New Student Convocation

Welcome to Seattle University. And congratulations on your decision to pursue your higher education here with us.

As we gather here today, you are the cusp of an amazing intellectual and personal adventure.

Beginning college marks the start of a new stage in your development, one that likely fills you with excitement but perhaps also no small degree of uncertainty or anxiety.

Each of you will experience this transition differently.

I hope you will approach it with the confidence that the Seattle University community (and by that I mean each of us) is accompanying you on this journey of discovery and growth.

We are committed to your success.

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In joining this university, you are becoming part of a community unlike any other you have experienced to this point in your life.

No matter where you come from (and collectively you come from all over the country and around the world), you have likely never been part of a residential community as diverse as this one, with so many different kinds of people from different backgrounds, life experiences and identities all living and learning together.

That diversity will stretch you – it will change the way you think.

Universities are unique communities in our society because we are dedicated to the production and transmission of knowledge and to the formation and education of future leaders. Accomplishing these important goals requires universities to maintain a distinctive kind of culture – one characterized by broad expressive freedom, by intellectual adventurousness and by comfort with disagreement.

This culture makes universities ideal places for exploring new and innovative ideas. But ideas are only as good as the facts that support them. As Pope Francis has put it, there is “a constant tension between ideas and realities.”

What is the difference between an idea and reality? 

The science fiction writer Philip K. Dick answered this question succinctly: “reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Pope Francis warns us against dwelling purely in the realm of ideas, against losing our tether to reality and facts.

We have a word for people who ignore this advice – people who bind themselves to ideas or opinions, regardless of the facts. We call them “ideologues.”

Resisting ideologues means rejecting their many means of ignoring reality:

1. Ideologues insist first and foremost on ideological purity – which is a kind of fundamentalism, whether or not the ideology is religious. They try to silence those who disagree, rather than learn from them.
2. Ideologues value rhetoric and performativity over actual engagement and real-world impact.
3. When ideologues fail to produce the results they promise, they invariably question the facts rather than re-evaluate their ideas.

To resist the oppressive certainty of ideologues (and to avoid becoming one ourselves) we need to cultivate an intellectual openness – a willingness to engage with those who disagree, those who see the world differently.

Learning how to engage in productive disagreement is a skill, like many other intellectual and practical skills you will work to acquire during your time here at Seattle University.  Possessing the skill of productive and graceful disagreement should be one of the markers of an educated person.  But mastering this skill requires the actual experience of disagreement.

If Seattle University is to be a place that helps you develop it, we need to be a place that welcomes a diversity of viewpoints on our campus. To explain why diversity of thought is so important, let me take a detour into the theory of juries and group deliberation. This field began with the Marquis de Condorcet, an 18th century French theorist.

Condorcet argued that, under the right conditions, a group of people deliberating about an issue – like a jury or a group of voters – is more likely to reach a correct decision than an individual considering the same question on her own. Over the centuries, Condorcet’s theory has provided powerful intellectual support – not just for the jury system – but also for the superiority of democracy itself over other forms of governance.

His basic insight was that, under the right conditions, groups are smarter than individuals.  But we also know that – under the wrong conditions – groups can devolve into mobs. As with all academic theories, however, the important question is – what are the “right conditions?”

In his 2005 book, “The Wisdom of Crowds,” James Surowiecki laid out several criteria to differentiate “wise crowds” from foolish crowds. . . from mobs. First, he said, wise crowds contain people with a diversity of opinions. If everyone thinks the same way, there is no value in deliberating as a group. Why bother, if we all already agree?

As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it,

“Non-diverse bodies gain little from deliberating: their members already reason similarly, take similar perspectives, know similar things, etc. In diverse bodies, deliberation can broaden the informational, perspectival, and methodological horizon. The more diversity, the more potential for . . . [meaningful] deliberation.”

Importantly, the kinds of diversity that help to improve deliberation are broad and inclusive. They include diversity of identity, diversity of life experience, AND diversity of viewpoint. At a university, I would add one more: the diversity of disciplines, which we can think of as diverse methodologies or perspectives for thinking about, approaching, and approximating a single, unitary truth.

Lack of diversity of opinion is perhaps the most common failure that stands in the way of sound group decision making. This is especially true today. In the age of social media, we have found extremely effective ways to avoid having to hear from people who think differently from us. Harvard Law Professor Cass Sunstein has observed that, when ideologically homogeneous groups deliberate, they tend to reinforce and even exacerbate ideological extremism among the group’s members. Online echo-chambers are perhaps the purest example of this phenomenon.

A second characteristic of wise crowds according to Surowiecki is the presence of independent thinkers; people whose opinions are not determined by the views of those around them. A diversity of viewpoints is not productive if people do not share their differing perspectives but defer to the majority sentiment. Asset bubbles provide an example of how crowds go wrong when people abandon their own judgments and simply follow the herd. Bubbles occur when investors stop exercising their own independent judgments about the value of an asset. The best antidote for the bubble is the contrarian.

The upshot of all of this is that, uncomfortable as it might be, engaging with people with whom we disagree is essential to our collective ability to learn and to make wise decisions. The good news is that it takes just a few dissenters – a small number of independent thinkers – to improve the quality of deliberation.

Dissenters do so in a couple of different ways. First, they introduce new information into the system. Second, by standing up to the majority, they embolden others to ask questions and to challenge the prevailing orthodoxy, creating a virtuous feedback loop of inquiry, disagreement and deliberation.

Disagreement, freedom of expression and engagement with divergent perspectives – even perspectives you may initially perceive to be obviously wrong or even offensive – are essential components of any healthy university community.

Although disagreement can create discomfort, I hope you will come to appreciate and sometimes even enjoy the conversations it sparks.

Of course, there are limits to this. Those who seek merely to offend or provoke, to denigrate or exclude, can be as corrosive of healthy discourse as those who would silence dissent. And so, at a university, even as we welcome disagreement, we always need to be working hard to sustain a culture of mutual respect and the virtues of collegiality and civility on which productive academic discourse is built.

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All of the foregoing is true of almost ANY university worthy of the name. But, as a Jesuit university, Seattle University adds further layers to this.

It is BECAUSE we are a Jesuit, Catholic university – committed to the view that all human beings are created in God’s image – that we seek to build an inclusive academic culture that reflects the many diversities of the human community.

It is BECAUSE we are Jesuit university that we have become the first selective university in the state of Washington to be designated by the U.S. Department of Education as a minority serving institution.

The radical inclusiveness of our invitation is ultimately rooted in our Jesuit, Catholic values, which teach us that all human beings, without exception or qualification, are loved by God.

Seattle University welcomes students, faculty and staff from all faith traditions – including many people who identify with no faith tradition and some who affirmatively reject faith altogether.

We welcome people of all races, national origins, sexes, gender identities, and sexualities. We welcome people with a diversity a viewpoints, abilities, and cognitive styles.

Some of you have chosen to come to Seattle University BECAUSE we are a Jesuit university. I don’t doubt that some of you have chosen to come to Seattle University DESPITE the fact that we are a Jesuit university. Others of you may be sitting in your seats this morning, asking yourselves: “Wait, Seattle University is a Jesuit university?”

Some of you are practicing Catholics. Most of you are not. Collectively, you represent the religious diversity of our region and our country. You are Protestant, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, neo-pagan, agnostic, atheist, and many more. But the largest single group – approaching 40% of you – are “nones.”

When I was a kid, a nun was a woman who wore a habit and taught in my Catholic elementary school. These days, “nones” refers to people not affiliated with any religious tradition. It is the largest and fastest growing religious identity among young Americans.

What does it mean for Seattle University to be a Jesuit university in the context of increasing skepticism about organized religion in general and – let’s face it – about the Catholic church in particular?

Let me start by saying what it does NOT mean. It does not mean that Seattle University is interested in convincing you to become Catholic. Our mission is to empower leaders for a just and humane world. Not just Catholic leaders; not just Christian leaders – but leaders.

Looking around the world in the 21st century, humanity faces a number of daunting challenges – from climate change, to political polarization, to racial conflict, to widening economic inequality, to dizzying and at times destabilizing technological change. Underlying the many, seemingly independent, crises we face, is a deeper crisis of meaning that pervades our contemporary culture.

Surveying our materialist, consumerist way of life, Pope Francis has dubbed it the “throwaway culture,” in which virtually everything, including human beings and even the earth itself, is treated as disposable. Within this culture, he says, “the accumulation of constant novelties exalts a superficiality [that makes it] difficult to pause and recover depth in life.”

One remedy for our contemporary crisis of meaning are leaders who receive precisely the kind of education you will experience here at Seattle University. The Jesuit model of education invites and encourages you to engage your whole self – mind, body, and spirit – in the educational process. We do not ask you to leave your values or identities at the door but rather encourage you to bring them into your educational experience, inside and outside the classroom. Jesuit education celebrates academic achievement and technical excellence, but it also emphasizes the importance of putting our gifts to work in the service of something larger than ourselves.

Seattle University shares this commitment with the dozens of other Jesuit colleges and universities around the country and around the world. But we are more than just a university and even more than just a Jesuit university. We are Seattle’s Jesuit university. And so we bring to our work a distinctive engagement with the culture of technology and innovation for which our city is known.

At Seattle University, we celebrate innovation, which we hope will unleash opportunities that lead us towards a more just and humane world. Seattle University has graduates working in every one of Seattle’s iconic businesses and innovative nonprofits. But, embedded as we are within our Jesuit and Catholic tradition, Seattle University approaches Seattle’s culture of innovation with the conviction that it needs to be guided by enduring values.

Recent discussions of generative artificial intelligence provide a useful example of what I am talking about. Some have predicted that generative AI will render entire areas of higher education useless. Why learn to write if ChatGPT can write an essay on any topics in just moments? Why learn to code if generative AI tools can write code in response to a simple prompt?

But ...

Relying on our enduring values, we have confidence that – even in the world of generative AI, knowledge will still matter. Expertise will still matter. The truth will still matter. In fact, in an era of generative AI, of deepfakes and malicious but capable chatbots, knowledge, expertise and the ability to ferret out the truth are going to matter more than ever. What better place to explore the implications of AI for our society than a Jesuit university situated right here in the center of one of the largest tech hubs in the world?

And so, as you begin your time at Seattle University, here are our commitments to you:

Your education here will attend to your development as whole persons.

• We will expose you to a broad range of perspectives, even those that run against the grain on this campus or in this city.
• We will encourage your spiritual and religious exploration and expose you to broad, interdisciplinary approaches to learning.
• We will prepare you to engage with technological innovation in an ethical and critical way.

These commitments are the reasons why your decision to pursue a Jesuit education in this city – this global hub of technology and innovation – is such an inspired choice.

I conclude how I started: I congratulate you on your superb judgment, and I welcome you to Seattle University.

This is the beginning of a great adventure.