Ziegler, New O’Rorke Professor in the Liberal Arts, Discusses Plans to Incorporate Ethics Across the Curriculum

Professor Joanna Ziegler says it is not a matter of if ethics should be incorporated into the curriculum at Holy Cross, but how.

Ask her why, and she rises high in her chair and responds in mock horror with rhetorical questions: “Can we start with the environment? You mean the rise of violence globally? You mean the increasing disparity among the rich and poor?”

Ziegler, professor and chair of the visual arts department, has begun her three-year term as the new Edward A. O’Rorke Professor in the Liberal Arts. She will work with faculty members to incorporate ethics into their courses. The professorship was made possible by a generous gift from Edward A. O’Rorke, a member of the class of 1929.

Of course, students at Holy Cross are constantly engaged in ethical and moral issues as part of both specialized ethics courses and cocurricular activities (Student Programs for Urban Development, Chaplains’ Office immersion trips, retreats, among others). Ziegler plans to create new opportunities for intellectual ethical reflection in classrooms across the curriculum.

Her 25 years as a professor of visual arts at Holy Cross and experience in incorporating ethics into her own courses, makes her ideal for this position. A recipient of the College’s Distinguished Teacher of the Year Award in 1994, she is highly respected among faculty and students alike.

Ethics wasn’t always a big part of Ziegler’s work. She came to Holy Cross to teach history of architecture. Her dissertation at Brown University was on medieval architecture, and she was drawn to “the performative enactment of faith,” she says. “Faith as a performance. It’s participatory, dramatic, sensory.”

A LIFE-CHANGING RETREAT Zielger’s journey into ethical reflection didn’t start in earnest until 1997.

That year she attended Collegium, a summer colloquium on faith and intellectual life. Rev. Brian Linnane, S.J., a former professor in Holy Cross’ religious studies department and the current president of Loyola College in Maryland, presided at a retreat that Ziegler says “changed my life.”

“He said that throughout the day that you want to return to the same place and listen for God because if you don’t go to the same place, how is God going to find you? It was a lot about repetition, returning to the same place, saying the same prayer, going through the same door. And for me it was a real time of thinking about the mission of the College and my own faith and doubts. I returned to Holy Cross and I thought: I want to do something like this with art.”

The following year she and Joseph Lawrence, professor of philosophy at Holy Cross, applied and received a fellowship by the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, where she explored ways to integrate such reflection by heightening students’ awareness of their unexamined dogmatism and preconceptions regarding art, all while deepening students’ connections to the discipline of art history.

“I asked myself, How can this elite enterprise, which is art, make humans more socially just and more aware of their place in the world? That’s what I’ve spent the last ten years doing,” she says.

NATIONALLY-RECOGNIZED PEDAGOGY Her answer has earned her national acclaim, and, along with Christopher Dustin, associate professor of philosophy, resulted in their book Practicing Mortality: Art Philosophy, and Contemplative Seeing. She has incorporated the exercise in her Introduction to Art History course.

“What I came to see — and what brought me to this position — is this idea of returning to the same work of art over and over and over and over throughout the semester. I usually start with a work of art that I know students are going to hate; something abstract. They typically respond with ‘Oh, I hate this. It’s boring. This is ugly.’ They have to go back to the same work of art [at the Worcester Art Museum] every week and write the same paper: What do you see now? By the end of the thirteenth week most of the students have fallen in love with this work of art. They know it like the back of their hand; they’ve become intimate with it.

“What’s happened is that they themselves have experienced their own prejudices. And I say to them, Well, if you can experience your own preconceptions and prejudices with a work of art, imagine if you could do that with a human being.”

This pedagogy has gained recognition by faculty from a wide range of disciplines at institutions of higher learning across the country. They have taken the “practice” that she has developed – having students engage, for an entire semester, a single work of art – into using a line of text, a musical phrase, a cell under the microscope, and so on. The work was cited in The London Times Higher Education Supplement in 2006.

FIRST STEPS Incorporating ethics into the curriculum at Holy Cross won’t happen for several years, until faculty have engaged in extensive discussion about the proper ways of incorporating ethical awareness into their coursework. During the upcoming academic year, Ziegler plans to host a faculty seminar every few weeks. Three Holy Cross professors — Mary Hobgood and Mary Roche of religious studies and Rev. William Stempsey, S.J., of philosophy — will discuss the specialization of ethics in their academic disciplines, so as to begin from a point of understanding the methodologies of the departments that “house” ethics.

Ultimately, Ziegler would like to host regular seminars, host nationally-recognized figures to lecture at the College, and offer two-day retreats in particular discipline-based areas.

Although the initiative is strictly volunteer, and those professors who decide to participate will get to choose how ethical reflection will be incorporated into their courses, Ziegler says Holy Cross, as a Jesuit, liberal arts college, is uniquely suited to engaging students in life’s tough questions because of “its implicit and explicit mission of care for others.” In addition, she believes that Holy Cross must continue to engage the “me generation” in critical thinking.

“Moving into the 21st century, Holy Cross could be at the forefront of this movement — of shaping the curriculum. Students are hungry for this,” she says, pointing to the increasing number of students who are committed to environmentalism and social justice. “They come in asking, Why am I here? What do I do with my life? And at Holy Cross we don’t shy away from tackling those questions.”