Big Plan on Campus

Louisville, Jun 01, 2006 by Ward, Joe

If 56-year-old Bellarmine University succeeds in increasing the number of its schools from five to 12 or more by 2020, and if the Louisville private college doubles the number of its buildings and triples the number of its students - if it becomes the Vanderbilt or Emory or Notre Dame of Kentucky - there will be people at Fordham University in New York who will refer to all of these occurrences as the "Revenge of the Jesuits."

Here's why: President Joseph J. "Jay' McGowan, who proposes to make his school the premier independent Catholic university in the South, was a Fordham administrator for many years, before he took over Bellarmine in 1990. Fordham has another Kentucky connection. It was founded in 1841 by the Archdiocese of New York, which soon turned it over to what McGowan says was "a band of French Jesuits who had been kicked out of Kentucky." (Accounts of Catholicism in this state corroborate this story. The Rev. Augustus Thebaud and some fellow Jesuits taught for a time at St. Mary's College in Marion County, then apparently had some differences with Kentucky Catholic clergy and went to New York to take over Fordham. Fordham became one of the most respected universities in the country and Thebaud became renowned as a college president and Catholic author.) Fordham's Kentucky connection remains part of the New York's school's lore: When McGowan left Fordham for Bellarmine, another Catholic college, friends at his going-away party there spoke of the "Revenge of the Jesuits on Kentucky."

It's been a constructive sort of revenge. Those old French priests who laid the foundation for Fordham's top ranking as a university might be looking down on McGowan's progress so far and saying the equivalent of, "That's what I'm talking about." Since McGowan took over what was then Bellarmine College, the number of buildings and students living on campus has doubled, and its endowment, annuities and trust values have tripled. Its plant assets and operating budget have nearly tripled, and its lacrosse team has achieved NCAA Division I status. U.S. News and World Report has recognized Bellarmine as one of the outstanding liberalarts universities in the South for the last 12 of McGowan's 15 years as president. The scores of incoming students on the American College Test, or ACT, averaged 21.8 in 1990 when McGowan arrived. They average 24 now, a significant jump in a major indicator of how good a college is. The student retention rate has increased from 74 per cent to 84 per cent over that time.

McGowan, 61, outlined his plan for Bellarmine's trustees last October. "It was the most important professional speech in my life," he recalled in a recent interview. He proposed to add seven schools to the current five, including schools of pharmacy, law, veterinary medicine and architecture. He said he'd increase the university's endowment by 20 times - to $400 million. The annual budget would triple to $150 million by 2010 and then rise to the same figure as the endowment, $400 million, by 2020. He wants to make an architectural gem of the campus, fitting buildings and open spaces modeled after the Italian hill towns and monasteries of Tuscany into his university's similarly hilly terrain along Newburg Road. St. Roberto Bellarmino, for whom the school is named, was born in the Tuscan village of Montepuciano in 1542.

McGowan said his plans for Bellarmine include a serious look at entering NCAA's Division I in all sports except football (men's lacrosse is the only program at that level currently). As a Fordham vice president, he was in charge of the 22-sport Division I athletics program there. "We'd be similar to Xavier University or many other Catholic urban universities" in that respect, he said. "We'd be the Gonzaga of Kentucky." Highly visible athletics programs attract students, donations and grants to a university. And McGowan proposes building Bellarmine into a school that would have an annual economic impact on Louisville like Notre Dame has on South Bend, Ind. -$833 million - or like those of Vanderbilt on Nashville or Emory on Atlanta, each of which is estimated at $3.4 billion. Louisville and Kentucky could use that sort of impact, he said. They will depend for their economic future on building a much stronger base of "knowledge" workers who have "at a minimum, college degrees."

"Louisville and Kentucky are doing many things well," McGowan said, but "unless they dramatically increase the number of well-educated people living here, their future is qualified."

Some say McGowan's plan is a long shot. John Thelin, a University of Kentucky professor and author of the wellreceived 2004 book History of American Higher Education, said Kentucky is "about 120 years late" for building what McGowan suggests. It's a "superb" idea, he said, but it would be like "developing a baseball team that would challenge the Yankees." It would be a great addition to Louisville and to the state, he said, but the going would be expensive and slow. "It's very late in the game to do this well and to gain legitimacy among established strong universities," Thelin said, noting that the University of Louisville was once private but had to enter the state system to survive. "The same with (the University of) Cincinnati," he said. "it's too late."