Faculty Convocation 2007
Remarks by Christine M. Wiseman, J.D.
Provost, Loyola University Chicago
On the occasion of Faculty Convocation
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Fr. Garanzini - members of the Loyola faculty.
At the AJCU meeting of Chief Academic Officers at Spring Hill College last October, we took some time to think about our roles at this moment in the history of higher education. The issue that lay unspoken in the room was whether chief academic officers had become irrelevant as universities become increasingly controlled by statistics and the rubrics of fiscal management. The discussion was pretty somber. The only moment of levity was offered by one of your very own, Dr. Jim Wiser, now the Provost at USF, who suggested to us that as Provosts go, perhaps this was not the most somber moment in our history.
And indeed, he turns out to be quite correct! My internet sleuthing reveals that from ancient times, the role of the provost was always one of prefect or magistrate with some form of supervisory authority. But the Office started out a little grim. During the Norman invasion of 1066, the "provost" was actually a military officer used to enforce discipline. He toured the country toting personnel and equipment indicating all forms of persuasion, including "the fearful apparatus used in torture."
And then, in the most obscure site, I found this interesting description of "the Provost," offered by Edward McGrady in his book, The History of South Carolina in the Revolution. Again I quote:
"The middle part of the cellar under the [Old] Exchange [Building] was the place chosen for the imprisonment of those arrested. It was called -- the Provost. The dampness of this unwholesome place, without any means of warming its temperature, caused great sickness and suffering and some deaths among those confined within its walls. It was in this place that the citizens arrested in August 1780 and sent to St. Augustine were first confined. Citizens -- marched from distant parts of the interior in irons -- were thrown into this prison. . . . Not only men, but women also were indiscriminately cast into this place. . . . "
Rest assured, all of you who are assembled here, that I hereby renounce the sins of my Office.
On a more serious note, our educational world has indeed become one of fiscal accountability and marshalling statistics. They have marked our past here at Loyola, and they mark our present.
In his address, Fr. Garanzini noted that we are the nation's largest Jesuit Catholic University and its largest national Catholic Comprehensive Doctoral Institution. Of greater significance to us as faculty, perhaps, we are also its largest Catholic Research University with the largest number of entering new freshmen among the 28 Jesuit schools. It is our present - and it is the foundation upon which we determine our future.
Not surprisingly, this matter was the subject of the Leadership Retreat that drew together Deans and administrators that second week of August. But there is no better occasion than this to draw faculty into that discourse. From my perspective as the new chief academic officer, the pivotal moment was a meeting that involved a rich variety of people interacting with all of the deans - including those from the Medical School and Nursing - to discuss our identity as a Research university whose mission is to offer a transformative educational experience to its undergraduate students. If memory serves me right, the issue was succinctly framed by David Prasse, Dean of our School of Education: Loyola's goal is to be a first-rate research institution where undergraduate students have the best learning experience.
As a research institution, we recognize that we teach what we produce, and what we produce is knowledge. And no one can or should do it better than us.
So let's examine first the aspect of our reality that addresses the needs of our undergraduate students. What does it mean to offer undergraduate students the best learning experience?
Our identity is Jesuit and Catholic. Jesuit undergraduate education is a formative process by which we empower students to examine the world, engage the world, and reflect on and change the world. It is the strength of our Core Curriculum - joined with co-curricular activities -- to produce women and men who are for and with others in the world. This experience is the stuff of our 450-year old intellectual tradition - distinctive from the outset because the Jesuit course of studies was founded in the humanities. As noted by Fr. John W. O'Malley, Distinguished Professor of Church History at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology, in his address entitled, "The Vision of Saint Ignatius Loyola: Then and Now," given at Wheeling Jesuit in October 2004, "the Jesuits produced civic and cultural institutions that were new for a religious order and that had a more professedly this-worldly orientation in large measure because they sprang out of persuasions originating in the classical world of ancient Greece and Rome, not in the Old or New Testaments." It was their commitment to this humanist program that set the Jesuit course of study apart. As Fr. O'Malley also noted, it was particularly important to be an "active learner" in the Jesuit system. It was not enough to read dramas; students needed to perform them as well.
But the focus on active learning and a course of humanist study did not and does not alone define Jesuit undergraduate education. Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach notes in his May, 2001 Rome address to the International Meeting of Jesuit Higher Education that Jesuit education was intended to be fully in the world because "the meeting with God always takes place in the world" and "to give creative responses to changing times." After all, according to HEROIC LEADERSHIP author Chris Lowney, "The Jesuits embraced the world and immersed themselves in its everyday life, living in its cities and cultural centers and traveling and working with its people." And so we also expect a level of competence and skill that will prepare our students for a productive life in society. Put another way, we expect them to be able to translate their education into sustaining themselves.
Beyond this dimension, Fr. Kolvenbach notes that Jesuit education "concerns itself also with questions of values, with educating men and women to be good citizens and good leaders, concerned with the common good, and able to use their education for the service of faith and promotion of justice." A Jesuit education is not foolish. It offers reason to the adage that, "to educate a person in mind and not in morals is to educate a menace to society."
Both in terms of our identity and in terms of our viability, we cannot not lose sight of this educational mission or we forfeit an intellectual tradition that has captured the essence of survival where no other has. But how do we best engage that mission - how does Loyola offer its students the best undergraduate learning experience while moving to become a high-level Research University, where the governing metrics are numbers and levels of publication and grant dollars? Where do we begin the discussion?
To some extent, that discussion is already engaged. It was engaged in earnest when Dr. Sam Attoh, the Dean of the Graduate School, contracted last January with the Yardley Research Group to conduct an assessment of the University's doctoral programs - at least those in the College of Arts and Sciences. Without addressing the particularities or the merits of their recommendations, some of the general observations within the Report mark the reality of a research university in today's world:
First: the "overwhelming reality" for higher education into the future will be budget inadequacy. Though we might be tempted by the prospect of greater funding under a different administration, the reality is that greater portions of shrinking tax bases will be devoted to the needs of an aging national population, civil security and other matters deemed more pressing than higher education. What's gone is gone. According to Yardley, this means that research universities especially will need to develop a capacity for self-funding, even to the level of the individual faculty member. And at that level, it likely means increasing the grant worthiness of one's research so that an individual faculty member can vigorously pursue grant opportunities.
Second: The long-standing pattern of federal agencies in awarding research grants places an emphasis on collaborative research projects conducted by multidisciplinary teams of faculty and students. Given this pattern, the trend is to invest institutional dollars in a few common areas of interdisciplinary research that have a critical mass of research-active faculty and graduate students. In other words, the trend favors strategic design of an institutional research portfolio.
Third: The primary strategic purpose of a research doctoral program is to help shape the particular discipline. Therefore, competitiveness is determined by the ability of a doctoral program to impact its field.
To quote Yardley, a research university like ours "will need to choose a few areas in which it can invest heavily in order to attract critical masses of both research-active faculty and graduate students sufficient to have a significant impact on the chosen fields."
To some extent, we already have moved in this direction. I am informed that several years ago, a Task Force identified three areas of institutional strength, which are now housed in Centers: the Center for Catholic Intellectual Heritage, the Center for the Human Rights of Children, and the Center for Urban Environmental Research and Policy. These areas are now joined with six others.
But questions of research priority and implementation remain. Some of those questions have been raised by Yardley and some by our Deans. Let me take this opportunity to raise them with you:
- Can we become a high-level research university with teaching loads of 3-3 or 3-2 (especially in our physical sciences)?
- What should be the role of our tenured and tenure-track faculty in teaching the basic required courses?
- How do we meet the expectations of our faculty for whom the Jesuit undergraduate experience consumes their focus?
- How can we build research capacity around the existing Centers and still maintain the flexibility to support the research needs of individual faculty so that they can develop other areas that hold similar promise for advancing knowledge in their fields?
- If we are to build on our existing research strength, then how do we foster greater collaboration with our graduate biomedical faculty in the Medical School, which is largely disconnected from the Division of Academic Affairs?
- How do we accommodate strategic institutional research growth if faculty believe that the University must continue hiring faculty to expand traditional departmental programs? Or do we learn something from the recent initiative of the English Department, which came together to identify textual studies as its desired area of excellence for the graduate program. This strategic movement carries the promise of synergistic connections within and without the University, attracting a new subset of graduate students who wish to work with digital technology and new media while interacting with existing scholars within the Department.
- Are we best served in all this by filling the role of Vice President for Research? Or should we appoint a representative Research Council as the chief architect of our plans? And if we do, what is the role that remains for our Deans and our schools and colleges in that process?
- Finally, what is the impact of building a strategic research initiative on our library and technology resources?
In short, how can we use what we are and what we have to build what we need?
The Yardley authors and I agree that the answer to this question and all the others will require lengthy faculty discussion -- a discussion I hope to begin in a Joint Faculty Forum next semester where we can come together to join these issues -- issues that justly consume our time because they are the issues of our future.
But as I close this first faculty convocation in light of those issues, I think it is only fitting that I do so with a prayer of gratitude for the opportunity to join you here at Loyola in those discussions:
To Fr. Garanzini and the members of the Search Committee - for their professionalism and their kindness;
To my predecessor, Dr. John Frendreis, to Dr. John Pelissero, Dr. Nancy Tuchman, Dr. Patrick Boyle, Ms. Marian Claffey and the other members of my staff who have worked competently and ceaselessly to support my fledgling efforts;
To the Library faculty and staff who were the first to welcome me to the Loyola community those early weeks in July;
To all the Deans - for their incredible leadership and their genuine friendship in extending opportunities for me to meet with all of you;
To the Communication Faculty - for their candor and their generosity in working with me throughout the summer to frame our new School of Communication;
To Dr. Pamela Caughie and Professor Margaret Moses - who invited me into their homes where I might come to share the personal relationships that mark Loyola Chicago;
To the Faculty Council - for their unstinting openness and willingness to share with me their passion and their work on your behalf;
To the members of the Jesuit community - who always find time to care for my soul (and offer a well-turned martini when only that will do);
And to those of you here and elsewhere - who have made this transition a time of conversation and welcome.
May the Lord Bless you all and grant me the grace to remain relevant to your future.
Amen.