 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. One more time. Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. That was music to my ears. Thank you so much. As we're talking about radical hospitality, it seems appropriate we start with a greeting. For those of you who are finding a seat, you're most welcome. I know it's tough to sit in the front, but feel free. There's lots of seats. Zach, come on, lead the way, my friend. You got this. Amber, come on. You got this. So we are having a reception at the end of the event to give you the opportunity to talk further with others. But of course, if you need a little hydration, there is a station in the back. I'd like to welcome everyone to this extraordinary event about which we are all very excited on radical hospitality, the fourth pillar of our diversity and inclusive excellence mission statement. You will find those on your seats for your reference. And on the back of those, you will see a listing of the presidential working group on inclusive excellence. And we are honored to have members of that group with us this evening. The fourth pillar is there for you to see radical hospitality, which is the topic of our conversation this evening. We have an outstanding speaker. But we are going to start with a welcome from our provost, Christine Siegel. So please join me in welcoming Christine to the podium. Thank you. Good evening, students, professors, administrators, staff, and most importantly, our distinguished guest and speaker, Father James Keenan of the Society of Jesus. Welcome to the first in our year-long series of critical conversations about radical hospitality. Throughout the academic year, our university community is exploring this construct of radical hospitality, which as Dr. Brishka just mentioned is the fourth pillar of our inclusive excellence mission statement. This summer, our first-year students pioneered this exploration as they engaged a series of pre-readings, participated in webinars, and gathered at our convocation to open the academic year with this year's speaker, Dr. Jacqueline Brishka, Professor of Politics and Associate Vice President, giving serious consideration to this serious question, what is radical about hospitality? In late August, Dr. Brishka helped to welcome new faculty to Fairfield University with the same question. And Dr. Father Jerry Blazcek of the Society of Jesus, our Vice President for Mission Identity, engaged faculty in connecting this construct to our university's mission. Tonight, we invite you, members of our scholarly community, to probe further. Engage not only the question of what is radical about hospitality, but also, what does being radical in our hospitality ask of us? And how is radical hospitality central to our university mission and our academic purpose? As a scholarly community, we take up these questions as we would any serious question in dialogue with one another, through the writings of multiple authors across multiple genres, in our classroom lectures, at our lunch tables, in residence halls, on our athletic fields, through our arts programs, and most especially tonight, with our invited speaker. Because it is by asking and engaging the serious questions of our time through our scholarly traditions that we come closer to the truth, the truth that is our current experience here at Fairfield University, the truth we aspire to become, and the truth that we can only achieve together. Welcome to the conversation. It is now my pleasure to introduce Fairfield University's president, Dr. Mark R. Namek. Dr. Namek. Thank you, Christine. And thank you all for joining us. And thank you to Professor Keenan for gracing us with his presence. What I would like to do as president is to both welcome you, but also place both this talk and the whole of the year in context. Fairfield is committed to be a model of the modern Jesuit Catholic University, to be an institution for the 21st century. Central to this commitment is a call to be a civic institution, to both meet the world as it is, but also to ask how we might be better. It is with this as an animating spirit that we chartered the presidential working group on inclusive excellence. Truth be told, it was also a personal journey. As one who in the fourth grade was volunteered, or actually I have to say my parents asked me, if I would be willing to engage in the experiments with Los Angeles Unified School District to integrate the public schools with a commitment to access and equity, and spent actually fourth grade what was happened. The court stepped in, so we only got one day. But fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade was preceded by me going from the west side of Los Angeles to the Mid City District, which is about an hour and a half each way, to help with this journey. But the key, as we know, is that the 21st century asks, in fact, demands that we think differently about inclusion. This and our Jesuit Catholic identity suggest to me that we focus on people rather than simply percentages. We focus on individuals rather than simply our identities. And in approaching this, we must do so at Fairfield as a university through our teaching, our scholarship, our formation, and our service. And as always, doing so by asking more of ourselves and more of our society as we pursue truth, grace, and beauty. That is why we are here tonight, and that is why I am so pleased to welcome you. It's great honor now for me to introduce my dear friend and companion, Father Jerry Blasek, to introduce our speaker. Good evening. When Dr. Barichka asked me to introduce Father Keenan, I was immediately excited and I happily accepted. But honestly, as I tried to compose an introduction for Father Keenan, I became increasingly conflicted and baffled. How do I introduce, in only a few minutes, someone as exceptionally accomplished, productive, and esteemed as Jim Keenan? How do I, within the conventions of academe, find the right voice, with which to express my own sentiments of deep gratitude, my personal respect, and my affection for my Jesuit confrere of almost 50 years? But let me give it a try. Who is Jim Keenan? Here is what you would discover if you waited through Google's literally thousands of references to Jim Keenan. James F. Keenan S.J. is the Kanisha's chair and director of the Jesuit Institute and director of the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program at Boston College. He has been teaching at BC since 2003. A Jesuit priest since 1982. He did his undergraduate studies at Fordham University and then received a licensure and doctorate from the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, where he studied with the renowned moral theologian Father Joseph Fuchs. Father Keenan has written and edited 25, count them, 25 books, and published over 400 essays, articles, and reviews. During his distinguished academic career, he has directed more than 35 doctoral dissertations. He's been a fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies at the University of Edinburgh, at the Center of Theological Inquiry at Princeton, and at the Instituto Trentino di Cultura in Trent, Italy. He's been visiting professor in Manila, Bangalore, Pune, Rome, and has lectured widely throughout the world. Who is James Francis Keenan? He is this year's recipient of the highest award that the Catholic Theological Society of America grants. The John Courtney Murray Lifetime Achievement Award. The citation, which accompanies the award, reads in part, James Keenan is a giant in advancing a global agenda of theological inquiry. His achievement combines depth of scholarship, a commitment to open inquiry, and a flair for theological entrepreneurship that is unmatched in our times. The citation honors Father Keenan quote, for leading ethical and theological dialogue beyond old patterns, and opening up new avenues in which other than Eurocentric wisdom plays a larger and larger role. It goes on to explain, if we were to single out one extraordinary accomplishment, among so many, it would surely be the founding and shepherding of the Catholic Theological Ethic in the World Church. For more than a decade, Jim has led this organization in exploring new avenues of pluralistic dialogue in the interaction between ethics and theology, holding multiple international conferences around the world, and providing scholarships to further the end of overcoming the old hegemony of the Northern Hemisphere in ethical and theological inquiry. Finally, I ask again, who is James Francis Keenan? Well, listen, and you will find out. Listen to Jim invite us to explore and acknowledge our own vulnerability, to recognize and to respond to the other. Listen to Jim's exegesis reflections on two familiar parables, the Good Samaritan and the Prodigal Son. Listen to Jim echo the call issued to people who work in institutions like ours to proceed boldly to the margins, to listen, and to search out those who are searching for meaning and experience exclusion, hostility, and exploitation. Who is James Francis Keenan? Listen to him, and you will find out. I was really thrown by Jerry starting all this. When he said he was hesitant of what he would say, I first met him about 1971. I was 18 years old, and I was in the Jesuits. And he was already much more accomplished than me, and he lived right across the hall from me. So I didn't know that he was going to resurrect something awful. And I sat here, mortified. Anyway, so I just want to give you what I'm trying to do here, a simple thing. I want to explore what does it take to be radically hospitable on a campus, Fairfield. So it's not to be radically hospitable in the world, but to be radically hospitable here on a campus. Because after all, there's a new crowd that arrives every year, and there's another crowd that leaves every year. We're pilgrims. Some of us stay a little longer, but here goes. Oh, and the accent. I'm from Brooklyn, but I've been living in Boston. So this is what happens with enculturation. It's pathetic. This is 45 minutes, so hold on. I'm going to talk about vulnerability and radical hospitality. In the 21st chapter of T.H. White's wonderful, The Once and Future King, The Telling of the Tale of the Training of King Arthur, we read a memorable account of creation that captures human vulnerability beautifully. It's the fifth and sixth day of creation. God has called the embryos of every animal species before God and saw that they were good. Of course, the embryos at that point looked exactly the same. They stood in front of God with their feeble hands, clasped politely over their stomachs, and their heavy heads hanging down respectfully, looking like an embryo. And God addressed them, now you embryos. Here you are all looking exactly the same, and we, the triune God always speaks, first person plural, are going to give you the choice of what you want to be. When you grow up, you will get bigger anyway, but we are pleased to grant you another gift as well. You may alter any parts of yourselves into anything which you think would be useful to you in later life. The giraffe embryo asks for a long neck for tree food. The porcupine asks for quills for protection, and so it goes for the entire animal kingdom, each making a specific request. The last embryo is the human, who when asked by God what he wants, responds, I think that you made me in the shape which I now have for reasons best known to yourselves, and that it would be rude to change. I will stay a defenseless embryo all my life. God is delighted, and in front of all the embryos, God says, as for you Adam, you will be a naked tool all your life, though a user of tools. You will look like an embryo till they bury you. White's vision of the human embryo as the bearer of human vulnerability is remarkable, for behind the story is the insight that Adam's decision to remain vulnerable is the same decision that God has made to remain vulnerable. We are made in God's image in as much as we are vulnerable, and so White concludes his account with God disclosing to the human Adam, eternally undeveloped you will always remain potential in our image, able to see some of our sorrows and to feel some of our joys. We are partly sorry for you Adam, but partly hopeful. Run along then and do your best. White captures human vulnerability, not as a weakness, but as capacious. Understanding vulnerability as capacious is the key to any understanding of an ethics of vulnerability. What do I mean? When we first think of God as vulnerable, we become prompted to look for the vulnerability of God in the scriptures, and here I would suggest we look at two of the most famous parables, the prodigal son and the good Samaritan. But first I would like to further develop the idea of vulnerability and then make a distinction between vulnerability and precarity. On vulnerability, the American philosopher, Judith Butler, has developed an entire ethics, reflecting on the prior work of Emmanuel Levinas and Hannah Arendt. In her own work, Butler writes, ethical obligation not only depends upon our vulnerability to the claims of others, but establishes us as creatures who are fundamentally defined by that ethical relation. That is, vulnerability is what establishes us as creatures before God, and as available and capable of being responsive to one another. Butler adds, this ethical relation is prior to any individual's sense of the self. It is not as discreet individuals that we honor this ethical relation. I am already bound to you, and this is what it means to be the self I am, receptive to you in ways that I cannot fully predict or control. Vulnerability is our nature, before any choice by ourselves. Butler writes, you call upon me and I answer. But if I answer, it was only because I was already answerable. That is, this susceptibility and vulnerability constitutes me at the most fundamental level and is there, we might say, prior to any deliberate decision to answer the call. In other words, one has to be already capable of receiving the call before actually answering it. In this sense, ethical responsibility presupposes ethical responsiveness. Our vulnerability in some is our capacity to hear another in need. Approaches to vulnerability emerged in literature, theology and philosophy, but also in psychology. Years ago, in 1988, in reflecting on gender and domination, the psychoanalyst and feminist theorist, Jessica Benjamin, reflected on infancy and mutual recognition among infants. So, mutual recognition among infants thinks six months. Six-month-olds all sitting in a room looking at one another. That's mutual recognition. All they've been seeing is big people and a lot of light and they don't know what's happening. And all of a sudden, there's somebody like them right in front of them. That's mutual recognition, or it could be. Mutual recognition is that central experience of infants among infants. After seeing people much bigger than they are, when they have the chance at six to nine months to meet others, they have the experience of mutual recognition. Jessica Benjamin writes, mutual recognition is the most vulnerable point in the process of differentiation. She adds, in mutual recognition, the subject accepts the premise that others are separate, but nonetheless share like feelings and intentions. In this work, Benjamin sought to explore ways of restoring mutual recognition as a defining key for understanding right relationship. In particular, she was concerned with gender and the problem of why more often, male children than females, abandon vulnerability for domination. She found that males as children are taught to abandon their own vulnerability and to develop instead this need for domination. The process to develop domination, she says, is a two-fold alienation. First, the male becomes alienated from his original vulnerable self. Second, he looks to dominate others, often women. In a more recent work in 2017, she turns again to mutual recognition and, among other matters, finds the language of vulnerability key for recuperating and restoring the experience of mutual recognition. These two scholars help us to appreciate more the reconciling and humanizing traits of vulnerability, helping us to see it not as a liability, but as something which establishes for us as human beings the possibility to be relational and therefore moral. Still, too many people think of vulnerability as a liability because they confuse it with precarity, being in a precarious situation. Precarity basically means being at risk. People sense a higher awareness of their vulnerability to harm. So it's a particular state that, as Butler notes, exposes, she says, the fragile and necessary dimensions of our interdependency. Therefore, we must be careful to recognize the difference between vulnerability and precarity. Certainly, in being vulnerable, we have the capacity to encounter and respond to another whose vulnerability is precarious as in the prodigal son parable where the younger son experiences precarity. In that parable, the beginning of the story focuses on the younger brother's precarity, and the center of the parable, but the center of the parable focuses on the vulnerable one, who is the father, who recognizes his son in the distance, runs to him, embraces him, reincorporates him, and works to restore all that was unstable, threatened, exposed, jeopardized, precarious. The same father remains vulnerable to his older son, who does not really suffer from precarity, but from resentment. Let us not think, however, that the father is surprised by the older son's resentment. When he sees his younger son in the distance, he knows that his movement toward the younger will trigger the older son's own insecurities. Yet it is this father's vulnerability that anchors both sons. The stability of the story is the vulnerable father, as the precarious son returns and the resentful one tries to leave. The centrality of the story is the enduringly vigilant, attentive, and responsive father, who is so because he is vulnerable. Vulnerability plays itself out even more so in the Good Samaritan parable. It is important for us to remember why Jesus tells this parable. He has just given the commandment to love one another. In response, one of the scribes asked Jesus, who is my neighbor? A close reading of the story reveals that Jesus is offering a very surprising answer to the question. At the beginning of the story, we are thinking that the answer to the question, who is my neighbor, is the man lying wounded on the road, that is the precarious one. But by the end of the story, we are no longer looking for the neighbor as the precarious one, but as the vulnerable one who is acting. The scribe rightly answers that the neighbor is the one who shows mercy, that is, to be neighbor is to be vulnerable. Like the surprise ending, many of us forget that this parable was never primarily a moral one. Throughout the tradition, many preachers and theologians saw in the story of the Good Samaritan the narrative and miniature of our redemption by Christ. Starting with Clement of Alexandria in the second century, then Origen, Ambrose, and finally Augustine, the Good Samaritan parable is the merciful narrative of our redemption. Later, from Venerable B to Martin Luther, preachers and theologians appropriate and modify the narrative. The basic allegorical expression of the parable was always this. The man who lies on the road is Adam, wounded by sin, suffering outside the gates, not of any city, but of Eden. The priest and the Levite, the law and the prophets, are unable to do anything for Adam. They are not vulnerable to him. Along comes the Good Samaritan, the Christ, a foreigner, one not from here, who vulnerably tends to Adam's wounds. Takens to the inn, which is the church, gives a down payment, leaves him in the inn, and with this down payment, begins the process of redemption and promises to return for him the second coming when he will pay in full for the redemption and take him with him into his kingdom. The parable then is first and foremost not a moral story about how we should treat others, but rather the central story of our redemption. That is what Christ has done for us. We are called, if you will, to a mutual recognition of seeing in Christ the one who is vulnerable for us so that we might be saved. Like the prodigal son, the parable is about the scandal of our redemption. Not how bad we are, but how vulnerable God is in Jesus Christ. In realizing how vulnerable God is, we recognize our own capacity for vulnerability and therein discover the capacity and the call to go and do likewise. In some, vulnerability is the fundamental capacity within the human condition to appreciate the challenges that others may experience. It is the capacity to recognize, respond, or to hear the need of another. It is based on our capacity for mutual recognition to appreciate within ourselves what another might or does hear, feel, sense, or experience in any precarious situation. So now let me turn to radical hospitality. I introduced this topic of vulnerability because unless one is vulnerable, I do not believe anyone will be terribly hospitable. The connection is most evident in the Good Samaritan parable. Only the vulnerable Samaritan is responsive and hospitable to the wounded man. Those who pass and by lack the capacity or the vulnerability to be responsive. The question prior to Fairfield asking how radically hospitable are you, therefore is the question about how vulnerable are you to the newcomer. This prior condition of vulnerability is needed if you are going to witness to this important claim that you make. So let's move to this concept of radical hospitality based on a notion of the Jesuit hospitality. I wrote this article called Jesuit hospitality. It's produced quite a number of jokes. I first came upon this issue of Jesuit hospitality when I read this comment in the introduction to the documents of the 34th General Congregation in 1995. This is what the introduction says. While the term was rarely used, GC General Congregation 34 was touching upon the Christian virtue of hospitality, of making the society a symbol of welcome to the poor, to lay people, to those searching for meaning, to those who want to take seriously, to talk seriously about religious issues. The General Congregation statement might strike some readers as certainly peculiar for regardless of the many charisms associated with the Jesuits, hospitality is not one of, say, the first dozen descriptions that come to mind. Our propensity for service leaves us often to be away from our homes and communities. In fact, often enough, one can arrive at a Jesuit community only to find no one at home. For instance, recently I traveled with Diocesan priest Father Antonio Oteado, the leading moralist in Europe, and we stopped in Dublin, and I got us two rooms at Leeson Street in Dublin. We were arriving on a Saturday and the community sent us the code to punch in on a weekend and enter the large double townhouse. We arrived, punched in the code, entered, and there were two envelopes, one for each of us, telling us where the dining room was, giving us the keys to our rooms, et cetera. We were staying for only 24 hours with complete access, but we met no one. This is Jesuit hospitality, my friend Antonio said to me. Anyone who has lived in a Jesuit community would be very surprised by this juxtaposition of Jesuit with hospitality. Indeed, if you want to know how guests should really be treated, go to a Benedictine monastery. First, assuredly, the Benedictines will be at home after all, they have a vow of stability. They don't leave. Second, you will be treated well. In fact, they will insist that you'll be treated like God by them. That's what they say. It's important then to understand that what the congregation write is meant by Jesuit hospitality is therefore very different from the familiar domestic hospitality that we attribute to the Benedictines. In order to understand this, we need to first understand Jesuit identity. For our identity is caught up in our mission. Jesuit identity is not shaped by where we live, but rather by what we do and by whom we serve. We are missioned throughout the world. This includes being missioned to accompany the most precarious. In light of this mission, we can understand the type of hospitality to which the contemporary Jesuit is called. As one theologian writes, the central image of the Jesuits that St. Ignatius seems to have had in his own mind right up to his death was that of a kind of apostolic vagabond. How can an apostolic vagabond be hospitable? What hospitality can a homeless vagabond provide? But is not the homeless vagabond the Good Samaritan? One of the early founders of the society, Jerome Nadal, wrote that Jesuit ministry does not expand from the Jesuit community, rather community occurs where Jesuit ministry is. Wherever there is need or greater utility for our ministries, there is our house. So at Boston College, about 110, 115 years ago, we moved from downtown Boston to Chestnut Hill. And what we did is we built the classroom building for four years, and for four years, the Jesuits from downtown commuted back and forth. Then after five years, they started building a house for them themselves. We went where the students were. We live wherever those in need live. Nadal's adds, the principle and most characteristic dwelling for Jesuits is not in houses, but in journeyings. Thus we form our communities in the heart of our mission. We live where those whom we serve live. In a manner of speaking, Nadal sees our ministry as like the first apostles. Our mission is to go to those most in need. We meet them as apostles of the church. Where they are, we dwell. And from that dwelling place, we support those in need. And as much as we are people sent on mission, we make our pilgrim lodging where the others are. We meet people where they're at. When I first wrote this, I was asked by JRS, the Jesuit Refugee Service, to write up how this reflects the work of our work with refugees. That journeying forth to meet those in need is then an act of hospitality. It's strikingly different from Benedictine notions of hospitality, because Jesuit hospitality is not found in its receiving, but in its sending. As one in the church and in the world, the Jesuit goes to those on the margins of society to welcome them into the church by preaching, by cataclyzing, or into the wider society by education or social ministry. Our model for Jesuit hospitality is not then found in the gracious Benedictine monastery, though indeed there is much we could learn from that place. And as much as the Jesuit charism is so strikingly defined by our mission to go to those in need, the new accent on hospitality or not to be understood as a call to appreciate and develop a more sensitive sense of domesticity. On the contrary, the new emphasis warns Jesuits against seeing the world as solely the place where we live. Rather, it calls us to be more attentive to where and how others live. It calls us to meet and to attend to others in the road, to meet them not where they are, not where we are, but where they are. I mean that both literally and metaphorically. We are called to be hospitable as the itinerant Good Samaritan was. Now what would this look like on a Jesuit campus? By invoking vulnerability, that is a sensitive, receptive awareness of the other and coupling it with this radical hospitality, I think we can see something deeply distinctive and transformative for the life of the university campus. Can we imagine it first in general and then in particular how this would be expressed? In general, we can acknowledge that in accompanying the other we need to empower the other so as to redefine our community. I wanna say that again. In accompanying the other, we need to empower the other so as to redefine the community. What do I mean by this? A university agenda that is vulnerable to being radically hospitable is not simply interested in providing a bed, some food, and a smiley welcome. Rather as the Samaritan made sure that the wounded man was well treated until he returned to bring him with him into the kingdom. The campus agent who welcomes the other is interested in allowing the newcomer to move from guest or newcomer to full agent. Often hosts tend to welcome guests but on the condition that the guest conformed to the host community's agenda. A colleague of mine, Christine Pole, is interested in how the guest is not simply received but allowed to flourish and allowed to literally become a leader in the community. In fact, this was the great success of the great confraternities of the 16th and 17th century. The people they welcomed became the next generation's leaders. In writing this, I am reminded of my own theology community that I headed in the 1980s. I was the house coordinator. We were a community of nine. This was gonna be our first community meeting. Four of us were returning and five were new. I began the community meeting, welcoming the five Jesuit newcomers, telling them, this is how we do things here. One of the five said, who is this we? He reminded me that among the we were five newcomers and that we might have an interest in how things were going to be done by us. When the host does not see the newcomers among the we, when the host believes that they will be unaffected by the initiatives of the guest, then truly the guest remain on the periphery as happens in many forms of hospitality. But true forms of hospitality are designed to incorporate the other into the community so that they are no longer the outsider, but the companion. No longer a recipient, but a full member and a full agent. There can be a terrible condescension to hospitality when the power inequity between the host and the guest is not subject to question, but who are you receiving? If there's not a mutual recognition as Jessica Benjamin names it, then there is no real reception of the other, but rather only a condescending self-serving gesture. We can only receive the other as agents if there is in us a mutual recognition. Hospitality has to empower people so that they can negotiate their own incorporation into our community, so that their presence as being among the we, as in the we at Fairfield, is one of their agency being evident. They are not the simple recipients of our being nice and welcoming. They are entering into the agency of the campus as full participants. In their becoming agents, I mean that the university agenda has to reflect the agency of all people it welcomes. And now I would like to suggest that the track record of this type of true incorporation is not as well impressive as we may think. I do work in university ethics, so here's my pitch. I want to name briefly six particular groups of people in the university and the different experiences of alienation that each one has. They are women, people of color, particularly African Americans, international students, contingent faculty, the working class, and the LGBTQ communities. Today, within American colleges and universities, more than 56% of the undergraduate population, more than 56%, hear this, you undergraduates. 56% of the undergraduate population in the United States is women. That means that less than 44% are men. Do you know that? You know it, but they're all know it. No, you're going, yeah, so talk to her. She says unstoppable on her blouse, so. So she knows that, that's why she's unstoppable. Despite that, the success rate at women at universities is remarkably different from men. Bloomberg reports, for instance, women who major in business, often become secretaries or administrative assistants, whereas men who major in business become chief executives and legislators at roughly the same rate. Even in education, a major dominated by women, men are more likely to become professors. Bloomberg adds, even in such a female-dominated professions as nursing or teaching, men are paid more, and the pay gap is even more severe for women of color. While college-educated white women earn only 55% of what college-educated white men do, college-educated non-white women earn even less. In my book, University Ethics, How Colleges Can Build and Benefit from a Culture of Ethics. That data is from this year, by the way. I have a chapter on gender and the university that begins with a quote by Nancy Hopkins at MIT that speaks of gender bias in the STEM community. Quote, people tend to think that the problem has gone away, but alas, it hasn't. Her quote is applicable across the university where we have seen that sexual assault of women, gender bias, difficulties in hiring, glass ceilings in administration, in economics and in STEM. Certainly with initiatives like Take Back the Night or Title IX, we see some improvements, but as Hopkins reminds us, gender bias is rife across the university, impacting women who are in the majority in the student population, but whose presence thins out progressively as you ascend in the university from undergrads to grads to faculty through administration. As you ascend, you find fewer women. The social structure, as well as the cultural setting of the university, together with the men who run it, helps silently to conspire against gender equity at the very institutions that teach that gender equity is unjust. What should radical hospitality say about the perpetual and pervasive university gender bias and how do we recognize the factors that inhibit women's agency at the university? Second, I have another chapter on race in my book on university ethics, and this one begins by a quote by the editor of Inside Higher Ed, Scott Jasek. This is the quote, as undergraduates progress in higher education, they become less interested on average in promoting racial understanding. He is reporting on a series of studies. In one, for instance, students were asked how important to you personally is helping to promote racial understanding. The students were asked the question upon arriving at college at the end of their freshman year and at the end of their senior year. The results were highest when they entered the school and began to fall by the end of freshman year and continued to fall well into the senior year. The researchers stated, contrary to our expectations, the average change in racial attitudes during the first year and over the entire four-year period is in a negative direction. They added that the study suggests that for some students, negative experiences with diversity may dampen the relatively progressive racial views they hold upon entering college. Mandating more culturally diverse classes is not the answer. Rather, the university as a whole needs to commit itself to promoting racial understanding as a good and that the good is visible across the campus in a variety of ways. The university needs to invest itself in developing and across the university witness to the value of racial understanding. The researchers write, colleges that can take the steps that promote environments conducive for cross-race friendship and other forms of positive interaction may have an even greater impact on students' racial attitudes. They found that without administrative intervention, students self-select racially the longer they are on campus. Moreover, they believe that their study called for more broad-based policies aimed at influencing the overall institutional environment. They found that to the extent to which an institution's environment was perceived as racially non-discriminatory, this positively influenced students' openness to diversity and challenge. They recommended purposeful policies and programs that both sensitize faculty, administrators, and students to what constitutes racial discrimination and to demonstrate unequivocally that such behavior is anathema to the institutional ethos. In a clear nod to the ethical foundations for these endeavors, they write, institutions should develop policies and programs aimed at creating a non-discriminatory racial environment, primarily because it is the right thing to do, not simply because it enhances student development. They conclude academic and administrative units that now think of themselves as separate will have to learn to plan and work together. In short, is the university hospitable to the pervasive racist culture that so often erupts at different times or places in our country? Or is it hospitable to a mutual recognition among all students and among the faculty, administration, and staff? That's a big question that we're not addressing. We don't talk about it, well maybe you do, but I go around and from what I understand, it's not really being talked about. We do have mandated a lot of classes for the students, but I think that the administration, that the leadership has to somehow embody what this really means and that's what these studies say. Third, just as universities aimed for greater racial diversity without addressing the need for a cultural climate change within the university, similarly, universities began the recruitment of international students without asking how hospitable the environment would be. Think about this, we cannot underestimate how the recruitment of international students is affecting the contemporary American university. So this is the first statistics from 2011. This is when this whole march began. The Institute for International Education reported robust numbers in 2011 of international successful student recruitment. The number of international students at colleges and universities in the United States increased by 5% to 723,277 students during the 2010 to 2011 academic year. That represented a record high number of international students in the United States and it was the fifth consecutive year that those figures showed growth in the total number of international students. Last spring, however, even with President Trump's migration policies, that number is now 1,169,464, a slight dip from the previous spring semester, which was 1,201,000. It is important to recognize that these students are in the majority Asian. In fact, around a quarter of Chinese followed very quickly by Indian and then by South Korean. The Institute explains the enormous economic impact that these international students make, usually paying full tuition because that's what the law requires. International students contribute more than $21 billion to the US economy through their expenditures on tuition and living expenses. Higher education is among the United States top service sector exports as international students provide significant revenue, not just to the host campuses, but also to the local economies of the host states for living expenses, including room and board, books and supplies, transportation, health insurance, and support for accompanying family members. Inside Higher Ed, it's one of the two big newspapers for higher education. Elizabeth Redden wrote an essay called, I'm not a racist, but. The title was taken from a tweet by a student at the University of Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska who wrote, I'm not a racist, but one thing I did not miss was all the Asians. Redden recounts a variety of episodes at college campuses that show little hospitality and a fair amount of aggression toward the new Chinese, Indian, or South Korean students. Moreover, she also reports dishearteningly that a recent study of these students found that nearly 40% of international students reported having no close American friends. What does that say about radical hospitality? So I ask, how concretely empowering is our radical hospitality to our international students? And dare we ask how much mutual recognition is there in our encounters with this student population or better, how much mutual recognition do we presuppose? The same alienating data can be found when we turn to the remaining groups, contingent faculty, the working class, and the LGBTQ communities. As the contingent faculties, both full-time and part-time grow at our universities, so too does their alienation from the tenure and tenure-track faculty. I cannot go into this here, but I'm on a national committee on contingent faculty, and I think that these faculty, beloved by students, are often enough to least welcome faculty on our campuses. I'm a, I'll just leave it at that. I would just say, we're far from able to address equity, let alone the attendant lack of hospitality. Working class, the great secret at the university, my father was Kojak. He was head of Manhattan South Homicide Squad. I entered the Jesuits at 17. I didn't know that the Jesuits actually did accept people from the working class, but there I was, and I was a scrappy working-class kid, and I've always been, and I've been the same way. I'm kind of rude, but I have other values. But the working class is the great secret at a university. We keep quiet about class at the university. I teach a course called HIV, AIDS, and Ethics, and every time I get to class, a number of seniors will say, I've never heard the word class brought up by a professor in a course that wasn't a sociology on class. They acknowledge that we have some courses on this, but even at universities that are known for need-based financial aid, working-class students are not able to participate in social activities that those from higher classes support, and students will remark that at the university, the bias of gender, sexual orientation, and race may be addressed in class, but classism itself is rarely recognized as a vice. Class remains hidden at our universities, but even when universities celebrate, for instance, senior week with among expensive formal affairs that working-class seniors cannot afford, or when students at community colleges nearby find a morass of bureaucratic obstacles rather than a bridge of welcome as they attempt to transfer from their community college to this university. The universities are willfully silent on class. Students and staff from the working class note the tendency of the university to simply overlook their situation. Finally, members of the LGBTQ communities are grateful for any hospitality they receive, but the language and actions of some righteous bishops and other Catholics, in particular in a variety of media outlets, and the concomitant silence of the university to acknowledge the impact that these statements have on them, serves as another reminder of how we let our members suffer in silence. I've been working in university ethics now for seven years, and I'm convinced that your decision to make radical hospitality a pillar of Fairfield's mission is brilliant. I haven't seen that. The only thing that I saw as brilliant as this is that Penn, after Penn had all their scandals where the president resigned, where the coach was resigned, where one of the other coaches was arrested, they created an office of ethical officer for the university, and he called me up after my book came out, and he said, I just want you to know I'm the ethics officer at my university, and I said, holy cow, where are you? He said, Penn, I said, figures. But this move by you is brilliant. Realizing, but realizing that mission might be harder than you think. If you don't heed the existing and underlying alienation that is across the American campus. I want to close, therefore, with a little ascetical challenge to encourage you, as you further your campus agenda of being vulnerable to radical hospitality. I think you might like what I propose. My best friend, Yusing Lucas Chan, a Jesuit from Hong Kong, died at 46 years of a sudden heart attack while on Marquette's faculty four years ago. He was a trailblazer in Asian theological ethics and in Catholic biblical ethics. He was a student of Dan Harrington, Lisa Soul Cahill, and myself. His second book, The Ten Commandments and the Beatitudes, Biblical Studies and Ethics for Real Life, unpacked the Beatitudes. I'd like to do that with you. In his exegetical treatment of Matthew's Beatitudes, he insists that by following John Climacus, a patristic figure, we should see the Beatitudes as a ladder of ascent. Each Beatitude, or Macarism, builds on the previous one. Lucas starts the ladder explaining that the first Beatitude, blessed the poor in spirit, means blessed are those who are the most abandoned, most alienated, most in need. That person or those people must become the first concern of any pathway to holiness. The second Beatitude, blessed are they who mourn, prompts us to ask over whom or about what should we mourn? Unfortunately, many claim that this Beatitude means if you have suffered a loss and you don't mourn, you'll never be consoled. But that's cheap psychology. And that's not what the exegetes say, know what Jesus meant. Mourning points to the condition of the poor in spirit, the first Beatitude. Blessed are those who mourn the condition of the poor in spirit, or blessed are those in the community who are empathetic to those suffering alienation in our midst. The third, blessed are the meek, is for those in the community who are sympathetic and want to respond to the poor in spirit, but who have too much power and might. They move toward the poor in spirit with a know-it-all benevolence. They need to learn meekness if they are going to address the poor in spirit. Only through meekness can they come down from domination and make a mutual recognition of the poor in spirit and encounter the poor in spirit in them as well. But how to become meek? The fourth Beatitude is blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness. But what does this mean? I think it can only mean, not that I'm gonna go on a fast for those who are poor in spirit, it can only mean that those who are seeking to be the meek need to practice fasting and abstinence so as to let their dominant, condescending personality wither and allow their vulnerable person to emerge. Finally, the fifth is the celebration of those who practice mercy. Now after recognizing the poor in spirit, after being empathetic to their condition, after seeking meekness by the practice of fasting and abstinence, now finally we can practice mercy. Now we can treat through a radical hospitality, our neighbor on campus with the hospitality that they deserve. I'm suggesting that we need to do something with ourselves so that we can have the mutual recognition that's required so that we welcome people with respect so that they can enter into the agency of the community that they're looking to have. When we do this, we will discover a purity of heart, a willingness to do one thing as Kierkegaard taught us, that we must aim for the poor in spirit in our midst. This will allow us to become peacemakers, the seventh Beatitude, helping us to be a truly vulnerable, hospitable presence. So I conclude, I pray that as you pursue radical hospitality, that you pray the Beatitudes, discover your own vulnerability, that you allow meekness to free you of domination and guide you to encounter a mutual recognition with those on your campus who long to be welcomed. And finally I pray on this way or on this ladder that you discover all along you were following in the footsteps of the one who tended the man outside the gates of the city. Thank you. So I threw a lot at you. Questions or comments? They have mics and they can bring the mics to you. So we have a few minutes. I'd love to hear what you think. I've never done this one before and I decided, well, it's a place I know some of the faculty at administration, I can get away with it. So I'd like to hear, I'd like for you to hear that this is somebody who's coming from within and not from without. Yes, please. Since I have the privilege of holding the mic. You were speaking about contingent faculty, then kind of cut it short. Could you just maybe open that up again? Yeah, so right now contingent faculty make up the majority of faculty across the country. Now these figures are very hard to work with because there's two types of contingent faculty, part-time and full-time. And in some universities, like my own, we have actually a very good policy for full-time contingent faculty where they receive merit increment. They're fully hired. They're giving promotions. They're in a separate track, if you will, too. There are about 168 contingent faculty in about 600 in the tenure, no, about 500 in this tenure and tenure track. But then there's another group called part-time contingent faculty and these are people who do, if you will, coursework. And at community colleges, the majority are individuals who are doing coursework, you know, one or two courses. And as a result, these are faculty who are teaching at two or three schools trying to make ends meet and many of them die in poverty. There's a lot of narratives about this but contingency is growing at our universities. Every university, when it does more hires, more percentage of their faculty are contingent faculty and I know, I watch it, I watch at department meetings how tenure and tenure track faculty are with contingent faculty at their department meetings. There is a two-tier system that happens and anything of some sort of professional equity is not there at all. So there's many levels of inequity with the contingent faculty. It could be what type of rights they have. We just did a survey through the Society of Christian Ethics, so it figures, right? Society of Christian Ethics, world professors and we've better do something about contingent faculty because almost half of our doctoral students who get a job are getting a contingent position and they want us to say something about, so we did an interview to find out what were the differences in pay? What were the benefits that they received? And it all depends on whether they're full-time or part-time and then what type of school they're in. We've learned from race that when there's power and equity, it's whites who should be speaking, not those who are suffering the inequity already in the society. But at the university, the only ones who are speaking about this are contingent faculty. There are very, very, very, very few tenured and tenure-track faculty who bring up the concerns, needs, or agency of contingent faculty there. And yet, these are the same faculty who teach justice almost anywhere but at their university. So I do a bit, I mean, this is why I've been writing on my plenary address at the Society of Christian Ethics on January will be vulnerable to the contingent faculty, a challenge for tenure and tenure-track faculty. You know, that's it in a nutshell, but I could go into, I could descend into the details but it gets only more depressing. I do wanna acknowledge though the initiatives that universities have taken to stabilize contingent faculty as full-time workers receiving promotion and merit increment, having evaluations and offering them a variety of positions where even in many instances their research is recognized is a significant step forward. And any time there's any forum that they can meet, contingent faculty, it gives them a place that they can talk about their experience. So I run the Jesuit Institute, it was always for tenure and tenure-track faculty so now it's for contingent faculty. I have, they're called the Jesuit Essentials and they have become an advocacy group for all the issues of the contingent faculty at our place. Yeah. Hi, I have a, just a quick question about radical, as I would imagine most of the questions probably wouldn't be about. What would I say to a student who says, I'm non-religious, how can I be radically hospitable to people but radical hospitality seems to be predicated on the sort of Christian or Catholic or religious moral foundation? But I don't identify with that. How would I address a student with that concern? Great, that's a great question because even as I was reading this, as I came in, I had all sorts of different people who are Jews or Muslims, all identifying themselves and I'm thinking, boy, this is a Christian talk. So this gives me a way to address that issue. But you know, like I'm a New Yorker, right? New York Harbor, what does it have? It has the Statue of Liberty that some people wanna forget what it says. But it does say, give me your tired and your poor. And it's basically a cultural understanding that the United States would be known for its hospitality, its radical, radical in its own identity, hospitality to the immigrant because it was formed as a nation of immigrants. So I just gave you a perspective of how in the Christian text, you can find hospitality. If you go into Islamic text, you're gonna find bundles of it. I mean, all you need to do is enter a mosque and it says, Allah, the most merciful one. Well, how is Allah merciful? But by welcoming you into Allah's own world of life. And in fact, if you go to many different countries, like I work in India, I've taught this seven or eight times, the Islamic, the Muslim hospitals are really rather an important stable presence of caring for the other there. Both religions, Christianity and Islam are founded on Judaism. The entire notion of the creation is an account of God making this world for us. And even the very first narrative that I began is really not a Christian text. It's a Jewish text that's being played with by T.H. White. So first, and this you say, still stunad, you're not answering the question about religion. But first I wanted to make a point about how religious identity is distinctive about it, but that is not exclusive. That was my point about the Statue of Liberty. The American identity has always been hospitable. It has not practiced it, but its identity, what it profiled itself was to be a nation of immigrants. When it would rout out different people, it was betraying its identity. This thing of mutual recognition, the United States, when it's vulnerable, lives the hospitality that it believes is pertinent to its identity. And when it's dominant, it betrays it. Judith Butler did a brilliant book called The Precarious One, and she wrote it after the bombing of September 11th. And she said, you know, the United States, by September 11th, was brought into a situation of precarity, and immediately it denounced its vulnerability in the name of domination. And she said, it betrayed its identity. And I think she's 100% right. I mean, I know there's political issues, yadda, yadda, yadda, but the experience of vulnerability is for us a vice in our contemporary language cultures. And that's what I'm trying to say. It's a betrayal of our identity. So, yes, oh, okay, you go, and then you go. Okay, hello, Father Keenan. Thank you for coming to Fairview University. My name is Ali Hadar. I'm a junior here, politics and economics double major. My question for you is, how does a Jesuit campus provide radical hospitality to groups of people who have competing and often opposing interests? Ah, great, I like that. I wasn't anticipating that. I always anticipated, did you get that? How does a university actually promote competing interests? You know, one of the things that these people on racial diversity wrote about was that the best thing to bring about racial familiarity is to get diverse races together, people of different backgrounds in a room, and give them a neurologic issue that they can all pick something. Trump, you put them in the middle of the room and have a debate on that. And what they say is that in those type of discussions, people discover the humanity of another and not their racial identity. I think that the university, by engaging people in debate, is actually providing the space for the things that remain silent. Like, look at this. I'm doing a little bit of a harangue here, right? I mean, I'm basically saying, look at women in our universities. What I said is really true. And if you were here and saw the number of women who were going like this, as I was speaking, and the men were not going like this, the women were going like this, the university provides space for these things to be said. We need the university. The Catholic Church needs the university because none of these things I ever said anywhere in the Catholic Church except for at a university. So the university is the place that provides safe space for engagement. When the university denies that, it's betraying their identity. Just as what I was trying to address to your colleague, your friend right there, that when the United States betrays its hospitality, it's betraying its identity. When the university decides to shut down discourse, it's, you know, except for in very particular ways, like the University of Virginia, when a group of white racists want to bring on torches on the campus. When the university wants to shut down discourse or when it inhibits it, it runs the problem of risking its identity, I think. But, Ravel, yeah. I'm just kind of building on these last two questions. I mean, I was taken by the idea of the, you know, the host needs to see the newcomer as the we as part of the we, but I guess the question for a Jesuit university is how do you balance that in terms of when the we are coming from different faith traditions? Yeah, I think that, you know, my own experience is like, I run the Gabelli Presidential Scholars Program. And so I'm a priest running this program and I go after the best students in the country and recruit them and they get the only academic merit scholarship that we give. And so we're competitive with, you know, really, we have the top percentile that we're looking at. And everybody says first to me, do I have to be Catholic in order to come into this program? And I said, well, you're Jewish, aren't you? And they say, yeah. So I said, you can come in the program. And, you know, and this will be with Islamic students or students of secular backgrounds and the rest. I think that Jesuit identity is only understood if it understands itself as entering into the world. If Jesuit identity is found by retreating, then it's not the sending that it argues that it is. Unless we actually engage the world as it is, whether in faith or not, unless we invite people around the table, unless we're participants with that. Now, I do acknowledge that at a university, there's an interest in keeping somewhere in the university the presence of Jesuit charism keeping and advancing the question of the Christian tradition, but not at the expense of the university's own identity, but as a purpose for animating the rest of the university. These are things that you play in tandem of both end. This has always been a Catholic way, not in either or. And so there has to be a way that we're as vibrant Jesuit and Christian as we're vibrant as a university that is able to have a multitude of speakers because we believe wisdom is that. I did my dissertation on Thomas Aquinas. He quoted everyone. My momities, Abyssinia, Averroes, Paul, Aristotle, Plato, that's what I think a Jesuit university is about. The multitudinous voices that animate wisdom, that searches for equity among all of us so that we can welcome those who are in need. That's what a university has to be about. That does not mean that those of us who are Jesuit or built into the Ignatian Charism do not brand themselves, but that does not mean that we don't want or need, in fact, we do, other voices who do and work in similar ways, but not with our identity. Please join me in thanking Father James Keenan. And now, before you leave, Ophelia Row-Allen is not gonna let you out the door. So oftentimes people come to a motivating, engaging conversation such as this. This is your call to action, so we're actually not letting any of you out the door. So you have a few choices and then many others. You can join a working group. There are three that are already in formation. The first is engaging the world, Melissa Kwan, who is in the back, and also Ophelia Row-Allen. Where are you, Ophelia? She's back there guarding the door. They are leading a conversation with people that is focused on community engagement, writ large. Number two is a working group on theological visions of radical hospitality being facilitated by Martin Nguyen, who is here, and Father Jerry Blaschek, who is right here. They'll be looking at the various theological questions, some of which we're just engaged with. The meaning of radical hospitality will be facilitated by myself and Chrissie Lee. Chris, are you still here? She had to leave, she had her son with her. It was very important. We are looking at both the political and philosophical meanings of radical hospitality. These groups, you can sign up in the back. Kim Bear, Kim, if you'd raise your hand. She's got sign-up sheets if you would like to join those groups that are in formation. You may also decide that you want to create an informal group, or maybe you want to have an event. If you are a student here, you can go to this website, fairfield.edu, critical conversations, and start, create, join an event. So we want to invite people to think about how they can engage in this critical conversation about radical hospitality, and stay tuned. In April of 2020, the three groups will be reporting out about their projects, about the working papers that they're going to create here in this room, and some of you may want to rejoin us at that particular time to tell us about the great event that you hosted in your Rez College. Maybe it was through your FYE class. Maybe it's a project that you choose to do in one of your courses or a capstone research project. It could be any or all of these things. And President Nemeck and Provost Siegel will be here to hear the kind of progress that we've made and to engage with us in the conversations that we're having. So get out there, get involved, get engaged, have a conversation in whatever formation that may take, and for now, enjoy the reception. Thank you all for coming. Thank you.