The President’s View

At Fairfield and at other Jesuit schools and universities we often say that we form our students to be “men and women for others.”

If one looks back at the long history of Jesuit education — which goes back to 1548 — one can see that there has always been an understanding that the purpose of an education was to prepare young people to take responsibility for making the world a better place. In recent years there has been a renewed emphasis on our obligation to take direct action in trying to achieve this end — not just talk about it, but do it — an obligation first articulated in this way on July 31, 1973 in an address of the then Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, at an international Congress of Jesuit alumni.

A critical component of our education now is service learning, by which we mean that we expect our students to actively participate in helping people by doing (and not just thinking about it).

At Fairfield, we have many service learning programs. Last week, under the direction of our Campus Ministry program, about 40 of our students and 8 faculty and staff spent their spring break in a different way — travelling to four different locations to work in communities where they could be of value. One group, with the guidance of two of our faculty, went to New Orleans to gather oral histories from Hurricane Katrina survivors. Another group worked on an organic farm in Massachusetts, while another group went to Immokalee in Florida to volunteer for social service agencies that help migrant farm laborers and to study food justice issues.

A fourth group joined volunteers from other colleges to work with the Christian Appalachian Project, repairing and building homes in eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest parts of the country. Our students went for one week, but over the course of three weeks — with skilled volunteers leading the students from other schools — the project group will renovate and improve between 8 and 10 homes in the region for families that could not afford to do it on their own.

As I write today, these groups have just returned, and so I haven’t heard all the stories yet, though I’m sure I will. What I do know is that these students come back to Fairfield with a better understanding of how privileged they are, a greater capacity for compassion, and a deeper grasp of the nature of their own humanity. Really, it is they who are the greatest beneficiaries of the experience. In short, the vital grasp in their understanding that Fr. Arrupe spoke of in 1973 — that the love of God includes a love of neighbor, and therefore a desire for justice — will have been strengthened. They’ll also come back with a more mature appreciation of what is truly important in life.

As one student said this time last year on returning back to Fairfield from Kentucky, “I’m not sweating the small stuff — my little desires and annoyances. I feel like I have a bigger picture, a better perspective.”

One of the benefits of working at a University is that one is continually made aware — year after year — of the degree to which students change from one generation to the next. Each new incoming class brings with it the aspirations, and anxieties, that have characterized the period in which these students have come of age.

The students who are arriving on our campus now are an optimistic, forward-thinking group. The Cold War, and the years that culminated in the collapse of the Berlin Wall — so defining of the attitudes and concerns of my generation — are a matter of history for these young people. Instead, this is a group that has been shaped by other concerns and prominent among them is the sustainability of the planet. They have grown up under the shadow of a cloud about whether we can continue to spend the earth’s natural resources as though they are limitless, as if the earth had an inexhaustible capacity to absorb the way we live in industrialized societies. Recently Sierra magazine, the publication of the country’s oldest and largest grass-roots environmental movement, The Sierra Club, found that while a few years ago students looking at colleges to attend were mainly concerned with prestige, location, and social life. “These days, however,” the editors wrote, “applicants look for something more: a school with green credentials.”

At Fairfield University we have invested in a community-wide effort to change the way we operate, so that we assess the environmental impact of what we do, both as an institution and as a community that lives together on a piece of land in Fairfield County. This land, with its ponds and trees, wild turkeys, foxes, and a fairly noisy and vibrant community of green parrots, is the small piece of the earth over which we have stewardship. As a Jesuit University, we have a particular responsibility to be good stewards of the earth, because this is a specific charge put before us by the Society of Jesus.

We have a number of sustainability projects underway — recycling, energy saving procedures, student programs that include a Green Campus Initiative and a Student Environmental Association. Earlier this academic year, we were named one of the nation’s “Cool Schools” by the Sierra Club for our environmentally friendly efforts.

We received more good news this week on this front. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has honored our University with an Energy Star Award for our combined heat and power plant.

The plant has been a source of pride for us since its opening in 2007. This combined heat and power plant, designed by Carrier and supported by a $2.3 million grant from the United Illuminating Company, uses a 4.5 megawatt natural gas turbine to generate electricity that meets most of our needs on the campus. But the added environmental bonus is that the heat generated in the process is captured and used to heat and cool most of our buildings. In making the award, Neeharika Naik-Dhungel of the EPA’s combined Heat and Power Partnership Program, said: “Through the recovery of otherwise wasted heat to produce hot water for campus heating and cooling, Fairfield University has demonstrated exceptional leadership in energy use and management.”

It was also noted that our plant effectively reduces our CO2 emissions by more than 7,400 tons per year. It should be said that the plant also saves us millions of dollars a year in energy costs, and this is certainly more important now than ever, as we face pressures on our costs all across our University budget.

One of the most gratifying outcomes of having adopted this energy system is that other colleges and corporations are coming to the University to tour the plant and to see how it operates. As a University, this is what we should be doing — looking to the future for solutions to global problems, then taking steps to address those problems to the degree that we can. In doing so, hopefully we can share what we have learned for the benefit of the entire community.