I continued to work with many people at Regis


through the years, including facilitating strategic planning on their campus. Through working in those roles, I spent a lot of time with the Jesuits. Then I had the opportunity to serve on their board of trustees. Father Mike Sheeran, who was president of Regis at the time, reached out to me and said, “We know you. You know us,” almost as a way of saying, “You may not realize this, but you very much understand Ignatian spirituality and what we’re doing here.” He invited me to serve on the board of


trustees, and I think that experience took my understanding and my internalization of Jesuit education to a whole new level. As a trustee, you really do need to understand that, because any of the decisions we made had to be focused around how to support the mission of Jesuit education and Ignatian spirituality.


What does the Jesuit education philosophy mean to you? It comes in a number of different forms, and


I was struck by it today walking around campus. I spoke to an individual who was working on


faculty development. A conversation that I have had on the Regis campus is about how we prepare our faculty to help students start to integrate the mission and ideals of social justice and apply it in the world. That does not mean our faculty have had to come through Jesuit education. In fact, they are of many different faith, cultural, and educational backgrounds. But we need to offer something more than just technical learning. I found out that there is a very concerted effort here—not just for new faculty, but ongoing professional development—to help faculty integrate these conversations and these issues into the classroom. As one example, almost every college has an


ethics course. But how do you take that to the next level and talk to students about practically applying those ethical decision-making challeng- es to social justice issues or challenges in their own life? How do they model to their colleagues and clients that those ethics must be very much at the heart of what they do? That is just an example of what our faculty


are being challenged to do. On the other hand, our students come here because they want an


education that doesn’t just teach them technical skills, which, in many cases, are going to be out of date in a very short time given the speed of transformation in many fields. That is really where I think the difference is in Jesuit education and, frankly, our liberal arts core curriculum. Our stu- dents have the ability to see the world through a different lens, to understand that it is about serving others. There needs to be that social justice component in what our students learn, which will long outlast the technical knowledge they receive.


As Loyola’s first lay president, how do you plan to maintain the University’s Jesuit mission and identity? I have already had a number of conversations


about this with the Jesuit community, especially Father Jim Prehn, who is the rector, and Father Brian Paulson, who is the provincial. Those conversations started early on, even as part of the search process, about how important it would be to closely work with the Jesuit community to continue to make sure that the mission and identity is front and center.


SUMMER 2016 15


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