BY PATRICIA GRANT
For millions of First Generation students and faculty, education is both learning-for-learning’s-sake and a vehicle for meaningful inclusion in the American Dream’s financial, social, and political benefits.
As Montás suggests, and as my experience with First Gen students and faculty affirms, the two different approaches co-exist and often balance each other. First Gen students and faculty regularly find fault with hegemony, colonialism, and exclusion of women and people of color, while also engaging in interrogatory discussions with “Great Books” that draw them closer to deeply personal truths.
As I was reading Montás’ book, I was especially struck by how the ideal of a classical Great Books-style education resonates with the values of Catholic Social Teaching (CST). Both call for deep examination of life and human dignity, of one’s rights and one’s responsibilities to society. Both seek to develop “the discipline and furniture of the mind,” in the words of The Yale Report of 1828, an early defense of a classical curriculum. Both value the cultivation of active and informed citizens who are deeply invested in questions about self-determination and human freedom. Both are designed to serve as vehicles for the kind of personal transformation and “intellectual baptism” that Montás experienced in Columbia University’s Core Curriculum.
Consequently, Montás’ vision of education seems not only appropriate for Jesuit colleges and universities, but also quite heartening: There is something soothing about Montás’ description of an academy where deep questions don’t lead simply to the wholesale rejection of potentially valuable sources of existential and ethical wisdom such Saint Augustine, Plato, Freud, and Ghandi among many other “greats.”
Still, I’m left wondering what exactly this means for First Gen students, many of whom may want to anchor their intellectual journey in an alternate, more inclusive list of “greats.” Is there room for this kind of flexibility in Montás’ vision? My sense is that the answer is yes, and that Montás himself would insist not so much on particular authors as on emphasizing a pedagogical practice focused on inviting students, week after week throughout their college careers, to pose and respond to big questions about meaning and human experience.
Contrary to those critics who eschew this kind of education as ephemeral and impractical for the construction of one’s post-baccalaureate life, it is just this kind of liberal education that will best prepare students—whether from socio-economically privileged backgrounds or not—to become active and informed citizens, capable of asking critical questions, of embracing political agency, and of catalyzing their own social mobility.
But crucially for First Gen students, widening the circle of “greats” can serve to reduce the instances of impostor syndrome that can simply be paralyzing for many of them. Further, since liberal education hinges on a cyclical and enduring investigation of truth through the lens of self, a wider circle can help promote the goal of liberal education as an iterative process of personal growth that First Gen students can more readily experience as their own.
Students from Loyola Marymount University’s First to Go Program (above) celebrate a decade of supporting hundreds of first-generation college students. Photo courtesy of Loyola Marymount University.
Further, for First Gen faculty, a more expansive vision of who qualifies as a “great” can be a natural way of deepening their investment in the ideal of a liberal education, enabling them to more effectively support and serve not only First Gen students, but any students who find themselves as outsider-insiders and strangers in a foreign academic land. Since the evolution of faculty members does not end in graduate school, becoming invested in the deeply personal process of opening up the doors to a liberal education can be one of the most rewarding and meaningful things a faculty member may do over the course of an academic career.
A liberal education aims to focus one’s attention both on the self and on the common good, and when done well, it plants seeds of understanding and revelation that bloom on a time continuum, over the course of a life—both among students and among faculty. We should consider these seeds and their eventual product as equally valuable to First Gen students and faculty as they are to anyone else.
Ensuring that these students and faculty can more easily see themselves among the “greats,” however, will make all the difference.
Patricia Grant is senior associate dean for the undergraduate program at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business and co-chair of the University’s First-Generation Faculty and Staff Initiative.
The featured cover photo (above) is courtesy of Jordan Christian via Unsplash.