Graduate school to be added

By Erin Crager

Santa Clara will be absorbing a Bay Area school of theology and adding it as another graduate program.

Board members for the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and Santa Clara have recently agreed to integrate the two schools. The decision was approved by Jesuit Conference President Tom Smolich and the ten U.S. Jesuit provincials who own JSTB, a small school located two blocks north of the University of California, Berkeley, campus.

As of July 1, Santa Clara will officially take ownership of the graduate school, just one of two Jesuit-operated theological schools in the United States.

"We're going to become a school of Santa Clara University, and in a sense you could think of us as being like the law school or the school of engineering, only we'll be the school of theology," said Kevin Burke, acting president of JSTB. "The one major difference is we're going to stay in Berkeley, which means Santa Clara will be adding a regional campus."

The school of theology is comprised of about 200 students, 40 percent of whom are studying for ordination or an advanced degree in theology.

Another 40 percent are lay students, and the remaining 20 percent are of other religious orders.

Students at JSTB are from 40 different countries around the world. Much of the Jesuit staff at Santa Clara have, at some point, trained at JSTB, President Michael Engh, S.J., said.

"It's partly motivated by the mission and strategies of the Society of Jesus to try to bring together some of its institutions, and in this case we have a theology school in Berkeley," said Paul Crowley, chair of the religious studies department at Santa Clara.

Crowley said there will be an exchange of faculty some time in the future, and that will allow students at Santa Clara to benefit from the faculty at JSTB.

"Religious majors will especially be able to benefit from it, but JSTB is interested in interfacing with all parts of the university, not just the religious studies department, so there will be a lot of rich interchange," said Crowley.

In 1934, JSTB, then called Alma College, was located in the Santa Cruz Mountains, not far from Los Gatos, Calif. and was affiliated with Santa Clara.

Degrees from Alma College were considered Santa Clara degrees.

In 1969, Alma College moved to Berkeley and became one of the member schools of what is called the Graduate Theological Union, changing its name to JSTB.

"It had to do in large part with the whole direction of theological education after the Second Vatican Council, and they were not alone," said Crowley.

Crowley explained that theology schools across the country were leaving their isolated locations in the country and moving back to the cities, usually next to a large university.

In preparing people for ordination, theology schools favored environments that exposed their students to all sorts of ideas, opinions, forms of knowledge and culture.

"That has worked very well for all these years, but the Society of Jesus itself is also interested in seeing its institutions work more closely together because we have a shared Jesuit mission," said Crowley. "This will help to intensify that for both Santa Clara and JSTB."

A similar integration happened on the East Coast, where Weston Jesuit School of Theology integrated with Boston College.

Contact Erin Crager at ecrager@scu.edu.