Exit Reflection - Law, Conscience and Nonviolence

Some facts:

--The Literature of Peace course, according to the Justice and Peace Studies program director has been offered for eight semesters, fall, spring and summer. McCarthy is the only professor who has taught year-round.

--Two sections of the courses are being offered this spring semester: the Wednesday 1:15 pm class has 59 students, the Wednesday 4:15 class has 45. Neither course has a university-supplied teaching assistant.

--Student evaluations of the course have been consistently strong.

--in 1994, McCarthy won the Peace Teacher of the Year award from Pax Christi, the national Catholic peace organization. In 2001, the same group named him its “Ambassador of Peace.”

--McCarthy has five honorary degrees, two from Jesuit colleges.

--In addition to teaching two peace courses at Georgetown, McCarthy is teaching this semester at American University, Catholic University, the Washington Center for Internships (a college program), and three public high schools. Since 1988, he has been teaching a fall semester course on “Law, Conscience and Nonviolence” at Georgetown University Law Center, as well as a fall semester course at the University of Maryland. Since 1982, McCarthy has had more than 6,000 students in his courses. At the public high schools, he is a volunteer, including a daily 7:25 a.m. class at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School.

--McCarthy founded the Center for Teaching Peace in 1984, and has raised more than $1 million for its programs—much o the funding coming from speaking fees at U.S. colleges. McCarthy give more than 50 lectures a year.

--“This dispute is straight from the conflict resolution textbook. It can end up either win-win or lose-lose. If the course is restored, students win by having a strong peace studies program. The administration wins by sticking with a course that it has repeatedly praised and I win by continuing to be with students that I cherish. If the course is dropped, students lose by have one less peace course to choose from, the administration loses by being two-faced in saying it values peace education but then dumps a peace course that it has backed for eight semesters, and I lose by losing contact with idealistic and genuinely loveable students.”

--“Father Richard McSorely, the late Jesuit priest who for years taught peace courses at Georgetown and who ardently said that Georgetown’s ROTC program contradicted Catholic teaching, once told me that if I was ever invited to teach at Georgetown that I shouldn’t get my hopes up that the administrators are really serious about peace education.

Maybe I should have listened. I did get my hopes up.”