Peace Studies (making the case)
By Colman McCarthy
If it’s true that all governments say they want peace, and that all human hearts yearn for it, a question arises: should schools be teaching ways to create the peaceable society?
Earning little public attention beyond their campuses, and sometimes even less inside those boundaries, Washington’s four major universities—American, Catholic, Georgetown and George Washington—are answering yes.
This fall, students at each school are taking courses in peace studies in larger numbers than ever. Professors report that enrollments would be much larger if more courses were offered. At the same time, peace teachers have no illusions that a few lessons and a required reading list on the literature of peace will cause governments to disarm or that students will instantly convert to Franciscan pacifism. Both locally and nationally, peace education is in its infancy. Out of some 3,000 U.S. colleges, well less than 100 offer degrees in peace studies—compared with 1200 that sponsor ROTC.
In Washington, each of the four schools shares a common dynamic: an academically rigorous program was begun, and is kept afloat, by a small group of tenured professors committed to exposing students to the idea and ideal that alternatives to violence—whether between nations, family members, races, classes and species—exist and that humans are not predestined to rely only on the fist and the gun.
Students have responded. It has been a consumer issue: put the product on the shelf and we’ll buy it.
My own teaching of courses on nonviolence since 1982—currently at four area universities, plus two high schools, and a prison—keeps me in contact with, and energized by, the local peace education community. Recently, I spent time with some of the program directors and professors to learn about their successes and frustrations.
.American University. The International Peace and Conflict Resolution program owes much of its breadth, even existence, to Prof. Abdul Aziz Said. The 69-year-old Islamic scholar—he corresponded in the 1960s with Thomas Merton about Sufi mysticism—modestly credits student pressure as the main force moving university officials to begin offering peace courses in the late 1980s and a major in the mid-1990s.
An average of 15 students a year pursue majors, with 70 working on masters degrees and three or four going for doctorates. With six fulltime professors and six adjuncts, the plentiful course offerings include “Nonviolence: Theory and Practice,” “Building Peaceable Schools,” “Applied Conflict Resolution,” and “The Literature of Peace.”
Said—at A.U. since 1957 and the longest serving faculty member—may have a mystical mind and heart but he also has active hands, ones skilled in shaking the money tree. The budget for his program is $700,000, plus a $4.5 million endowment for scholarships. On why he teaches peace: “It is an inner calling, a way of reinvesting the sacred in my life.”
With a thriving program that provides ample intellectual nutrition, A.U.’s peace studies students take their energies off campus to such sites as the annual protest at the Army’s School of the Americas in Georgia and anti-death penalty rallies in Philadelphia. They are also heavily involved in Project Pen, the campus internship program that sends students into D.C. primary and secondary schools to teach conflict resolution skills.
This fall, American’s Washington Semester Program has attracted 50 students to its peace studies courses, well above past enrollments.
Catholic University. In one stretch during the 1980s, the Peace and Justice Studies program was well-promoted and popular. By the mid-1990s, administration support flagged and course offerings dropped. This year, with momentum returning, between 60 and 70 are expected to take one or more of the three core courses that are part of the 18 hours needed for a minor.
With no peace studies department, and a budget of only $2,000, peace education exists on the margins at Catholic. Without the doggedness of Prof. William Barbieri, who runs the program from his department of religion, and a few other persistent professors, peace studies might vanish altogether.
The irony is that in their 1983 pastoral letter “The Challenge of Peace: God’s Promise and Our Response,” U.S. Catholic bishops wrote: “We urge universities, particularly Catholic universities, in our country to develop programs, interdisciplinary research, education and training directed toward peacemaking expertise.”
No one at Catholic agrees with that more than Barbieri: “It’s hard to imagine a more pressing responsibility than to teach students how to both analyze and respond constructively to conflicts of all sorts. This should be a high priority, however much it might cause financial sacrifice or overcoming deep-seated disciplinary prejudices.”
A group of C.U. students recently interested in founding a campus organization to work on peace and social justice issues recently approached Barbieri for help. “Here and elsewhere,” he says, “the potential is emerging around which successful peace studies programs might be built or expanded—provided they receive the institutional support they deserve.”
Georgetown University. The Program on Justice and Peace has roots in the 1960s when Father Richard McSorely’s courses on nonviolence were packed to capacity. McSorely, an uncompromising pacifist in the tradition of pre-Augustine early Christianity, regularly rebuked Georgetown’s Jesuit administrators for paying only flickering attention to peace education while proudly hosting an ROTC program.
McSorely, author of “Kill for Peace?” and who ardently supported students who burned draft cards in opposition to the Vietnam war, is now in his 80s and not teaching. But his work is carried on by others, though of tamer spirit and milder tongue. Georgetown’s program--revived seven years ago--does not offer a major. Its budget of $60,000 is “almost nothing compared to a real department,” says Mark Lance. He is the only professor specifically appointed to teach in the program, with most courses staffed by teachers who have a passion for peace education and who do it as extra work. With more than 100 students pursuing minors, three core courses are offered, along with such electives as “Community Conflict Resolution” and “The Ethics of Nonviolence.”
The latter is taught by Lance. The course readings, he says, “focus on the sorts of social injustices that lead people to form movements for positive change. For me, to think only about the techniques of dealing with conflicts, apart from the social problems that cause them, is both intellectually and politically irresponsible. If people took nonviolence seriously, and the options it provides, it would lead to profound changes in all levels of society.”
George Washington University. Paul Churchill chair of the philosophy department, has directed the peace studies program for six years. In 1985, he and a few like-minded colleagues “wanted to create a program to address issues of social justice and peace not being addressed in the curriculum.” Churchill, who opposed the Vietnam war and received an occupational deferment by teaching in a Baltimore elementary school, offers courses on nonviolence that routinely attract a full enrollment of 35.
With school officials allowing only a minor to be offered, and granting a budget of less than $5,000, Churchill the philosopher is less than philosophical about the situation: “If there have been only a few students at GW looking for someone to offer them help in thinking about alternatives to the violent way we solve problems, and I failed to be there, I’d have trouble living with myself. I feel very frustrated by my limited abilities to do more by way of expanding the program. The university hasn’t been hostile, only indifferent. I feel embarrassed to be teaching at a major university as well-placed geographically that doesn’t take seriously peace education.”
If the nation’s colleges could marshal their educational power to give students more academic choices that go beyond conventional solutions to conflict, what a positive force that would be.