Archive for the ‘Colleges and Universities’ Category

On August 29, 2005, New Orleans experienced one of the worse natural disasters in U.S. history. While the city escaped a direct hit from Hurricane Katrina, the rising waters breached the levees that surround the city, leaving 80 percent of New Orleans under water. Five years later, New Orleans is a city rebuilding.

There has been a strong Jesuit presence in New Orleans from the days of the city’s founding over 300 years ago. The Jesuits have been in New Orleans in times of crisis like typhoid and yellow fever outbreaks at the turn of the 19th century and when the city flooded previously in the 1920s. Jesuit works like Good Shepherd Nativity School, which provides educational opportunities to disadvantaged children in the city, and Café Reconcile, a youth training program that provides on the job training in its restaurant, continue to help the city look toward a vibrant future. Schools like Loyola University and Jesuit High School continue to provide top notch education opportunities, while the Harry Thompson Center, a day shelter for the city’s homeless, reach out to the city’s most vulnerable. Today, the Jesuits continue to serve the spiritual needs of people of New Orleans and will continue be there for the city as it rebuilds and recovers.

National Jesuit News highlights the outreach and the dedication of the New Orleans Jesuits in the video piece below and provides a comprehensive overview of the Jesuit works in New Orleans five years after Katrina in the article following the video below.

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As a Jesuit institution, Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.  is grounded in a 450-year-old educational tradition inspired by St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus. Since 1980 alone, 30 Georgetown alumni have entered the Society of Jesus, which represents the largest male religious order in the world, to become Jesuits.

On their campus website, the school recently profiled several alumni in various stages of Jesuit formation. Click here to read these next-generation Jesuits’ stories.

Fairfield University’s Center for Faith and Public Life has been awarded a two-year, $200,000 grant from the Ford Foundation to study the education of undocumented students at Jesuit universities. Fairfield University will lead the project, collaborating with Santa Clara University and Loyola University Chicago.

Jesuit Father Rick Ryscavage,  professor of sociology and director of the Center for Faith and Public Life at Fairfield and a former national director of Jesuit Refugee Service/USA, who will serve as director of the project, said, “there is very little hard data about the situation of undocumented students in American universities. This grant will allow us to make a major contribution to the national understanding of the problem.”

Under the grant, a research study will seek to survey and understand the social context and current practices and attitudes in American Jesuit schools of higher education regarding undocumented students.

The study will consider:

• Structures that support or challenge the higher education of undocumented students
• Best practices and strategies for ensuring their eventual success
• A potential collaborative model for helping students as they move through their university years
• Issues facing students after graduation

Leading the research team, consisting of law and social science faculty from all three institutions, will be Dr. Kurt Schlichting, a professor of sociology and anthropology at Fairfield.

The project is designed to stimulate a sustained dialogue with the 28 Jesuit schools of higher education in the United States by asking two questions:

1. What are the current practices among our schools?
2. What challenges do we face in trying to serve these students?

A final policy paper, highlighting the results of the study, will include a moral argument, anchored in Catholic social teaching, for better meeting the needs of undocumented students.

Jesuit Father Rick Curry runs the Academy for Veterans at Georgetown University for those retuning from Iraq and Afghanistan. The program aims to assist veterans who have been disabled in combat in rebuilding their lives and responding to their needs. The program also includes emotional rehabilitation through performing arts.

Fr. Curry recently spoke to Vatican Radio about the unique experience of working with the disabled veterans. You can listen to Curry’s interview here

Creighton University student Maria DeMeuse had a problem, and so, like countless Bluejays over the past decade, she called Jesuit Father John Schlegel and scheduled a sit-down.

She expected maybe 10 minutes of the university president’s time. Instead, they debated whether Creighton had strayed from its Catholic mission and the meaning of Catholic identity.

They discussed the school’s class offerings and its faculty.

An hour passed, then 90 minutes. It got so late the president’s secretary went home.

Fr. Schlegel stayed. He listened.

“It’s very easy, being in this atmosphere, to cater to the administrators, to the board,” DeMeuse said Wednesday. “He sees his mission as being here for the students. … We’re definitely going to miss him.”

Schlegel, the longtime Creighton president, announced Wednesday that he planned to retire in July 2011. You can read more about Schlegel’s legacy at Creighton in this article from the Omaha World-Herald.