Noting Jesus’ own instructions to His disciples to go and teach, Washington Cardinal Wilton Gregory outlined several urgent needs for improving higher education today during a Feb. 22 online lecture.
“Places of higher education must not be in the business of teaching people what to think, but instead, teaching students how to reason and think critically in their discipline and in the world around them,” Cardinal Gregory said. “Education should be about forming well-rounded individuals who can understand how their discipline of study relates to the world and how to utilize the knowledge they gain for the good of the whole community.”
Washington’s archbishop delivered his remarks on Feb. 22 to an online audience during the Cardinal Bernardin Lecture for Elmhurst University in Elmhurst, Illinois. The lecture is part of a series of talks given to honor a variety of religious traditions, and this year’s presentation coincided with the university’s 150th anniversary.
The lecture’s namesake, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin, served as archbishop of Chicago from 1982 until his death in 1996 from pancreatic cancer. Cardinal Bernardin had been scheduled to speak at Elmhurst University 10 days before he died, and the university has since honored him with the lecture in his name. Cardinal Gregory, a native of Chicago, was ordained a priest there in 1973 and served the faithful of the Archdiocese of Chicago and Cardinal Bernardin as his master of ceremonies and later as an auxiliary bishop.
“It is an honor to be part of this series named after a man whom I worked closely with during my time in the Archdiocese of Chicago,” Cardinal Gregory said before presenting his talk, “The Critical Needs of Higher Education from a Roman Catholic Faith Perspective: On the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of Elmhurst University.”
In honor of Black History Month, Cardinal Gregory began his presentation sharing a prayer from Sister Thea Bowman, an African American woman religious who has been named a Servant of God in her cause for canonization. She is one of six Black Catholics from the United States being considered for sainthood by the Catholic Church. The cardinal urged participants to research Sister Thea’s work in education and for justice as he prayed that people might overcome obstacles to being in community with one another and “overcome the prejudices and the stereotypes, the anxieties, the grief, the fear, the negative attitudes – all those barriers and boundaries that keep us apart.”
In his talk, cardinal also emphasized the role that education plays in salvation, noting that theology – one of the oldest areas of study – originally “helped one to understand the importance of giving to God first and then serving Him through service to neighbor.”
Cardinal Gregory said colleges and universities ought to be accessible to all, including people of color and those with socioeconomic needs. “The right to full participation means our institutions for higher learning must put networks in place to support and advise students in order to raise equitable outcomes for all learners,” he said.
Institutions of higher education must maintain diversity, critical thinking, accessibility, and student support in order to fulfill their purpose, the cardinal said. Quoting Pope Francis, Cardinal Gregory stated that education could not be “neutral.” It takes a “rich path” of “many ingredients” to enrich students, he said.
Cardinal Gregory criticized the high cost of universities as the average cost of tuition and fees at a four-year public university has risen nearly 180 percent in the last two decades. “Many students in poor and marginalized communities are finding the dream of higher education to be just that, a dream.” However, he added, higher education often serves as a way for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to break the cycle of poverty.
The cardinal also warned against removing core courses in favor of focusing on only one field. He said emphasizing “hard sciences” such as biology, chemistry and engineering comes at the loss of other skills like critical reading and reasoning that are typically learned in the humanities and can be applied to all areas of life. Cardinal Gregory said that a student majoring in creative writing ought to take a course in mathematics – while it might be difficult, it could open up the value of logic and order, and he added that a student majoring in biology would “do well to study philosophy and theology lest they fall into the ‘Jurassic Park error’ – they were so busy wondering if they could, they did not stop to think if they should.”
Throughout his remarks, Cardinal Gregory spoke of the rich history of the Church’s role in education. From Jesus’ command to go and teach, through the early monastic communities and clarifying councils instructing on the faith and the need for Scripture scholars eventually leading to modern, degree-conferring universities of the 11th and 12th centuries.
“One of the hallmarks of Catholic intellectual inquiry is to evaluate knowledge through the lens of truth, beauty and goodness,” Cardinal Gregory said. “These transcendentals reflect the divine origin of all things and the unity of truth found in God the Creator. When we educate students to identify those things, which are true, beautiful, and good, we give them the ability to look critically at the information around them.”
