Over the two evenings of the Lonergan Workshop, Jacobs gave a two-part lecture titled “Systems of Economic Ethics,” in which she outlined the two ethical and value systems that she believed governed everyday economic life. She called them “trading” and “raiding,” but later referred to them as the “commercial” and “guardian” syndromes. A handout she prepared lists the traits associated with each configuration.

Jacobs did not travel much, but when she did, her husband often accompanied her. Bob joined her for all of her visits to BC. In a thank-you note following their visit, Jacobs commented: “Both of us were struck by the general atmosphere of the college and the students—such a wonderful combination comes across of intelligence, earnestness and happiness and zest.”

Following the symposium, which included lengthy discussions about her proposals, Jacobs decided to recast her work in progress as a dramatic dialogue modeled on Plato’s Symposium, in which the interlocutors articulate and defend opposing viewpoints. She provisionally titled it, “Survival Systems: A Summer Dialogue on Ethics.”

The proceedings of the 1987 Lonergan Workshop were edited for publication in 1989. The volume included the texts of papers presented at the workshop as well as transcriptions of the question-and-answer sessions that followed Jacobs’s lectures.

She returned to campus in 1991, sending Keeley a draft to distribute in advance. She recorded a 90-minute conversation with several faculty and participated in a PULSE Council seminar that included five undergraduates along with Keeley and Flanagan. Jacobs expressed her indebtedness to each in the acknowledgements to Systems of Survival, which appeared in final form the following year. Professor Richard Nielsen’s critique of “managerial isolation” is referenced directly in a segment of dialogue on organizational self-policing, a theme that re-emerges in Dark Age Ahead.

Jacobs’s Systems of Survival was published in 1992. A Japanese translation appeared in 1998.

Other Visits to Boston College

Dick Keeley invited Jacobs to BC for a third time in 1993 to participate in a conference that he organized under the auspices of the Carroll School of Management, where he had been appointed associated dean. One of the conference sessions was devoted to Systems of Survival, which Keeley noted Jacobs had decided to cast in the form of a dialogue after reflecting on her experience in the 1987 Lonergan Workshop.

In an enthusiastic thank-you letter following the conference, CSOM dean Donald White referred to the nickname that Bernard Lonergan, SJ, had given her: “Mrs. Insight.”

During the week she spent in Boston in 1993 for the CSOM conference, Jacobs returned to visit Boston’s North End, which she had first seen during the Depression in 1938 and then again in 1960, when she wrote about it in The Death and Life of Great American Cities.

In 2000, Jacobs returned to Boston College for a third conference devoted to her work, this time organized through the Law School and its Environmental Affairs Law Review.