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

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

A major outcome at LeMoyne and elsewhere has been a much stronger sense of community. Over the course of eight Summer Institutes, friendships and working relationships have developed between departments that rarely interacted prior to the seminars. It has become easier to talk about values because faculty know they have colleagues struggling with how to do it. They call on each other for help.

"The institutes were never just about education," says Kirby. They were about how things would change as a result. At the end of three weeks, the groups began to form a trusting community. All sorts of bridges between departments began to be built. The experience gave faculty the confidence that they were not alone. They could change things. ... We now have more community service, more discussion in classes. Our political science department has changed its self-description to embrace the doing of politics."

Student interest in the values program boomed during the 1989-1990 school year. The Values Program sponsored a weeklong event on South Africa. During that week, everyone on campus wore either a red or a green arm band. The reds were denied access to certain facilities and forced to use back entrances to most buildings. "By the end of the week," recalls David MacCallum, a student at the time, "the reds were conspiring to revolt."

This kind of direct, experiential involvement has been the most visible impact at LeMoyne (South Africa week received wide media coverage). But the greatest effect, according to senior Shareen Decker, is in the core curriculum. "That's where they've really made their mark," she says.

The LeMoyne effort is part of a diverse but serious effort by Catholic schools to rethink how values relate to the overall academic effort on campus. "I think that in the 1960s we worshiped at the altar of objectivity," says Fr. Edmund Ryan, who has taught at a half-dozen Jesuit colleges and universities and is now at LeMoyne. "Now we realize that objectivity is just one part of learning."

"LeMoyne, I think, is unique," says Judith Dwyer, dean of Notre Dame College at St. John's University, Staten Island, N.Y. "It has evolved over a number of years, and the intensive work with faculty sense of community is very impressive. It shows that values can be developed in a curriculum that is very diverse."

In a time when the very word values seems to be owned by religious conservatives, can a process of "discussion and discovery" help secular institutions face their own values and questions?

Jim Chapiala is the principal of Fayetteville-Manlius High School, just a few rolling hills east of LeMoyne. He and several faculty members in this wealthy suburban school were already grappling with the problem of teaching values, when he met LeMoyne's Tom Curley at a seminar.

"We felt the breakdown of common values among the students," says Chapiala. "We were seeing children who didn't have a sense of community, who didn't understand responsibility. Then we did a school-wide survey on cheating."