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Embracing Diversity
USF’s Catholic and Jesuit identity is also tied to its diversity as it is one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse of all Catholic colleges and universities, Jesuit or otherwise. In 2008, only 42 percent of the school’s undergraduates said they were Catholic, with others claiming Protestant (7 percent), non-religious (3.2 percent), Buddhist (2.2 percent), Jewish (2 percent), Muslim (1 percent), and Hindu (.7 percent) backgrounds. (The remaining students opted to not declare their religious background.) The number of Catholics at USF is low among Jesuit schools in the U.S., where the average is more than 57 percent, according to the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. When USF’s entire student body (including graduate students) is counted, the number of Catholic students drops even lower, below 30 percent. But USF faculty, staff, and students say this diversity is more a boon than a blow to the school’s Catholic and Jesuit identity. “The Jesuit tradition has always engaged with other traditions,” Fr. Godfrey said. “We do not retreat into the citadel and put up the moat. Our vision is a vision that engages with all people of good will, of all faiths and none. And if you look at the person of Jesus, that’s who he was.”
The proof of that vision lies in how welcome people who are not a part of the Catholic tradition feel at USF. Jeffrey Brand, dean of the USF School of Law, said confronting questions about the school’s identity and mission led him to a richer exploration of his faith. “I can’t think of a more wonderful thing to say of a Catholic university than that it is where a Jew would feel so at home that it provided strength for my own Judaism,” he said. He has delivered two homilies at St. Ignatius Church and written openly about his faith, and said he always finds his religious perspective welcome in faculty and student encounters. “If this were just a secular university, none of that would have happened,” he said.
When Nikki Raeburn, associate professor of sociology, arrived at USF in 1998, she thought it would be temporary. “I never thought a Catholic university would hire an out lesbian feminist,” she said. “But they did. I did not think there was any way I would get a tenure track position here. But I did. So I educated myself about what Jesuits are and what a Jesuit university is, and to me, that commitment to social justice, that is Jesuit. And my understanding of Catholicism is that sentence in our mission about USF welcoming people of all faiths and no faiths.”
Magnified by Location
USF’s diversity is a reflection of San Francisco and the broader Bay Area, one of the most ethnically and religiously diverse parts of the U.S. It also includes some of the most affluent and poverty-ridden neighborhoods in the country. That means the school has certain responsibilities to the city, some of which serve as witness to its Catholic and Jesuit identity. USF officials say it isn’t enough to send students to work in the city’s homeless shelters, but it must also ask its students to examine the roots of the problems that created those soup kitchens and shelters. “A university has a different mission from a St. Anthony’s or a St. Vincent de Paul,” Fr. Godfrey said. “Our mission is to ask the questions. Why do we have such a big homeless problem in San Francisco? Our business should be to understand why those homeless shelters were created and how we can change that.”
Murphy said the school’s perch on Lone Mountain provides it with a golden opportunity to live out its mission. “The Tenderloin is only a bus ride away,” he said. “But if we had a student who went to St. Anthony’s every week for four years but never asked why there are so many hungry people, then we would not have lived out our Catholic identity.”
The Most Reverend George Niederauer, archbishop of San Francisco, said the university can also contribute to the development of Catholic identity among the archdiocese’s 89 parishes and 11 missions. He sees a give-and-take between the university, its students, and faculty, and the local clergy and laypeople developing into “a dialogue that explores what difference being Catholic makes in the life of the university and what difference the university makes in the life of the local Church,” he said. “Out of this dialogue could emerge collaboration between the university and the local diocese in the three-fold work that the Second Vatican Council identified for the Church: making Jesus Christ the priest, prophet, and shepherd, present in the world though faith, sacrament, and service.”
Jesuit Education of the Future
The Jesuit order—like other Catholic religious orders—is shrinking. In 2006, the Society of Jesus counted 3,034 brothers and priests in the U.S., down from 8,400 in 1965. Who will carry the banner of Jesuit identity at USF and other Jesuit schools in future generations? To Fr. Privett, the answer is clear. “If we think the future of the university rests with the Jesuits, it doesn’t,” he said. “It rests with the Jesuit capacity to evoke from others what our understanding and our tradition is about. We pass that on to them and then it is their show.”
But is that enough? Some of the nation’s top universities—Harvard, Yale, and Princeton among them—were founded by religious people with a vision. But when the laity succeeded them, those universities gradually lost contact with their religious foundations. If that happens at Jesuit schools, it would be costly. “They’d probably still turn out fine MBAs, but something the world desperately needs would be lost,” said Thomas Groome, professor of theology at Boston College and author of What Makes Us Catholic. “A sense of the spiritual, of how to make a life for one’s self and not just make a living, of service to the common good. It is hard to mount that kind of ethic for students without some spiritual grounding.”
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