Jesuit Values

So I generally choose not to read the alumni magazine from my school, Boston College, when it comes in the mail. (Ditto--times two--the special alumni newsletter for former Boston College Presidential Scholars.) This is because I always end up with a crazily intense inferiority complex about all the prestigious awards and high-powered jobs my classmates have won since graduation. Given that I will never make any money and will probably never do anything that Boston College--the institution, anyway--would deem worthy of highlighting, I figure I'm never going to end up in the alumni magazine and don't really want to compare myself to those who have.

But this time, the alumni magazine kind of sneaked up on me. Bored and needing something to read, I started to flip through it, and I came across an article about this year's commencement ceremony. The commencement ceremony where Condoleeza Rice had been invited to speak and would be receiving an honorary degree from the university, as it happens.

What the article was really about was the faculty-led protest of Rice as the choice for commencement speaker. Now here's where I get really proud of my Jesuit education:

• Nearly a quarter of tenured staff at BC signed onto a petition saying they were against having Rice speak at commencement
• The petition was authored and moved by Fathers Himes and Hollenbach. Father Hollenbach taught my Human Rights class, which dramatically shaped my politics and the direction my life since college has taken. Father Himes taught the religion class that first opened me up to the concept of radical spirituality and Christianity. He also said the noon Wednesday Mass at St. Mary's that was always so profound and so perfectly germane to what I was dealing with that I literally shaped my school and work schedule around it.
• The decision to move the petition was defended on the O'Reilly factor by Charles Derber, a sociology professor who taught me about globalization and solidified all of the social/economic justice leanings that had started with Father Hollenbach.

Many other professors and students took a stand against Rice (and more specifically, the administration she represents and the insidious war they continue to wage in Iraq), invoking the Jesuit-honored traditions of peace and justice.

I am proud to have gone to a school that not only says it is committed to the Jesuit values of social justice, but whose faculty is unafraid to stand up for them and act upon them. I am proud to call these people my teachers, and I hope that the work I do always upholds the values they have taught me.