Winter 2016

James
Campbell
JC
Steve
Phelps
SP
Pam
Shay
PS
QUESTION: According to the SUES “Stanford’s founding
grant states the university’s ‘object’ succinctly: ‘to qualify
its students for personal success, and direct usefulness in
life.’ Today, more than a century later, we still subscribe
to that goal. But we also hope for more. We want our students
not simply to succeed but to flourish; we want them
to live not only usefully but also creatively, responsibly,
and reflectively.” O’Dowd’s mission picks up on the theme
of the need for strong inner development and recognition
of external impact, “seeking to develop leaders of influence
who are loving, open to growth, religious, intellectually
competent, and skilled leaders committed to justice
and peace.” We recognize that who our students become
has an effect on others and we have a responsibility to
develop our students to have a positive impact. Can you
speak to the importance of the recognition by administrators
and faculty that who our students become
has an impact on others, as well as the subsequent
implication for the shaping of a young person’s education?
JC
I think the O’Dowd mission statement puts the
matter perfectly. Your version is more explicitly
religious than the statement in the SUES report,
reflecting the fact that your institution is a Catholic high
school and ours is a secular research university. But the
core insight - that a holistic education is concerned
not simply with instilling knowledge and skills but
also with fostering values like openness, empathy,
self-reflectiveness and so forth - is the same. As we
said in our report, if the history of the Twentieth Century
teaches us anything, it is that people who are knowledgeable
and skillful are capable of doing great harm as well as
great good.
SP
O’Dowd is a dynamic and evolving Catholic school
committed to the values expressed in our charism.
Those values require a commitment to excellence,
which in this fast-changing world often require continually
evolving facilities and technologies to prepare students for
the era in which they will serve and lead. Academic, personal
and spiritual learning is cumulative and we are simply being
faithful to our core values. Our graduation outcomes call
us to prepare students to be academic achievers, spiritual
individuals, effective communicators, globally responsible
citizens and active leaders. As our knowledge base doubles
every few years, our students can only achieve these outcomes
if we also are learning and utilizing new knowledge.
An O’Dowd education is special because our intentional
core spiritual values bring inclusiveness, diversity, excellence
and joy to our community and society.
QUESTION: The SUES identifies four important pillars to a
Stanford education. Why are these four pillars - owning
knowledge, honing skills and capabilities, cultivating
personal and social responsibility and adaptive learning
- essential elements of a Stanford education?
JC
It’s hard for me to answer this question directly; to
some extent, the “aims” statement at the beginning
of the SUES report grew out of the committee’s
effort to avoid a pitfall into which many previous General
Education committees had fallen. Forgive me for saying
this, but university professors have a tendency to make
every conversation revolve around themselves. Thus the
question of ‘what do we want our students to learn’ quickly
gets transmuted into ‘what should we professors be teaching
our students,’ which in turn gets reduced to a debate about
which of our courses we should require students to take.
4 // Dragon