The Ellacuría Initiative Office
The Beginning
In October of 2000, a delegation of University of Scranton administrators, faculty and professional staff attended a conference on Commitment to Justice in Jesuit Higher Education at Santa Clara University. At that conference, Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J. challenged all U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities to emphasize “the service of faith and the promotion of justice…in who our students become, in what our faculty does, and how our universities proceed.”
This meeting spawned a number of gatherings at the University of Scranton, leading to the creation of a Task Force on Education for Justice to examine, publicize and promote campus initiatives, to research and propose new ones, and to propose a permanent structure to guarantee that such initiatives would continue to be effective. The University of Scranton Education for Justice Task Force Report 2005 made its recommendations at the end of the 2004/2005 academic year, and a Coordinator of Education for Justice was named in the fall of 2007.
After a decade under the Provost’s Office, Education for Justice moved to the Jesuit Center in 2016. We did so because of our shared commitment to working with faculty and staff to promote justice-related initiatives on campus. Now, in 2017, Education for Justice has been renamed The Ellacuría Initiative.