Hello Friends! As we all work on wrapping up our papers, I wanted to share a couple of resources I came across that do a good job, I believe, in articulating both an example, as well as some of the foundational values, that could inform engagement in Catholic Higher education.
The first piece (found here and attached below) is a great essay about the University of Central America (UCA). The UCA was one of the most elite universities in Central America in the 1960s and 1970s, and many refer to it as a sort of “patron saint” of engagement in Catholic higher education, due to the prophetic stance its leaders took in re-orienting the university’s research and teaching toward addressing issues of structural poverty and oppression during the Salvadoran civil war. (The leaders of the university were famously murdered for their work by US-supported paramilitaries in 1989).
The second piece (found here and attached below) is a more philosophical/theological essay written by one of the well known theologians of the UCA, Job Sobrino. (Sobrino was out of the country when the assassinations took place, and has continued work at the UCA since).
Finally (here and attached below) is a piece that traces some of the thought of Ignacio Ellacuria, the president of the UCA, before his murder. I thought this passage below does a good job summarizing Ellacuria’s vision of the UCA’s shift toward becoming a “different” university.
By “different,” Ellacuria intends a university that “by its very structure and proper role as a university is actually committed to opposing an unjust society and building a new one” (DKU 177, emphasis added). The criteria we should use for measuring the “ultimate significance” of a university, and “what it is in reality,” is “its impact on the historic reality in which it exists and which it serves” (DKU 178). Elsewhere, Ellacuria asks bluntly, “Should the university as a university be formally and explicitly devoted to defending the fundamental human rights of the poor majority, or is that a task which at best should occupy it tangentially and secondarily?” And he answers, “Yes, the university should not only devote itself formally and explicitly to having the fundamental rights of the poor majorities respected as much as possible, but it should even have the liberation and development of those majorities as the theoretical and practical horizon for its strictly university activities, and it should do so preferentially.” The goal of a university should be to solve the complicated problem of “attainment by the poor majority both of living standards sufficient for meeting their basic needs in a decent manner and of the highest degree of participation in the decisions .that affect their own fate and that of society as a whole” (UHRPM 211-212). In other words, in addition to meeting the basic needs of the poor, the goal of university activity must be to re-empower their agency as effective participants in society, “assuring them their proper place in the political and economic process” (UHRPM 214).
I know none of you work in Catholic higher ed per se, but just thought I’d share, as I find it both inspiring, and interesting, as an example of institutional core values rooting a university’s community engagement.
Community Engagement and Higher Education 