University of San Francisco - USF Don Yearbook (San Francisco, CA)

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the city of San Francisco 105 years after the founding of St. Ignatius College.

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Literature was an even stronger social force. The Victorian novels, behind their facade of seemingly tacit confirmation of Her Majesty’s benevolent rule, were powerful documents of social criticism and judgment. With the French novelists — Balzac, Hugo, Stendhal — the novel was a great weapon for a stinging denunciation of corrupt society. Poetry of the romantic age. as far back as Shelley, was a continuous cry for freedom. Then, too, poets such as Foe and Baudelaire were telling society of emotions of which it preferred to pretend ignorance. Religion was torn by modernism, rationalism. Its only answer to all of these objections seemed to be a reaffirmation of conservatism and reaction, which answers failed to crush the ever-mounting tide of question and doubt. Hegel. Marx, and soon Darwin, in their analysis of man in all of his ramifications, bewildered the European by their deft and complete revision of early notions, of everything which in former times had been accepted as correct. This was the age of revolution in Europe. Man was not content to purchase bread at the price of freedom. It was an age of questions which demanded answers, of answers whose application frightened the mind. On the other side of the world lay America, still swathed in the comfortable provinciality which was as yet untroubled by great revolutions. In New England, the country’s only intellectual area, there were great minds who were aware of the revolutions in Europe. Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott all knew of German transcendentalism, and were heavily influenced by it. The curious Utopian experiment at Brooke Farm saw the New England intellectuals milking cows in the morning and reading Aristotle at night. And then there was the unique genius of Thoreau: at Walden Pond he pondered on the individual and his relation to society. But, save for these intellectual islands, the rest of America cared little for Europe and its new ideas of revolution. Vet America itself was in the throes of great movement. The discovery of gold in California forced that long-dormant region into a lusty and bustling life. Its past Spanish glory was only a dim memory. The missions of the Franciscans and the Jesuits, the glamorous California of the Spanish haciendas, had disappeared with the political dissolution from Spain. The secularization of many of the. missions had precipitated the state into a soporific coma from which only the coming of the lively Americans could raise it. But in 1855, life had roared back into California. Life was disordered, in great part purposeless, and had only the most flimsy of motives: but it was nevertheless life. The hunger for gold was only the cause by which California began to grow. For the few who found it, their search was a cause for rejoicing; for the many who failed, it was imperative, for the sake of survival, to chart a new life in a new land. Of the needs faced by these people, education was one of the most pressing. And it is in this that the Jesuits and the embryonic University of San Francisco enter history. 16

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The entry of the Jesuits into San Francisco in 1855 was most unspectacular. They arrived by cattle-boat, and came to a city in which priests were so rare as to be an object of curiosity. The Jesuit missions of southern California had long ago settled into decay; the work was new, and had no roots on which to draw save those of oast greatness and determination. The Jesuits had come to San Francisco to serve as priests, of which there were too few. They probably had no definite ideas of starting a school, but were content to do whatever work the archbishop offered them. When they did suggest starting a school, they were offered a realm of sand dunes as their site. Their first school. Saint Ignatius College, was a one-room building. Its beginning was most primitive, but it grew until it is today the University of San Francisco, the only such institution in this city. The university has always taken pride in its uniqueness; but, it may be asked, is there any real reason for this pride, or is it only unwarranted chauvinism? Is the University of San Francisco a unique institution in this city, or is it just another school which happens to be Catholic and Jesuit? All institutions of education work with facts and iniormation meir raw materials; their differences as schools lie in the manner and methods by which they interpret and affix these facts to the world outside the school walls. The uniqueness of the University of San Francisco, therefore, lies in the fact that it is a Catholic university, because its interpretation and explanation of facts are base l on Catholic philosophy. The secular institution is content to influence its student towards becoming something called a humanist. At best, the humanist learns to organize his information into a philosophy of service, and thus to heln himself and others. At worst, he is free to shape and understand facts in any manner which pleases him, and then to transfer this twisted image onto those with whom he has contact. But the Catholic school is radically different. It does not allow the student to use information to suit his fancy; it does not merely make him a “useful member of society. It teaches him, honestly and without pretense, the Christian interpretation of reality, because it knows that its interpretation is correct. The University ot San Francisco is in existence as a Christian institution, only because God; in the person of Jesus Christ, revealed the truth bv which man can obtain the goal for which he exists. The Catholic theory of education, and its Jesuit practitioners, exist only to further the work of Christ. It is this divinity of purpose which gives the University of Sail Francisco its real uniqueness. 18