Posted: November 7

Mile high in Denver

(Denver) The campus of Regis University has changed a great deal since those long-ago days when I first took the bus here as a high school freshman in 1960. For one thing, a brand new church crowns the hill side on the north side of the campus where the old gym used to stand. I remember my sister popping her head in the door of the wrestling practice room when I was back at Regis in the late 70s and coaching wrestling. The sweet smell of adolescent athletes was so overwhelming that she wisely chose to wait for me outdoors. Now people come into a chapel with a solid wall of windows looking out over the northern suburbs of Denver off to the mountains beyond. Of course, my view of the mountains as a kid always got me into trouble, because I would look out and see the peaks I liked to climb and immediately float away into daydreams. My Latin teacher, Father Bakewell, took perverse delight in mocking me whenever he caught me lost in dreams. This new church would have tested my natural inclinations, but I always thought that day dreams are very close to prayer anyway.

I was back at Regis for the first-ever worldwide conference on adult learning and distance education. The high altitude in Denver makes it hard for some people to breathe, but the meeting itself took my breath away. People came from the United States and Latin America as well as Micronesia, Australia, the Philippines, Lebanon, Europe and Africa. Many people think of the traditional undergraduate campus-based education when they say “Jesuit education” but more and more schools are reaching out to the huge number of adults who want to learn new fields or expand their ability to respond to changing situations. Actually, I count myself as an adult learner since I went back to school after ordination and after teaching for four years. I went to Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and got an excellent education, but almost everything I work with now in terms of web sites was not even invented when I got my initial professional training in graphic design. So I know the pressure to learn new ways to work and I appreciate the innovations in education that the people at this conference are engaged in. Many participants at the meeting are in schools of “professional studies”, others are in nursing and computer science. Still others are in basic education.

Beyond the normal sharing of professional interests that you would find at any similar gathering of university people, there was a strong thread of interest in connecting higher education resources to the needs of poor people. Four people from Australia gave a presentation about their innovative ways of making tertiary education available to Burmese refugees. Their presentation in the meeting at Denver touched many hearts. I had two opportunities to give presentations about what I am trying to do in Zambia setting up digital learning centers.

Often I find myself having to slow down in meetings and not race ahead of the conversation, since my mind frequently jumps ahead several steps and people get nervous seeing things develop too quickly. The folks at this gathering, however, were just as fast as I am and ready to think about new ways of working. It was exciting. And it is only the first step of what could be a major new way to reshape Jesuit educational resources by relating them more closely to the needs of the poor and marginalized. Now wouldn’t that be great?