As I write this, we are told that summer will soon be here—any day, in fact—but it seems a little slower and wetter in arriving this year. And this is a year when we could use a little summer, with the gray clouds of the economy likely to hang around a little longer.
Certainly, these difficult financial times have given rise to more than a little introspection. Assumptions about the value of a Catholic, residential, liberal arts education, which we have taken for granted for a long time, have been profoundly challenged. While we acknowledge that most of our recent graduates have to enter the world of work quickly, we cannot fall into reckless abandonment of the time horizon that is embedded in the type of education offered at Saint Michael’s.
Indeed, a liberal arts education implicitly recognizes work as being very important in defining one’s life. After all, many of us when asked who we are include what we do in the response, what we work at as one of the principal defining characteristics of our person. To be sure, our work life may not be at the top of the list, but it remains fundamental to our sense of who we are, even in the face of the transcendental nature of our beliefs. And, it is important precisely because we spend a good deal of time helping our students decide what is “good” work—something that will be worth devoting the better part of the next fifty years of their lives to doing well.
In the personal development afforded by the intimacy of a Catholic, residential, liberal arts college lies the very reason why this sort of education is so valuable, both to the student and society at large. Institutions like Saint Michael’s are deliberately structured to afford students the perspective of the long view. It is almost as if our young people are asked to imagine life backward from the perspective of seven decades, informed by some of the great minds and moral exemplars who preceded us.
This issue of the Saint Michael’s College Magazine gives great witness to the value of our Catholic, residential, liberal arts education. The life of an alumnus who is an accomplished scientist, physician and public-health official on the world stage has many of its roots here in Winooski Park, while a group of students just beginning their journey is enthusiastically initiated into a sense of obligation to others that they will carry with them always. Both are described in these pages. There are few better testimonies to the value of the Saint Michael’s experience than to demonstrate that it begins a life well and can culminate in great personal achievement and benefit to humanity.
