[NYTr] McDonald's Mega-Grant Founds School for Peace Makers

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

[$50 million's not actually a lot when endowed chairs cost several mill
these days. Universities usually want to be able to live on the income
and invest the principal. And... note this school is at a Catholic
university being run by a Catholic priest who was formerly a high honcho
at Catholic Relief Services, hardly a bastion of radical peace activism.
However, it could be worse: she might have given her big bucks to
Georgetown where the Jesuits have been in bed with the CIA for
generations. This guy's not a Maryknoll, but he doesn't sound terrible,
either. And the program is probably small enough not to be a big magnet
for covert infiltration by the government, as so much "conflict
resolution" research has been, along with the US-Government run
Peace Institute which -- like a Catholic University, to quote George
Bernard Shaw -- is a certainly a  contradiction in terms. Its location
in rah-rah military San Diego might not be a particularly bad thing,
either. The military these days is getting a big bad taste of what
happens when they get a chickenhawks' war handed to them, which has to
be a good influence on them. -NYTr]


sent by rick kissell

LosAngeles Times - Aug 26, 2007
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-peace26aug26,1,6927214.story?coll=la-headlines-california&ctrack=1&cset=true 

Dean's job is pursuing world peace

The leader of a San Diego school will use $50 million from the late Joan 
Kroc to train diplomats, relief workers and experts in conflict resolution.

By Larry Gordon
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

SAN DIEGO -- How much world peace will $50 million buy?

That is not exactly the question facing Father William Headley in his 
first weeks as the founding dean of the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace 
Studies at the University of San Diego. But Headley is in the enviable 
position of leading an institution with that amount to train generations 
of diplomats, relief workers and experts in conflict resolution.

That's because Kroc, the billionaire McDonald's hamburger chain heiress, 
left $50 million after her 2003 death for a new peace studies school and 
a related, preexisting think tank at the Catholic university perched on 
the bluffs above Sea World.

She previously had given the university about $30 million that was used 
to, among other things, construct a 90,000-square-foot, Spanish-style 
building to house those programs.

Aware that many colleges offer traditional degrees in international 
relations, Kroc wanted something different, a place devoted to what she 
described as "not only talking about peace, but making peace."

Her motto seems to align with Headley's life story. "This is not a job 
for me; it's a vocation. It's in my bones," said the 69-year-old priest, 
who has vast overseas experience, in part from his previous high-ranking 
job at Catholic Relief Services.

A former counselor to the agency's president, he helped coordinate aid 
amid ethnic strife in Africa and the Balkans and in tsunami-ravaged 
parts of South Asia.

Headley is determined to show that peace studies deserves its Aug. 1 
elevation into a full-blooded school -- one of six, including business 
and law, at the 7,500-student university.

Skeptics should take note of all the conflicts around the world today, 
Headley said.

"Particularly now and particularly in our country, there are some 
questions about how the standard military approach to these things is 
working," he said. "People are looking for some new answers," he said 
during an interview in the six-year-old Kroc building where a portrait 
of the late donor, who had owned the Padres baseball team in San Diego, 
is prominently displayed.

Headley declined to state his own position on the Iraq war. He described 
himself as generally, but not absolutely, pacifistic.

"I have to allow in my intellectual thinking for the possibility of 
supporting" a war, he said, adding that he has long studied the Catholic 
doctrine of "a just war," which permits war only as a last resort 
against an aggressor and only if it does not create evils worse than the 
one eliminated.

Many of his views were forged in the tumult of the 1960s. As a young, 
white, Philadelphia-born priest in the Congregation of the Holy Spirit 
order, he worked in African American parishes in South Carolina during 
the civil rights movement.

Although not an active protester against the Vietnam War, he said he 
remains deeply affected by the experience of his younger brother, a 
Marine who was badly wounded in Vietnam in 1968 and remains disabled.

Headley rose to become the leader of his order's eastern U.S. province 
and later headed its international efforts at peace and justice out of 
Rome. He has researched peace-making efforts in India, Northern Ireland, 
South Africa, Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Headley, who has a doctorate in sociology from New York University, 
established a graduate program in conflict resolution and peace studies 
at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, where he taught.

Though he is still considering his plans for the San Diego school, he is 
expected to sharply expand a small master's degree program that began 
five years ago and was run through another academic unit. It enrolls 
about a dozen students and is expected to have about 30 within two years.

There are plans to hire about five professors initially while continuing 
to have some courses taught by teachers from other parts of the 
university. A peace studies program for undergraduates is to be upgraded 
from what is now a minor to a full degree major by next year, officials 
said.

Headley also hopes to raise the profiles of the related Kroc-funded 
think tank that has a solid track record of sponsoring a wide range of 
international research, exchanges and peace activism and of a separate 
center, also to be merged into the new school, that focuses on issues 
along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The peace school's mission goes beyond the formal diplomacy Headley 
describes as negotiating treaties at "mahogany tables."

Courses for the yearlong master's degree include international 
negotiations, comparative religious ethics, environmental justice and 
computerized geographic mapping.

Most of this year's graduate students spent much of July in refugee 
camps in Tanzania, on a trip they organized to do research and develop 
mobile health clinics. Alumni are working in international diplomacy, 
human rights organizations and at U.S. and overseas charities, among 
other places.

Headley said he had early concerns about heading a peace program in San 
Diego, a city with a huge military presence that, he conceded, might not 
automatically welcome his ideas.

"It was a consideration when I came out here, wondering whether I could 
hack my trade -- to put it crudely -- in an environment which has a 
reputation as being relatively conservative and has a very strong 
military base," he said. But he said he has long had excellent relations 
with military officers and expects military personnel to enroll as 
students and teach at the new school.

He also wants potential students to know that the peace studies program 
offers a lay education even though it is set at a Catholic university.

"I am a Catholic priest, and I make no apologies for that," Headley 
said. "I think it influences my perspective on things. But I know this 
has to be interreligious. Otherwise it would be feeding into the very 
problems that cause many conflicts in the world."

Some students and faculty complained about the long time it took to hire 
a peace studies dean. However, university officials said the $50-million 
gift took them by surprise, so they needed time to decide on its use.

University Provost Julie H. Sullivan attributed some delays to the peace 
school's untraditional and cross-disciplinary nature and difficulties in 
finding someone like Headley who combined academic credentials with 
real-world experience at "peace building at the core of his identity."

The number of U.S. universities and colleges offering some form of peace 
studies has grown tenfold over the last two decades to about 200, 
according to the Peace and Justice Studies Assn., a group housed at the 
University of San Francisco.

Among the most prominent programs is the University of Notre Dame's 
20-year-old Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. Kroc 
gave that Indiana institute about $71 million, including $50 million 
after her death. It enrolls 40 master's degree students and 200 
undergraduates who take peace studies as a double major, institute 
Director R. Scott Appleby said.

Appleby praised Headley as "an effective builder of peace with hands-on 
experience," but said he should prepare for possible political 
controversies.

Notre Dame, for example, hired Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Islamic 
scholar from Switzerland. Then U.S. authorities in 2004 revoked 
Ramadan's visa before he left Europe because of donations he made to 
charities that the government contended aided Palestinian terrorists.

Ramadan, denying any known connections to terrorism, resigned the Notre 
Dame professorship and never made it to the campus.

In San Diego, even a big endowment will not shield the school from 
critics who think "the very idea of putting money into studying peace is 
somehow contrary to patriotism," said Mark Lance, a philosophy professor 
who runs a justice and peace studies program for undergraduates at 
Georgetown University.

However, professor I. William Zartman, director of the conflict 
management program at the School of Advanced International Studies at 
Johns Hopkins University, urged the new San Diego school to have a solid 
grounding in international relations and history to avoid being seen as 
a "goody, goody program." It needs faculty who can tell students "how to 
use power instead of just saying power is a bad thing," Zartman said.

Headley said he was ready for such discussions and for some 
discouragement about continuing violence in the world.

But he said he always hopes for peace.

"That is part of my vocation," he said. "That is part of the sustenance 
I take from my religious background: that there is always hope."