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

In eight years the endowment has gone from $40 million to $135 million.

Further, "we've had some lovely gifts" for the still-in-process Center for Science and Technology. "The biotech community doesn't have a lot of money right now; people individually are still giving but not at the level that we had mentally set aside for them," said Hayes." There's also the new, internationally-recognized Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace and Justice that opened in 2002.

Even so, everything in a university starts with the incoming freshmen. Fifty percent of the intake is from the West Coast and half of those from San Diego. Foreign students, only a few hundred of them, often find their way to the university through the Internet.

Freshmen have to live on campus. Theology and philosophy and ethics courses are mandatory. "We have ethics across the curriculum programs," said Hayes. "We've funded training programs for faculty members so they have the confidence to discuss ethical issues across the undergraduate programs."

Catholic identity is a high-level topic at Catholic colleges and universities. When Hayes arrived, the University of San Diego already was a member of the Catholic faculty-oriented Collegium, to which Hayes was an early consultant (see accompanying stow).

Hayes tracked the ebb and flow of the Catholic identity issue across four decades.

"There was a contentment in the 1960s. Catholic universities were Catholic because a lot of Catholics went there," she said. "There was an increasing number of lay faculty, and leadership from the Jesuits all over the place." ("They were very brave in taking me on," she added in an aside.)

"Ron Walker, the first lay dean at Loyola, felt it important to reassure people the place was still going to have a Jesuit Catholic identity," she said, "so every year at the dean's convocation a member of the Jesuit community was asked to speak about Catholic identity. One year a philosopher, next year a theologian.

"I don't think there was a sense of anxiety until the '70s. Nobody was afraid we weren't Catholic enough. They were afraid we weren't academically respectable. There had been a drive for academic excellence, strong academics in each department--not sufficient attention to whether that person was contributing to the Catholic identity."

By the 1980s identity was a major priority at the 200-plus Catholic colleges and universities, and by the 1990s, with in-services on campus and Collegium programs externally, the new mood and methods were in place to enhance the "Catholic" element. The University of San Diego sends two faculty members each year to Collegium programs.

Hayes said, "I think we've brought a new consciousness of Catholic identity. I urged Msgr. [I. Brent] Eagen, our vice president for mission and ministry, to write a paper on the Catholic intellectual tradition. He did and I gave it to the provost who took faculty from a variety of religious commitments, and they wrote the university's guiding document, `Insights.' And we have a series of seminars for new faculty members that discuss issues of Catholic identity."