By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Toya Graham, the black mother who slapped her son “up side the head” to get him away from the other young black men throwing rocks at the police in Baltimore, has been getting praised all over the talk shows. I was tempted to disagree, to point out that she should not be treated as a hero, considering that she is the single mother of six children and that her behavior is part of the problem plaguing minority communities. But I had second thoughts.
I could not find any details about Graham’s family situation. Perhaps she is a widow, struggling to keep her family above water in the crime-ridden neighborhood of Baltimore where the rioting was taking place. If I had to bet, I would say that is not the case, that the children have multiple fathers, but I just don’t know.
But there is still something to be said about the public reaction to Graham. Have you noticed that Graham is receiving high praise for her dramatic intervention in her son’s life even from those sectors of society that deplore corporal punishment as a barbaric vestige of our unenlightened past? We heard people all over the news programs proclaiming that the “country needs more mothers like that!”
What happened to the familiar mantra: “Violence against children never accomplishes anything, other than encouraging the children to use physical force in their own lives.” Some wag on one of the talk shows argued that Graham “would have been arrested for child abuse” if she had been beating her child like that in almost any other setting. It is not a far-fetched point. What if she were caught on camera beating her son and dragging him away from a Planned Parenthood clinic giving him advice on birth control devices?
You say what? That that would be different; that there would be no threat of violence at Planned Parenthood clinic. Exactly. The setting matters when judging the appropriateness of corporal punishment. Corporal punishment cannot be judged out of context. Beating a child severely for not putting away his socks is different from slapping him to keep him away from serious physical or moral harm. It was not that long ago when most Americans thought that common sense. We knew that a quick whack on the hand or the backside is not child abuse.
In the first public school where I taught in the late 1960s, in a suburb of New York City, there was a paddle prominently on display above the desk of the assistant principal. It was there as a form of memorabilia, but of a not very distant past.
We all — even those firmly opposed to capital punishment — have experienced the irony of cheering television detectives such as “Danny Reagan” on Blue Bloods and “Andy Sipowicz” on the old NYPD Blue when they disregard the rules against “tuning up” a prisoner in custody in order to save the life of an innocent child. We recognize intuitively that police officers beating prisoners is wrong — but that there are exceptions.
The reaction of the country to Toya Graham whacking her son a few times to remove him from the street thugs throwing rocks at the police teaches us the same lesson: Making it a crime, as some European countries have done, for parents to use corporal punishment, regardless of the time and place and circumstance and nature of the slap, goes overboard. Common sense should prevail in this matter, as in all others.
On another topic: maintaining the Catholic identity of Jesuit colleges now that there are so few Jesuit priests available to serve on the faculties of those institutions. It is a situation not likely to improve anytime soon, since the number of Jesuit seminarians is tiny in comparison to the past.
When I was a student at Fordham in the early 1960s, there was no mistaking the Catholic identity of the school. About half of my professors were Jesuits, and not just in my theology and philosophy courses. Many of my history, political science, and math teachers were also Jesuits. Beyond that, there were chapels scattered around campus where it was convenient for me to attend Mass in between my classes. There were also morning Masses available to my classmates who boarded on campus.
Fr. William J. Byron, SJ, former president of the University of Scranton, the Catholic University of America, and Loyola University New Orleans, and a Jesuit since 1950, has proposed a way to deal with the problem in an article in the Jesuits’ America magazine entitled “Company Men: On preserving the unique identity of Jesuit universities.”
Byron suggests that there be created “on every Jesuit college and university campus a group of Jesuits — say four or five in number, with the rector of the local Jesuit community as their leader.” He is not talking about Jesuit professors; not necessarily, at any rate.
But we must keep in mind that not every young man who wants to become a member of the Society of Jesus wants to be a professor; and that not every Jesuit who might want to be a professor will be hired by the laymen and laywomen who now control the academic hiring at most Jesuit schools.
What Byron is seeking is a group of Jesuits to serve as “retreat directors, chaplains, moderators, non-tenure track teachers, coaches or counselors,” as a “band of brothers whose presence and professional services help to set the institution clearly apart from other schools.”
Byron proposes that space be provided on campus “in university-owned student unions or campus centers, or ‘on corridor,’ as we used to say referring to service as dormitory counselors. The team would have to be visible and easily identifiable as Jesuit.”
Byron is confident that this group of Jesuits in residence on campus would clearly establish the “Jesuit identity” of the college, and that it would give to the “admissions offices of these schools” something “additional, if not unique, to pitch when they compete in the tightening race for new students.” His hope is that his proposal “could also be a partial response to the challenge the order faces as it deals with diminishing Jesuit manpower in the United States.”
The proposal sounds good to me. I wish that my grandchildren could have available to them the kind of Jesuit university I attended in the 1960s, staffed largely by an impressive array of Jesuit professors. But since that is not likely to happen any time soon, Byron’s suggestion strikes me as the next best thing.
If the Jesuits in the band of brothers he proposes take their responsibility seriously, it would remove the nightmare that many parents face when they send off their children to college: the prospect of them taking up residence in a sexually promiscuous and drug-ridden version of the dorms in the movie Animal House.
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford CT 06492.
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