is not enough to offer someone a sandwich unless it is accompanied by the possibility of learning how to stand on one’s own two feet. Charity that leaves the poor person as he is, is not sufficient. True mercy … demands justice, it demands that the poor find the way to be poor no longer. It asks … the Church, us … to ensure that no one ever again stand in need of a soup-kitchen, of makeshift-lodgings, of a service of legal assistance in order to have his legitimate right recognized to live and to work, to be fully a person.

The CSCE now regularly engages students in social action training, legislative advocacy efforts via letter-writing and call-ins, and small group work that examines policy related to reform in the criminal justice system, the environment, immigration, and education (dubbed “Policy Pods”).

Figure 1. Programmatic framework for CSCE activities

Cura Personalis and Reflection-in-Action

The CSCE’s community engagement efforts have permeated most areas of campus. In the 2018–2019 academic year, over 80% of the student body engaged in some form of service during the year (CSCE, 2019). In addition, civic participation has increased tremendously, with midterm voting rates of students on campus increasing from just 18% in 2014 to over 43% in 2018 (National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement, 2019). And while this commitment to community engagement has certainly been realized in multiple academic units on campus through service-learning and community-based research, the design of the new university-wide core curriculum also points to the CSCE’s institutional impact.

The CSCE staff and other community-engaged scholars on campus helped ensure the Core would evidence fidelity to the intertwined ideals of Jesuit education: moral character development and engaged citizenship. In its final, approved version, the CSCE’s programmatic fingerprints on the Core have been unmistakable, especially with the new Cura Personalis course sequence and the Reflection-in-Action attribute.

Cura Personalis I, II, III

Cura Personalis—a Latin phrase for “care of the whole person”—is the name of a three-requirement sequence focused on students’ holistic development. No other US Jesuit university, at least at this time, offers a required curricular equivalent through a similar set of courses and formational experiences.

Cura Personalis I, or “Self in Community,” asks students to “explore fundamental questions of identity, history, and place” and reflect on how being situated in their particular communities—such as urban, midtown St Louis—impacts and becomes part of who they are (UUCC, 2020: 6).

Cura Personalis II, or “Self in Contemplation,” guides students in structured processes of vocational reflection and discernment informed by the Ignatian tradition and our shared call to foster justice in our personal and professional lives.

Cura Personalis III, or “Self in the World,” directs students to turn their focus outward to their communities to address “how their skills, competencies, and knowledge transfer to professional, personal, and/or civic vocation(s)” (UUCC, 2020: 7).

Reflection-in-Action

The Core’s Reflection-in-Action attribute is an experiential component via which students engage in meaningful learning opportunities beyond the walls of the University and reflect on how their community engagement enhances their understanding of acting, in the Jesuit tradition, “with-and-for-others” (UUCC, 2020: 11).

These elements of SLU’s new Core complement other courses distributed across a range of scholarly disciplines, including those fulfilling a requirement in Dignity, Ethics, and a Just Society which challenges students to “apply concepts of human dignity, well-being, equity, and justice to an analysis of existing social systems” (UUCC, 2020: 11). While it remains to be seen how these newly formalized curricular components will impact students’ educational experience, having these signature elements of the Jesuit tradition now systematically embedded in the design of the Core helps ensure that justice education and its spirit of personal and social transformation are preserved well into SLU’s future.

Conclusion

Ellacuría’s vision of social projection for higher education—rooted in the development of moral character that manifests in civic engagement and social action—may be overly aspirational for US institutions to realize, at least as the UCA proceeded in a top-to-bottom way. Nevertheless, it is very possible that small but strong programs and centers committed to those ideals—seeded in US colleges and universities—will become catalysts for broader scale institutional change over time. The CSCE at SLU is a concrete example of how the seeds of Jesuit-inspired, justice education can grow and transform structures within higher education from the bottom-up. The moral motivation to form “men-and-women-for-others” in conjunction with the civic narrative of democracy proves to be a powerful force for transformation of educational institutions and their relationship with society. Social projection could very well become the new “moral act” of the next era of civic education in the United States, at least if Jesuit institutions like SLU continue to shape the American higher education landscape.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Bryan W Sokol

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