Called: A Lay Leader Looks at Catholic Higher Education

New England Journal of Higher Education, The, Summer 2005 by Mullen, James

As this article is published, I will have been on the job as the ninth president of the College of Our Lady of the Elms in Chicopee, Mass., for under a week. It would be presumptuous of me to claim profound insight into the future of Catholic higher education. But I can offer some humble reflection on why I have traveled to a Catholic liberal arts college and why I believe that institutions like Elms hold a special place and responsibility today and in the future.

My journey to Elms has led me to think back lately to the faculty and administrators at the College of the Holy Cross who influenced me as an undergraduate and as a person of faith. They taught me that one can grow as a Catholic while engaging a spectrum of ideas and a diverse array of perspectives. The Catholic tradition offers a wide intellectual field on which to play, and I will always owe the Jesuits a debt of thanks for encouraging me and my classmates to take full advantage of it.

The Jesuit approach to learning emphasizes the importance of "forming men and women for service to others." That mandate has always been my passion, whether as vice president at Middlesex Community College in Massachusetts and at Trinity College in Hartford or in my most recent role as chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Asheville. Father General Peter-Hans Kolvenbach expressed the Jesuit approach to learning well in a speech delivered at Santa Clara University in October 2000 when he described a Jesuit humanism that integrates and harmonizes academic excellence with social responsibility. "To be a university," he said, "requires dedication to research, teaching and the various forms of service that correspond to its cultural mission. To be Jesuit requires that the university act in harmony with the demands of the service of faith and the promotion of justice."

As I transition from public higher education back to the independent sector, I am at once struck by the similarities between the core purposes of each and excited by the prospect of joining the Elms community to explore what is rich and unique about the Catholic intellectual tradition.

There are many similarities between the mission of public higher education and that of Catholic colleges and universities. Each is rooted in a commitment to opportunity for men and women of all socioeconomic backgrounds, races, religions, ethnicities, genders and identities. Each respects and embraces the value of intellectually rigorous debate. Each values service as fundamental to the learning experience. Each, at its best, focuses on needs of the larger community beyond the campus. Each in its truest expression asks students to believe in something bigger and more important than the self.

In the years to come, I believe we will witness an increasing number of lay leaders in Catholic higher education. For them, as for me, two pivotal questions will loom. First, can I energetically embrace the tradition of the founding religious community? Second, does the mission of the institution resonate with my beliefs and values?

Although the answer to both questions involves considerable soulsearching and prayer, it is reassuring to know that professional organizations like the Concilium initiative sponsored by Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., provide programming and other resources specifically designed to help education leaders of today and tomorrow explore questions related to tradition and mission. As a new generation of education leaders continues to emerge from the ranks of the laity, it becomes particularly important for us to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other in an effort to surface the common characteristics shared by all Catholic institutions of higher education and the unique spirit of the founding congregation or charism of a given institution.

We all know that this is a time of significant challenge and opportunity for the Catholic Church, as it continues to evolve in the spirit of Vatican II. Today's leaders in Catholic higher education have the responsibility to engage the various constituencies of the campus in a conversation informed by sensitivity both to tradition and to signs of the changing times. Informed dialogue is a cornerstone of the Catholic tradition and Catholic colleges and universities have a most significant role to play as centers of such dialogue.

In this dialogue lies the opportunity to reassert the rich tradition found in Catholic teaching as well as the Church's lived commitment to social justice and human dignity.

Higher education has historically been one of the most important points of intersection between the church and the secular world. The recent study on "Spirituality in Higher Education" by the Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles reveals that many of today's college students are searching for spiritual meaning and guidance. The researchers surveyed more than 112,000 students at 236 colleges and universities and found that 80 percent of the students were interested in spirituality, 76 percent were searching for meaning or purpose in life and 79 percent believed in God. A report on the survey notes that students "are searching for deeper meaning in their lives, looking for ways to cultivate their inner selves, seeking to be compassionate and charitable, and determining what they think and feel about the many issues confronting their society and global community."