Title: Racial and Environmental Justice, Immigration Rights, Women in Leadership Subjects of Jesuit Higher Education Conference

As this year’s conference host, Georgetown convened six plenary sessions and corresponding response sessions – as well as more than 80 poster presentations – examining Universal Apostolic Preferences, Ignatian spirituality, racial justice, immigration, women in leadership and environmental justice.

“We share a commitment to justice – to the work of encouraging this commitment in our students, urging them to have their hearts on fire responding to the needs of the world with passion, with courage and with urgency,” said Georgetown President John J. DeGioia at the conference opening. “This conference provides an important opportunity to reflect upon how we might draw upon our Catholic and Jesuit tradition in new ways as we respond to the challenges of our moment and the ongoing and urgent call for justice in our world.”

Ignatian Year

Originally scheduled for 2020 but delayed due to the coronavirus pandemic, the conference convened at the beginning of the Ignatian Year (2021-2022), which celebrates the 500th anniversary of Society of Jesus founder St. Ignatius of Loyola’s spiritual conversion. 

“We need to continue to deepen the processes of change that the processes of conversion that began long ago and continue today in our university communities and in our countries,” said Fr. Arturo Sosa, S.J., superior general of the Society of Jesus.

This was the sixth Justice in Jesuit Higher Education Conference, which first convened at Santa Clara University in 2000.

Racial and Environmental Justice

Conference participants considered justice – and the role Jesuit institutions, colleges and universities play in achieving it – across disciplinary and societal dimensions.

Kaye Whitehead, associate professor of communication and African and African American Studies at Loyola University Maryland and founding director of the Karson Institute for Race, Peace, and Social Justice, moderated a plenary on how race and racism are embedded in society, the reality of privilege and power and why white supremacy is harmful to all of humanity.

“The policies have changed, the laws have changed, but that final frontier – which is the hearts and minds of white folks in this country – that has not changed in the places that would bring about fundamental differences in the lives of Black and brown people,” said Whitehead.

Universities are uniquely placed to take on issues of injustice – through institutional practices, but also through research and the education of young people.

Recent Georgetown alumnus Nareg Kuyumjian (SFS’21) introduced a plenary presentation by Nancy Tuchman, founding dean of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability at Loyola University Chicago, on the place of environmental justice in the commitments of Jesuit institutions of higher education.

“It is incumbent on every university in the country to provide the problem solving tools and consciousness nurturing contexts with which students can be empowered by and give power to a harmonized human-environment relationship that replaces today’s exploitation and abuse of nature with systems based on regeneration, circularity, resilience and sustainability,” said Kuyumjian.