Starting Over 1/9/06

Classes started today at Loyola and I can't help but wonder if it's the first time that the beginning of a semester has been on the NBC nightly news. New student orientation included a bus tour of some of the badly damaged areas, so that those who are coming, are coming with their eyes open. I am told that 87% of the students who were registered for the fall semester that was to have started on August 29, the day Katrina hit the city, have arrived to begin this new semester and I'm impressed at that number. My son said that the campus looks beautiful, a sight for sore eyes, and that it was great to see his friends again, but that, and he allowed for the possibility that this was in his imagination, the school's support staff looked to him to be a little lean. I suggested that he apply for a job.

They ("they" meaning the City, the State, the feds and the various "commissions" empowered with decision-making, or the lack thereof, since Katrina) may still be trying to figure out what and when and how to bulldoze and there may not be an agreed-upon plan for rebuilding New Orleans (or a working trauma center, for that matter), and whether or not there will be adequate federal support where it is so clearly mandated is still in question (not to mention the levees!), but these universities are going ahead with their missions, ready or not. Loyola is in remarkably good shape, given the extent of the devastation so close, but Tulane, Xavier, Dillard and UNO have students staying on cruise ships docked on the river and put up in hotels. It all shows a remarkable commitment to returning to "normal", a commendable determination to finish what had been started, despite how much things may have changed.

Not being a new student, my son and his roommate did their own "tour" on Saturday and drove into the Lower 9th Ward and he used the same empty words that we've all heard over and over: "Nothing anybody can write or any camera can capture can possibly convey the extent of the devastation." I suggested that he might try. He has a way with words.

As for me, not knowing where to begin or what to say, I have gone back and re-read the entry I wrote upon returning from his Orientation in the summer of 2004 and I think it bears repeating, because the meaning, while the same, is deeper and more important now. In my post entitled Loyola University New Orleans I wrote:

There is an image that displays, alternating with other images, on the home page of their website (www.loyno.edu), which shows a boy wearing a sweatshirt that says "Social Justice University" followed by the words:

"Our rich Jesuit tradition is not a passive one. Challenge status quo. Live meaningfully. Engage.
After all, the people who are bold enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do."

This theme of "learning in context" and "challenge status quo" seemed to run through many aspects of Orientation. I hope it's real, rather than just Catholic lip service (something of which I've had too much for one lifetime). I'm going to go in, believing they mean it because it seems real. The Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, Dr. Frank Scully, talked about education "in context" and emphasized the Jesuit mission of "educating to prepare women and men with and for others." He also stressed their commitment to "imbue students with values that transcend the goals of money, fame and success," and quoted the Superior General of the Jesuits, Peter-Hans Kolvenback, who said, "We've learned that appropriation of knowledge does not humanize." As we were riding back, my dear son reached up and gently fingered the newly-acquired Mardi Gras beads that hung around his HS graduation tassel, dangling together from the rear view mirror of the car, and laughed, "I've gone from a conservative Republican HS where I was in the minority as a liberal, to a college where I'm not liberal *enough*!"

It seems to me that this fine Jesuit institution may very well have a unique opportunity to make good on those lofty ideals, and put them into meaningful action in the days to come.

Last night, after cooking dinner (worth a whole blog entry all by itself!), I sat on my lovely back porch and listened as a slight breeze tinkled our neighbors' wind chimes, upstairs. Our chimes, heavier, with a fuller sound, hung unmoved by the light breeze and I thought of wind chimes and how I like ours better than the ones that our neighbors hung upstairs. Theirs, stirred by the slightest of breezes, tinkle above the wind, imposing themselves as the primary sound, while ours, stirred only by the strongest of breezes, issue a fuller, deeper sound that gives a baseline melody below the roar of the wind. As I stared into the night and listened, I could only think of my son and of all of these students going back to New Orleans, committed, despite the lack of direction, the absence of a plan (or a trauma center), returning to their colleges anyway, to get something perhaps greater than just an education, and to become, in each their own way, some small part of the resurrection of a great American city.

Edit (from comments, but bears repeating here): In re-reading my post, I think what I failed to convey was that the attitude that (at least) Loyola is deploying in response to Katrina is an extension of their Jesuit philosophy of education, which encourages learning as a way of living, and that their "liberal" approach is not "liberal" in the sense of a political point of view so much as it is a classical philosophy of life.