NYT profiles new Fairfield Jesuit residence.

It isn't often that a Jesuit residence gets a favorable write-up from a leading architecture critic, but that's exactly what has happened to the Fairfield University Jesuit Community Center. Already the recipient of major architectural awards, this weekend the year-old residence became the subject of a very positive New York Times article by Fred Bernstein. Here are the first few paragraphs:

When 10 Jesuit priests moved into their new home at Fairfield University about a year ago, some of them couldn’t fit their old desks into their new bedrooms. And "we live out of our desks," says the Rev. Mark P. Scalese, who teaches at the university. He was referring to the Jesuits’ penchant for learning, as reflected in a 10-year training period known as "formation" that includes extensive graduate education. Many end up with three or four advanced degrees.

But if the Jesuits at Fairfield had to sacrifice their old furniture, they were doing so to magnify their presence. Their new residence, boldly contemporary and centrally located, was designed to increase their visibility at a time when the number of Jesuits on campus has been falling.

At Fairfield’s leafy campus in southwestern Connecticut, the Jesuits teach subjects as diverse as philosophy and film production, while trying to help students develop "spiritual depth," in the words of the Rev. Dr. Paul J. Fitzgerald, the university’s senior vice president for academic affairs. Their goal is to remain relevant, a problem on a campus where student concerns range from the shortage of parking spaces to rules forbidding the distribution of condoms.

Once there were nearly 100 Jesuits — members of an order founded by St. Ignatius Loyola in the 16th century — at Fairfield. Today, there are 22. Only six are professors; the others are administrators, or retired. That means some of the university’s 3,200 undergraduates will make it through four years without having a single Jesuit professor.

The article cites the usual statistics about the numerical decline of the Society of Jesus, helping to put the dimunition of the Jesuit presence at Fairfield in a broader context. Bernstein also does a surprisingly good job of explaining how Jesuits at Fairfield have been working, in Father Fitzgerald's words, to make their lay colleagues "true partners in the enterprise of Jesuit education," by, for example, offering seminars on Ignatian pedagogy for new faculty and making the Spiritual Exercises available to lay faculty, staff, and employees.

Though Fairfield's general way of dealing with the reduced Jesuit presence on campus mirrors the approach that other Jesuit colleges and universities have taken to deal with this issue, the role that the new residence itself plays in efforts to enhance Fairfield's Jesuit identity deserves special attention. For more on that, consider these paragraphs from the NYT article:

Fairfield’s new Jesuit home, a 22,000-square-foot eco-friendly building, is part of an effort to reach out to students and non-Jesuit faculty. Unlike their previous house, in an isolated spot on the periphery of campus, the new structure commands a prominent hillside overlooking a main thoroughfare.

"There was a conscious desire to have a front door that opens to the campus," says Father Scalese, who was on the committee that helped plan the new building. It was designed by Gray Organschi Architecture, a New Haven firm, as both a symbol of openness and a tool for reaching out to the university community. The building contains a chapel, counseling rooms and a large social hall. "We can have people over, to talk about how, together, a small group of Jesuits and hundreds of faculty and staff do the Jesuit university thing," Father Fitzgerald says.

The Jesuit university thing, he says, includes helping students avoid fragmented lives — "when they party with their friends, they are tempted to have one personality and set of values, and then in class they have a second personality and set of values, and then they come home to see their parents for holidays, and they have a third personality and a third set of values."

One way Fairfield hopes to help is by requiring freshmen to take classes with their dorm-mates, so that they live and study with the same group. Sophomores choose dorms with themes derived from Jesuit teachings, including justice, leadership, environmental stewardship and creativity. One with a religious focus offers monthly mentor meetings to discuss such questions as "Who am I called to be?" Seven Jesuits live in apartments in the undergraduate dorms, where they hold weekly Mass and open-door hours.

To read the rest of the NYT article, click here. For a fuller report on the new Fairfield Jesuit residence from the architects who designed the building - including some excellent photographs of the structure - click here. AMDG.