Good morning. I am Lance Grahn. As you know, I am an academic. I started my professional career as a member of the teaching faculty, and now I am an academic administrator. My academic life actually began in junior high school where I got hooked on Hispanic culture. I graduated from high school intending to pursue a Ph.D. in Spanish literature but left college on a path to a Ph.D. in Latin American history instead. That academic journey led my wife and me to Calvin College and revolutionary Central America where we experienced the social, economic, political, and personal impact of the life of the mind. Intellectual pursuits – in my case, history; in the case of several of my colleagues, theology—had meaning in the real world of both the poor and the powerful. Academics as vocation, not just as a career, characterized our work at Calvin.
Vocation as the basis and impetus for learning developed even further when I joined the faculty at Marquette University. During my first semester there, six Jesuit academics, their housekeeper, and he daughter were murdered on the campus of the University of Central America, a place where I had spent several days just three years earlier. The priests’ vocation of study, learning, and teaching in service to the poor and disenfranchised of El Salvador had cost all eight their lives. As a new faculty member at a sister Jesuit university and someone who had become personally familiar with the local reputation of the victims in a transformational experience at a Christian Reformed college, it was almost impossible, then, for me not to accept the invitation to enter into serious conversations with Jesuits and Catholic laity who led the campus onversations about mission and identity. Vocation is central to the Society of Jesus and to Jesuit education. Vocation is, in fact, central to the character of most faith-based colleges and universities. They all challenge us to ask why we do we do what we do, beyond doing something that we enjoy and doing something that we’re good at. What is the larger purpose of study, research, teaching, and academic publishing? Is there a greater meaning, a higher meaning to what we find to be personally fulfilling? The responses, of course, are more complex and more nuanced than I can describe in the last 15 seconds of my “vocation minute.” And even though the last 14 years of my academic career have been in public secular higher education, I still respond out of my Jesuit-framed world view. There is indeed a greater purpose, a higher meaning to what we academics do. Our work is a response to the divine, an activation of our God-given talent, a means to an end far beyond preparing students to become good employees. A vocational perspective on higher education means that we develop not only the workforce but that we also develop human beings better to be better equipped to live into their potential and, through our students, we develop communities that are better able to live into the ideals of life in community.
