YEAR OF THE CITY

LOYOLA COLLEGE TAKES JESUIT MISSION BEYOND CLASSROOM WALLS

Across the nation, hundreds of colleges and universities thrive in the midst of urban communities. But how many people in those institutions really make an effort to leave the classroom and venture into the neighborhoods beyond? At Loyola College in Maryland, faculty, staff and students set aside a whole year to do just that.

When Fr. Brian Linnane, SJ, took over as the 24th president of Loyola College, he gave a stirring inaugural speech in which he declared that the 2006-2007 academic year would be the “Year of the City.” In his remarks, Linnane stated that, “the education Loyola offers will be deficient as a Catholic, Jesuit education if it fails to help our students understand the social realities of poverty, race and class in our cities and throughout our nation.” With the Year of the City, Linnane launched a campus-wide initiative that touched every facet of the college’s life. In so doing, Loyola created a model for experiential learning and community collaboration that can inspire other urban institutions.

“When I came to Loyola, I was aware that while Loyola itself is in a very suburban environment, one end of our campus interacts very quickly with a very urban area marked by poverty, some drug trafficking, and crime,” says Linnane. “I realized that if I treated this as a threat — if I hired more campus police or put up walls — I could never really resolve it. I had to look at it as an opportunity for how we, as a Catholic university, could engage that challenged neighborhood in a way that’s productive.”

At the same time, Linnane was contemplating the devastation that transpired in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Like New Orleans and so many cities throughout the United States, Loyola’s hometown of Baltimore has problems of economic stratification and a persistent underclass that is not empowered to join urban renewal efforts happening in other parts of the city. For example, in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, tourists flock to popular attractions while only blocks away open air drug markets flourish and homeless men sleep on benches near City Hall. Loyola was already galvanized behind the Katrina effort, working overtime to take in students from New Orleans’ battered universities. According to Linnane, the energy to do something big was in the air.

He envisioned a sweeping effort that challenged everyone from students and faculty to groundskeepers to look at their skills and resources and find a way to use those talents to interact and share knowledge with the surrounding urban communities. In the end, more than 100 programs that embraced the Year of the City mission were conducted through the 2006-2007 academic year.

Fr. Brian Linnane, SJ, president of Loyola College, announces the Year of the City initiative during his inaugural address.

Linnane’s speech sent organizers scurrying to create a system that could support such an unprecedented campus-wide effort. Joan Flynn, assistant vice president of administration, and Steve Miles, assistant professor of theology, were named co-directors of the Year of the City.

“The aims really addressed this question of what does it mean to be a Jesuit institution in an urban environment,” explains Miles.

Flynn adds that another important question posed was, “How do we make Loyola more available to the city? Not just how do we get to Baltimore, but how do we bring Baltimore to us?”

Flynn and Miles agree that a key component of the year was the creation of a Year of the City website. On the site, faculty and administrators could find resources to help them plan their year initiatives. There was a section for students, highlighting things to see and do in Baltimore outside the realm of the usual tourist destinations, which encouraged them to explore the city in a productive fashion. Linnane posted Year of the City missives on the site, and students and faculty could check in to see how they could get involved in Year of the City activities and programs.

“All of the students participated in Year of the City in some capacity,” says Miles. “It was really impossible to miss it.”

One of the year’s most ambitious projects was Loyola’s partnership with St. Mary of the Assumption School. The small school sits on an invisible dividing line between one of the area’s more affluent neighborhoods and a diverse, working class community. Competition from nearby private and parochial schools, a decrease in overall elementary-school age children in the city, and the diverse socio-economic demographics of the local community are just a few factors that led to decreased enrollment at St. Mary’s. With that decrease came concerns about teacher retention and overall academic achievement.

“St. Mary’s is a school that was reaching a critical stage in the sense that if it continued to not take in new students and the faculty left, it would become quite problematic,” says Bishop Denis Madden, urban vicar of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, who was so inspired by Linnane’s inaugural speech that shortly thereafter the two met to develop strategic partnerships between Loyola and the local community. “We settled on St. Mary’s because it is close to Loyola and it is a school that was and is in need.”

Mary Cameron works with St. Mary's students Arnay Marshall (left) and Kerron Moore to enhance the classroom experience.

The resulting activities at St. Mary’s are a true partnership between academia and the archdiocese, a partnership working to stabilize the community and build faith and good will.

Loyola provides on-site tutoring and homework help for St. Mary’s students and teacher assistants three days a week, as well as field trips and enrichment workshops. St. Mary’s children with special needs receive reduced-fee speech, language and hearing evaluations and reading assistance through Loyola’s Belvedere Square Clinical Centers. Plans are under way to revitalize the school’s athletic program and its largely outdated computer lab has received a major overhaul thanks to its Loyola partners. Loyola students are constructing a database of St. Mary’s alumni to facilitate the school’s future marketing and development efforts. Loyola staff is also working with the school and the pastor of St. Mary’s to develop a long-range strategic plan for the school to ensure that these efforts carry it into the future. These activities are all part of a massive action plan aimed at stabilizing the school and transforming it into one of the best parochial environments in the archdiocese. While St. Mary’s School will certainly see quantifiable change for the better, the opportunity to work there is beneficial to Loyola students as well. In addition to providing an opportunity for them to live the Jesuit philosophy of men and women working for and with others, St. Mary’s provides hands-on experience for Loyola’s education students. It is also a way to instill a fundamental belief in service and social justice in a new generation.

According to Linnane, the partnership with St. Mary’s was an ideal way to demonstrate what he wanted to show the community — that Loyola is a good neighbor. “One key thing we wanted to do was something new in our neighborhood, a new endeavor to mark the Year of the City,” says Linnane. “I also think it is an important step to enhance the health and quality of life in the neighborhood.”

Many Year of the City programs demonstrated tremendous creativity. Fr. Michael Braden, SJ, affiliate assistant professor in the communications department, was already working with John Devecka, operations manager of Loyola’s radio station, WLOY, on an idea to create a documentary with students. The men were inspired by the history of Pennsylvania Avenue in Baltimore’s Sandtown, a neighborhood once famous for its jazz clubs in the 1930s and 1940s and now one of the city’s economically challenged areas. The Year of the City gave them the opportunity to expand the idea into an experiential learning project that would involve several academic disciplines and showcase Baltimore’s unique neighborhoods and the efforts being made to restore them.

“It was John’s idea that there are a lot of interesting places in Baltimore where the neighborhood was once one way and is now another and where they are struggling, in a sense, trying to restore Baltimore,” says Braden. Working closely with Devecka, communications professor Kaye Whitehead, and department chair Russell Cook, Braden and his team identified six communities as candidates for the documentary. One course, taught by Whitehead, was the central class for this project and was open to any student interested in working on what was called the “Restoring Baltimore” project. In addition, professors of other classes that require specialized skills in video production, graphics, public relations and journalism, altered their syllabi to make room for the students’ contributions to the project.

Students from Whitehead’s class went to the Maryland Historical Society and Enoch Pratt Library to conduct research before Braden and Whitehead sent them into the actual neighborhoods, armed with camcorders, to capture oral histories from current residents. The oral histories were given to a scriptwriting class and whittled into scripts for the neighborhood documentaries. Each script then went to a video production class that edited the documentaries to the script’s specifications and produced a DVD called “Restoring Baltimore,” that features six vignettes, one for each neighborhood, all created by the students. The videos were presented at a campus-wide event called Loyolapalooza. Whitehead’s students also turned their research into feature articles that were laid out into newspaper tabloids by graphic design students from yet another class. Braden estimates that in some fashion, the project involved about 100 students.

Loyola student Carly Cedermark helps Jasmine Jackson, a student at St. Mary's of the Assumption School, take photographs using a digital camera.

“A department like this puts into the hands of our students the most powerful techniques of communication the world has ever seen,” says Braden. “One of the things students struggle with is having something to say, probably because they don’t have a wide enough experience yet. This gave them a little bit of that… they had stories to tell. It was very gratifying for me to have them suddenly understand, in a visceral way, the power of the media for good.”

Braden admits the project had its pitfalls, mainly that he and his colleague, Whitehead, ended up doing more of the editing than they’d planned. Also, the project required a tremendous amount of cooperation and curriculum restructuring among numerous faculty. But he feels the eye-opening experience the students received was invaluable. Students met and learned from community activists, many who have been affected by drugs, gang violence and incarceration. They gained a broader sense of what “Baltimore” really is and put a face on Loyola College for those community leaders who may have perceived the institution as a closed door.

In an audio reflection on the project compiled by Loyola student Christopher Nelson, one female student said, “The thing about this class is you see your neighborhood in such a different light. You see it for the people who live and work there and yeah, you see it for the challenges but also for the opportunities that lie ahead.” Another Loyola student noted that “when you read the newspaper or listen to the radio you don’t really get a full sense of what life is like in a city such as Baltimore. For every bad story there’s actually a story of hope. I think our class had a chance to get a more balanced view of Baltimore than we had before.” Although the formal review of the Year of the City’s success is still in process, the anecdotal feedback has been positive. It galvanized a college, which is by nature, a compartmentalized system, and forced each member to reflect on what each had to give — and get — from the community. “It allowed us to come to a fuller understanding of who we are as an institution,” says Steve Miles.

Now the challenge is to tap the energy that was generated by the year and institutionalize it. Linnane likes to say the Year of the City didn’t end, it culminated. What that culmination will be is still a philosophical question in action.

“I think [the Year of the City] has helped us understand how Loyola has been perceived in the city,” says Linnane. “The other thing is it has changed the perception of our students about how they interact in the city and what they can get from an urban education, that it’s not just a playground – there are real benefits that come from getting to know a city and thinking through the challenges of urban life.”

Christianna McCausland is a freelance writer in Baltimore