Implementing the Laudato Si’ University Pathways: To change everything, we need everyone
By Chad Raphael, Alison Benders, and Lindsey Kalkbrenner
The Laudato Si’ University Pathways offer an urgent and generational opportunity for Catholic higher education to advance environmental and social justice. More than 130 universities and colleges around the world, with more expected to join, have pledged to embark on a seven-year journey to promote integral ecology in all they do.
As institutions develop their plans, this is an important time to learn from each other how we are implementing the Pathways’ sweeping vision to transform our campuses and communities. We can think together about how to foster learning and action for integral ecology across our whole curriculum, and link this to opportunities in the co-curriculum, research, campus operations, and community engagement.
To educate the whole person for the common good, we need to draw on the whole institution and its common resources. As climate marchers like to say, “To Change Everything, We Need Everyone.”
Seven Goals, Seven Years
The University Pathways challenge our institutions to embark on a seven-year journey toward the seven goals of integral ecology. For each goal, the Pathways urge us to identify actions that link environmental and social justice, and join personal transformation with social action.
We should focus not only on how each of us can do our part, but how we can make the right connections among us. As the Pathways ask, “How do we foster within our administration, faculty, students, and staff a sense of belonging to a community that is both ready to receive and ready to offer an ecological education?”
We can begin by designing planning processes that involve all campus constituencies. Santa Clara University has embarked on such a process, co-led by its vice president for mission and ministry and the director of its Center for Sustainability. Five working groups will consult widely with the campus to design aspects of the plan over the 2022–23 academic year.
Campuses can also learn from each other by sharing their process on the University Pathways website, and take inspiration and lessons from the leadership of the International Association of Jesuit Universities’ Task Force on Environmental and Economic Justice, which designed the Pathways, and from publications such as Ecojesuit and Promotio Iustitiae.
Across the Curriculum
To incorporate learning about integral ecology in each discipline, the Pathways urge us to provide a bedrock of environmental knowledge about urgent challenges and the search for solutions, but also to cultivate ethical and spiritual reflection that “raise ecological awareness, stimulate greater commitment to care for creation, and train for global environmental citizenship.” Practical steps can include creating relevant interdisciplinary majors and minors, student fellowships, research centers, campus programming, and working groups for curricular reform.
These efforts will require faculty and staff to step beyond narrow disciplinary training to broaden their own and their students’ horizons. We cannot inspire students to make connections that we are unwilling or unable to make ourselves. We will need, for example, engineers who are prepared to address questions of justice, scientists who can speak with people of faith, humanities faculty conversant with environmental policy, and business instructors familiar with corporate environmental, social, and governance principles. Faculty members will be needed to help students discover how each discipline can address the challenges ahead, and to help students discern their vocations within their field.
To this end, we can learn from successful professional development programs, such as those offered by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). Santa Clara has expanded its AASHE-affiliated training program to offer a new Laudato Si’ across the Curriculum program, which will support faculty and staff in Catholic universities to learn from each other about how to lead curricular and pedagogical reform to incorporate integral ecology.
Across the Co-Curriculum and Operations
Staff and student leadership will also be crucial for coordinating efforts to spread integral ecology across the co-curriculum and campus operations. Many of the Pathways’ recommendations are best led by campus offices of sustainability, facilities, student life, Campus Ministry, student government and clubs, and staff and student organizations working for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
They will be most effective if they collaborate in campus governance on sustainability planning to reduce consumption and waste, foster time spent in nature and alleviating poverty, promote green jobs in career counseling, practice antiracism and gender equity, and deepen interfaith dialogue and spiritual practices of integral ecology. Can we incorporate these activities into departmental missions and job descriptions in a way that helps everyone do their jobs better without making them bigger?
At Santa Clara, we have found that faculty and staff can support these steps by co-designing academic projects to help students apply disciplinary knowledge to campus change efforts, making the campus itself a living lab for innovation. These projects are a natural fit for Ignatian pedagogy’s interweaving of experience, action, and reflection, including spiritual reflection. For example, after Santa Clara committed to becoming a carbon-neutral, zero-waste campus, we had carbon and consumption footprints to calculate, waste reduction campaigns to design, and procurement policies to evaluate. If all campus constituencies understand the challenges and trade-offs involved in taking these steps, and collaborate to make difficult choices, we are more likely to make wise decisions and earn the widespread trust needed to enact them.
Across the Community
The Pathways call for renewed “acts of solidarity within and between universities and community-based partners” to address local problems. While strengthening services — for poverty alleviation, job training, economic development, and the like — we also need to address damages we have caused to others. This involves changing our relationship to communities that serve as sacrifice zones for our and others’ consumption and waste. It involves reconciling with Indigenous peoples on whose historic lands many of our campuses sit. It means reforming our campus master plans to avoid burdening our neighbors with traffic, gentrification, and displacement. And it means paying employees living wages and benefits, so they can help support their families and communities.
To heal our relationships with these communities, the Pathways encourage us to cultivate skills in organizing, advocacy, and collaboration with social movements and social ministry; truth and reconciliation processes; and participatory community-based research and learning.
Santa Clara is strengthening community-engaged learning and research for integral ecology through its Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative, which supports faculty and staff with grants and training.
The university’s tUrn Project brings climate and climate justice leaders, especially underrepresented voices, into dialogue with the campus. Santa Clara has also begun a reconciliation process with Ohlone and Muwekma Ohlone peoples, on whose traditional and unceded lands our campus sits, which has influenced campus ceremonies, museum exhibits, mapping projects, and research agendas.
Across Our Leadership
How well we follow the Pathways will depend largely on the quality of our strategic planning and evaluation, and our ability to practice inspirational and consultative leadership. While the Pathways ask much of us, each institution can ask itself which of the Pathways’ goals and steps its campus is best positioned to prioritize, given its strategic advantages.
Presidents and provosts can prioritize and resource substantive change, while inviting specific strategies to bubble up from below. For example, they can ask schools and departments to draft student learning outcomes about integral ecology that are relevant to their disciplines and accreditors. They can support faculty and staff to share pedagogies and community engagement strategies with colleagues. They can ask staff and students to suggest ways to reinforce and supplement these outcomes in the co-curriculum and operations.
We can also ask trustees and donors to prioritize integral ecology as mission-critical and fund more effective strategies than endowed professorships and non-essential facilities.
Could we persuade donors to allocate at least half of their contributions to reducing their favorite athletic team’s greenhouse gas emissions? What if we asked donors how they would want us to spend their money if our campus communities were threatened by hunger, fires, floods, and droughts? Because they are.
The scope and interrelatedness of these changes require all of us to rethink how we collaborate — in our classrooms, conference rooms, and board rooms — and to learn to transform our institutions together. Let us share inspiring programs and promising practices, as well as noble failures, and wish each other godspeed on the journey before us.
Chad Raphael directs the Laudato Si’ Across the Curriculum program; Alison Benders is vice president of mission and ministry; and Lindsey Kalkbrenner is the director of the Center for Sustainability at Santa Clara University.
