Agents of Hope: Our Students

St. Michael’s is a venerable institution marked by a rich history, replete with timeless traditions and more than our share of larger-than-life personalities; these realities make this place special and are a source of pride for us all. Any complacency, however, or self-satisfaction with our past leaves our community vulnerable and may even constitute a distortion of our mission. Don’t get me wrong: I am an historian and the importance of things past is not lost on me. I do believe, though, that the recent pandemic has confirmed what we were already coming to understand, that all is not well, and not just in the state of Denmark.

This is a time of great disruption in our society: climate change is no longer simply a future possibility; all Canadians, and Catholics in particular, must face the truth of our broken relationships with Indigenous peoples and commit to a path of justice, reconciliation and healing; and global political turmoil, marked in part by the rise of populism and a disregard for truth, is threatening our trust in public institutions and democracy itself. As a university president, and as a parent of four university-aged children, I have a front-row seat to the profound impact these disruptions have on our students and universities. You would not be surprised, I imagine, that our young people are struggling in unprecedented ways with the usual challenges of university life, the perennial questions about faith, and now even the premises of the educational social contract itself.

But all is not lost. To my mind, this is not the time to hunker down, to congratulate ourselves for our great resiliency and to console each other that all will be well if we just hang together through these difficulties. Step aside, Nietzsche—who posited that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger—this is a time to rekindle hope.

The kind of hope I’m thinking about is not simply the search for the silver lining in troubling times, but what my insightful colleague from Bishop’s University, Dr. Jessica Riddell, calls critical hope. In her view, being stoic or simply positive about these challenges and the inequities they reveal is not only inadequate, it can be toxic. Rather, we all must do the hard work of facing these troubles before us with eyes wide open in order to imagine a new way forward, a path of hope for all, one that requires a transformation of ourselves and of our society.

And where better to engage in this difficult and necessary undertaking of providing hope for the world than St. Mike’s? After all, this is what Catholic university education has always been about. We were never meant to be bastions of the status quo; we have always been called to be centres of intellectual and spiritual creativity, agents of new beginnings and messengers of the good news. St. Mike’s—from its very founding and throughout its 170-year mission—was called to be a source of hope for new Canadians, and for the people we served here in Toronto and around the world. This remains our mission to this day.

Of course, we must ask ourselves who is best equipped to lead this noble enterprise. I can assure you that the seeds of hope are not planted and nurtured only in the Office of the President, or at the Collegium table. If the pandemic has shown me anything, it is that the real creativity and solutions to the problems we face are found throughout our community: our faculty and staff, who took on with enormous grace the difficult challenges of teaching, mentoring, researching and working remotely; our alumni, trustees and donors, who recognized in real-time the shifting demands on our community and then stepped up with unprecedented understanding and support.

Ultimately, however, the enduring solutions we seek and the critical hope that we need to provide will come, not from above or outside, but from our own students. They are the engines of innovation within our community, and they are the agents of hope that we can count on to help transform our institution and our society. It is our duty to provide them with the opportunity, guidance and support to engage in the difficult questions we now face, and to assist them as they imagine solutions to these immediate problems, and those to come. I, for one, am confident that our students will continue to show the way, as they have done in the past. In this undertaking, we should all be proud and honoured to entrust the future to them, and to stand beside them as they take up this important mantle of leadership, at St. Mike’s and beyond.