But the grit and challenges of everyday life in the real world, particularly for women on the lowest rungs of society, pulled her away from the intellectual ether in which she floated the first few years of her studies.
“I had this romantic idea of reading Big books, discussing Big books and Big ideas,” Jones said. “And then that interest fell away during my study abroad in Chile.
Jones' great awakening came during spring semester 2006; she credits professors in UM's English and foreign languages departments for the stirring of her newfound interests.
They are the ones who said to her, “Go travel, immerse yourself in another country and bring back what you learn.”
For six months, Jones attended a public university in Valparaiso and traveled the country, learning about its people, politics, culture - and learning about herself.
But it wasn't until she got back to the United States, and back to campus at UM, that she realized her internal and world perspectives had taken a dramatic shift.
“I truly realized how fortunate I am to have my life, to have access to education and to have choices,” Jones said. “In Chile, poverty is a lot more overt than it is here. I would walk to school every day and pass people who were very, very poor and that affected me a lot.”
She learned, too, that in Chile abortion is illegal - even if the pregnancy is a consequence of rape or endangers the mother's life.
“I found that to be very troubling - and wrong,” Jones said. “I just couldn't fathom that.”
Back in the mid-1980s, Jones' mother Marna was director of Planned Parenthood in Missoula, during the years when the Blue Mountain Women's Clinic in Missoula was firebombed.
“I grew up with an element of consciousness on the issue, but I hadn't done much about it,” Jones said. “But what I learned in Chile is what prompted me to start acting on that consciousness.”
There, she got in touch with local women's groups and got involved with their petition-signing campaign to legalize abortion. She also got involved with an interviewing project, where Chilean women and men talked about their personal experiences with abortion and why it should be legalized.
In Chile, the topic of abortion is very much taboo, Jones said, but the hope is that the interviews eventually will be published and distributed.
“I think it's going to be hard for women and men to legalize abortion if it's something that can't be talked about,” Jones said, which is why she got involved. When her study-abroad semester ended, she left Chile with a promise to transcribe some of the taped interviews.
The effort became her UM senior project, and her hope is to get the material published in a small book and send those books back to Chilean women's groups to help educate their members - and others.
The general message on the tapes, she said, is that while those interviewed do not support the practice of abortion, they believe it should be legalized because about 3,000 women die each year in Chile from complications of pregnancies and abortions that are illegal and performed in secrecy.
On Saturday, Jones will graduate with a double major in Spanish and English literature.
She'll spend the summer in Missoula and then pack her bags for a year in Madrid, Spain, where she will travel on a $28,000 Fulbright Scholarship to teach English and continue her research on abortion and women's issues in Latin America.
“I am hyper-aware of the fact that my education is a privilege,” Jones said. “Not everyone has had the access I have had, and I feel it's my responsibility to take the information I've learned the last four years and use it in order to benefit others.”
As she moves on from UM and into the world beyond campus, Jones said she carries with her a favorite phrase she learned from history professor Paul Lauren: “the consciousness of mankind.”
“I really like that phrase because it's an idea that you need to be aware of people at more than a local level - on national and international levels.”
And when there's time, she said, she'll find her way back to some of those Big books she set aside.
Maybe, she'll even write a few.
Reporter Betsy Cohen can be reached at 523-5253 or at bcohen@missoulian.com
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