The President’s View

About 400 student leaders at Fairfield will gather this week for an annual celebration in which we acknowledge the role they play in the life of our University community. Some of them work as RA’s in our residence halls — as you can imagine, that can be quite a challenging and eye-opening experience — while others lead by serving with the Fairfield University Student Association, or as mentors in our diversity programs or in our sophomore living and learning communities. We also acknowledged recently those members of our faculty who have excelled in the classroom, and have led the way through their example as mentors and advisers to students.

It seems to me that it is increasingly important that a University be a place where we encourage students to lead — or to “step up” as is the common parlance. That’s why at Fairfield we have intentional programs that encourage students to really engage with one another and begin to see themselves as members of a community. Then, out of this experience of commonality, we encourage them to find their place in the community where they can begin to give back, particularly by making themselves available to younger students who are just entering the stream of University life, and, whether they know it or not, are looking for role models as to how to best manage the transition they are making to early adulthood.

This fundamental experience of “community” is the critical first step along this developmental line, because once you begin to feel that you belong, then you want to share in the common responsibilities that make a community a healthy, vibrant, and creative environment. Out of a sense of belonging springs a desire to contribute, and the confidence to believe that you have something important to contribute.

In so many respects it is our students — and our faculty — who are on the front lines in the efforts that we make to build community on campus. Yes, we set programs in place and hold for certain values, but where our community really gels is late at night — in the residence halls, in private conversations, in moments of shared insight and empathy, laughter, and moments of criticism, forgiveness and camaraderie that bind friends to one another. There are also the “office hour” conversations that anyone who has ever taught will be familiar with as well — the encouraging words from a teacher who points a student in the right direction, who lets them know of their genuine concern for their wellbeing, and ability to achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves.

There is much talk these days about what is appropriate to the “academy.” There’s much more to be said on this issue, but one thing is for certain: Only a fraction of what goes on at a University takes place in the classroom and the library. Most of what students learn during their University years they learn in their relationships, and through the processes of maturation that lead them to a place of confidence and self-awareness. We depend upon our student and faculty leaders to sustain the optimal environment that fosters this formation and maturation.

At Fairfield and at other Jesuit schools and universities we often say that we form our students to be “men and women for others.”

If one looks back at the long history of Jesuit education — which goes back to 1548 — one can see that there has always been an understanding that the purpose of an education was to prepare young people to take responsibility for making the world a better place. In recent years there has been a renewed emphasis on our obligation to take direct action in trying to achieve this end — not just talk about it, but do it — an obligation first articulated in this way on July 31, 1973 in an address of the then Superior General of the Society of Jesus, Fr. Pedro Arrupe, at an international Congress of Jesuit alumni.

A critical component of our education now is service learning, by which we mean that we expect our students to actively participate in helping people by doing (and not just thinking about it).

At Fairfield, we have many service learning programs. Last week, under the direction of our Campus Ministry program, about 40 of our students and 8 faculty and staff spent their spring break in a different way — travelling to four different locations to work in communities where they could be of value. One group, with the guidance of two of our faculty, went to New Orleans to gather oral histories from Hurricane Katrina survivors. Another group worked on an organic farm in Massachusetts, while another group went to Immokalee in Florida to volunteer for social service agencies that help migrant farm laborers and to study food justice issues.

A fourth group joined volunteers from other colleges to work with the Christian Appalachian Project, repairing and building homes in eastern Kentucky, one of the poorest parts of the country. Our students went for one week, but over the course of three weeks — with skilled volunteers leading the students from other schools — the project group will renovate and improve between 8 and 10 homes in the region for families that could not afford to do it on their own.

As I write today, these groups have just returned, and so I haven’t heard all the stories yet, though I’m sure I will. What I do know is that these students come back to Fairfield with a better understanding of how privileged they are, a greater capacity for compassion, and a deeper grasp of the nature of their own humanity. Really, it is they who are the greatest beneficiaries of the experience. In short, the vital grasp in their understanding that Fr. Arrupe spoke of in 1973 — that the love of God includes a love of neighbor, and therefore a desire for justice — will have been strengthened. They’ll also come back with a more mature appreciation of what is truly important in life.

As one student said this time last year on returning back to Fairfield from Kentucky, “I’m not sweating the small stuff — my little desires and annoyances. I feel like I have a bigger picture, a better perspective.”

One of the benefits of working at a University is that one is continually made aware — year after year — of the degree to which students change from one generation to the next. Each new incoming class brings with it the aspirations, and anxieties, that have characterized the period in which these students have come of age.

The students who are arriving on our campus now are an optimistic, forward-thinking group. The Cold War, and the years that culminated in the collapse of the Berlin Wall — so defining of the attitudes and concerns of my generation — are a matter of history for these young people. Instead, this is a group that has been shaped by other concerns and prominent among them is the sustainability of the planet. They have grown up under the shadow of a cloud about whether we can continue to spend the earth’s natural resources as though they are limitless, as if the earth had an inexhaustible capacity to absorb the way we live in industrialized societies. Recently Sierra magazine, the publication of the country’s oldest and largest grass-roots environmental movement, The Sierra Club, found that while a few years ago students looking at colleges to attend were mainly concerned with prestige, location, and social life. “These days, however,” the editors wrote, “applicants look for something more: a school with green credentials.”

At Fairfield University we have invested in a community-wide effort to change the way we operate, so that we assess the environmental impact of what we do, both as an institution and as a community that lives together on a piece of land in Fairfield County. This land, with its ponds and trees, wild turkeys, foxes, and a fairly noisy and vibrant community of green parrots, is the small piece of the earth over which we have stewardship. As a Jesuit University, we have a particular responsibility to be good stewards of the earth, because this is a specific charge put before us by the Society of Jesus.

We have a number of sustainability projects underway — recycling, energy saving procedures, student programs that include a Green Campus Initiative and a Student Environmental Association. Earlier this academic year, we were named one of the nation’s “Cool Schools” by the Sierra Club for our environmentally friendly efforts.

We received more good news this week on this front. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has honored our University with an Energy Star Award for our combined heat and power plant.

The plant has been a source of pride for us since its opening in 2007. This combined heat and power plant, designed by Carrier and supported by a $2.3 million grant from the United Illuminating Company, uses a 4.5 megawatt natural gas turbine to generate electricity that meets most of our needs on the campus. But the added environmental bonus is that the heat generated in the process is captured and used to heat and cool most of our buildings. In making the award, Neeharika Naik-Dhungel of the EPA’s combined Heat and Power Partnership Program, said: “Through the recovery of otherwise wasted heat to produce hot water for campus heating and cooling, Fairfield University has demonstrated exceptional leadership in energy use and management.”

It was also noted that our plant effectively reduces our CO2 emissions by more than 7,400 tons per year. It should be said that the plant also saves us millions of dollars a year in energy costs, and this is certainly more important now than ever, as we face pressures on our costs all across our University budget.

One of the most gratifying outcomes of having adopted this energy system is that other colleges and corporations are coming to the University to tour the plant and to see how it operates. As a University, this is what we should be doing — looking to the future for solutions to global problems, then taking steps to address those problems to the degree that we can. In doing so, hopefully we can share what we have learned for the benefit of the entire community.

All universities are motivated at least in part by the conviction that they are engaged in shaping the world for the better – principally, of course, by forming young men and women who will take their place in society as creative and informed citizens. Certainly at Fairfield University, that is is our primary obligation. But as a Jesuit and Catholic University we have a specific obligation to do more than this. We have a duty to do what we can to serve the interests of justice, to try and transform social realities that perpetuate human suffering, and to take an active role in helping those in need.

As part of their education, our students are involved in service learning work. Our campus community is engaged in seeking solutions to global problems through our research and service activities, as well as through collaborations with local and international charities. In other words, our educational mission and our mission of service are not disparate emphases – they are integrally connected missions. They are one and the same in effect, because our overarching mission as a Jesuit apostolate is that we work to “help souls,” as St. Ignatius put it.

This week, we released a report into our financial involvement in Project Pierre Toussaint, a program founded by our former student to assist abandoned boys in Haiti. That project is now stalled as its founder has been indicted on charges of child sex abuse. This is truly a tragic matter for all concerned. The University conducted a review of charitable donations made to the Project’s financial arm (The Haiti Fund), through our University chapel. While the report did not find that any money was inappropriately diverted, it recommended that we monitor more closely how donations are handled, and we have taken steps to implement these recommendations.

Our deepest concern is that we do whatever we can to serve Haiti, particularly at this time when the people of Haiti need so much. With regard to Project Pierre Toussaint, I have been in discussions with members of the Board of Directors of The Haiti Fund for several months now, to explore how we can facilitate a partnership with charitable organizations on the ground to reopen the facilities in Cap Haitien. The decision to reopen the Project rests with the Board of the Haiti Fund, and we will continue to work with it to help reopen the facilities. In the aftermath of the earthquake, there is an even more urgent need to see if these facilities can be used to help alleviate the humanitarian crises in whatever way possible. (See the thoughtful editorial in the Post on this issue).

Meanwhile, there have been several University-wide initiatives in response to the situation in Haiti. We are working with the Business Council of Fairfield County together with other groups to collaborate on ways that we can respond to help rebuild the country. Our University’s chapter of the Jesuit Universities Humanitarian Network held a day of discussions in late January to begin to strategize on how we should respond to the needs of the people of Haiti. This has led to the formation of the Fairfield Haiti Task Force, which in the coming months will be identifying a potential partner in Haiti to work collaboratively on developing assistance programs. We also intend to make Haiti an integral part of our teaching curriculum next year, and several students have started a “Fairfield for Haiti” site on Facebook. More initiatives are under discussion or in process.

Fairfield University’s tradition of service in the interests of justice and compassion will continue, and as a University community, we expect to implement initiatives to be of direct service to the people of Haiti.

With the rest of the world, the Fairfield University community has been following the devastating earthquake in Haiti with sadness and concern, and as a community we are anxious to do whatever we can to be of service to the people of Haiti in their pain and suffering.

While the full scale of the disaster is still unfolding, we know that many people in Haiti have been killed and many more injured, made homeless, or left without food, water, or shelter. Our prayers go out to the people of Haiti at this time and we will do all that we can in support of the international relief effort. I will be presiding at the 11 a.m. Mass this Sunday, January 17 in the Egan Chapel, at which point we as a University community will offer special prayers for the victims of the earthquake.

At this moment, we are also aware that there are many people in our University community, and in the broader Fairfield County community, who are in Haiti at this time and we are anxious for their well-being. There are a few alumni of the University who reside or work in Haiti, as well as several Fairfield students and family members of the students and staff in Haiti. Through the network of relationships in Haiti, our faculty and staff have been able to ascertain, at this point, that four of our students in Haiti are okay, and we will continue to do all that we can to inquire about the well-being of any other members of our community.

Fairfield University is planning both educational and relief efforts through a variety of collaborative relationships. We will be working in partnership with the Business Council of Fairfield County to help coordinate a collective relief effort. Fairfield University’s chapter of the Jesuit Universities Humanitarian Action Network (JUHAN) will coordinate a working group of faculty, administrators, staff, and students to organize a public forum addressing the current humanitarian crises in Haiti. More information will become available in the next few weeks.

I would ask, too, that along with our prayers, we all give what we can to the international relief efforts that are currently underway. There are many international relief agencies that are seeking support and have established relief networks in Haiti, including Catholic Relief Services (www.crs.org ), Partners in Health (www.pih.org ) founded by Dr. Paul Farmer, and Caritas Internationalis (www.caritas.org ). The Jesuit Refugee Service USA (www. jrsusa.org) is mounting an emergency relief effort to provide aid, including food and other urgently needed items, to the Haitian people. For many years, the Jesuit Refugee Service has had a grassroots presence in Haiti and has provided humanitarian assistance to displaced Haitians in both the Dominican Republic and along the Haitian border.

Speaking on Wednesday, Pope Benedict XVI said, “I appeal to the generosity of all people so that these brothers and sisters of ours who are experiencing a moment of need and suffering may not lack our concrete solidarity and the effective support of the international community. The Catholic Church will not fail to move immediately, through her charitable institutions, to meet the most immediate needs of the population.”

Our prayers are with the people of Haiti at this time, and we will continue to explore ways that we can be of service as a community.

Last week, we were fortunate enough to open a new building on our campus — the Jesuit Community Center. It’s quite a striking work of architecture, partly hidden from view by a line of beech trees at the base of Bellarmine Hall, but also oriented so that large windows from the common room look out onto the campus, Long Island Sound, the town of Fairfield, and the city of Bridgeport.

The building has a number of intriguing features — including a geothermal heating unit which literally taps hundreds of feet into the earth — where in the winter months, the temperature at 400 feet is about 60 degrees Fahrenheit— to heat the building during the winter. It also has a grass roof on a large portion of the main part of the house which will reduce the building’s heat signature, and work as natural insulation to save energy.

But the most significant dimension to this new building is what it says about the future of Fairfield University, and the role that the Jesuit community will adopt in the coming years.

We Jesuits have been operating schools and colleges since the 16th century, and there are currently 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. We do this because our founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, believed that God is educating us all the time, bringing our truest and deepest nature to fore through the experiences of our life. It was St. Ignatius’ conviction that his followers should primarily and practically be given to the business of “helping souls,” and what better way to help them than to actively participate in educating them, liberating them to an experience of their true potential.

Every age presents us with new challenges. Currently, like most universities and colleges founded by religious orders, Fairfield ( established in 1942) is faced with the question of how to maintain and reinvigorate our Jesuit identity at a time when there are fewer men entering the Society and able to serve in a University setting.

Of course, this question of how the Society of Jesus will evolve in the future is one that has been debated and considered for many years. The conclusion that we have reached is that our future as a Society will be even more profoundly based on “collaboration” with men and women of good will from all backgrounds, faiths, and orientations who share our values. In the future, we Jesuits will in many cases not expect to be at the forefront of many works and projects but instead, we will look to find ways to support others who share our dedication to the service of justice, and to the “helping of souls” through education, and in other areas of service where we are committed. The way that our former Superior General Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach expressed this was to see it as a shift of perspective from “How can lay women and men assist Jesuits in their ministry?” to “ How can Jesuits serve lay women and men in their ministries?”

That’s what our new building is all about. In effect it moves the Jesuit community — which had been housed on the periphery of the University — right into the heart of the campus. Already, many of the Jesuits live in the residence halls, but now the entire Jesuit community will literally cross paths with the students, faculty, and staff on a daily basis, and while the building was designed as a residence, it was designed with an emphasis on “collaborative” spaces, with large common areas to house readings, meetings, lectures, workshops, and so on and an inviting chapel that will no doubt become a place for spiritual reflection for the entire Fairfield community.

What I’m most excited about are the opportunities that our new building will create for greater interaction between the Jesuit community and our students. I think we’ll see the Jesuit community and the University community become increasingly interrelated. New friendships will develop, and new and unforeseen learning experiences will arise as well — both for the students and faculty, and for those of us in the Society.

Already, every day we move into a deeper understanding of what “collaboration” will mean for us as a Society and a University. Personally, I’m grateful that we’ve taken a decisive step to embrace our shared future in such a concrete and exciting way.

For those of us long past the university years, it’s hard to remember how rocky the transition can be from high school to college. It is often true that students are leaving behind a safe and familiar world, the only world they’ve ever known— friends, neighborhood, family, even pets — and embarking on the first steps toward genuine autonomy in a new city or state. It is a profound leap. All of a sudden, they are being faced with the expectation that they will manage their own lives, and make decisions about their future, without the reassuring familiarity of their childhood environment close at hand.

At Fairfield we have given a lot of thought to how critical this step is, and what we can do as a University to make sure that our first-year students are made to feel at home. In fact, we have developed a four-year developmental model for how we approach the entire arc of the lives of our undergraduates. While we see this developmental model as an organic and flexible one, basically the way we imagine the Fairfield experience is that in their first year, we do what we can to help our students find their place in the University community. In their second year, we expect our students to begin the process of vocational exploration — in other words, “Who am I and what do I want to do with my skills and talents?” In their third year, we encourage our students — who are now comfortable with who they are and where they are — to give back to the community as a student leader, as an intern, by volunteering in a service learning program or studying abroad. Finally, in their senior year, we ask our students to engage in a reflective process of discernment, to process what they have learned and how they have grown and prepare themselves for the next stage of their lives.

But the foundation of developmental model — and essential to its success — is the notion of Fairfield University as a community. We have put a lot of programs in place to try and develop that sense of community for our incoming students. In fact, the process begins before classes begin — with freshman orientation programs that bring our students together in fun and engaging ways so that they already feel that they have made a friend or two before they arrive on campus.

If our students don’t feel that they have a place in the community, and feel secure in their place, then the subsequent development steps will be more difficult.

Two recent articles, on in Inside Higher Education and the other in The Chronicle of Education, illustrate why this emphasis on building community on campus in the early phases of an undergraduate education are so critical. In Inside Higher Education, Bryan Matthews [link] writes that of the 2.8 million first-year college students each year, more than 450,000 do not return to the college or university that they started with in their second year. In other words, 25 percent of first-year students do not feel they have found their place, and either move on to another school or drop-out altogether. Certainly, there may be good reasons for a student to move elsewhere to a place where they feel they will be better suited, but it must also be true that many of those students are so discouraged by their experience — by the feeling that they don’t belong — that they don’t return at all, or move on to a circumstance that will not necessarily provide them with the best possible environment. Obviously, for universities and colleges, this retention issue also has financial implications. It makes sense for us to look very closely at the freshman experience and do what we can to make sure that nobody is slipping through the cracks. Matthews concludes that the “call” is for universities to “redefine the orientation and preparation process for first-semester students, and to commit sufficient resources to preparing their newest clients for success prior to their arrival on campus,” a call that I think we at Fairfield have heard and are striving to respond to.

But what of those students who come to a campus, don’t feel like they fit in, and move to another school? Well, in a recent article by Ben Terris in the The Chronicle of Higher Education it seems that transfer students have a more difficult time ever feeling like they are fully engaged in their college education. A study by the National Survey of Student Engagement found that “transfer students tended to lag behind ‘native’ students, as it calls those who did not transfer, in terms of campus engagement.” Transfer students seem less likely to study abroad, or take internships for instance. They report less satisfaction in general and are move likely to avoid leaderships experiences. The director of the study, Dr. Alexander McCormick of Indiana University in Bloomington concludes from the data that a large number of these transfer students “were not able to succeed in making good relationships at their first college.”

Whatever the implications, it is clear that building a campus community, and making sure that everyone is engaged and encouraged to find their place in that community as early as possible, is a critical step in ensuring that students get the most out of their college experience.

Anyone who is curious about what lies ahead in the world of higher education should read the article on the future of large state flagship universities by Paul Fain in the Oct. 26 issue of the New York Times. The article shows the growing trend of public universities operating more like private universities, such as Fairfield University.

For most of their history state universities were able to count on generous financial support from state legislatures. In turn, these schools provided good educations to state residents at a very low cost.

Many of these universities grew to become enormous institutions with extensive research programs, huge enrollments, and almost limitless graduate, undergraduate, and varsity athletic programs. But the economics of higher education are such that this is beginning to change. Many states are slashing their budgetary allocations to state universities, and that trend is likely to continue.

At the same time, the costs of universities are extremely difficult to manage down. Even with conscientious cost-cutting, universities are expensive to operate: They depend on a high concentration of well-educated faculty and personnel, the need to house and feed thousands of people and provide them with healthcare, public safety, recreation, and access to the latest in research tools and technology. Most of these are fixed costs that are very difficult to contain.

As costs rise and money from state legislators starts to dry up, many state universities are beginning to operate like private institutions, with steep rises in tuition and an increasing tendency to seek students from out of state — who pay higher tuition and fees than in state students — to try to address their budget gaps.

David E. Shulenburger, vice president for academic affairs at the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, who is interviewed in the article, “sees the tuition increases as part of a larger movement toward privatization of the most desirable flagships.”

The article notes that with “state contributions largely flat or down over the last 15 years, and enrollments and costs up, many top flagships are turning to nonpublic sources for money and, in some cases, accepting larger numbers of out-of-state students, who often pay twice the tuition of residents.” The University of Michigan now only receives 7 percent of its budget from the state, while the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Wisconsin and several other big schools now enroll 30 percent or more of their students from out of state.

Certainly, when I meet with administrators and presidents from other universities — private or public — what always comes up in discussion is the challenge of trying to maintain the quality of our programs while keeping our institutions accessible in a time of limited resources. All of our institutions of higher education will have to look very closely at our missions in the coming years in order to adapt to the times, and state universities may not be able to be all things to all people any more. It may be possible that in this changing future, we can find ways to build cooperative programs — between the private and public institutions — so that we can find efficiencies together.