Above All, Love, Truly
Senior reflects on relationships and the state of ethics at Santa Clara
Sitting down to write a “final” say is something I’ve never done. I guess, when I graduated high school, I posted a sentimental paragraph on Instagram about the Jesuit institution that showed me God and gave me four years of love and light and laughter beyond imagination.
And, well, I guess that’s exactly what Santa Clara did, too.
How to speak of a place and an experience which has brought me further into my selfhood, further into connection with the world, further into love with creation, further into the holy promise of knowledge—hopefully further into wisdom?
I’ve decided to write on love. This includes both how Santa Clara offered me deep fellowship and mentorship, and also how I understand the university’s responsibility to love as a clear indication of both room and requisite for growth and recommitment to genuinely love-soaked values and actions.
Graduating with a Bachelors in English and sociology, I am embodying my forever-dream of being a writer, and am looking forward to the future without the gnawing weight of dread that’s usually characterized uncertainty.
I forewent a chance to go home to Colorado when the pandemic set in, and have been lucky enough to keep living with my housemates at Santa Clara for our final quarter. So many of us were forced away from our final few months at a place that’s been home for the last few years, and my heart goes out to all the other seniors whose goodbyes have been cut short and relocated to Zoom or FaceTime.
Having stayed here for the final quarter instead of with my family in Denver, I’ve had time to smell the roses (literally—they’re gone through full bloom in the Mission gardens, and I wish you all could see them), to do what I’ve called “grieving at the hospital bed” of our college experience. It’s been a strange and reverent practice to walk our nearly-empty oasis of a campus, its entrancing flora, color, and architecture as stunning and peace-instilling as ever.
It is quiet. It is lovely. It is somber, and it is missing the people that amplify its beauty. It is alive at the same time that it is longing for the community that makes up its life.
One of the greatest blessings that has given body to my time at Santa Clara is the community I found in this space. The incandescent friendships that my time here has gifted me. I won’t credit the institution with the wonderful people who make me feel alive and challenged and loved in the most miraculous ways, but man, my time on this Mission campus intensely cemented for me that relationship is everything. Love is everything.
Above all, love, truly.
One of my favorite professors, Dr. Phyllis Brown of the English department, reminded me of the priority of friendship this past year. In the fall, I was struggling to balance my life and mental health, and I’d been explaining to her the ways in which I was trying to recalibrate, to even out my pace and take care of both myself and my duties. I mentioned something about stepping back from my friends a bit—I was frankly really struggling to trust my loved ones at the time—and she gave me a piece of advice that I will cherish closely in my heart until it’s my time to leave this life.
Dr. Brown said: you don’t let go of friends. If there’s a trade off, if you need to cut back or take care of yourself or say goodbye to certain commitments, great. But don’t let go of your friends. Our friends will sustain us, she said. In a Silicon Valley hooked on productivity and starkly opposed to holistic humanhood, this offering of humanity gave me life.
Friendship sustains us. It is priority. It is vital that we keep leaning into each other. I see beautiful friendships all around me at Santa Clara—I also see people seeking vulnerability, who might not yet have the relationships that build them up and help them grow into the people their souls urge them to be.
But remember this, if anything: friendship sustains us. Do not give it up for anything.
On a similar note, Santa Clara has also encouraged a deep rapport and connection between my professors and me, which I value as priceless and sharpening friendship. Apparently, it’s a rarity—really a privilege of small institutions in higher education—to actually learn with closer relationships to the people who mentor and guide you. I’m not sure everyone knows how truly privileged we are to have such direct access to the great minds and hearts that pour their expertise into our futures.
I call some of my professors good friends. What an intense grace—and really shouldn’t it be this way?—that the souls who teach us don’t all stay inaccessible to us from behind a podium. The educators and programs at this university allow us to take our education into the world, to rip away at our learning with our hands and our teeth, to enter the spaces we’d like to partake in before we walk on graduation day (or log in to Zoom).
We’re lucky that if we harbor a passion for something, Santa Clara is probably ready and willing to offer a path towards cultivating it. The internships, the grants, the funding for conferences, the research opportunities: the opportunities placed before us are ridiculously abundant. Getting a degree here might be a really expensive way to approach these opportunities, for many of us, but… what privilege we walk in.
We carry on our very blessed shoulders a great, great responsibility, which is actually, after all this sappy lovey-doveyness, what I’d like to discuss as my final offering to the institution that has come to shape me and my future in unimaginable ways.
Because my relationships here are what has been most meaningful, and because Santa Clara itself has urged me to relate to other beings in a loving way, I am nudging Santa Clara to do the same in every aspect of its relationship with students, faculty, and staff.
A university that hopes to champion leadership needs to carefully examine its own practices. I, and many of my classmates, want to be proud that we went here for reasons beyond the diploma and rigorous education. Part of what sets Santa Clara apart from other universities is its verbal and curricular dedication to upholding the dignity of other human beings—I would strongly urge all university leadership to keep this in mind.
Santa Clara will not continue to achieve greatness solely by climbing the ranks of Best Colleges or adding more phenomenal infrastructure to an already-stunning campus.
This university has a lot of growing-into-the-gospel to do. Santa Clara is a beautiful, remarkable institution, one which I hold very dearly in a very beloved place in my heart.
Santa Clara also needs to recalibrate in its approach to embodying love, embodying Christ, and living as the actual hands and feet of God.
If this institution really wants to form women and men with and for others, the institution itself should approach every detail, every relationship and individual, in the same manner of cura personalis, of unique sanctity and care.
There’s a reason prophets and activists have constantly harangued their communities for millenia, for doing the same thing over and over again, and it goes something like this: practice what you preach, because you’re not doing it.
In light of our current situation in a far from post-racial America, it is my greatest hope as I leave this space that Santa Clara will make good on its promises to genuinely and wholeheartedly promote racial justice. This will not be an easy task—love may not be particularly easy.
I imagine there will be countless hours, sacrifices, and unacknowledged efforts on behalf of Black students and alum to advocate for the justice they deserve. I imagine it will be challenging to legitimately step into the shoes of allyship for our Black neighbors. I imagine it will be frustrating for everyone, and I imagine that the justice we would hope for might often seem impossible.
Work for it anyway. Listen to Black voices on our campus, and work for justice regardless of the struggle, because there is no other option. I expect my alma mater to truly act like Black lives matter, and I have great hope that this university can make good on its endeavors and assurances to love and do its part.
This, I truly beg of you all.
On another note, faculty and staff—the very people who make Santa Clara an academically competitive, exceptional, creative locus in the first place—should be a priority instead of the first round of salary cuts when we face financial crisis.
My professors have been a lifeline to me. People that have ineffably altered my life course and my relationship with existence and meaning itself. They are the lifeblood of the university. Would we drain the community we love of its life?
On the topic of draining this community of its life, it is astoundingly unprincipled that professors in different departments are paid differently based on their discipline or line of work or study. Engineering professors are not worth more than English professors, and paying these instructors disparate wages is a genuine slap in the face.
Their job is to teach, and regardless of the “profitability” of their field, every professor is exerting the effort to prepare every Santa Clara student for real work and engagement in the world.
Professors are each to be valued as the precious gifts that they are, and as a student trained by this very university in ethical living and cura personalis, I will not accept any less.
Santa Clara’s own Markkula Center offers a Framework for Ethical Decision Making that I sadly do not believe the university as a whole truly embodies. A claim that “the Center's history reflects Santa Clara University's commitment to ethics as part of educating the whole person in the Jesuit tradition” is a nice sentiment, and certainly Santa Clara maintains a certain devotion to this mission.
However, in evaluating all of its relationships and decisions, Santa Clara would do well to reassess and reimagine the Markkula Center’s own instructions—to ask, as they do: “Which option treats people equally or proportionately? Which option best serves the community as a whole, not just some members? Which option leads me to act as the sort of person I want to be?”
What sort of spirit does this university want to have?
Professors, conversely, who operate their classrooms in sexist—even predatory—or in an otherwise derogatory manner should obviously be let go, or at the very least mandated to change, regardless of their tenure status. How is that a question?
Why should my friends be in class with teachers who treat female engineers like nobodies? Why should my friends be in class with married teachers who openly flirt and brush their student’s chest while leaning over to help them with a project? Why should we continue to be in classes with professors who are never held accountable for their actions?
Why are certain administrators and professors able to ignore protocol and basic levels of human decency at the expense of our most vulnerable and marginalized students?
What happens when a student is removed from her scholarship program in the aftermath of an off-campus rape without any warning—without so much as a letter or a meeting on scholarship probation, without the chance to appeal for release of aid in the wake of this crime? When GPA falls below scholarship eligibility, should it not be general practice to ask why it fell—to rehumanize students beyond what numbers may reflect?
For this student, why was it impossible for scholarship directors to support her in a way that preserved her dignity, and why didn’t they know what resources to refer her to—or is it that Santa Clara simply lacks those supportive structures?
What was she supposed to do when she was ostracized, alienated, and unceremoniously uprooted from her scholarship community other than to drop out, other than to believe that she was the failure?
Who is responsible? Who will be held responsible?
We have failed her. Santa Clara failed her.
There are so many individual stories that go untold here. There is so much pain, so much frustration and injustice that my classmates and I have experienced, witnessed, and protested, all for seemingly naught.
Who is this university protecting? Who is this university loving?
There’s a somewhat commonly aphorized idea that “God loves you too much to leave you the way you are.” Love seeks the good of its beloved, and goodness takes time, and effort.
I love Santa Clara too much to watch it continue the way it is. It is, like all of us, belovedly imperfect. It has such a deep capacity for good, and so much good does indeed happen on our flowering campus every single day.
But Santa Clara is meant to attend to a call beyond prestige and public-facing honor. The yardstick a Jesuit institution will be measured by is one of on-the-ground justice and wholehearted, faithful love.
Love is absolutely encompassing. There is no other option for us any longer but to fully immerse ourselves in what we mean to do and who we mean to be. Santa Clara’s job, as a university, is to educate. As a university grounded in faith—not requiring it of its members but wholly rooted in mission to pursue what it actually means to live into a godly love—Santa Clara’s job is to encompass its community in this love.
Because, as “Love Does” author and non-profit founder Bob Goff writes, “that's what love does—it pursues blindly, unflinchingly, and without end. When you go after something you love, you'll do anything it takes to get it, even if it costs everything.”
What would it look like if the institution of Santa Clara University blindly, unflinchingly, and without end went after love, whatever the cost? Can you imagine the splendor?
Can you imagine it? I can. Imagination is our power to manifest the brighter future we’d like for our world. Let’s imagine it, Santa Clara—a future where love is more than just a fun bumper sticker or an occasional custom. Imagine the greatest love you can, and let’s live into that.
And cheers to you, my dear Class of 2020. Imagine the most beautiful future you can, and make it happen. It’s what we are meant to do.