By Kerry Cronin
March 26, 2020
Each summer I finalize my course syllabus for the fall. That syllabus serves to outline the objectives of the course, to distribute course materials reasonably so as to get my students somewhere close to those objectives, and, if that syllabus is really good, to create an arc of questions and themes that will draw students in, ignite the questions, and inspire their own pursuit of understanding the world and themselves more deeply. That last bit, the part about understanding themselves, is usually something we often include in the list of course objectives since we’d be hard-pressed to measure the outcome. In the current educational climate we feel largely ambivalent about education’s role in the moral formation of young adults. Though it’s still embedded in most university mission statements, the character and integrity of our students remains on many campuses a relic of a patriarchal past. So for the most part, the moral lives of our students follow a “second syllabus,” which runs parallel to the ones we use in our classes.
The objectives of the second syllabus are formed long before students arrive in our classrooms and reflect many developmental demands: figure out how to fit in and belong, plug into the community, find space to safely unload a range of personal and emotional baggage, gain habits and skills of “adulting,” and find and develop gifts and talents. The texts of this syllabus are a strange brew of our culture’s romantic-expressivist scripts mixed with one’s own family values and a dash of campus culture: pursue your dreams— as long as the money follows; if you can figure out how to “be yourself,” whatever that might mean, everything will work out as it should; while love and romance are a goal in the long run, it’s important to calculate your currency in the sexual marketplace; learn the hyper-stressing and hyper-unwinding rhythms of the daytime and nighttime campus cultures; create a moral code that is at least practical, if not truly moral.
We hope that this second syllabus is impacted by the first, official syllabi that we hand out at the start of the semester, though we’re hesitant to ask about it. We like to leave it to Student Affairs, Campus Ministry, Mission and Ministry. The reality is that moral growth is among the areas of student development that sees the most expansion in college, particularly among students who attend four-year, primarily residential colleges, but many of us in American higher education seem to have decided to sit this one out. Educational research has long shown that participation in college, especially in the first year, influences moral growth profoundly, even when controlling for a host of other factors including a wide array of demographics, cognitive abilities, and cognitive motivation. In short, something is apparently happening in college that sets the condition for significant growth in moral sensitivity and moral reasoning. And it’s happening despite our best efforts to ignore it.
I find that students are often surprised when I tell them that they brought a moral philosophy with them when they arrived that first day at Boston College. They tend to think they haven’t developed a moral framework yet and are planning to find one when they begin “adulting” at some vague point in the future. The moral codes they bring are typically pragmatic and ruggedly personal, marked with various cultural signposts and capitalist bottom lines. Years ago a good and noble friend told me that he learned what a moral life looked and felt like from reading The Lord of the Rings, since even at a young age he could tell that his family’s notions of integrity, honesty, and courage were pretty lame. What is a young adult to do when her culture gives her such a stripped-down moral sensibility that it’s hard to even construct a scaffold around it to shore it up? How do you build a robust moral conscience when no one around you ever talks about having one or using it? Over the years, I have found that, like my friend, my students have a deep desire for the companionship of good questions and conversations as they wonder about the sufficiency of their own moral philosophies. They feel unsure that they have what they need to become a brave and true friend, to be able to make a promise and keep it, to become a good partner and parent, to do the right thing when it is called for, even in the face of sacrifice. I think it was for this reason that my former student walked with me, telling me of his new ethical theory. It was also why we met up again several weeks later to talk about it and why several of his roommates came along to get in on the conversation.
Pope Francis might agree that it won’t be the incessant buzzing of an alarm clock or the ringtone of my phone under my pillow that awakens my conscience, but instead it is an encounter with another person. It was for this reason that, as his Province’s formation director, the young Jesuit Jorge Bergoglio required that seminarians work in the barrios as they studied theology, to be taught not only by their professors but by the needs of the community. Encounter keeps us grounded and reminds us that the concrete, lived experiences of God’s people are the home base from which we travel as missionaries into the world of theoretical understanding. But it’s not easy to encounter another person as another person. As Rev. Michael Himes notes, most of us experience other people simply as players acting out the bit parts and side roles in the stories of our own lives. Encountering another as another involves finding out what questions, concerns, needs, loves, and values they are living and to make those, at least in part, my own. When the central question that you are asking about yourself and the world becomes a question for me, I am awakened in such a way that what is “outside myself” may deeply move what is “inside myself.” This is surely one of the most important processes of developing moral conscience. I would like to give Pope Francis the last word here. For, he reminds us that the worst thing for a human being is not failure or rejection, but the worst thing is to make ourselves incapable of being moved by the plight of another, the beauty or joy of another, the pain of another, the desire for another. When we become incapable of that, yeah, I’m panicked.