From President Robert Wild, S.J.

A Jesuit friend of mine, Father Raymond Schroth, recently wrote an essay on the relevance of philosophy and theology today. Father Schroth has once again started studying philosophy “mostly because” as he put it, “the state of the world demands that we confront its moral and religious chaos with all the wisdom at our command.” I think Father Schroth touched on something fundamental: the benefit of having a deep awareness of what it means to be a human person and a reflective awareness of the perennial human questions that we all face one way or another as we go forward in life.

Just before Christmas Marquette University’s leadership team discussed how educators are to go about their business in the 21st century given the extraordinarily explosive growth through computer technology of globally available information and interconnectivity. It seems to us that the common denominator here is still the human person and that this latest revolutionary advance in technology compels us to renew our focus on the values and questions central to human experience, the kinds of concerns that philosophy, theology, literature and the arts continually reflect upon and discuss.

Since I was a faculty member in the Department of Theology here at Marquette for nine years, I readily admit to some bias when it comes to discussing the values imbued in a liberal arts education. My own partiality, though, has been affirmed many times by alums who either in correspondence or when we meet at university events reflect on the importance that dimension of their Marquette education has had for their lives. Countless alums have told me how their courses in the liberal arts, particularly in philosophy and theology, have helped them lead moral and faith-based lives, to raise children who value what’s truly worth valuing, to be supportive and committed spouses, to be professional at their work places and to avoid compromising on non-negotiable values. These conversations provide real evidence for the validity of the approach the early Jesuits took in developing the first Jesuit educational curriculum 500 years ago.

Young people come to college frequently with a single educational objective: to learn the skills that will prepare them well for a chosen profession. That’s very understandable, of course, and we can be sure that the parents who sent their children to the first-ever Jesuit school in Messina, Sicily, almost five centuries ago expected a similar outcome. But then, as now, the Jesuit response has been, “Yes, we need to help you in that way, but we have more to teach you than just that.” And when freshmen question the importance of our University Core of Common Studies, which requires every Marquette undergraduate to earn 36 credits in nine different knowledge areas (including two required courses in philosophy and two in theology), we have the same sort of answer. We want to provide an education that not only will prepare students well for their chosen profession but will serve them throughout their lives. We want them, for example, to be aware of the perennial questions that human beings reflect upon, how they themselves might think about such questions, how to view our world and its variegated human family with more understanding eyes, how religious faith is understood in its varied forms and how it might play a deeper role in their own lives. Ultimately, we are asking our students carefully and reflectively to consider these larger questions so that they will be better prepared to make a real difference in our human community after they leave us. I have said before that our true measure of success is not simply a question of whether students leave here better educated; this must be so. But our success is when they leave here as better human beings, prepared and eager to lead in a complex and challenging world.