Induction Ceremony Speeches

I am so honored to be receiving the Alpha Sigma Nu teaching award, and I want to begin by expressing my gratitude for being a teacher at a Jesuit University. Boston College takes seriously its Ignatian mission of educating the whole person, and because of that fact, I am able to participate in reflective discussion groups, Halftime and First year retreats, Capstone classes, and the Arrupe program. In these contexts, I get to see who students are outside the classroom, and that not only informs my teaching, but also makes it more fulfilling.  

Boston College also takes seriously the Jesuit dictum to be women and men- people-  for others, and I am grateful to teach in the PULSE program, which embodies this phrase and has allowed me to be in fellowship with my students as they try to live out this charge. Typically, in a philosophy class, the teacher is the focal point of the class. This is because the material tends to be difficult and abstract, and it can only come alive for those encountering it for the first time through an engaging teacher. In PULSE, however, the service takes center stage. Through the texts we read in class, I help guide the students to articulate the deeper meaning of their service, but it is the service that transforms them and the service that they will remember the most. What they learn in their service I learn as well, and thus I have the opportunity to be both student and teacher. The structure of PULSE allows me to meet with my students for an entire year, and that allows me to get to know them- and more importantly, for them to get to know each other, so we can form a genuine community.  

Teachers often hear about the impact they have on their students, but I am not confident that students know the profound impact they have on their teachers.  I certainly wasn’t aware of this when I was an undergrad. Thus I want to spend the rest of my time up here describing some of the ways students have had an impact on me. When I started teaching, wasn’t aware that my students would help me stay in what is now termed a growth mindset. F. Scott Fitzgerald, wrote that when we are 18, our convictions are hills from which we look; when we are 45 they are caves in which we hide.  I get to spend my work hours with students who are standing on hills- they are willing to be bold in interrogating their convictions. Accompanying students at one of the most exciting times of their lives- when they are figuring out who they want to be and how they want to live, inspires me to live the passion of my convictions. My students also challenge my convictions and my assumptions, which is difficult and humbling, but also enormously valuable.   

College students are also eager to discover new things, and they expose me to new music, new books, and even new cool sayings- you all slay, by the way- which reminds me of all there is still to discover in the world. Sometimes their new experiences include a newfound love of philosophy, and I get the pleasure of reliving my experience of falling in love with it 40 years ago.    

My students have transformed me into a more hopeful person. I specialize in Schopenhauer, the philosopher of pessimism, so this is no easy task. My PULSE students, specifically, give me hope because of their capacity for goodness.  It isn’t easy taking the T, which breaks down with a consistency that feels deliberate. It isn’t easy being fully present at service in the midst of continuous midterms and miserable weather. It isn’t easy entering into a community that perhaps doesn’t always welcome you, or that humbles you, or that challenges everything you thought you knew about fairness, or justice, or what makes a good society. The generosity and compassion that my students over the years have demonstrated in service to others feels miraculous to me, and it never stops feeling miraculous to me.  Because of my students, I feel hopeful that there is sufficient goodness in this broken world.  

Finally, my students teach me a great deal about love, and that has been transformative. Another reason I am grateful to teach at Boston College is because love is not an embarrassing word in the context of teaching. Fr Michael Himes, one of my teaching heroes, said that teachers should love who they teach, love what they teach, and introduce the two to each other, Pope Francis described teaching as an act of love.  I love what I teach, and I also grow to love my students over the course of the year. That may be the greatest gift that they, you, have given me.  

I am so blessed to be a teacher- thank you.  

Good afternoon, President DeGioia, Reverand Michaelson, distinguished guests and faculty members; and warm greetings to the Georgetown students whom we are celebrating today, and their families and friends who are with us. I am so pleased to be here with you today to help honor this extraordinary group of students. 

I thank the student board of the Georgetown chapter of Alpha Sigma Nu for inviting me to be among three honorary members for 2024 and your speaker today. Steeped as I am in Jesuit training and tradition, let me explain why this honor is especially meaningful to me and to my family. 

First, this wonderful Jesuit tradition applies not only to me, but to my wife, Dr. Christine Grady, who regrettably cannot be with us today due to a prior commitment. Christine earned her undergraduate degree in nursing here at Georgetown. Afterwards, she joined the National Institutes of Health, which is where we met. And it was right here in this beautiful Dahlgren Chapel that in 1985 we were married.  

Later, Christine returned to Georgetown to earn a doctorate in bioethics. This eventually led to her becoming Chief of the NIH Department of Bioethics.  

Now, a bit about my background and how it segued into the Jesuit tradition that has framed my life. My parents descended from my Italian immigrant grandparents. We settled in Brooklyn, New York where we lived above the pharmacy run by my father. At that time, the 1940s and 50s, being a pharmacist in Brooklyn was more like being a neighborhood doctor. As I helped deliver prescriptions on my bicycle, I came to realize and empathize with the fact that many people suffered illnesses and infirmities that were not readily apparent and often were not properly attended to. I wanted to do something about this, and it was here that the sparks of public service emerged in me. 

Fate helped me out. Although Brooklyn was home, I had the good fortune to attend Regis High School, a Jesuit school in Manhattan. I thrived in the intellectually rigorous environment, captained our basketball team, and importantly, absorbed Jesuit tenets as my touchstones.  

My father’s “doctoring,” my love of science, and the Jesuit focus on serving others all stirred my interest in becoming a physician, and my Regis advisors encouraged me to continue my Jesuit education at the College of the Holy Cross, which I did.  

Although I was a pre-med major at Holy Cross, my academic tract had a named that was somewhat oxymoronic. I graduated Bachelor of Arts, Greek Classics/Philosophy, Pre-Med. Typical Jesuit, as they say. Subsequently, I earned my medical degree at Cornell University Medical College. 

The Jesuit call to serve others was again among the key factors that led me to start my career as a physician/scientist by joining the NIH in 1968. 

This broad perspective has served me well throughout my entire career. As Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, I was repeatedly required to oversee biomedical research programs to tackle a succession of large, challenging, and often urgent global health problems in infectious diseases, from HIV/AIDS to pandemic influenza, from Ebola to COVID-19. 

After ending my NIH career 54 years later, in an extraordinarily positive turn of events, my life came full circle—back to my Jesuit roots—when Georgetown welcomed me as a faculty member last summer.  

Today, the Georgetown students being initiated into Alpha Sigma Nu, as well as we three honorary members, pledge and re-affirm our dedication to three Jesuit ideals: Scholarship, Loyalty, and Service. I have already spoken to you a bit about my call to public service. Let me share just a few of many examples of how Loyalty to Jesuit ideals and Scholarship also factored in my career. 

First, Loyalty to Jesuit Ideals. Not long after the first U.S. cases of a mysterious illness later identified as AIDS were published in mid-1981, I made the radical decision to completely redirect my NIH career and focus on this new disease. My mentors tried to dissuade me since they thought that this would interrupt what was the promising career tract that I was on. I felt differently. I felt that it was a calling for me to use whatever talents I had to help these desperately ill patients. When I began personally taking care of persons with HIV— mostly young, gay men—it was initially heartbreaking because we lacked remedies, and one after another, they died usually within months. Infections that normally would not kill an immunocompetent person inevitably killed them because HIV had devastated their immune systems. 

Soon thereafter, in 1984, I was selected as Director of NIAID with major responsibility for developing de novo an HIV/AIDS research program.  

Although I was determined to secure the research funding, we needed from Congress to quell the epidemic, the Reagan White House took years to even acknowledge that AIDS existed, and many young lives were tragically lost during that period. 

And so, during the 1980s, as deaths among their friends mounted, AIDS activists became understandably impatient with the slow pace of research and wanted to play a role in setting the policy and the research agendas.  

It was in the context of personal attacks on me as a representative of the Federal government and demonstrations by AIDS activists that in retrospect, I made one of the most important decisions of my career.  

I did something many of my peers were intimated to do, I invited some of the activists up to my office to engage them in a conversation. And when they were not shouting and when I listened carefully, a lot of what they were saying made sense and I realized that if I were in their shoes, I would be doing exactly what they were doing – protesting and demonstrating.  

Our honest and transparent conversation was the beginning of a genuinely effective research partnership between NIAID and the HIV/AIDS advocacy community, a partnership that is constructive, has grown stronger over decades, and that exists to this day as the original prototype for advocates working with the research community on other diseases.  

Likewise, I visited gay and lesbian community centers in places like Greenwich Village and the Castro District of San Francisco, meeting activists on their own turf when they felt the government was not listening to or including them.  

Ultimately, we developed the highly effective drugs that have completely transformed the lives of persons with HIV allowing them now in 2024 to lead normal healthy lives as opposed to the inevitable death sentence they would have faced decades ago. Loyalty to the Jesuit ideals of caring for and service to others was the consistent driving force for me over those 43 years that I was involved in the AIDS saga.  I feel confident that you will personify these ideals. 

Now let me turn to briefly address the issue of Scholarship. 

The highest level of scholarship is integral to the Jesuit tradition. I would like to address one element of scholarship that is very relevant in today’s world.  Current forces in our society that are trying to undermine scholarship worry me greatly. And I need to bring this to your attention since it will involve you. 

Scholarship is a process of gathering evidence and data to make informed decisions that are important in life. Evidence and data are what drive progress in scientific and medical research, leading to tangible health benefits.  

When society normalizes untruths as we are clearly seeing in today’s world, the truth means nothing, and when veracity is meaningless, and when people have their own sets of truths, it is even more important for those of us trained in this Jesuit tradition, and committed to intellectual integrity, to stick to the highest principles of scholarship.  

Since the emergence of the COVID pandemic, it has become apparent that we have entered an unfortunate era characterized by the tacit and weary acceptance of untruths.  

It is no secret that the political landscape is rife with disinformation and misinformation, distorted truths, and conspiracy theories unrelated to reality. I am profoundly disheartened by the indifference many people have to the proliferation of falsehoods and egregious lies in our public discourse.  

Complacency about rampant untruths imperils democratic societies everywhere. That is why universities, and particularly Jesuit universities, are crucial bastions for championing scholarship that defends intellectual integrity and the truth.  

Here is where you come in. You are not too young to start pushing back on this assault on integrity and truth. Our country and the world are relying on you to put your Jesuit training into practice and continue throughout your lives to be staunch defenders of the Jesuit principles that you are learning so well at this extraordinary institution. 

In conclusion, to the Georgetown Alpha Sigma Nu initiates—my sincere congratulations and please continue your good work! I have great faith that as Jesuit ideals become the cloth of your character as you carve a career path out in the world, you will be among the civic leaders protecting, restoring, and building our world into a better place. 

We’ve heard from our executive board about the values of Alpha Sigma Nu: scholarship, loyalty, and service. I won’t revisit familiar ground. What I wish to offer, briefly, is what a Jesuit like me hopes for each of you as members of Alpha Sigma Nu.  To begin with, an embarrassing admission: I did not take advantage of Alpha Sigma Nu opportunity when I was in undergraduate at Marquette.  With a number of honors societies and awards on offer at the end of four years, I thought Alpha Sigma Nu was just one more feather in the cap before graduation.  I thought it was just sprinkling some more Jesuit language on my already wonderful life.  But now I see there can be a big difference, if we are intentional. So what is the value-add of this Jesuit Honors Society? 

You are a smart bunch, so allow me to travel a little further upstream from the ideals we’ve heard so far today.  Allow me to suggest that Jesuit education is not merely about scholarship. Every university worth its salt asks for careful scholarship from its faculty and students.  And every academic institution, after its graduates move on, relies on the loyalty of its alumni – especially the advancement office. We are seeing the great loyalty of Marquette’s alumni fans coming out to support our basketball team at this very moment.  Loyalty is good, when it’s loyalty to the proper things.  So that leaves us with service.  Surely service is a distinctive measure of a Jesuit education, yes?  It absolutely us, but allow me to suggest that you will find no university in the United States that is opposed to community service, or trying to make the world a better place.  Perhaps it is a mark of the power of Jesuit education that these ideals have become so pervasive, even in non-Jesuit universities!   

But what I think underlies all of these elements is that we Jesuits, at a Catholic University like Marquette, hope to offer a vision for humanity, grounded in a living relationship with God, that helps you navigate life in a complex world.  

You may have heard of the 17th century French mathematician and philosopher Blaise Pascal.  Pascal would be spinning in his grave knowing that I am quoting him, since he was not a fan of us Jesuits! But Pascal offered a helpful consideration of the great religious traditions.  He noted that a great religion, if it is worthy of your time, “would have to account for both the greatness and misery that humans are capable of achieving.  A true religious must inspire both self-esteem and self-denial, both love and hate.”  Hate?  Why hate?  Let us start with the love: our world is marked by great beauty and opportunities — cherishing what is good is crucial.  But we live in a complex world marked by social strife and visible inequalities, by sin and suffering.  If we don’t actively confront what is wrong, it doesn’t go away.  Ignoring what is bad does not make them problems go away, but gives them more power in our imagination, leading people to become anxious and depressed, cynical and hopeless.  

We Jesuits hope that someone educated at a Catholic university will have cultivated sufficient spiritual depth, drawing upon your own religious tradition, that you can love God, and your neighbor as yourself, as Christ called us to.  We Jesuits hope that you will commit to pursuing what is true and good, without giving into cynical detachment, or despair.  Each of us is capable of doing small acts of harm, by our words, actions, or omissions; but we are equally capable of small acts of goodness and truth, sacrifice and generosity.  These are especially important when no one is watching, and there are no awards or recognition attached.   

These are some of the lessons I’ve learned in my 18 years as a Jesuit so far, lessons I hope you have gotten a taste of in your time as an undergraduate here.   

Today, as we go forward, I encourage you to consider whether you feel spiritually equipped to navigate the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune in our world beyond this campus.  If you’re not there yet, don’t despair!  Might I suggest getting involved with campus ministry’s many opportunities for direct community service to those in need around Milwaukee? Have you taken advantage of Marquette’s great off-campus retreats?  Have you taken advantage of Masses or the religious services in your own tradition?  

But also, I ask you to recognize where you have already been equipped intellectually, humanly, and spiritually, to recognize the great goodness and hope for the world.  Equipped with this Catholic, Jesuit vision of hope, how are you specifically called to respond to a world in need of your time, your talents, and your dedication?  For at the end of the day, Jesuit education is about scholarship, loyalty, and service. But it is grounded first in our Catholic, Jesuit imagination that trains our attention and talents not only for my own good, but for the good of my neighbor, and for the world – and all done for the greater honor and glory of God.  Congratulations fellow inductees, and welcome to the vision of Alpha Sigma Nu, the Jesuit Honors Society! 

Thanks to Laura, Karina, and Dr. Willis for inviting me to address you, our Alpha Sigma
Nu inductees, on this great occasion. As an ASN member and a triple product of Jesuit higher ed,
with my undergraduate work at Boston College, graduate studies at Fordham, and now my career
here at SCU, it’s an honor to be with you.
I’ll frame my comments tonight around ASN’s core values: scholarship, loyalty, and
service. But rather than reflect on these values in a face-value way—talking about scholarship as
studies or service as community engagement—I’ll look at these values through the lens of three
core principles of the Ignatian tradition: contemplation, discernment, and action. After all, we’re
here as members of a Jesuit Honor Society! But even more importantly, I think this approach will
greatly enrich our understanding of these values and open broader horizons for thinking about
what it means to be formed in the tradition of Jesuit education and to belong to an august Society
like ASN in terms that take us beyond “this will look great on my resumé” and lead us to reflect
on who we are and discern how we can contribute to cultivating social and ecological justice by
bringing our gifts, our knowledge, our passions, to the needs of the world.
So, first: scholarship. At face value, being recognized for scholarship might sound like
“getting good grades,” or “being smart”—whatever that means. But in Jesuit tradition, studies
aren’t undertaken for their own sake. They’re not undertaken for the sake of getting internships,
good grades, good jobs—and certainly not to get rich! Scholarship is an art, a practice of life—a
way of proceeding. It’s most basically a practice of contemplation that cultivates an informed
awareness about the world—and especially about suffering and injustice—so that we can bring
our gifts to the world’s needs. I first encountered real suffering—suffering that broke the shell of
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privilege I didn’t even know I had for the first 22 years of my life—when I was teaching on Pine
Ridge Indian Reservation as a Teach For America corps member. I’d heard of systemic poverty.
I’d studied it. I thought I understood it. But seeing it—seeing people struggling to exist on barren
land because of a history of oppression—changed everything. No longer was scholarship just
about learning, or “book smarts.” It was about deep encounter and reflection on the world. This
is more than an ELSJ requirement can give us. It’s about being authentically present to people
and the earth, listening to the earth and the human poor when they cry out for justice. In the
Jesuit tradition, then, scholarship is about attuning our minds and our hearts—Ignatius always
integrates thought and feeling—to what the Jesuit martyrs of El Salvador called la realidad, the
total socio-ecological and political reality of which we’re part, and contemplating that reality
with a particular attentiveness to injustice and suffering.
This requires deep learning, but again, the learning is not an end in itself—or even a
means to an end: a job, a paycheck. Because you are more than your grades; you are more than
your major; you are more than the internship or job you get—or don’t get. You are amazing,
beloved, and certainly not reducible to your expertise or credentials. You are not a cog in a
wheel; you are a whole person. Ah, but scholarly contemplation reminds us, Benson Workers are
whole people, too, as are the poor of El Salvador and Pine Ridge, adjunct lecturers crying out for
a living wage—all people who receive unequal pay for equal work. And not just humans: the
goodness and integrity of Earth is being degraded by an ongoing lack of contemplation—as
ecosystems collapse, lands and peoples are degraded by fires and storms, beautiful, intricate
species go extinct—breathing their last in the name of human “progress.” In all of this, I think
it’s a lack of awareness coupled with an unspoken belief that some people, some creatures really
are more valuable than others that drives this system of oppression. But engaging la realidad in
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those terms, encountering suffering, contemplating it deeply, bringing our understanding to bear
on reality in service of a greater good: this is the heart of the Jesuit understanding of scholarship.
Finally, I’ll say that this stance of deep contemplation and informed awareness that arises
from the Jesuit tradition of scholarship and is projected towards the needs of the world humbles
us and calls us to integrity—on a cosmological scale. After all, right now, there are quarks with
statistically indeterminate properties flying around your head. How often do you think about
that? (My favorite property of quarks is “charm”—the allure of quantum particles—scientists are
weird.) Not only that, but think of the great redwoods of our local ecosystem, which over the
course of their evolutionary history developed the capacity to drink fog—how’s that for a Bay
Area ecological relationship?—and to return that fog to the world as oxygen, the breath of life.
That process is happening all around us, and we humans depend on it. Trees don’t need us—but
we sure need them. “Who’s superior now?” they ask us. Humility. In light of this ecological and
evolutionary interconnectedness, in my classes I often invoke the “Spider-Man principle”: “with
great power comes great responsibility.” What if rather than thinking that our big brain mass and
capacity for critical thought makes us superior—recognizing that not too long ago White folks
were using this same argument to assert superiority over peoples of color—what if instead of
superiority, our advanced capacities actually make us more responsible, more accountable to the
needs of the world. Rather than trying to change the world to meet our own needs, whether
individually or as a species, what if we used our powers to transform injustice into justice,
degradation into flourishing, suffering into joy?
We could do that if we wanted to. The world doesn’t have to be the way it is. Remind
yourself of that every morning when you wake up. The world doesn’t have to be the way it is.
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So much for scholarship, or contemplation of reality. To my mind, the principal fruit of
this idea of scholarship is a stance of discernment, which is the way I’m going to interpret ASN’s
second value: loyalty. How do loyalty and discernment connect?
We often think of loyalty as a commitment to an institution, a relationship, a team: the
Dubs, Niners, your spouse, ‘Murika—you name it. In light of the ways Jesuit higher education
sees scholarship as a basis for contemplation and action for the common good, I’d suggest that
loyalty in Jesuit education isn’t so much about being a proud Bronco—though of course that’s
good, too!—as it is about living a commitment to the values and vision of Jesuit education. This
means committing ourselves to the needs of the world, not to institutions; with loyalty to the idea
that “another world is possible”—that the status quo is often unjust, but it can change.
Hand in hand with the vision of scholarship I’ve articulated, loyalty to this vision of
flourishing, justice, and love invites us into a posture of discernment. By committing ourselves to
such a vision—which in practice means committing ourselves to a vision of flourishing that says
all creatures—human and other—have a right to live, thrive, and have what they need to live a
full life reorients our priorities and pushes us to consider in every moment how we can use our
intellectual and material resources to serve the world. Whereas loyalty to institutions can often
blind us to suffering, creating insider and outsider categories that excuse injustice—loyalty to a
vision challenges us to look out to la realidad and ask, “What is going on here? Where’s the
good, and where’s the bad? Who is suffering? What can I bring to the needs of this place and
time? If loyalty to one thing ever leads you to ignore suffering, or feign ignorance in the face of
social or ecological injustice, then I’d invite you to reconsider the object of your loyalty. After
all, whether institutionally or personally, accepting the status quo is a choice—but loyalty to the
vision of Jesuit education is a way of proceeding, a stance of life that calls us continually to
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discern what’s right and wrong, good or bad, lifegiving or demeaning, and to act accordingly.
And that brings us finally, and most briefly, to service.
The third ASN value, service, is practically a commitment to action, or better, as a way of
proceeding (and a way of connecting the dots of what I’ve shared), it is a call to contemplationin-
action through ongoing discernment with minds and hearts attentive to the needs of the world.
In this sense, service is not about charity in the narrow sense—of giving some resources here or
there or showing up once in a while to do something good for people in need, or hugging a tree
or cleaning up a pond. Service is a way of life that arises out of scholarship and loyalty—out of
contemplation and discernment. By being attentive to and deeply knowledgeable about la
realidad, we as inheritors of the Ignatian tradition are called to do what needs to be done. In
Ignatian lingo, this is about Magis, which doesn’t mean “doing the most” but means doing that
which brings about the greatest, most expansive good in any situation. It’s a holistic orientation
that calls us all to use our intellectual, personal, and material resources, our voice and our money,
the whole of our lives, to transform injustice into justice, to speak out against oppression, so that
all may flourish in freedom and the fullness of life. That’s the vision that the Jesuit tradition
gives us, and that to me is the gift and challenge to ASN members: to use our scholarship,
loyalty, and service—our contemplation, discernment, and action—to build a better world.
Congratulations, and go set the world on fire! (but not literally!)