Blueprint for an America Built to Last and Indian Country

In yesterday’s State of the Union address, the President laid out a blueprint for an economy that’s built to last – an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.  The President has been clear that we need to do more to create jobs and help economic growth.  But under his leadership and thanks to action taken by the President, the economy is growing again.  The economy has added a total of nearly 3.2 million private sector jobs over the last 22 months. 

Last night, the President outlined a series of ideas to build an economy that works for everyone, one that will bring about a new era of American manufacturing, and promote homegrown and alternative energy sources.  The President’s Blueprint for an America Built to Last includes the following initiatives that will benefit Indian Country: 

• Prevent tax increases for Native American families by extending the payroll tax cut: The President challenged Congress to strengthen the economic recovery by extending the payroll tax cut for the rest of the year so that taxes don’t go up on American workers. About 1.5 million Native American workers – throughout urban, rural, reservation and village communities – will benefit from the extension and expansion of the payroll tax cut, giving them and their families more money to keep our local economies strong at this critical time. Today, one of the most important ways we can continue to support economic growth in Indian Country is through the extension of the payroll tax cut. 
• Forge new partnerships between community colleges – including tribal colleges – and businesses to train and place 2 million skilled workers: Many industries have difficulty filling jobs requiring specific technical skills, even with many Americans still looking for work. In coming years, America will need to fill millions of mid- and high-level skilled positions in industries from healthcare to advanced manufacturing, clean energy to information technology. The President proposed a new initiative to train and place two million Americans in good jobs through partnerships between businesses and community colleges that give workers the skills employers explicitly need. The program is modeled on efforts by employers and community colleges from Charlotte and Chicago to Orlando and Louisville. To address future workforce needs, the President will support partnerships between high schools and industry to create more career academies, which combine instruction in academic subjects and industry skills.
• Help start-ups and small businesses in Indian Country succeed and create jobs by reforming regulations and expanding tax relief: Start-ups and small businesses create most of the new net jobs in this country. The President is proposing to build on measures he has already taken to enact 17 small business tax cuts through additional tax relief to start-ups and small businesses that are creating jobs and increasing wages and by calling for further measures to expand access to capital for small businesses by simplifying and streamlining regulations.

Increasing Access and Supporting Catholic Education

I believe the success of the great American experiment is inseparably intertwined with a commitment to opportunity for everyone—that every person will have an opportunity for happiness, an opportunity to fulfill their potential, an opportunity to be safe, gainfully employed, prosperous in the most important ways. I believe that outside of the role of family in an Americans’ lives, the role education plays in achieving these goals of equal opportunity is paramount. Without the foundation of a first rate education, few people would have many opportunities at all. Put another way, when America succeeds at education, we succeed at being America. When we fail at providing the best education for even a single child, in that moment we fail as America because for that child we know there is little opportunity.

For this reason, I am grateful to the White House for choosing to honor individuals in the field of Catholic education this week as “Champions of Change,” for I believe Catholic schools are an essential component of a successful American education system, and therefore a successful America. We know Catholic schools have a history of succeeding with marginalized populations. After all, Catholic schools began in America hundreds of years ago with the very purpose of serving poor immigrant populations, whole groups of new Americans that generations later have risen up in this land of opportunity. Yesterday’s poor Catholic immigrants sat in the desks of rigorous, values-based, Catholic school classrooms, and today the descendants of those first Catholic school students are more often than not actualizing the American dream.

Promoting Comtemporary Jesuit Education Locally, Internationally and Globally

Jesuits are committed to two ideals that make for a heady agenda on college and university campuses: seeking God in all things and pursuing the magis, the greater and more effective good in whatever they do. The contemporary Jesuit campus is busy with living those ideals with a freedom to pursue to new ideas, work on new frontiers, and to be continually restless to be more effective and generous in pursing important issues and projects.  Add to that a current emphasis on realizing a global perspective in and out of the classroom.

It has been my privilege for the past 14 years to lead the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU), which serves the 28 Jesuit schools by representing them, supporting them in every way possible and promoting national and international collaborative efforts that make these institutions at once local, national and global.  My role has led me to interact with the talented women and men on our very dynamic campuses by following, encouraging, and facilitating their good work. 

My role has taken me to: El Salvador with our students engaged in a transformative immersion experience on a campus where Jesuits and their co-workers were killed over 20 years ago (one of many immersion experiences developed by our schools); to a refugee camp in Kenya, where our faculty are now offering on-line courses to refugees; to Latin America to work with our sister Jesuit universities there; and to China where U.S. Jesuit universities have collaborated to offer both an international MBA and an undergraduate immersion experience.