As new president, her goal was quality: now with applications soaring, USD's Hayes prepares for retirement

National Catholic Reporter, April 11, 2003 by Arthur Jones

Eight years ago Alice Bourke Hayes had a tough act to follow. It was 1995 and the St. Louis University executive vice president had been appointed president of the University of San Diego.

The beloved president she succeeded had been in office for 24 years. A popular dean who had been at the university for many years, and who felt it was already on the right track, later told her that his chief hope when she arrived was that she wouldn't screw things up.

Hayes asked, "Were your hopes so small? Didn't you hope that maybe we would have something new, some new creativity, some new growth?"

In 1995, she said, the academic community's anxiety "was that something good would be lost. My big hope was that something good would be discovered."

Now, Hayes herself is in the countdown to retirement. She's 65, and doesn't have to leave. "It's just time," she said. "My real decision last year was one year or six years." There's a new strategic plan and capital campaign in the air, she said, "and you can't start that and pull out in the middle. In that sense it wasn't a hard decision."

The University of San Diego has named Hayes' successor: Mary E. Lyons, who has served as president of the College of St. Benedict, a 2,000-student women's college in St. Joseph, Minn., since 1996. Before that, Lyons, a retired captain in the U.S. Naval Reserve, was president of the California Maritime Academy for six years. She will assume her new position at the University of San Diego July 1.

In light of that approaching day, NCR asked the university's outgoing president to reprise the challenges inherent in running a Catholic university today Hayes-style. The interest, of course, is in the twin quest for academic excellence and continued Catholic identity.

A research biologist with a master's in science from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D. from Northwestern, Hayes was six years at St. Louis, and before that 27 at Loyola in Chicago. She said she took the job because she saw in San Diego an institution with strong academic potential, "maybe just beginning to hit its stride."

"My concern was to try to make some decisions that would allow excellence. I think the toughest decision was to say, we're going to define growth differently," she said.

Hayes decided the university "would not define growth as growth in enrollment, growth in programs, but as growth in quality. And that is a very different way of looking at things and maybe that was the hardest challenge."

Freshman enrollment was capped at 1,000. There was a cap on the sought-after law school. Graduate programs were allowed a little more flexibility because they were not saturated.

Today, freshman applications have soared: 7,000 applications for a class of 1,000. "When I first came we accepted about 80 percent of the applicants, and now we accept less than 50 percent," said Hayes. "More than 55 percent of the undergraduates are Catholics. Graduate student religious affiliation is not known, "but we do know [Catholic affiliation] is a very attractive feature for the professional schools."

It has been three decades since today's University of San Diego was formed in the 1972 merger of the Religious of the Sacred Heart's College for Women with the diocesan College for Men and School of Law. The merger was gradual: first cross-registration at eider campus, then faculty exchanges, then full merger. The total student body in 1972 was 2,500; last fall it was 7,126.

The original academic entity sponsors have four of the 40 seats on the board: the bishop and the Religious of the Sacred Heart provincial, plus one person nominated by each of them. "It's only four votes, but I would tell you," said Hayes, "those are very influential votes. I think that if we were doing something that the bishop and provincial felt wasn't in some way amicable to Catholic higher education, they would tell us."

At the time the merger was coming together, Alice Hayes had already been at Loyola for a decade. She began as a researcher into tuberculosis, but her later specialty for more than two decades was investigation into all aspects of "why leaves are flat."

"It's not a trivial question," said Hayes. The flatness "allows photosynthesis, the source of all the food and oxygen on earth."

By 1986, she was in the space biology program funded by NASA, had been dean of Loyola's science division and was an associate academic vice president.

Asked if she would be vice president, she agreed, and arranged a funding transition so that her work was handed over to colleagues.

In 1989 Hayes went to St. Louis University as executive vice president, provost and biology professor until the San Diego move.

At the University of San Diego she wanted to use the budget in a different way--to increase the number of faculty while holding the number of students constant; to transition from a large adjunct faculty to a more fun- time faculty; to shift to a two-year budget from a one-year budget; and to aggressively go after funds from foundations and major donors.