Students are hungry for values: Catholic schools issue all-areas values alert

National Catholic Reporter, Oct 6, 1995 by Ed Griffin-Nolan

"Schools have to lose their fear of even mentioning the word values," says Thomas Curley, philosophy professor at LeMoyne College, a Jesuit school at the edge of Syracuse, N.Y. Curley has been involved for more than five years with LeMoyne's Values Program, an effort designed to promote discussion of values on campus.

The main reason Catholic colleges and universities need to learn to talk about values? Students are hungry for it.

"We don't need to teach students to question," says Krystine Batcho, a psychology professor at LeMoyne and a longtime participant in the Values Program. "We are seeing a generation of students who question everything, including their own self-worth. But, unlike the 1960s, there is no social or political agenda. They don't want to be indoctrinated. They want some grounding and a collegial effort to help them work it out for themselves."

As Catholic colleges and universities seek to define their identity in changing times, they are discovering methods that may help our society confront its current crisis of values.

Faculty around the country are engaged in a search for approaches that avoid both the force-feeding of values promoted by conservative politicians and the ungrounded moral relativism that took hold of much of society after the changes of the 1960s and '70s. Values education seeks to help students, Catholic or not, to integrate what they learn at college with their own system of values, and to put their values into action.

The Values Program at LeMoyne, seen by many as a model, attempts to legitimize discussion of values across the curriculum and to give faculty the support and the tools they need to address values questions in their discipline. Thus far, schools as far away as Mexico and Taiwan have taken an interest in the approach.

In the mid-1980s, LeMoyne conducted a "values audit." This broad-based survey involved hundreds of faculty, administrators, students and staff. It asked whether the college's actions were consistent with its stated values and identity. The answers revealed nagging gaps between the school's declared mission and its actual achievements. Many students were in school only to find jobs. and often were out of touch with the society around them. At the same time the college conducted an extensive evaluation of its core curriculum and found that many students saw their classroom learning as disconnected from the world around them.

The college was in danger of losing its way. "In the early days of LeMoyne (the school was founded in 1947), it was easier to say what Jesuit values were, what Catholic identity was," says Fr. Donald Kirby, founder and director of the Values Program. We had sodalities, we had first Fridays, as ways of transmitting those values." The 1960s changed much of that, and did not leave anything of substance in its place.

The values audit was something of a wake-up call to the college. A group of seven faculty and administrators met to devise a seminar to deal with this crisis of values. "It became clear to us that the problems were big and were not unique to LeMoyne," says Kirby. "We knew we were not going to get out of it with any one-shot deal. This wasn't going to be addressed by any one seminar."

Kirby and his partners began what they call their "ambitious dream" - the title of a 1990 book on the Values Program, published by Sheed & Ward. "After every meeting I was sure that they would never come back," recalls Kirby.

But they came back, and that summer the group held a three-week session on the theme of economic justice. The Summer Institute, as it was called, brought together faculty and administrators from all departments. They discussed content and pedagogical techniques. That first Summer Institute launched the Values Program.

On the surface, the Values Program seems deceptively simple. In fact, the process requires both an institutional commitment and individuals willing t6 confront differences and find common ground.

The Values Program is now enshrined as a fundamental part of LeMoyne's own strategic plan. Eighty percent of faculty have gone through the Summer Institutes.

The structure remains Spartan - a tiny corner office in a brick building among the rolling drumlins that ring the city. We are not out to create new institutions," says Kirby. "We work with the institutions the school already has and seek to breathe vitality and spirit into them.

"How do we get the faculty member teaching math, biology, literature or accounting to rethink how they teach? How do we get students to. think about the values implications of what they are learning?"

These same questions are being asked by educators at Catholic schools across the country. Avila College in Kansas City, Mo., published a statement of values in 1988 and has incorporated discussion of those values into hiring, curriculum decisions and student life. The statement was distilled from a process of consulting faculty and staff.

At DePaul University in Chicago, a group of faculty have been meeting to prepare the groundwork for a Summer Institute similar to that conducted at LeMoyne. According to Fr. Patrick Murphy, they hope to find a process that can work on their campus of 17,000 students, most of them commuters.