Leading with the Heart:
what it means to be a Catholic, Augustinian University

Maureen McKew

Every Catholic University does – or should – aim to give its students a stellar education within a framework of a community of scholars committed to service of humankind, to make them better citizens of their country, to inspire them to create a better world. Each Catholic university has its own particularly identity; often a legacy of the religious order which founded it. Villanova University places love, friendship and community at the heart of its educational mission.

A few weeks ago, the Rev. Edmund J. Dobbin, O.S.A., ’58, sat in his office and recalled the inaugural speech he delivered at his investiture as University president on Oct. 5, 1988. He also remembered the slight trepidation he felt as he laid out what he described as the essentials of an Augustinian university. “One of my fears was that it would be seen as overly idealistic and thus occasion a few cackles from the audience.”

He need not have worried. Afterwards, a faculty member came up and thanked him for “hitting the nail on the head.” Others thanked him for articulating values that had long been a part of the University’s intellectual and spiritual fabric, but were not always identified as related to St. Augustine of Hippo or Villanova’s Augustinian heritage.

Now, fourteen later, a rare day goes by when someone doesn’t make reference to those values: the relationship between the mind and the heart, community, and a unity of knowledge. They underpin the University mission statement and its various strategic plans. Blue Key Society members cite them as they guide prospective students, parents and friends of the University around the campus. The relationships among staff, faculty, administration and students are animated by them.

Well, a reader might wonder: what’s so special about using one’s head and heart, having a sense of community, and an integration of the knowledge one acquires at a university? Doesn’t the University of Notre Dame aspire to this? Don’t the Jesuit, Franciscan, Benedictine, Dominican and other Catholic institutions strive to uphold these values? Of course, they do.

Those values are not unique to an Augustinian enterprise, and Father Dobbin doesn’t use the word unique in this context. Almost every Catholic institution of higher education has been influenced by Augustine. He was one the greatest philosophers of Western civilization and the premier philosopher of Christianity.

However, the way an Augustinian university interprets and institutionalizes these values is, to use the president’s word, distinctive.

Leading with the Heart

For Augustine, faith is not just a belief in truths, Father Dobbin explained; it is a way to see, which comes from a discerning heart. “A person who is deeply in love has a way of dealing with reality which is more than observing the facts of science,” he said. “To Augustine, faith was the way people who are in love with God see the world. Obviously, belief is
important but your belief system is really something you cling to because of the discernment dimension you have from faith. Faith has aptly been defined as ‘knowledge born of religious love.’ The French writer Blaise Pascal, who was very much influenced by St. Augustine, said ‘the heart has reasons which the mind cannot understand. So for Augustine the heart
ablaze with God’s love gives direction to the intellectual quest. In this sense Augustine’s philosophy gives a certain priority to the heart over the mind.”

By the time of the Middle Ages and emerging philosophers like Thomas Aquinas, a shift of emphasis had taken place. Rationality drove spirituality. As Father Dobbin pointed out, however, one emphasis was not necessarily better than the other; they were simply different. As each religious order founded during and after this period engaged in education and other ministries, it brought to bear its own distinctive charism. The Dominicans were influenced by Dominic and, of course, Aquinas; the Franciscans were influenced by Francis of Assisi.

The Jesuits, a strong presence in American Catholic higher education, have instilled their soldier-founder’s philosophy in their institutions and students. Dr. John R. Johannes, vice president for Academic Affairs at Villanova, is a product of Jesuit education, in high school and at Marquette University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree and where he was a professor and administrator for a quarter of a century. After seven years at Villanova, he offered a few thoughts on the difference between Augustinian and Jesuit traditions. “The Jesuits are consummate soldiers, in the tradition of Ignatius Loyola himself,” Johannes pointed out. “They make no bones about the fact that they want to take potential leaders of society and train them -- first intellectually, then morally for service. The emphasis is more on the individual at a Jesuit institution, whereas here at Villanova, community has priority.”

In comparison, when a group of Irish Augustinians founded Villanova in 1842, they instilled in it Augustine’s unity of mind and heart with priority to the heart. They built a learning community based on friendship. One hundred sixty years later, the formula endures. Villanova, so often described as a community of scholars, is also a community of lay and religious, of students, faculty and staff. It educates its students to use the knowledge and skills they gain for the benefit of the world community, whether it is in downtown Philadelphia, in the mountains of Latin America, in the towns of Northern Ireland, or in Bryn Mawr, Pa. They are expected to take the ethics they have learned and apply them in financial centers, courts of law, engineering firms, technology centers, classrooms, healthcare, and educational institutions.

A Culture Steeped in Augustine

Dr. Helen K. Lafferty, University vice president, has been a member of the Villanova community for more than 20 years. She has witnessed, actually helped to create, a raised awareness of Augustine’s place at the heart of Villanova. Like Father Dobbin, she believes it has always been there. “In the past, we would make reference to Augustine on public occasions, but he was not in the forefront,” she said recently. “In the last 10 years, I have seen a real progression, both in Augustinian thought and also in contemporizing his thought. It’s not just a matter of quoting Augustine because we are an Augustinian university. It is now a matter of asking how his thoughts still influence our history. When our students reference him, it points directly to the success of our Core Humanities program because of its Augustinian component. That component, by the way, is unique to Villanova.”

Lafferty is working to make that influence and ethos grow even stronger at Villanova. She considers it an imperative. “At this juncture in human history, there are people who have such great intellectual capacities. Couple that intellectual disposition with an understanding and commitment to how we should live together and improve the quality of life, and we now have an Augustinian paradigm which truly is transformative.”

“There is one university in this entire nation that is Augustinian. Villanova has a tremendous responsibility to ensure that Augustine’s thought is promulgated to our students through our faculty. Villanova should be a university preparing the next generation of scholars steeped in their disciplines, first-rate scholars who can translate their wisdom in ways that advance human history. Villanova should be the place where issues of life and death, bioethetical and environmental issues, scientific advancements and diversity . . . all the issues that will determine the future of humankind . . . are studied and critiqued within an Augustinian framework. Who better than Villanova to be that community of scholars and searchers, advancing the mission and extending the legacy of Augustine?”

Liberal Arts and Sciences in the Augustinian Mode

Augustine was not a great fan of the liberal education of his day, at the end of the fourth century. A product of it, he learned after great struggle and conversion that its effect had been an increase in his own intellectual snobbery. It is safe to say that Augustine would not have the same opinion of Villanova’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. How could he? In so many ways, the College strives to fulfill his ideal: that learning should always be directed to a higher purpose.

The Rev. Kail C. Ellis, O.S.A., ’69 M.A., dean of the College, is chiefly responsible for keeping that vision alive. However, in true Augustinian/Villanova tradition, he acts in a collaborative fashion with the department chairs, faculty and students. One of the most telling examples of a community of scholars acting to integrate Augustine’s thought into the curriculum is the Core Humanities Seminar, now in its tenth year.

“It evolved from an attempt to make us a true college of liberal arts and sciences,” Father Ellis said, “and Dr. Helen Lafferty and Dr. Jack [John A.] Doody deserve a great deal of the credit. Dr. Lafferty was associate dean of the college at the time and Dr. Doody was chair of philosophy. We used to do a lot of brainstorming, including meeting with the chairs
of the four departments that formed the core curriculum at that time: Jack Doody in philosophy, Rick [Dr. Sterling F.] Delano in English, Don [Dr. Donald B.] Kelley in history, and Father [Francis A., O.S.A.] Eigo in theology. We discovered that at some time earlier, there had been small seminars. However, in the various revisions of the core throughout the years, the concept had been lost.”

This “kitchen cabinet,” as Father Ellis called it, decided to re-establish the seminars. At the same time, the College examined its core curriculum and while its content proved to be very good as it was, a new piece was added: a writing-intensive Core Humanities Seminar. Many colleges and universities have such programs but Villanova added an extra ingredient that would make it different from any other: the thought of St. Augustine.

Eventually, aspects of the core curriculum, including the Core Humanities Seminar, would find their way to the nursing, business and engineering colleges.

Around the same time, the Province of St. Thomas of Villanova voted to create a chair in the thought of St. Augustine in the theology department. The new liberal arts building, which opened in 1992, was named for Augustine. The student “blue book” talked about Augustine. The College also established a subcommittee on mission, led by Dr. Barbara Wall,
O.P. The subcommittee grew into the Office for Mission Effectiveness, now reporting to the University president and Wall’s responsibilities became University-wide.

Nursing and Augustine: A Ministerial Alliance

In his writings, Augustine frequently used the metaphor of the healer or physician. It is entirely appropriate that a college which prepares healers should be influenced by him.

The College of Nursing is a professional school. However, the profession for which it educates is a ministry as well. In addition to healthcare competency, it also provides its students with a values system that affects not only the delivery of care at the bedside, but also in the entire healthcare industry. This is both an advantage and a challenge.

Dr. M. Louise Fitzpatrick, dean of the College of Nursing, had a visitor recently: a graduate who had spent her first year in the profession at a distinguished teaching hospital. The nurse expressed frustration at not being able to deliver the attention, the compassion and care she believed her patients deserved. The healthcare system constrained her. She had so many patients, so many machines, and so much paperwork that she could not spend time with them as individuals.

“I was sympathetic to her,” Fitzpatrick recalled. “I’ve heard it before. But she validated what we teach here: the extra dimension of Augustinian spirituality that I believe makes our nurses special. It gives them a quality which puts them in demand.”

That spiritual dimension affects the way in which Villanova nurses are prepared to respond to health and illness phenomena, and to care for patients. “While professional practice is grounded in knowledge and skills, it is the art of nursing, drawn from the emphasis on the heart, which is also played out in the delivery of health care or the way we think about patient care,” the dean stated.

When the Core Humanities Seminar was developed for the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Fitzpatrick and her faculty made it a requirement for all undergraduate nursing students.

The College places a strong emphasis on ethics, with undergraduates being taught by two members of the philosophy department, and with a graduate course taught by Dr. Barbara Ott, associate professor of nursing, who has a strong background in bio-ethics.

Undergraduate students take ethics early in their program so that when the reach the clinical courses, they have a strong framework for decision making. Master’s students are being educated to take leadership positions, which require critical judgments.

Nursing students are also given many opportunities to apply their knowledge and their art before they graduate. In addition to clinical practice in hospitals, they learn in community health settings with diverse populations, such as inner city schools, to promote health care habits among children and their families. They frequently volunteer for
University-sponsored trips that take them to places where health care is a luxury, not an entitlement.

Whether they go directly into practice or return for a graduate degree, Villanova nurses take with them the sense of community and values they learned and practiced as undergraduates, and apply them to the human community.

Bringing Augustinian Values to the World Business Community

The headlines about creative accounting, insider trading, criminal activities and cover-ups in the executive suites of the some the biggest companies in the world would make any business student shudder. Students at Villanova’s College of Commerce and Finance are being given the knowledge, the leadership skills and the ethical training to change that culture.

During the last six years as dean, Dr. Thomas Monahan has overseen the hiring of 30 new faculty member, a review and revitalization of the curriculum, the introduction of courses to equip Villanovans to function in a global economy, and the renovation, technical upgrade and expansion of Bartley Hall, the College’s home.

He took a few minutes not long ago to talk about the need for ethics in business and for an approach to business education that goes beyond the professional courses. “Every business student is required to take the Core Humanities Seminars with their Augustine component. All study philosophy and religious studies, and all study ethics,” he said. “In
addition, we have developed a program for implementing ethics and social responsibility contextually in our entire business curriculum. Each department has a plan for including ethics, whether through cases or discussions. Every single student will be exposed to discussions of ethics and social responsibility in his or her respective field of study.”

“In addition,’ the dean continued, “we have a course on Catholic social teaching and decision making. It is an elective for seniors who have taken all the business courses which focus on maximization of share holder value, profit and the like. This course challenges them to become excellent business persons, maximize share holder value, etc., while taking an
ethically, socially responsible approach.” In other words, ethical business practice is smart business practice and, in Monahan’s opinion, it can create tremendous value for human life.

Ethics is an equally important part of the graduate school curricula. In each of the concentrations, a professor with a strong ethics background will go in and team-teach with the regular faculty member for two weeks, so that ethical issues are raised in the context of the discipline.

This emphasis on ethical business practices might well have pleased Augustine, had it been available when he was the bishop of Hippo-Regius in the fifth century. That town was a commercial center, many of whose citizens spent a great deal of time and energy suing one another over what they perceived as unfair or illegal business deals. As bishop, Augustine
had a civil responsibility to mediate such cases. He spent many of his mornings doing this and he hated it.

Augustine’s influence of Villanova’s business school is not limited to ethics. Monahan explained: “Augustine was one of the pre-eminent scholars of all time and, it seems to me, very pragmatic. He would understand business education since all education, including business, is rooted in the liberal arts. There is a pragmatic aspect to education which builds on that,
makes it intellectually stimulating, and creates value for society.”

Engineering a Better World

Dr. Edward V. McAssey, Jr., professor of mechanical engineering and holder of the James R. Birle Endowed Chair of Energy Technology, served this year as acting dean of the College of Engineering. He is an admirer of Gary Wills’ biography, St. Augustine of Hippo. His favorite quote is from a dialogue Augustine had with himself, “Reason says: ‘I ask you now why you want friends to keep living even when not actually living with you?’ [Augustine replies:] ‘That we may together scrutinize our souls and guard, so that whoever discovers anything will help the others to do it more readily.’”

In the College of Engineering where McAssey has taught for more than 35 years, aspiring engineers also are exposed to the Core Humanities Seminars in the expectation that whatever they learn for their profession will be influenced by Augustine. In addition to their specialized field, they learn a respect for society and awareness of the implications of how their
technical expertise affects that society. Like physicians, they develop sensitivity to the need to do no harm.

Villanova engineers also are encouraged to use their newly found knowledge even while they are students. Civil engineers have worked on projects in Honduras while mechanical engineers created a conveyance for a person with a disability. Others participate in campus and community projects and are encouraged by the College to do so.

A very interesting course, “Engineering: the Humanistic Context,” examines great disasters or projects that resulted in loss of life, then probes the way that suffering could have been avoided by using higher ethical standards. It is team-taught by Dr. John H. Fielder, professor of philosophy, and by Dr. Robert D. Lynch, ’53 associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, and dean emeritus. Some of the cases include the Challenger space shuttle disaster, airplane crashes and even the building of New York City’s Brooklyn Bridge, which cost a high number (even by 19th century standards) of workers their lives.

McAssey expects that this community spirit and emphasis on ethics will continue and even expand in the administration of the new dean, Dr. Barry C. Johnson, who is a 1970 graduate of the College. “He is very sensitive to the mission of this University, of the need to give back, to increase diversity, and to continue to increase scholarly activity,” McAssey said.

An Inclusive Catholic Law School

Dr. Mark A. Sargent, dean, and the faculty of the Villanova School of Law have spent a great deal of time in the past few years thinking about what it means to be a Catholic and Augustinian institution. The ways in which they have exploited that heritage are imaginative and affective.

“One of the first things we did was to take seriously the words of St. Thomas of Villanova: ‘The Lord hears the cry of the poor’ by instilling in our law students the value of service to the poor,” Sargent said. “We created a large clinical law program, which includes four new full-time faculty members, as well as a clinical teaching fellow. They run, in effect, an in-house law firm, in which our students, under the supervision of these attorneys, represent people in need. It includes a civil justice clinic, which is a general poverty law clinic; an asylum clinic, which represents people fleeing religious and political persecution; a farmers’ legal aid clinic, the first clinic dedicated exclusively to farm workers, of whom there is a considerable population in southeast Pennsylvania; and a low income tax payers’ clinic.”

These clinics expose law students to the gritty reality of poverty and oppression. They also enable the students to earn credits as they help people, and provide them with an ethos they can carry into private practice.

The law school also hired a full-time pro bono coordinator, who channels students into working with the poor on a pro bono basis, not for credit. She also coordinates them in working with alumnae and alumni who do pro bono work.

These initiatives in social justice and the law have necessitated a major reallocation of the school’s budget but clearly the College considers it money well spent by a Catholic, Augustinian law school.

The law school has also reinforced its identity in its intellectual life with faculty workshops on Catholic social thought and the law, and a series called “Encounters with Augustine.” Another series, “The Catholic Perspective on Law and Lawyering,” is open to students and faculty. Sargent says that through these a conversation begins about how one’s
religious perspective can inform law. Courses such as “Catholic Social Thought and the Law” have been added to the curriculum. Dr. Steven Frankino, former dean, continues to teach a course on “Law and Religion in a Pluralistic Society.”

Sargent is well aware of the fact that many Catholic law schools have become secularized. At the same time, he has examined what are called religiously sectarian law schools, in which virtually all students and faculty are members of that sect. The students learn only from and within the tradition of that sect. These schools, by definition, are not diverse in any
real sense.

Sargent opts for a third model, which he calls an inclusive vision of a law school which is true to its Catholic heritage yet also engages the world in all its diversity. Not surprisingly, the Villanova School of Law realizes that vision. An article he wrote for Commonweal magazine, explaining that vision, appears in this issue of Villanova.

Is this Augustinian Identity as Pervasive as Villanova claims?

It would be dishonest to give the impression that every member of the faculty, student body or staff is equally absorbed by Augustine and his influence. However, a significant number have found themselves taken with this man. They are fascinated by how contemporary his thought is, even though he developed his ideas and ideals more than 1,600 years ago.
Many alumnae and alumni, who didn’t have this intensive exposure to Augustine, hunger for it. Father Dobbin says that, occasionally, when parents complain that Villanova has not done well by their children, they reference the Augustinian principles underlying Villanova’s mission to make their case.

Most importantly, members of the entire Villanova community have seen for themselves what one particular Catholic university can accomplish in the 21st century when, in the words of its mission statement, it “seeks to reflect the spirit of St. Augustine by the cultivation of knowledge, by respect for individual differences and by adherence to the principle that
mutual love and respect should animate every aspect of University life.”

That is what it means to be “Catholic and Augustinian.

Back to All Things Augustine

To Villanova Magazine Archives