New Employee Orientation
Br. Thomas Scanlan’s Speech
September 7. 2007
I want to thank everyone here. I want to emphasize a point that Barbara made as I extend a personal welcome to everyone who has joined us, and that is that you are very important. The college doesn’t function well unless everyone, in all our different roles, uses their time and talents and energy to do their role well. And when we all [work] collectively, we run a terrific college, and we serve so well the young men and women who bless this campus. So you are truly welcomed. We need you. We need you with particular gifts and talents and expertise that you have to do the role that you’ve taken and to do that well.
My role here will be to talk about the mission statement which is in the package to give a little life and context to a number of the words and phrases that you will find on that mission statement.
Manhattan rests on two historical pillars and the first one is John Baptist De La Salle, who was born in Reims, France in 1651. He founded the Brothers in 1680. He came from a wealthy family. Some of you may know Moet champagne. Still to this day, that’s his mother’s family. Because he was fortunate to have a wealthy family as well as be gifted intellectually, he was able to flourish because the family could afford tutors. At that time in 17th century France and all of Europe, you had to learn Latin and Greek and then you went on to one of the four classics: theology, philosophy, law or medicine. He went on to theology, and got his doctorate in theology and then came back to Reims, where he became a canon of Reims He had a tenured, lifetime-endowed chair as a canon of the Cathedral of Reims. So he was set with this life and well to do.
However, God had other plans for him, and gradually he was incorporated into helping with a real problem then that still exists to some extent, and that is what are you going to do about all these street urchins? Urban gangs, we would use the phrase today. And he came to realize in the history of human kind there is only one thing that is proved effective in combating poverty: Education.
And so he did things that were almost unknown at that time. He said, “Well they’re not going to go to school that long, so let’s teach them in French.” And if we came from the Caribbean, we learned in French or Spanish; here we learn in English. We just take it for granted, but he started that. He said, “there are an awful lot of [students] out there; we can’t tutor them one, two, three at a time. We have to have a class. It’s not all going to get done in one year, so we have to have grade levels.” Well if you have classes in grade levels, you are going to have to have a curriculum, then you going to have to have lesson plans, then you going to have to have tests to see that they are qualified and can move to the next level, promotion and then eventually graduation.
These are things that we take for granted, and that is why, in international educational circles, John Baptist De La Salle is known as the innovator of modern pedagogy.. That’s how the educational system is structured. But he was the one in large part who made that possible. And when they were dealing with street urchins, there was a concern about two things: If they had no skills, they were going to engage in a life of crime — and even worse, after a lifetime of crime, they were going to go to hell. And so he started a school that was going to give them some job skills so that they could become employed, earn a living, support a family, contribute to society, as well as some religious instruction so they understood that God was important and could save their souls.
St. La Salle ran such great schools that he wrote a book, The Management of Schools, talking about discipline. He had a great sense of efficiency. When students stood up and took turns learning to read, they would read something about hygiene. Like cleaning nails, brushing teeth — or they would read something about manners, how to address other people, or how to eat a meal properly and using utensils — or they would read something about religious instruction.
Some of that theme carries through today, because everything we do, like writing—we have a core writing course, but the faculty in every department are responsible for helping to advance the students communication skills beyond that freshman level course as part of our outcome assessment. We also have ethics across the curriculum. There is a core course but we teach ethics in the professional schools and in all the schools. Computer skills, a core course but students can tune in to develop. So that everything that the student learns does not have to be another course. There just would not be enough time in the day in the school’s schedule.
Now the second thing that is important to know about De La Salle, beside the fact that he was pedagogically the innovator, was that in the Roman Catholic Church he is known as the patron saint of teachers. Which is a rare privilege. It was not Ignatius, or Dominic, or Benedict or Mother Seton or Mother Cabrini, it is our John who is the patron saint of teachers. And the reason for that is he had a special insight into teachers.
Especially now, in a modern 24/7 residential college you could say, and it is true to say, every one here is an educator. Because everyone participates in creating the whole educational environment in which students grow and develop. Obviously at the core are the academic program and the faculty. But all the rest is essential to it too.
And Saint La Salle would say to you, you don’t have just a job. You don’t even have just a career. And you don’t even have just a profession of which we are all proud of our professional associations. None of this was negative, but a career is richer than a job, and a profession is richer than a career—but he said something else. He said every one of you are ministers because you share in doing God’s work. And you are God’s proprietors after the parents who bring this life into being and help this child grow and develop. That’s the role of educators. To help students flourish and grow in all of the areas of their life to reach their potential. And he said in that sense very much, you, we together, are sharing in the work appropriation with the student’s families and with God. Therefore, you are ministers.
And it was that insight that led him to become the patron saint of teachers. Because he saw teaching in the most noble of ways. It is said that De La Salle’s vision of education is based on a very high ideal of a teacher-student relationship. He insisted that every teacher, every educator, know each student as an individual person. He understood that there could be no significant learning without that kind of relationship.
Now part of what you received in the package today, and what we are very fortunate to have, is a simple, very readable life of John Baptist De La Salle, The Work is Yours. The work is yours in two senses. He is saying to each of you who join this enterprise, “the work is yours.” And you are acknowledging in a sense if you follow his philosophy, you are saying to God, the work is ultimately Yours—and I am joining in to help. And so we are pleased to have that as one of our historical pillars.
Now, the other historical pillar, of course, is Manhattan College that goes back to 1853: its official start. In 1848, four brothers from France got on a boat. It took about six weeks to sail across the Atlantic; it arrived in New York, and the English they spoke at that time was the English they learned on the boat. I always wondered how salty it might have been.
Anyway, that was their first grasp of the English language. And they ended up down on Canal Street which runs across from East to West and takes you across to the Holland Tunnel at the west end. That original enterprise was later moved and is now the foundation of La Salle Academy on Second Avenue and Second Street. Well, only five years later, 1853, a boarding division was moved out of the city all the way up to Manhattanville. At that time, the border of New York City stopped at about 50th Street. And, of course, it was not until almost 1900 when the boroughs became incorporated in the city of New York. If you want to know where we are, sometime when you are taking the Number One train and coming up to the College, it is easier to see from that side and you come out of the tunnel after the stop at 116th street and Columbia University station. If you just look out of the windows at the cross signs, there is 123rd street, there is no 124th street, it’s LaSalle Street. You will see it there on the street sign.
That’s where we were.
So whom did we teach? The children of immigrants, the children of workers. What did St. La Salle want to do with the children of immigrants? Give them skills to get a job and strengthen them in their religious beliefs, because many of them came from an Irish background, Catholic Ireland. Now we are much more realistic today, and so we acknowledge we always had the two.
The College curriculum at that time required that classical languages shall be thoroughly studied and prominence shall be given to higher mathematics and the natural science. [This emphasis] not [encouraged] in any similar institution. That combination, if you would, of arts and sciences was almost unique. Combining the advantages of a first-class college with a polytechnic institute was what was done in the founding of Manhattan College.
In 1853, we had the school of Arts and Science; embedded in that was Education which took the more secure route. It was a program of degree, a department, a division. Not until the 1990s or 1980s was it a school, but it was there. In 1898, the School of Engineering was founded. In 1927, the School of Business began. As a side note, we didn’t have nursing because of sexual stereotyping. Men thought nursing was always a women’s job. That’s an historical fact. But we taught programs: engineering, accounting, teaching, etc., where the bachelor’s degree would be the entry degree into those professions. And that was part of the [emphasis] of the programs that the college ran.
We outgrew Manhattanville in 1923 and followed the Number One up the line to the last stop of that transit hub, and put the college here in Riverdale, where they bought 20 acres. It was a lot more than the city wanted them to have, to this day.. But here we are, a big landmark once again.
In 1961, there was a major reorganization of the college that followed a Middle States Self Study and visit, after which no one was hired to the faculty who didn’t have or was about to have a terminal degree in his or her field. The administration was structured into vice presidencies, there were deans to lead the schools instead of a simpler structure. In 1974, the college went co-ed, and happily. Now our student body for the last three years is almost exactly 50/50 in terms of full-time undergraduate students, men and women.
There is a growing diversity of the student body. And we are also in a dramatic shift. If you go back all the way through the 1960s, 80 percent of the student body were commuters, and 20 percent were residents. We are about to flip that percentage, because parents and students across America in almost all groups consider college a residential experience, and so we need to respond to the marketplace. In fact, we are losing people who could walk to the College because we can’t give them a bed right now, as well as people who could just take the subway a couple of stops. So they are going to a place that would give them residence.
Again, in terms of this historical pillar, we are fortunate to have the history of the college for the first 125 years, The Arches of the Years, there in writing. As you can imagine, there is far more to both of these historical pillars. I’m just trying to give you a little flavor and sense of what’s there. What rests on these pillars is our foundation. And you have heard us talk about the core belief of Manhattan College. Karen has started off with a prayer, “let us remember that we are in the holy presence of God,” the entrance, the religious symbolism on campus. And one of the things that is so beautiful about “let us remember that we are in the holy presence of God,” whether you called on Jesus or Yahweh or Allah, we can come together in that prayer, that we are in the presence of our God as each of us names our God.
From this comes our core value: respect for the dignity of every member of our campus community. You can see this in Saint La Salle when you see that we’re ministers, we’re doing God’s work. There is a little quote I have, that each student is precious. From this comes our hallmark, our caring campus community, as well as the fact that we ask students to reflect on faith and values and ethics. With the pedagogy and the history, Manhattan is characterized by high academic standards and teaching excellence.
What are the foundations, the pieces that come together to make Manhattan very special? What we build on that.
We want our students to graduate with confidence, in whatever field they choose. We are preparing them not just for their first job, but for a career. Moreover, we want them to be caring members of our society. And ultimately with all of this support is the overarching goal of the College, which is the full human development of each and every student. Going back to the sense that we are focusing on God, thanking him in every aspect, for their intelligence, their physical, emotional, social, spiritual and moral growth. That is our overarching goal of the College: the full human development of each student. As you look at the Mission statement, some of the words will come alive.
Two other things I want to mention when we talk about our vision for 2025; we want to be the premier, high-standard-seeking, excellent Catholic, full human development and core belief college. Manhattan is primarily an undergraduate institution. We have graduate programs in areas that have a synergy in part that enhances the undergraduate education. Some places—and it might have been part of your experience at a university—they will charge an undergraduate $10,000 more a year for the privilege of having graduate students as their teachers, because they are subsiding the doctoral programs. People presumably know what they are getting, and there are tremendous good things there obviously. But our focus is on the undergraduate, and we are committed to that.
Our relationship to New York City is important, in part because of our history, in part because New York City is still the first port of immigration. And this location in the United States allows us to continue our special service to first-generation college students, in part because it is the capital city of the world. Educating our students for global awareness and to be global citizens is enhanced by that [location], especially because, again, the whole world is present in New York. It allows us enrich the campus experience with diversity, and that is so important—and a major part of what we are going forward.
Now let me address another issue in terms of our expectations. Because everybody is not Catholic, even those who are Catholic aren’t always comfortable, and so what is it that we expect of people? Well, we want people to understand. We want people to understand that our Lasallian Catholic identity is our identity. We want people to understand that our overarching goal is the full human development of our students; primarily their intellectual growth but also the other elements including spiritual and moral. We want people to support these goals. And the first thing to say about support is that it isn’t negative. It’s a positive sense of purpose, because people who are going to be negative are contrary to all that we are about.
But here is where it begins to be different, because we have different roles, and we have different comfort levels, and we don’t want people to get outside their comfort level. One element of support that we have found across the board is people have been comfortable in recognizing, supporting, joining into the core value of the institution, treating everybody else here with dignity and respect. People have had the comfort level in joining in on ethics, professional ethics of the various fields and beyond.
People are comfortable in a commitment to social justice. People are comfortable in knowing the college and supporting it, helping at times in the social action program with the students. So they have some direct contact with the less fortunate, and we have to develop their sense of caring. That’s one level.
A second level: think for a second by analogy. If this was an all women’s college, if this was an historically black college, if this was a military college, one would expect a certain focus and emphasis on women and women’s issues, blacks in history, black issues or black prospective on issues, or military issues. In our case, we are a religious affiliated college, so the emphasis is religious. So that one would not be surprised at an all-women’s college that the students encountered a higher percentage than average of women authors. And one would not be surprised in an historically black institution if the students [studied] a larger-than-usual percentage of black historical figures—and in the military college, military scientists, and so forth. In one of the past Lasallian Convocations, and Karen invited you to the one later this month, back in 1997, we had a panel of faculty who was speaking. Judith Plaskow of the Religious Studies Department said, and I have quoted this many times because I think it says it best, “Catholicness involves a commitment to examine and engage with the particular history of said text that broadly defines the Catholic tradition.” The Catholic institution is one where students have the opportunity to grapple with the history, practices, teachings and documents that have shaped the church and characterized Catholic peoples. Where they consider how these forces have shaped them in the larger society, whether for good or evil, and where they can reflect on their own responsibilities as citizens and members of a particular profession in light of the value questions that emerge from this history. That’s an intellectual grappling and an emphasis.
A women’s college that only looked at women’s authors or a historically black college that only looked at black historical figures would do a disservice to their students. Because they are not giving them the full education that they need to function properly in society and communicate with others—but you would expect an emphasis, a higher than normal proportion in terms of addressing these issues and given the prospective of women or black or military or and our case of the church, on issues of today’s poverty, justice, nation-state relations, environment and so forth. So that’s part of the support.
The last issue on the support is a little tricky, and everybody is not as comfortable, but at least again in terms of awareness. If you go to the cooperative institutional research program CIRP, which has been run for more than 35 years out of UCLA, and Manhattan has participated for more than a quarter century, they do a very professional survey of the thoughts, the backgrounds, the expectations of incoming college freshman. And we do this as part of the orientation program. Annually they get the results of more than 400,000 students and 700 institutions nationwide. This was the topic of last year’s Lasallian Convocation. I will read a piece of her presentation that comes out of that data: “While it’s true that employment preparation tops the list of today’s student’s expectations for college, it’s important that we don’t lose sight of the fact that large numbers of student’s across different types of colleges also say it is very important or essential that their college experience assist them in enhancing their self-understanding and developing their personal values.”
Over roughly half of entering freshman nationally also explicitly endorse encouragement of personal expressions of spiritually. And even Harvard, the great secular institution that it be, whose President Derek Bok said about 30 years ago, that “religious college” is an oxymoron, have come to realize the error of their ways, and in a report on their undergraduate curriculum make reference to a course or new subject area they are [initiating]. Originally, it was reason and faith, and as it went through discussion, it is now culture and belief: a decision they said appeared to mollify some and anger others.
Anyway, the report says, Harvard is a secular institution but religion is an important part of our student’s lives. When they get to college, students often struggle to sort out their relationships between their own beliefs and practices and those of fellow students, and the relationship of religious belief to the resolutely secular world of the academy. It is important for students to have the opportunity to learn something about the impact religious belief and practice has on the world as well as themselves. So this is what I am talking about in terms of support.
Now everybody does not have my view that if you study differential equations and number theory, you quickly get to the metaphysical in our thinking about God. But if you are teaching 1900-century Irish poets, most of them were Catholic and many of the poems have a religious belief. So this varies and we understand that. And your own comfort level varies. But again, this is what we are about, so that you understand and support it to the extent that you have.
Now one last thing, and I draw the line here because this is an invitation only. And again, it goes back to what Karen shared with you with the Lasallians. Robert Benning, in a book “Quality with Soul,” talked about religiously affiliated, higher-education institutions’ rights, “Without committed persons, a religious tradition is merely an historical artifact.” Several pages later he goes on and says, “We need adequate number of persons with a firm understanding and commitment to translate that heritage into the school’s life in a persuasive manner.” That’s what needed.
Traditionally, it used to be the religious. The spirit is changing that. Now all people are invited to participate in the charisma, in the mission, in the identity of the college. But again, comfort level. While we need your understanding and support, everybody is not comfortable in joining into the faith community, becoming part of the Lasallian Education Committee and its activities, but we need people, and so I want to extend that invitation. Some are not comfortable until they are here three or four or five years, some are enthusiastic and then life changes and they kind of move to the side, but it will not continue—the college and this strong charisma and rich heritage—unless there are people at some point in your time here who accept the invitation and join in and help to keep this core of what we are alive and well and vibrant and operating.
I just close again with two thoughts. I am giving a very quick overview, but trying to give some richness to the mission statement and to encourage you to read and give you some ideas to reflect on. Some of this you will have the opportunity with colleagues and at Lasallian events to enrich it. And again, I end by repeating what I said, we welcome, we need you, we are grateful for your presence. The college runs effectively, our students benefit when all of us work together and do our jobs very well, and serve them well.
And now I will turn the podium over to one of Harvard’s great accomplishments, our Provost and Executive Vice President, Dr. Weldon Jackson.
