Remarks delivered by President Jo Ann Rooney, 2022 Faculty Convocation, Loyola University Chicago, September 18, 2022
Thank you, Dr. Callahan, for the gracious introduction. Thank you, also, to Dr. Badia Ahad and everyone in the provost’s office for their work organizing this important annual gathering of our scholarly community.
Convocation officially celebrates and marks the beginning of a new academic year. It enables us to bring together new and returning faculty, and celebrate the work of esteemed colleagues across our schools, disciplines and campuses. We share the gift of time, being present to each other and acknowledging that we convene as one strong, dynamic university that, through its people, makes a lasting difference.
It is always an honor and a privilege to join with you at this gathering. This year brings an unexpected pleasure, since I thought last September 2022, was my final opportunity to open the year with you. When we came together last year, on a beautiful early fall day, it was our first in person gathering since the start of the pandemic. We were grateful for that opportunity, yet the energy and excitement, though palpable, were tempered by a future that was still filled with so many unknowns as we continued to navigate evolving health and safety concerns with the need to support our students and each other. We did it all…together.
The coming together that is Faculty Convocation, always creates an extra energy and a sense of common purpose. Over the past 6-plus years, we have shared exciting, innovative ideas, developed new initiatives, celebrated awards, engaged in spirited discussions and debates, weathered controversies, made tough decisions, and enjoyed many satisfying successes. We lived and animated our Jesuit mission, together as one in spirit, with much forward progress, united around shared values and a mission of transformation in the pursuit of faith, justice and the common good. As a university community, we may each fill different roles, but our paths converge—accompanying young people to a hope-filled future.
Hearing about the achievements of our award winners today, I am filled with gratitude for their passionate work and that of everyone that is part of this exceptional faculty. While these awards are given annually, they do not honor work done just during this past year. Rather, as today’s honorees reflect, we recognize years of work: devotion to a lifetime of study, preparation, and hard work, a vigorous commitment to sharing and advancing knowledge, to creating community and civil discourse, to the education of future generations of leaders.
Your work is the center of Loyola’s work--to create a space that is at once spiritual and secular, a place of reason and faith and civil discourse. In this space, students from diverse backgrounds seek ways to engage in individual formation, grow their understanding and acceptance of each other, ponder deep questions, and uncover and develop their talents and passions. Within that evolution, they become persons for and with others.
Through research and scholarship, through teaching and continual learning, you add knowledge to disciplines and build bridges across academic boundaries. In your mentorship of students and partnerships with colleagues, you lead the way in building a culture of collaboration that generates innovative thinking and action across specialties and schools. As scholars, teachers, and exemplars you are direct stewards of our mission.
Last year during our time together, I shared a few ways that Loyola Chicago has continued to evolve over the past few years, creating new and innovative structures to foster interdisciplinary collaborations around pressing scientific and social issues: The Parkinson School of Health Sciences and Public Health; the School of Environmental Sustainability; the Rule of Law Institute; the Institute for Racial Justice are just a few examples.
I also talked about exciting collaborations across campuses, disciplines, and communities, about lessons of the pandemic, and how you as faculty continued to move the University forward, when that called for rapid innovation, adaptability, flexibility, and some comfort with—or grudging acceptance of--ambiguity. We discussed the robust fiscal health of the University that enabled us to be in the position of making strategic investments in our future. This fiscal discipline and stewardship has continued, allowing us to end this recent fiscal year strongly, achieving a debt level this is the lowest in decades and sending a strong message to those who want to support us and our work. We talked about the increasing diversity of our students and faculty, about our efforts to create an ever more welcoming and inclusive community at Loyola.
All of that continued and intensified throughout the last academic year, continuing through today. This fall, we set as a goal a slightly smaller entering class than last year, which was our largest class in Loyola history at 2867. We achieved that goal, welcoming our second largest first-year class in university history—2864 strong – three students less than last year’s record.
While this very strong entering class is certainly something to celebrate, we are facing some headwinds in declining graduate program enrollment and declining retention across all undergraduate classes. Addressing the challenges facing our students as they also emerge from remote learning and the stresses of the pandemic and ensuring that our programs continue to prepare students for the world’s opportunities and realities need ongoing and focused attention. A university must never be static nor fall into complacency. It must always evolve to meet the needs of the times. Embrace this challenge!
Fundamentally, however, our strong enrollments these last several years demonstrate not just our strength as an educational institution but our distinctiveness as a Jesuit, Catholic institution with a faculty deeply committed to great teaching as well as great scholarship. Taken together, this makes a profound difference.
This class of 2026 is the most diverse, reflecting several years of work and commitment to achieve these goals and enabling us to exceed our peers. Just over 50 percent of our freshmen identify as people of color compared with 47 percent last year. Also, more than 50 percent of our students now come from outside Illinois, owing to the success of our national recruiting strategy. Over all, our University continues to be more diverse than it ever has been, with significant progress diversifying our faculty and staff. Measurable results, yes – but there is so much more to be done.
This progress is the result of very hard work and the passionate commitment of faculty and staff across our campuses and programs. It would not have been possible without the engagement of faculty who stepped up as trained diversity, equity, and inclusion liaisons with our faculty hiring committees, who contributed anti-racist pedagogies, ideas, and practices, who wove new awareness, new works, and new ideas into their curricula, syllabi, and classrooms.
But, we must be honest with ourselves and each other about the challenges that remain, the work yet to be done. We can refine our recruiting practices and reach out in new ways to students from all backgrounds. But unless we create an educational experience that is inclusive, creates a feeling of belonging, is seen as equitable and develops true community in our classrooms, laboratories, libraries, co-curricular activities, and campuses, we will not have created the kind of sustainable change that will foster success for all students. These same lessons apply to faculty and staff.
We can do it – we have the knowledge and we have the will.
This fall we partnered with Hope Chicago and brought in 33 new students from Chicago public high schools. Prior to this new program, we recruited very few students from these same schools. We expect this wonderful partnership to grow in the coming years. We also started a new relationship with the organization “She-Can”, welcoming a new student from Monrovia Liberia. Again, we anticipate this partnership will continue to grow, opening the doors to more underrepresented students. We have expanded tutoring services, partnered with Alumni Relations to expand student mentoring through the People Grove platform, hired a new AVP for diversity student engagement, created the Center for Diversity and Inclusion, the Center for Student Engagement and launched the Center for Black Student excellence as well as the Rambler Brotherhood Project.
But for Loyola Chicago to reach its greatest, most impactful potential while also assuring access to and a pathway to success through a quality education to students from all backgrounds, we must be bold and audacious in engaging with the philanthropic community who supports these same achievable goals.
This past June, we announced a significant milestone achievement along this pathway, receiving the largest gift in Loyola history: a $100-million commitment from John and Kathy Schreiber.
Their gift will perpetually endow full scholarships, room and board, and an array of comprehensive support services for Black, Latino, other students of color and first-generation students who are underrepresented in higher education.
This fall we formally launched the first inaugural cohort of Schreiber Leadership Scholars. This initial cohort of 20 diverse new students, a number that will expand significantly in future years, will be the first to receive full tuition for four years and room and board for two years, intensive and personalized support that includes mentorship, academic advising and tutoring; financial, career, and personal planning. They will join together and build a tight camaraderie as they develop their foundation and network within the wider academic and career communities. These kinds of strong support programs have proven to be powerful helping students flourish in Loyola programs at Arrupe College and in our Achieving College Excellence programs for first-generation students. You will hear much more about this expanding work and growing numbers of Leadership Scholars in the years to come.
John and Kathy Schreiber’s $100M gift to the endowment marks the beginning of one of the largest undertakings by a major university in the U.S. to provide tuition, room and board, and wraparound support services for economically disadvantaged, first-generation and students of color students—the very students for whom a college education is truly life changing. With the Schreiber’s transformational gift and their ongoing work to attract more funding leading the way, this Loyola initiative is targeting a goal of $500-million to be added to the endowment as part of a larger comprehensive fundraising campaign. This one-half of a billion dollars will be fully dedicated to providing financial, educational, and social support for these students. For the students and their families, education and a college degree is a key to economic and social mobility on a generational scale.
The Schreiber gift and those that will follow represent a significant opportunity to accelerate our pace toward “doing” or “walking the talk” on access and attainment for students from Chicago’s neighborhoods and underserved regions. It is about us prioritizing what matters most, embracing them, supporting them, and meeting their educational, developmental, and social needs. It is what Loyola does so well. It is how we live and breathe our distinctive mission as a Jesuit Catholic university advancing social justice grounded in faith.
The Schreiber gift and our endowment initiative represent a major vote of confidence in Loyola as a vibrant university and in you, as faculty. Your demonstrated success in reaching students, meeting them in the Ignatian sense, where they are, and supporting and accompanying them to success through education and your example says it all. Even as Loyola grows in its global partnerships and research capacity as a nationally ranked university, the fundamental, basic connection and exchange between teacher and student remains at its core.
The support and confidence of the philanthropic community bodes well for Loyola and its students. There will always be headwinds, some difficult choices to make and essential debates to be had. But our continued progress, reaching our greatest potential as a university, requires a spirit of respect, collaboration and civil discourse, with healthy debate but also with a willingness to set aside political agendas or personal preferences in favor of a pluralistic greater good.
In less than two weeks, this Loyola University Chicago community will welcome the arrival of Loyola’s 25th president, Dr. Mark Reed. He is a wonderful colleague, an energetic, student-centered leader with deep roots in Jesuit education and issues of diversity, access, and attainment. Our community, with his leadership, will continue implementing and investing in a dynamic Strategic Plan steeped in Loyola’s enduring values with a focus on equity, innovation, and excellence. The continuity of these values and our care for students is not dependent on a single president or any one individual, but on our community working together, moving forward, one in spirit building upon what brings us closer not focusing on what divides us apart.
Loyola has emerged from the disruptions of the pandemic more resilient and more resourceful, with its heart and mission reaffirmed. We are a place where people from many backgrounds and experiences come to learn and to grow where we strive to do more in the service of others accompanying each other to a hope filled future. Our new students ritually passing through the green doors of Cudahy Library is symbolic, welcoming them to our campus community and this new and important chapter in their lives. It is also a strong reminder to them—and to us--of all the doors that still must be opened more widely and more equitably.
Today was a gift - where we committed the time to be together, be present to each other and celebrate what it means to be faculty. It also provides me with an opportunity, one final time as your president, to say thank you for all you do for Loyola University Chicago and our students each and every day. I remain honored to be a part of this Loyola community and know that a piece of my heart will always belong here. Even from a distance, know that I will remain a steadfast supporter, cheering loudly from the sidelines. With my deepest gratitude, I wish you tireless courage, unwavering faith, and an abundance of blessings and successes this year and in all that follow.