Adjustment & Tradition

Despite the many physical changes during the postwar period, Saint Joseph’s administration made a point of saying that the college was, in most other respects, the same as before. In reality, adjustments in many areas coexisted with certain traditions and set the stage for greater changes a decade or two ahead.

Frequently speaking or writing about the unchanging goals of Jesuit education was Hunter Guthrie, S.J., chair of the college’s philosophy department. At the annual Mass of the Holy Ghost in September 1953, held in the field house, Father Guthrie reminded his audience, "The proposed task of Jesuit education is the total formation of the perfect man." In order to realize this goal, he went on to say, the college had endeavored to enhance three important "faculties" in each student: "taste which is derived from poetry; judgement which is sharpened by philosophy; and conscience which is engaged by rhetoric and ethics."¹ (Emphasis is in the original.)

In 1953, at the opening convocation for that year, Father Jacklin echoed certain of Guthrie’s ideas about the aims of Saint Joseph’s College, especially as embodied in the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum. Admitting that the Ratio itself, as set down in 1599, made for "dull repetitious reading," Jacklin went on to say that the method had nevertheless produced generations of Christian gentlemen, who had at their disposal the best of what western civilization had created—from Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome, as well as from the post-Renaissance revival of learning.²...

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