The Mission

Fr. Dennis Gallagher, A.A. '69, Vice President for Mission

Education and 9/11 (Spring 2002)

We have been hearing frequently in recent months that our world is fundamentally altered as a result of last September’s terrorist attacks. While it is not difficult to defend that statement — a more realistic appreciation for our vulnerability, a consequent vigilance in protecting ourselves, a heightened sense of common cause, etc.— the long-term effects of that fateful day as it concerns changing our way of life remain less certain, more open to debate. Those of us who teach courses whose stock-in-trade are the permanent questions regarding good and evil and the relationship between religion and the political order suddenly found ourselves able to frame those questions in a context which gave them a far greater degree of immediacy and urgency. One professor reports that after years of trying, without much success, to argue for the inadequacy of a dogmatic, though unreflective relativism, he actually succeeded for the first time in getting his students to seriously question their own taken-for-granted premises.

As the impact of those events recedes, however, our students themselves wonder whether the initial willingness to wake up from slumbers of various sorts has much in the way of staying power. I raised that question in class the other day, and my 8:30 a.m. students—some of them under the influence of bodily slumber—were hedging their bets about how much had really changed as a result of 9/11. These conclusions invited further reflection on what is necessary in order to substantially alter habits of thinking and reorient our lives. These are questions hardly peripheral to the goal of an Assumption education, which, as liberal education, aims to free its students from the tyrannies proper to a corrosively materialist and individualistic society. One response to the 9/11 events was to feel ourselves connected to a sense of purpose larger than the pursuit of our private interests. The price was ever so dear, but the galvanizing effect of that experience was unmistakable and sheds light, perhaps, on the extent to which the horizon of our lives had been flattened out. 

What are the prospects, then, for educating our students to a sense of responsibility to an order larger than themselves? As Professor Lowenthal has noted in these pages recently, political responsibility is the context in which liberal education has traditionally acquired its particular coherence. In its link to the long political and religious tradition of the West, an Assumption education at its best prepares its students to understand themselves in the first place as members of a larger community—as citizens of polities in this world and as citizens of the City of God. The immediate effect of the 9/11 events was to prompt us to understand this with a degree of seriousness not felt in a long time. The ongoing challenge for us is to provide an education which lifts the minds and hearts of our students beyond the narrow range of their private selves, and to appreciate the urgency of this both in times of peril and in times of peace.