This Is Our Love
Thank you.
It is an honor to come before you at this faculty convocation, where we mark the beginning of a new academic year, bring together new and returning faculty, and celebrate all faculty across our campuses coming together as one strong, dynamic university.
Earlier during this celebration, we honored some exceptional faculty members. I would like to add my personal congratulations and gratitude to our outstanding faculty award winners.
Today is a time where we pause, take time to be together, and be present for each other. It is also a time that I, along with others, can say thank you for all you do every day. In a special way, I want to acknowledge and thank you for your work during an unprecedented period over the last 19 months. As individuals you have had to deal with concerns, anxieties, losses, and wrenching changes in both personal and professional lives, yet you have found a way to support our students and the needs of each other.
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything!
No – this is not the final line of a pop culture romance novel. It is something that for all, especially as part of this Loyola University community, has a much deeper meaning. For many, I hope it sounds very familiar and possibly part of a regular reflection. For everyone, I hope it resonates with each of you as faculty members and as educators.
Whether you have been part of Jesuit education for many years or have chosen more recently to be part of Jesuit education here at Loyola Chicago, we are each challenged to embrace and even love our Jesuit mission in all of its facets, appreciating how Jesuit spirituality informs Jesuit pedagogy, and understanding how we must embrace social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion as part of animating our mission, not in spite of our mission or in addition to it.
So much this fall is different from last fall. Being able to come together is creating that extra energy, that sense of urgency, that common focus. It enables us to experience the intellectual interplay that arises when we bring together different disciplines, perspectives and backgrounds united around shared values and a mission of transformation for the common good and justice.
As a faculty, you have continued to drive the University forward, even when that called for rapid innovation, adaptability, flexibility, and some comfort with ambiguity. From these experiences, I submit that there is an even greater confidence in our capabilities and capacity and more appreciation for the difference we can make in the future together.
This confidence will certainly be tested and it will be required as we partner even more closely, collaboratively, and more purposefully with our communities to rebuild and transform. The impact of this pandemic has laid bare the profound inequities across our society and in our own neighborhoods that lie between the triangle formed by our three Chicagoland campuses. Your work in the classroom, in the laboratories, through your research, through your community service will make the difference in addressing systemic issues and the most vexing societal and structural problems.
Whether this semester marked the first time you greeted students in your class with anticipation along with a bit of nervousness and uncertainty, or you were excited, enthusiastic and still just a bit anxious to meet freshmen on their very first day of class even though you had done it more than 30 times before, (thank you Dr. Bucholz for letting me have the privilege of joining you yet again for that important milestone), being educators, being teachers, being part of shaping the lives of students who will be our future, is your greatest calling. It is what you love.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
Yet, amidst lingering uncertainties, and acknowledging that embracing change is part of our mission, I can stand here today and tell you that Loyola University Chicago is in its strongest position educationally and financially to meet the future, whatever it holds. We are positioned well to implement our audacious strategic plan discussed by Dr. Callahan and developed by our shared collective and input. That does not mean that difficult choices will not have to be made. As a Jesuit institution, we often must choose between competing good options, however, we have the power of discernment and love of our mission to guide us. Making these choices, doing this effectively, requires a spirit of respect, collaboration and civil discourse, with a willingness to set aside personal preferences in favor of the greater good. We are positioned to do just that.
Let me share just a few specific data points among many that support my comments and this confidence.
This fall we welcome the largest first-year class in university history—2,867 strong. This is not the first time, nor the second time you have heard me say that we are breaking enrollment records. Our strong enrollments these last several years demonstrates not just our strength as an educational institution but our distinctiveness as a Jesuit institution that differentiates our mission and commitment to social justice and serving others. We call upon our Rambler community to be leaders in every way.
Along with being the largest class in our history, this class of 2025 is also the most diverse, reflecting several years of work and commitment to achieve these goals. 47 percent of our freshmen identify as people of color. Put in context, overall, our University is more diverse than it ever has been, with 43 percent of our student body today identifying as people of color. You are also aware that our faculty recruitment is beginning to show significant progress in diversifying across schools and we anticipate announcing and welcoming our new VP for Institutional Diversity Equity and Inclusion very soon.
For the first time in our history, we are exceeding our peer institutions in admitting Black students. We are also seeing increased student retention rates for all of our students that is a direct result of your hard work as faculty along with ongoing enhancement and expansion of student support services. I share all of this not to say or even imply that our work is “done” or that our goals have been reached. I share this to reinforce that with focused effort and commitment, not just for one year but over several years, we are capable of making and being the change we want to be. There is much more work to be done and we will make mistakes. Yet we have much more growing and learning to do as well, and it must continue—for all of us.
We have fortified our financial position by making thoughtful, prudent and sometimes difficult choices ensuring the financial stability that we must maintain to invest for the future. We have significantly reduced our debt burden by over 40 percent to a level that is more sustainable for the longer term. Finally, we are aggressively ramping up for an exciting comprehensive fundraising campaign that will be the largest in Loyola’s history and are currently working on potential transformational lead gifts to support that effort.
This year, again for the first time in University history, our endowment has surpassed $1 billion through a combination of excellent investment management by our internal team that we established a few years ago and successful fundraising results. This benchmark places Loyola in a select group of universities nationwide and bodes very well for our students, for our future strategic initiatives and for continuing to attract philanthropy.
Provost Callahan has outlined the values and pillars that will continue shaping our future through our new strategic plan. Looking at the last few years, you can get a sense of Loyola’s vital future from the new schools, institutes and centers created that are rapidly gaining in influence and engaging the most critical issues of our time.
The Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health certainly raised its leadership profile as a source of considerable expertise and service during the pandemic but also as a source of future influence extending well beyond the current health crisis. We founded the School in 2018 as a space for interrelated and interdisciplinary fields to address health-care delivery and public-health disparities. The ongoing critical nature of that work is undisputed.
Last year’s elevation of the Institute of Environmental Sustainability to the School of Environmental Sustainability raises the expectations for the impact that will grow as SES becomes a center for scientific, economic, and policy development around issues of climate change and sustainability. It transcends the work being done locally and regionally into work impacting the world. It reinforces our deep commitment to caring for our common home – also one of the Universal Apostolic Preferences of the Society of Jesus.
Our two newest institutes—the Rule of Law Institute in the Law School and the Institute for Racial Justice—will bring faculty, students and collaborators from multiple disciplines together to address some of the most fundamental and urgent questions of social justice facing our world today.
These are just a very few examples - deep and dynamic and new and innovative scholarly work continues across the university in business, education, medicine, nursing, social work and in the College of Arts and Sciences, the very center of our liberal arts and sciences education.
While I have announced my transition at the end of this, my sixth year, I remain honored to be part of this Loyola community. I will continue to work diligently to ensure that my successor is well-positioned to take Loyola forward from a position of strength that will enable the audacious goals of our strategic plan to be realized.
I deeply appreciate your many notes of gratitude and well wishes and look forward to thanking you in person throughout this year and as we work together.
The continuity of our excellence, the strength of our mission is not dependent on a single president or any one individual, but on our community, on our collective whole.
Transcending any one moment in time, we continually embrace new challenges and new programs of education and research that will address some of the most urgent issues in the world today—poverty, climate change, public health, racial justice and the rule of law.
In this coming year, we will work as a community to bring Loyola’s strategic plan to life as a community-wide, shared endeavor. We will commit to measuring our efforts and holding ourselves accountable for the work we undertake. We will articulate our plans toward answering the questions: Where do we go from here? How will we proceed? How do we measure our progress? How do we adapt to changing needs? How will we live into being contemplatives in action?
This Loyola University plan for the future, must reflect our combined wisdom and input, even though many of us will likely not see the long-term benefits of the work we will undertake now.
Collectively, this is our calling, this is our passion, this is our love.
Fall in Love, stay in love and it will decide everything.
In closing, I would like to share all of the reflection attributed to Father Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
Nothing is more practical than
finding God, than
falling in Love
in a quite absolute, final way.
What you are in love with,
what seizes your imagination, will affect everything.
It will decide
what will get you out of bed in the morning,
what you do with your evenings,
how you spend your weekends,
what you read, whom you know,
what breaks your heart,
and what amazes you with joy and gratitude.
Fall in Love, stay in love,
and it will decide everything.