Dear Readers,
As you are ready with the Annual Sample Reports for dissemination among our network, in the format of a Newsletter I would like to thank all the colleagues on behalf of all the rectors of IUS/ISHE global network for your dedication in bringing Salesian Higher Education stories to a wider world.
I have seen over the past one year, since I took on this new role, the ways in which you have collaborated with the wider mission of Salesian Education as agents of transformation through the media network. Your team work is a model of engagement worth emulation within institutions and between institutions.
I do look forward to deepening this process through an online interaction between all the respective webmasters of each of our institutions and then through them with the respective media coordination teams in each region and in each of our Institutions. You are aware, for example, of the initiative in South Asia of training news agents through an internship program inviting the participation of prospective student news editors and story tellers.
IUS/ISHE world is growing and expanding even while it’s deepening its engagement in the social space around it, is what I have seen and witnessed in my recent visits to Africa and South and Central America. There’s much good being done and immense opportunities lie before us.
Garnering the strengths of Salesian Higher Education globally and creating cross continental collaborations is where our hearts desires are taking us. One of the recent such plans being nurtured, as in an incubator, is an online international conference between the Spanish, Portuguese and English speaking nations and cultures that have modernised through these languages across continents in the last 500 plus years.
This is a story in which Salesian Education has an in depth knowledge and a role that needs being highlighted. The civilisational cross currents of contemporary cultures in search of a future needs to revisit the heritage we own as our patrimony. An honest assessment of the pre colonial era in these continents and the transitions effected through encounters that have occurred over past centuries could offer insights when engaged with cross culturally by scholars of history, anthropology, sociology, literature and philosophy, not excluding scientific interventions into archaeology and linguistics.
The Salesian commitment to research as an academic community of excellence in Bolivia, Guatemala and San Salvador the heartland of pre Spanish world having integrated modernisation compared with Portuguese integration in Brazil, Angola and Mozambique contrasted with the South Asian Anglophone interventions into Indic civilisational matrix is a story of the future yet to be told.
I want to thank all the Rectors/Presidents of Universities and the respective Provincial administration teams for the warmth and acceptance accorded to me in the new role entrusted to me. I have personally learned much and admire the daring of the early Salesian missionaries across the world whose labour, along with that of more recent ones especially indigenous Salesians, have over the decades made possible this significant presence in the care of teenagers and young adults in universities.
May Don Bosco the dreamer and strategist be our model for the recreation of his vision of transforming societies through our accompaniment of young people.
Yours truly in Don Bosco,
George Thadathil
IUS/ISHE Coordinator
11/10/25