Engineering Education and Practice: Embracing a Catholic Vision

4. Engineering at Santa Clara: Jesuit Values in Silicon Valley

Chapter Four Engineering at Santa clara: Jesuit Values in Silicon Valley DaNiel a. Pitt This chapter originated as part of a special project at Santa Clara University called future Directions: Achieving National Prominence as a Catholic, Jesuit University. My original purpose was to issue an invitation to the university community to reflect on the role of engineering at Santa Clara. That we are part of a Catholic, Jesuit university, located specifically in Silicon valley, is only part of the story. The rest is the particular nature of Santa Clara University, including our history, our mission, and our values. How engineering helps the university achieve its desired prominence is another part of the story. The rest is helping the university achieve its self-defined goals, which all the studies in the special project address.1 SaNta clara uNiVerSity Santa Clara University, the oldest institution of higher learning in California, welcomed its first students in 1851. It was established on 90 Engineering at Santa Clara: Jesuit values in Silicon valley 91 the site of the Mission Santa Clara de Asís, the eighth of the original twenty-one California missions. The Mission Church plays an active role in many aspects of campus life—religious and secular—and buildings dating back to 1822 are still in use. Today it enrolls 4,500 undergraduate students and 3,500 graduate and professional students; most undergrads live on or near the campus while almost no grad students do. The School of Engineering offers B.S., M.S., and (a few) Ph.D. degrees , the Leavey School of Business B.Sc. and M.B.A. degrees, the School of Law J.D. and LL.M. degrees plus J.D./M.S.T. and J.D./M.B.A. programs, the School of Education, Counseling Psychology, and Pastoral Ministries M.A. degrees, and the College of Arts and Sciences B.A. and B.S. degrees. As a comprehensive university it ranks number two in the west according to U.S. News and World Report.2 Three Centers of Distinction serve as major points of interaction among the schools and colleges and between the university and society. The Ignatian Center for Jesuit Education helps the University community realize the evolving role and implications of our Jesuit identity and tradition of faith through justice. Its components engage students in real life, community-based learning experiences both locally and abroad through dozens of formal relationships with community organizations ; promote the contemplation of vocation in the sense of finding one’s true calling; and organize immersion experiences to provide students, faculty, staff, and alumni with prolonged contact with the poor and marginalized. The Center for Science, Technology, and Society exploits the university’s many ties to Silicon valley to illuminate the interplay of science and technology with culture and society. Among its prominent activities is its support for technology that benefits the less fortunate, through its role in the Technology for Humanity Awards and its global Social Benefit Incubator for winners of the awards and other social entrepreneurs. The nationally known Markkula Center for Applied Ethics helps people develop strategies for understanding and resolving the ethical dilemmas that confront them and society. frequently enrolling first-generation college students, the university strives to prepare and retain all students and has the third highest graduation rate among US master’s universities. Approximately 45 percent of undergraduate students and 67 percent of graduate students 92 Daniel A. Pitt identify themselves as people of color. All the graduate and professional programs accommodate the working professional, so the graduate demographics mainly reflect those of Silicon valley’s high-tech working population. The university makes student learning its central focus in an educational environment that integrates rigorous inquiry and scholarship, creative imagination, reflective engagement with society , and a commitment to fashioning a more humane and just world. All undergraduate students complete a university-wide core curriculum comprising ethics, liberal arts, and religion. All students benefit by small classes (all taught by professors) and a values-oriented curriculum that educates students for competence, conscience, and compassion . The traditions of Jesuit education—educating the whole person for a life of service—run deep in the university’s curricular and cocurricular programs and embrace all faith traditions. It is worth noting the central role played by El Salvador at Santa Clara. Our Jesuits have maintained longstanding ties with their counterparts at the Jesuit university in San Salvador, Universidad Centroamericana...