By Maria Calzada with Alice Clark
The inauguration of a new president underscores the high aspirations of leadership at a Jesuit college or university. On November 15, 2018, the day before the inauguration of Tania Tetlow as Loyola University New Orleans’s 17th (and first lay) president, Fr. Ron Mercier, S.J., provincial of the Central and Southern Jesuit province, formally missioned her as director of the apostolic work that is Loyola University New Orleans.
The questions used in this missioning ceremony show that the president of a Jesuit college or university, and by extension the entire leadership, is held to and should aspire to standards that go beyond those that might operate at a secular institution. (Click here to view the questions).
The first and third questions of the missioning charge the president to foster the institution’s mission and use it to shape decisions – not really surprising, since the president of any institution should foster its mission and use it to guide decision-making.
The focus on faith, and even leadership “patterned on Christ,” again may not surprise, but the emphasis here is not only on personal faith but on justice, interreligious dialogue, and “creative engagement with culture.” In other words, this is a faith that is actively engaged in community, and not only the community of the like-minded. Where some like to think of the university as an “ivory tower,” withdrawn from the world into a homogenous community, here the president, on behalf of the entire community, is charged to engage with a world of difference.
Perhaps the most unusual element is contained in the second question, as well as in the provincial’s response: to collaborate with superiors of the Society of Jesus. This can be extended to a broader charge to collaborate with the superiors, but also with the Jesuits on campus, and by further extension with the whole community. This collaborative leadership is messy, but it is the president’s calling – and our own.
This kind of mission-driven, diversity-focused, collaborative approach to leadership can be particularly difficult to live when resources are scarce, as is often true today not only at Jesuit colleges and universities but in much of higher education in general. It is human nature to make distinctions between “us” and “them” at such times: Our program should keep its support while theirs should be cut, we in the administration know best and shouldn’t have to explain our selves to them among the faculty and staff, we on the faculty rebel against the enemies among the administration, and so on. Again, however, we are called upon in these missioning questions to go even beyond our disciplinary training to make logical decisions based on evidence, to foster understanding in a diverse community, to enact justice through faith, and to collaborate with our Jesuit colleagues and by extension with all members of our community.
What does leadership in the Jesuit tradition mean in practice, especially under financial difficulties? This is not easy to articulate. At its essence, it amounts to a combination of cura personalis and cura apostolica. An example may be helpful. Over the last few years at Loyola New Orleans, we have been forced to make budget cuts that, among other things, led to reductions in force, without which the institution would not have survived. Such things are never easy , and we can’t say we dealt with them perfectly , but we tried to be led by our Jesuit values. That meant, in part, that we tried to make evidence-driven decisions, as anyone should do, but also that we honored the human dignity (cura personalis) of those we had to let go as much as we could while making the cuts we needed to take care of the institution (cura apostolica). For instance:
Individuals were told in person.
Extraordinary (non-tenure-track) faculty were given severance (at least in one of the rounds of cuts).
In all cases staff were given severance.
Staff were offered access to a career coach, to help with resume-writing and assessment of skills and goals.
Staff who were enrolled in university degree programs, or whose dependents were so enrolled, using the university’s tuition benefit, were able to continue that benefit to complete the degree in progress, even after employment was terminated.
In the aftermath of reductions in force and budget cuts, leaders are called to lift up a saddened community to come together and to continue to do what we do to for our students. At Loyola our mission by itself is inspiring: Loyola New Orleans “welcomes students of diverse backgrounds and prepares them to lead meaningful lives with and for others; to pursue truth, wisdom, and virtue; and to work for a more just world.” But a hurt community needs the inspiration of a leader that shows them a bright future worth working for. President Tetlow started in August of 2018 and has been actively listening and responding to this community. After all the hard work done before her arrival to balance our budget, we are now starting to allow ourselves to dream, imagine, and create a brighter future for Loyola, under her leadership.
As it turns out, this diverse, collaborative, creative environment also moves leaders. At the spring 2019 convocation, just five months after her start at the institution, President Tetlow said, “Most of all, you inspire me, every day. When I listen to the passion that you bring to your work, I know what it means to be part of a mission. We are in this together, not because it’s easy, or glamorous, but because we love these students, and we know that we transform their lives. Most people talk about ‘doing God’s work’ as a metaphor. We know that we really are.”
As we write this article, the university is beginning a new initiative, Cura Loyola, specifically geared to help us reaffirm our values and use them to improve how we function as an institution. This has been conceived by leadership but will require the entire community to be effectively implemented; we hope it will become a good example of the kind of collaboration that mirrors the presence on our campus of lay and Jesuit faculty and staff and the interaction between the president and the Jesuit superior that Tania Tetlow vowed to uphold.
Maria Calzada, Ph.D., is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University New Orleans. Alice Clark, Ph.D., is a professor of music history at Loyola University New Orleans and Secretary-Treasurer of the National Seminar on Jesuit Higher Education.