By HEIDI BOSTIC, ANNMARIE CAÑO, BONNIE GUNZENHAUSER, MICHELLE MALDONADO and DANIEL PRESS
We are five deans of arts and sciences who began these new roles in the 2020–21 academic year. We made moves ranging from 35 to 2,000 miles and arrived with more than 50 combined years of leadership experience. All of us were external hires and none came directly from an AJCU university. Yet the pull of mission — the chance to do the work of formation and address the world’s most compelling questions, personally and collectively — was crucial in each of our decisions to accept the opportunity.
But which opportunity, exactly?
Unexpected beginnings
The work differed from what we expected. Soon after accepting our positions, we were faced with a global pandemic, financial crisis and instances of racial injustice. We were called to care for others we hardly knew during one of the most challenging periods of their lives and careers, and to do so almost entirely through computer screens. The five of us quickly came together and developed a community of support rooted in the Jesuit mission. We met monthly during this first year. Together, we have tried to lead as “contemplatives in action.” By acting, reflecting and sharing our experiences with each other, we continually discern how best to work on behalf of others and to provide healing to enable students and colleagues to emerge with renewed strength and hope. The strategies we found to weather the storms of this year — including the community we formed — echo one of the Universal Apostolic Preferences presented by Fr. General Arturo Sosa, S.J., namely, to work toward “a hope-filled future” for our university communities.
Beyond the broader mission appeal, we were each drawn to our particular university for reasons both local and global. We found in conversation a shared desire to contribute to a larger project in contemporary higher education. AJCU (with its international partner IAJU) provides an active and valuable professional network, to be sure, but more deeply, it fosters a caring community of Jesuit Catholic higher education that aligns with the needs of our world and with our individual vocations.
Sustaining the heart of a Jesuit education
As deans of arts and sciences — the heart of Catholic, Jesuit education — we feel a deep responsibility to sustain the mission. We occupy a middle landscape between faculty, staff and students; executive leadership and external constituents including donors and the hiring managers who recruit our graduates. We pull together many strands of mission: student formation, faculty and staff development, enrollment management, program innovation and the bottom line. We are called to champion the liberal arts and our institutions’ commitments to social justice during a turbulent time for both.
Rejecting the notion that undergraduate university studies are solely pre-professional preparation, we join our colleagues in attending to the formation of the whole person, recognizing that a real education cannot be reduced to mere technical skills. The foundation of this vision of the university is St. Ignatius’ positive attitude toward creation and human culture. As Ronald Modras demonstrates in Ignatian Humanism, this person-centered approach to development infuses Jesuit education. We are interested not only in what students know but in who they become as persons for others, engaged citizens who respond compassionately to human suffering and the crises that plague our contemporary world.
Who are we and why does it matter?
Although in the past it almost went without saying that the arts and sciences dean would be a Jesuit, none of us is a priest or a religious sister. Among us are a theologian and a trained spiritual director in the Ignatian tradition. Coming from different faith traditions, we embody the growing role of the lay apostolate in guiding Catholic institutions. As articulated in Gaudium et spes, the Church is the people of God and needs to engage the world. The diversity of global Catholicism should lead the Church to embrace unity in the midst of (not in spite of) diversity. Similarly, together we as deans represent a new chapter in the future of academic leadership in Jesuit higher education.
Our religious and disciplinary diversity is also reflected in our group’s demographics. Three of us are children of immigrants or political refugees, one of us was born abroad, two of us are Latinx. Our linguistic diversity includes varying levels of fluency in speaking Ignatian. We bring our diverse perspectives to bear in our leadership and everything that we do.
Hopeful epiphanies
Like the Church on a broad scale, as in our own small cohort on a personal scale, we are called upon to foster unity in diversity through discernment and vision. We must show how our colleges’ disparate elements combine to form students, advance knowledge and serve the world. Sometimes the challenge feels like building a bridge in mid-air: The two sides must be joined, but there is rarely ample support to span the gap. The connections we make are among our most important responsibilities. In that spirit, over the past year we had two epiphanies of note.
We share not just a common set of pandemic-inflected experiences, but also a particular perspective on leading thanks to our identity as newer arrivals. As universities everywhere reinvented long-held practices on the fly to adapt to difficult realities, we soon realized that there was freedom and possibility in approaching this moment innocent of institutional history or preconceived ideas of what will and will not work. While adapting to new circumstances, our approach has included asking “why not...?” and “how might we…?”
The strength we gained through our small, self-created cohort speaks to strategies for our campuses to promote student, faculty and staff success. We lived from the inside what it can mean to form communities to foster a deep sense of purpose and belonging.
Into the future
As newcomers, we have endeavored to live out the Jesuit charism. In welcoming us, our campus communities demonstrated hospitality and courage. Our universities were open to the new; in us they have found different perspectives and a deep commitment to the mission. We symbolize the health of change. As new generations arrive — in leadership, in faculty and staff, in students — our universities encounter new opportunities to build a hope-filled future. Such change may be more powerful and purposeful if we harness the promise of cohorts and create opportunities to reflect together on shared experience and common possibilities.
Heidi Bostic is dean of the Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences at Marquette University. Annmarie Caño is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Gonzaga University. Bonnie Gunzenhauser is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at John Carroll University. Michelle Maldonado is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at The University of Scranton and Daniel Press is dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Santa Clara University.