Commencement Address 2005 | Press Releases

Ddelivered by Rev. Jeffrey P. von Arx, S.J., President of Fairfield University

Bishop Lori, Fairfield University faculty and trustees, ladies and gentlemen:

I know that you, our graduates, and your parents, family and friends don't need me to tell you how important this occasion is. For our graduates, it is the culmination of years of hard work and sacrifice. It is an important ending in your lives, and this is nowhere so apparent as in the parting of friends so soon to take place. It is, as well, a beginning, even if some of you aren't entirely sure about what comes next!

For parents, family and friends of our undergraduates, this is a moment to acknowledge a transformation in a son or daughter who entered this place a child and leaves it as an adult, ready to assume the responsibilities and autonomy of adulthood. For the husbands and wives, children, parents and friends of our graduate students, this is a moment to recognize their status as true professionals, prepared to make, more than ever, distinctive contributions to the community.

For me, too, this is an important occasion: the first graduation that I preside over as President of Fairfield University and I am tremendously grateful to you all for your kindness in listening to me, and I want to assure you that the Class of 2005 will always have a special place in my heart and in my prayers as the first class to graduate from Fairfield during my time as president.

I have been promising our graduates that this will not be a long address: indeed, has there ever been a complaint about a talk that it was too short? But I do want to say a few words to our graduates about the hopes and expectations that we, the faculty, staff and administration of Fairfield University, have for them as they leave this place.

First, we hope that during your time at Fairfield you have come to know yourself. Self-knowledge, as I hope you have come to realize, is a reflexive activity: that is to say, you cannot aim at it directly. You can only know yourself insofar as you have come to know other things. This is the epistemological equivalent of the profound spiritual truth that you can only find yourself by losing yourself. We hope that here at Fairfield you have given yourself over to a passion for learning many things, and that out of that passion, you have discovered something of what it is to be a whole and fulfilled human being.

Second, we hope that as a result of self-knowledge gained through study, you have developed a set of values to live by. Values, as I'm sure you have discovered, are not a matter of your tastes or preferences, your likes or dislikes. Among educated people, our values come from what we know we know, and we come to that knowledge through a disciplined and systematic way of thinking about our world, ourselves and, for the community of faith, about how God has revealed himself to us. Indeed, if our values do not at some points challenge our inclinations, we have probably not done a very good job of developing them.

Third, we hope that your education at a place like Fairfield has helped you to understand what it is to make good decisions about your life. In all of my years involved in working with young people, it is their difficulty in making good choices about really important issues like their vocation in life that has concerned me most. And yet Jesuit education, if it is about anything, should be about the ability to make good decisions, not on the basis of whim or circumstance or peer pressure, but rather on the basis of self-knowledge and values that we are confident of. I believe that it is this ability to make decisions you can have confidence in that young people today long for more than anything else. It is my hope and conviction that the kind of integrated education and education in values that we have offered you here at Fairfield has given you the ability to make decisions that you know to be the right ones, within the limits of our human fallibility.

One hears much these days, within education circles and elsewhere, about outcomes assessment. Competence and skills, certainly, are an important part of what you, your parents and employers and others expect a quality education to provide. But Jesuit education has its own particular and indeed peculiar set of standards for success which are not always measurable by the normal expectations of outcomes assessment, and sometimes cut across conventional ideas of success. A commitment to the common good and, more particularly, an engagement on behalf of those who have no one else to be their advocates, should be characteristics of you, our graduates, and the litmus test of whether the integrated education, formation in values and discernment of vocation that we advertised have achieved their desired outcome.

As graduates of Fairfield, you will always be welcome back in this beautiful place, and, indeed, we hope you come back often. Some of you, I expect, have formed friendships with your professors that will last a lifetime. But for the most part, with this graduation, our role as your teachers is over. We hope we have served you well in that role, and for our failures, we ask your pardon. But there is always an aspect of teaching that is an act of faith. Neither you nor we know the full impact of our encounter here upon your future, and so, as we bid you farewell, we make that act of faith in you and commend you to God's care.

God bless you all; God bless Fairfield University.