DEPARTMENTS
Letters from Father
How has the work of the last 12 years built a foundation for strategic priorities ahead? Read Fr. McFarland's essays on various areas-from residence life to athletics to Catholic and Jesuit identity-that Holy Cross will be focusing on in the coming years. Links to his essays, which were originally crafted as newsletters to President's Council members, are now available to entire community here.
July 2010
In July 2010, Fr. McFarland shared the information he gathered at a conference in Mexico organized by the International Committee on Jesuit Higher Education. The conference, which was held at the Universidad Iberoamericana, just outside of Mexico City, was called "Networking Jesuit Higher Education for the Globalizing World: Shaping the Future for a Humane, Just, Sustainable Globe."
Dear Friends,
Shaping the Future
April for me is usually taken up with alumni receptions and other visits, along with the many campus activities connected with the end of the semester. This year, however, I carved out time to attend a conference in Mexico organized by the International Committee on Jesuit Higher Education, at the request of Fr. General Nicolás, to bring together representatives of Jesuit higher education from all over the world to discuss the apostolic challenges facing us today and how we can cooperate more effectively in responding to them. The conference, which was held at the Universidad Iberoamericana, just outside of Mexico City, was called "Networking Jesuit Higher Education for the Globalizing World: Shaping the Future for a Humane, Just, Sustainable Globe." As the name indicates, the emphasis was on the challenges and opportunities presented by the increasing globalization that touches every nation and culture.
The Society of Jesus throughout its history has been on the leading edge of the Church's encounter with the world, and has been asked to respond thoughtfully and creatively to the needs and conditions found there, something Pope Benedict reaffirmed in his allocution to the last General Congregation (GC35), when he spoke of the Society as operating "at the frontier." In response to that mission, it has always been important for Jesuits to monitor the social, cultural, political and religious movements around them and recognize emerging issues, needs and opportunities. Jesuit education, with its extensive intellectual resources and its deep involvement in the surrounding cultures, has an indispensible role to play both in discerning the greatest needs and in responding to them.
The conference was attended by 216 representatives from 117 institutions in 38 countries, representing every part of the world. The United States had the largest delegation with about 60 people representing 27 of the 28 Jesuit colleges and universities in this country. India was next with 22 from 15 different institutions. Host Mexico followed with 16, leading a good sized Latin American delegation from thirteen different countries. The Philippines was also well-represented, one of eight countries in East Asia and Oceana to send delegations. Spain, which has by far the most Jesuit institutions of higher learning in Europe, was the best-represented among the eight European countries whose delegates overcame the travel problems caused by the Icelandic volcano to attend. Africa, where Jesuit higher education is still very young, sent eleven representatives from nine institutions in six countries. It was truly an international gathering, which made it a rich experience of the worldwide scope and diversity of the Society of Jesus for all of us who attended.
Fr. General himself attended and gave the keynote address. (You can download a PDF of the address here.) He began by noting that the conference marks "an extraordinary opportunity to have a hand in helping to shape the future, not only of our own institutions, but of the world ... through 'networking,'" made possible by what Pope Benedict calls "the explosion of worldwide interdependence, commonly known as globalization." Fr. General then outlined three challenges we must respond to if we are to reorient our mission to the new context created by this globalization.
"Depth of Thought and Imagination"
The first challenge is what he called "the globalization of superficiality." To illustrate this, he told the following story:
A couple of Jesuit professors from Sophia University [in Japan] told me, 'The Internet is wonderful. You get so much information so quickly and so easily.' And at the same time, each said, 'But I have to confess that now I read less, I think less, and I spend less time discerning what to do.' If professors say this, what can we say of the students?
Fr. Nicolás noted that he was the first General of the Society to use e-mail and surf the Web, so he was not unaware of the benefits of the technology. His concern was that, when it is so easy to access information and to publish and receive opinions from so many sources, people tend to react in an immediate and shallow way, avoiding "the laborious, painstaking work of serious, critical thinking." Moreover, the ease with which people make and break connections online can trivialize relationships as well. The greatest threat here is to our inner life and values, as "shallow, self-absorbed perceptions of reality make it almost impossible to feel compassion for the suffering of others; and a contentment with the satisfaction of immediate desires or the laziness to engage competing claims on one's deepest loyalty results in the inability to commit one's life to what is truly worthwhile."
The challenge for Jesuit higher education is to understand how this affects our students and to find effective new ways to offer "the depth of thought and imagination that are distinguishing marks of the Ignatian tradition." The use of creative imagination, rooted in the Spiritual Exercises, is especially important in this. In the Exercises, we encounter Christ by first using our imagination to enter into the concrete reality of his earthly life, meeting him on a deep personal level, so that we are transformed in a profound way by the encounter. Used in this way, the imagination is not a way of escaping the real, but a way of entering into it more deeply and being changed by it. In the same way, Jesuit education must help students encounter the real, especially the "world of suffering and need, a broken world with many broken people in need of healing." We must probe the depths of that reality, thoughtfully and imaginatively, to find "the hidden presence and action of God" and be transformed by it. In summary, then, "in Jesuit education, the depth of learning and imagination encompasses and integrates intellectual rigor with reflection on the experience of reality together with the creative imagination to work toward constructing a more humane, just, sustainable, and faith-filled world."
Fr. General emphasized the importance of openness, flexibility and creativity in this process. This is something he learned teaching seminarians in Japan, where he spent so much of his life as a Jesuit. The Japanese were coming from a very different place, formed by a different culture, so it was necessary to find different methods and models to help them in their growth and discovery. In the same way, our students have grown up in a very different culture from our own, and will require different approaches to bring them to a deep and transformative encounter with the real.
Universality
One great advantage of globalization is that it has made communication and cooperation on a global scale much easier and more available. That has helped us to appreciate much more our common humanity. This new understanding calls Jesuits to a deeper awareness that, in the words of GC35, we "bear a common responsibility for the welfare of the entire world and its development in a sustainable and life-giving way." Globalization also offers us the means to carry out this responsibility by working together on a worldwide basis.
Many Jesuit universities, like their secular peers, are already internationalizing their curricula, their student bodies, and their institutional affiliations, in order to enhance their quality, their relevance and their prestige. As Catholic and Jesuit institutions, however, we need to look beyond that. Fr. General referred to Pope John Paul II's charge in Ex Corde Ecclesiae that "every Catholic university is called on to become an effective, responsible instrument of progress - for individuals as well as for society." As Fr. Nicolás put it, a Jesuit university should "seek to insert itself into a society, not just to train professionals, but in order to become a cultural force advocating and promoting truth, virtue, development, and peace in that society." While Jesuit institutions of higher education have taken this seriously, they have so far done so individually or in loose local or regional associations. We have not yet realized what GC35 called "the extraordinary potential we possess as an international and multicultural body." Therefore, Fr. General challenged us to "more effectively realize the universality which has always been part of the Ignatian vision of the Society." Again he called on the authority of GC35: "The new context of globalization requires us to act as a universal body with a universal mission, realizing at the same time the radical diversity of our situations." That means forming more effective universal networks to address some of the greatest challenges the world faces, and to share resources, such as expertise and libraries, between our wealthier, better established institutions and those that are just starting out in places like Africa.
Fr. General suggested three areas where global consortia of the type he described were needed. The first would be to challenge the growth of what is known in Europe as a "new aggressive secularism," which is militantly anti-religion. This movement, which has begun to affect cultures outside of Europe, is often built on "false dichotomies between science and religion." The second need is for a consortium to analyze, understand and find better solutions to "the world's poverty, inequality, and other forms of injustice." The third consortium would address "global environmental degradation which affects more directly and painfully the lives of the poor."
Learned Ministry
It is also necessary to rethink the implications of scholarship in this highly technological, globalized world. Rather than seeing it as "the production of knowledge," we should understand it as "learned ministry," a term that is common in Jesuit discourse. Even though this work requires a relentless search for the truth, careful thought and rigorous analysis, it is still a ministry and therefore should be "in the service of the faith, of the Church, of the human family and the created world that God wants to draw more and more into the realm of his Kingdom of life and love." It should not be "recondite conversation among members of a closed elite group"; rather it should address serious human problems.
One challenge of intellectual work in today's "knowledge society," where knowledge is the primary source of wealth and power, is that the poor are too easily excluded because they do not have access to that knowledge or the means of attaining it. Therefore our institutions have to consider who has access to the knowledge they produce, who benefits from it, and how we can share it with those who need it the most. Faculty and students should become "voices for the voiceless, sources of human rights for those denied such rights, resources for protection of the environment, persons of solidarity for the poor."
Another challenge related to scholarship today is the growing divisiveness provoked by intellectual movements. On the one side, as mentioned earlier, is an "aggressive secularism" that sees religion as irrelevant at best, or even as a cause of the world's great problems. On the other side is the growth of "various fundamentalisms, often fearful or angry reactions to postmodern world culture, which escape complexity by taking refuge in a certain 'faith' divorced from or unregulated by human reason." What these two movements have in common is that they exclude the possibility of a fruitful dialogue between faith and reason.
Jesuit education, on the other hand, has always been dedicated to pursuing the truth through human reason while maintaining a strong commitment to the faith and the message of the Gospel. This has allowed it to pursue a fruitful dialogue among religions and cultures and the effective integration of faith and justice. The early Jesuits and their students studied classical pagan authors, science, mathematics and the arts, as well as philosophy and theology, which equipped them to bring the Gospel into dialogue with a variety of non-western, non-Christian cultures throughout the world. That tradition is much-needed today. "I believe," Fr. General said, "that our universities are called to find new ways of creatively renewing the commitment to a dialogue between faith and culture that has always been a distinguishing mark of Jesuit learned ministry." As he pointed out, this has been a specific mission given to the Society by both Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict.
Implementation
Conference attendees were assigned to working groups based on language and area of interest. The topics clustered around the three areas where greater international cooperation is needed, as detailed in the second section of Fr. General's talk. Some groups, including the one I was in, looked at the promotion of dialogue between theology and science, and faith and culture. Others looked at issues related to poverty, inequality and human rights. A third cluster considered environmental issues. These groups brought together people from very different cultures, contexts and regions throughout the world and asked them not only to analyze and explore their given topics, but to create truly global initiatives to address them. A number of proposals for consortia, conferences, shared research, cooperative agreements and other structures came out of the groups and are now moving forward.
Fr. General's call for a deep, thoughtful and transformative educational experience, for greater worldwide collaboration among Jesuit institutions around key issues such as secularism, justice and the environment, and for the use of scholarly resources to address pressing contemporary problems, should influence the mission and direction of Jesuit institutions of higher education now and in the future. There are certainly contributions we can make to this at Holy Cross. Most important, the kind of education Fr. Nicolás was talking about as an antidote to superficiality is central to our mission here. As our mission statement says, we believe that, "because the search for meaning and value is at the heart of the intellectual life, critical examination of fundamental religious and philosophical questions is integral to liberal arts education." This is embodied in a special way in Montserrat, the first-year program in which all students participate; but it is present throughout the curriculum. Moreover, community-based learning, our many volunteer service programs, study abroad, immersion trips and other programs bring our students into contact with "the real" and ask them to reflect on it in a personally meaningful and transformative way. As Julianna Stuart, this year's valedictorian said in her commencement address, "this institution taught us how to be uncomfortable. It gave us a gift and a responsibility. And honoring that responsibility requires that we never stop questioning, we never stop listening, we never stop trying for something better than what we are told to accept."
As a small, undergraduate, liberal arts college, we do not have as many opportunities for international partnerships as larger universities do, outside of our extensive study abroad program. However, we have developed a strong partnership with Sanata Dharma, the Jesuit university in Indonesia, including the sharing of expertise, faculty exchanges and sending students there. We have begun doing some projects with Hekima College in Kenya as well. Beyond that, we will look for ways to take part in some of the collaborative efforts coming out of this "Shaping the Future" meeting. Finally, we have many faculty whose research engages important questions of justice, inequality, human rights, peace and conflict, the environment and other issues critical to human welfare; and, particularly through the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture, we have had many events exploring the interplay of faith and reason, and science and theology, as well as promoting interreligious and intercultural dialogue. We will be looking for innovative ways to build on all of these new efforts with the directions Fr. General has established for Jesuit higher education.
Sincerely,
Michael C. McFarland, S.J.
President
October 2010
In the October 2010 Letter, Fr. McFarland discussed the impressive statistics on the incoming Class of 2014, and shared thoughts on diversity on campus as well as the continuing need for excellence in financial aid.
Dear Friends,
Beginnings
August 28 dawned clear and bright, the beginning of a splendid day for the arrival of the Class of 2014. An army of volunteers, including about 60 alumni/ae, stood poised to greet the new students and whisk their (many) belongings up to their rooms in Wheeler, Hanselman and Mulledy Halls. After settling in, the students and their families filed up the hill to the Hart Lawn for the Mass of the Holy Spirit, the formal beginning of our academic year. At the end of Mass, the orientation leaders escorted the new students off to their activities, while the families were left to make their way home. This poignant moment was captured by a reporter/videographer from Newsweek and posted on the magazine's Web site:
http://education.newsweek.com/video/2010/09/13/putting-the-words-in-parents-mouths.html.
The 727 members of the Class of 2014 who arrived on August 28 are a very interesting, talented and diverse group. Their academic profile is similar to that of recent classes, with a median class rank of 8 percent and an average combined verbal and math SAT score, for those who reported it, of 1279. There were 15 more students with our highest academic rating than last year, in part at least because of a new effort to have faculty call admitted students in that category and talk to them about Holy Cross. Racially and ethnically, this is the most diverse class we have ever enrolled. Close to a quarter, 24 percent are ALANA (African-American, Latin American, Asian American and Native American) students, the highest percentage ever. This is two percent above last year's figure and twice what it was ten years ago. Latino students make up the largest group with 84, almost 12 percent of the class. African-Americans and Asian Americans each make up about five percent, while students who identified themselves as "multi-race," a new Federal reporting category, are about 2.5 percent. They are diverse in other ways, too. Almost 19 percent of the class (136 students) consists of first-generation college students, and 64 or nine percent, speak English as a second language. Over 19 percent are Pell Grant recipients, which means they come from low-income families.
Geographically, this class, like last year's, is slightly less diverse than two years ago. Thirty-seven percent of the students in the Class of 2014 come from Massachusetts, while 44 percent are from outside New England (whereas it was 32 percent and 50 percent respectively in the Class of 2012.) Many other schools are seeing a similar trend, with students generally staying closer to home, probably due to the economy. The Class of 2014 includes 179 recruited athletes, about 25 percent, which is typical of the student body as a whole. Ten percent are "legacy" students, meaning at least one parent attended Holy Cross.
Constructing a class to meet the multiple goals we have for academic quality, diversity of various kinds and special talents is a complex task. We are able to get such a highly-qualified class in part because we have a large pool of applicants to choose from. This year there were 6911 applicants, up four percent from the previous year, for the roughly 730 places in the class. Of those, 2450 (35 percent) were originally offered admission. The other factor that affects the quality and makeup of the class is the "yield," that is, the percentage of admitted students who chose to enroll and how representative they are of those selected. This year the yield was down a little at 30 percent, but still reasonably strong. We only took 18 students off the wait list to get the final number of 727.
Financial Aid Costs
The one serious concern is the amount of financial aid committed to this class. This was the second year in a row in which the new class required more financial aid than was budgeted. For both classes, the budgeted increase was set assuming that the "discount rate," that is, the proportion of operating revenue, mainly tuition, room and board that goes into financial aid would remain steady. However, the Class of 2013 saw an increase of 5 percent in the number of students who had demonstrated financial need and therefore received need-based aid; and while the Class of 2014 had about the same number of students with need, those students had significantly greater need on average, which accounted for an additional increase in need-based aid. The poor economy, in which many families suffered job losses or saw their incomes stagnate and their assets, including home equity and investments, decrease in value, was certainly a major factor in these changes.
The increased financial aid for the most recent two classes has, as would be expected, led to extraordinary increases in financial aid expenditures over the last two years. In Fiscal Year 2010, which ended last June 30, the financial aid budget had enough slack to be able to absorb the increase. That is not the case, however, in the current fiscal year, where financial aid will exceed its original budget of $36 million by about $2 million. Some of that overage is due to financial aid commitments where there is offsetting revenue. Correcting for that leaves $750,700 that can be attributed to the increased proportion of students with need and the increased need of those students. Because of the economy we had put aside $1 million as a reserve fund in case financial aid went over budget, so that will cover the current shortfall. However, even if there is no further increase in the need profile of entering students, the next two classes will each require over $1 million more in financial aid than the classes they are replacing, after adjusting for increases in tuition, room and board. Given the continued economic distress of many of our families, the situation is likely to be worse than that. Thus a larger proportion of what we collect in revenue each year will go back out in financial aid, limiting our ability to fund other commitments and to fund new projects and programs to improve the College.
Financial Aid Policies
Our financial aid is so closely tied to student need because of two policies we maintain. First, we are need-blind in admissions. That means that in making decisions on whom to admit to the College, we do not consider whether candidates will need financial aid or how much they will need. Candidates are evaluated based on their academic achievements, intellectual engagement, commitment to service, personal qualities, and other characteristics that enhance the College community.
The second policy is that we meet the full need of all admitted students. We use standard federal formulas based on a family's income and assets to calculate what they are able to pay toward the full cost of our education. When there is a gap between what they can pay and what we charge, we offer a financial aid package to make up the difference. Generally the first $7800 of that, the so-called "self-help" part, consists of $6000 in subsidized federal loans and $1800 in work study. The rest is a grant that does not have to be paid back. For low-income students, some of that grant can come from state and federal funds allocated specifically for that purpose; but most comes from Holy Cross funds, including operating revenues, annual gifts and endowment.
Few schools maintain both policies. There are only 42 others that we know of. They include all of the Ivies, a number of other top schools such as Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Chicago, and Rice, and highly-ranked liberal arts colleges such as Bowdoin, Middlebury, Pomona, Swarthmore, Wellesley and Williams. Boston College, Georgetown and Notre Dame are the only other Catholic schools on the list. There are several prestigious schools that are not need-blind, such as BU, Colby, Colgate, Oberlin, Trinity and Tufts. On the other hand, schools that do not meet full need tend to be somewhat less selective and less well-resourced. They generally use financial aid as a tool to attract students, both to fill their classes and to raise their academic profiles. Thus they offer their top candidates so-called "merit" aid, which exceeds their calculated need, to give them an incentive to choose that school over other competitors. This does not leave enough in the budget to meet the full need of admitted students that are less highly ranked, who most likely have fewer attractive choices. Those are left to make up the difference on their own, whether by taking out additional loans, working extra jobs or finding other benefactors.
The Importance of Need-Based Aid
There are serious questions about whether the two policies of being need-blind and meeting full need are sustainable in the long run for a school like Holy Cross. As long as we are committed to them, there is no clear mechanism for controlling financial aid costs. If the number of students with financial need or the size of their need or both increase faster than our total revenue from tuition and other sources, as has been the case recently, then financial aid commitments will continue to cut into the rest of the budget.
Nevertheless, those policies are important to us, so we are reluctant to give them up. Being need-blind is the fairest way to do admissions. Students are judged on their merits, not on where they come from or their economic circumstances. Moreover, it gives us the freedom to select the best students, those that will make the most of the education offered and contribute the most to the College and to their own communities and to the wider society. We feel even more strongly about the policy of meeting students' full need. Not to do so is to leave families in a very difficult position. Often they can find ways to get through the first year or two, taking out private loans, getting help from family members, working two or three jobs and so on; but as time goes on, the financial situation becomes more and more burdensome, if not intolerable. Schools that do not meet full need generally have significantly lower retention and graduation rates. Many of their lower ranked students who did not get adequate financial aid struggle academically and at the same time find themselves getting deeper in debt and falling behind in other ways financially. Eventually they just give up and drop out. It is not something we would be comfortable doing; and fortunately we have not had to.
In addition, these two policies have allowed us to attract and maintain a student body that is relatively diverse socio-economically, at least for a school of our caliber, and to help the vast majority of students from all backgrounds to succeed. The proportion of Pell-eligible students at Holy Cross, which is about 16 percent for the student body as a whole, is considerably higher than at most elite schools, where it tends to run around 8-10 percent. Furthermore, the number of students who have financial need at Holy Cross, which is over 60 percent, is quite a bit higher than at many top schools, where it is 35-40 percent. This indicates that we still have a substantial middle and working class representation among our students, in contrast to many elite colleges, which have a majority of very wealthy students and a smaller group of high-need students selected because of their athletic ability, racial diversity or other special characteristics. Moreover, our low and moderate income students have a graduation rate similar to that of the student body as a whole, which at 90 percent or more is among the highest in the country, showing that they are receiving the financial, academic and social support they need to be successful.
Throughout its history, Holy Cross has helped many students of limited means who have gone on to be exceptionally successful after graduation. This is an important part of our tradition that we want to maintain if at all possible. Moreover, it is central to our mission as a Catholic and Jesuit college that we provide educational opportunities to students from underserved communities, not only for their own advancement, but also to provide leadership for their communities. The importance of this broad sharing of knowledge and expertise, one of our most precious resources in today's information society, has been emphasized consistently by our Jesuit leadership. It is also essential, both educationally and for the building of a more just society, that all of our students be exposed to people from different backgrounds, experiences and cultures. Need-based financial aid is an essential tool for creating a diverse community where that interaction can take place.
Opportunities for Growth
If our already-stretched financial aid budget would allow, we would like to offer more merit aid in order to increase our competitiveness for some of our most sought-after applicants. We are fortunate that our quality and distinctive mission are attractive enough to draw a highly-qualified student body, including a substantial proportion that are able and willing to pay the full $50,000 per year that their education costs. Nevertheless, we also know that there are many applicants, including some of our best, who are responding to merit aid offers from other schools, including some that are not of the same quality as Holy Cross. There is evidence that we could increase the yield for our top-rated applicants if we were to offer them substantial merit aid packages. For example, in the Class of 2009, we offered significant merit aid to our highest-ranked candidates and saw a yield that was considerably higher than in subsequent years when the budget did not allow us to repeat the experiment. In particular, for applicants with little or no need, the yield was three times higher. As another example, in those few cases where we have established full-tuition scholarships in specific areas, such as the Brooks and Organ scholarships in music and the Bean scholarships in classics, we have been able to bring in truly outstanding students who have gone on to distinguished achievements both at Holy Cross and beyond. With more merit aid, we could certainly raise the academic profile of our student body and our overall academic standing. Furthermore, there is a danger that without further merit aid, we could slip, as the cost of our education continues to rise and students and their families become more price-sensitive.
Strategic Decisions
Financial aid is an essential means for achieving several of the College's most important strategic goals. As the needs and expectations for aid continue to grow, it is imperative that we maintain and increase our financial commitment to it. At the same time, we also have to continue investing in the people, programs and facilities that are necessary to be competitive in attracting the best students and assuring them and their families that the value of a Holy Cross education is worth the price. That creates serious and conflicting pressures on our budget. Cost cutting by itself will not solve the problem. In responding to the current economic crisis, we have already made those cuts that would not seriously affect our quality and value. There is not much left there. To maintain our need-blind and meets-need policies, and possibly to expand our merit aid, we will need additional resources. Much of that will have to come from philanthropy. In the short term we are looking to increase our annual giving for scholarships; and beyond that we need to build a much larger endowment for financial aid. That will be a major focus of our next comprehensive campaign, the silent phase of which is likely to begin in the next year or so.
Sincerely,
Michael C. McFarland, S.J.
President
The next essays, written by Fr. McFarland in early 2011, cover his thoughts on neighborhood conflicts and students' faith lives.