Hello and welcome to the Providence College Podcast; my name is Joe Carr. This
is a special edition, as our guest is Father Brian Shanley, the president of
Providence College, recording this today as a video in addition to the podcast on
July 1st. A couple of things will happen with respect to Father Shanley. He will
hit thirteen years as president of PC, and he will begin a six-month sabbatical.
Father, let's begin by talking about that latter point. How did the sabbatical come
about, and what are some of your plans? Well I I know a lot of other college
presidents, especially in the Big East, and a few years ago the president of
DePaul said to me that he was taking a six-month sabbatical and I said how'd
you pull that off and he said well I told the board that if they wanted me to
keep going that I needed some time off and then he told me another guy that I
know down at Loyola had negotiated a six-month sabbatical
at the 10-year mark. And I was in my 10th year, but we were in the middle of a
campaign there are too many things going on so I filed it in my head and said I
should have negotiated a sabbatical. When I got into my third term as president
and I've been talking about it with the board, that at some point I'd like to
step back and recharge and take a break and the stars seem to fall in alignment
right around now because we finished the capital campaign. We finished the
centennial of the college. We went through the reaccreditation process,
and that went well. I'm rotating off a couple of boards that took a lot of my
time, from the Big East to accreditation. And I suddenly saw a window starting
this summer or where I thought, you know, I could leave right now, and there are
great people here. We're gonna finish the strategic planning process probably this
summer, or the fall. If I'm ever going to get a chance, this is the window, and so
for the last six months or so I've been kind of planning this time, and it still
looks like the right time for me, and I'm really excited about it.
So only 12 people have sat in your chair, so certainly your
story is distinctive. There are things about it though that are sort of
quintessentially Providence College, and I think one of the things that comes to
mind is the multi-generational aspect of your story. Your father was a PC
graduate; your mother worked here. Tell us about your parents and your other family
connections. Yeah, so my dad came here as an Army veteran after the
Second World War, and he grew up in in Dominican parish in New Haven, St. Mary's.
And so the story I tell, I don't know if it exactly went like this. When my father
came home from the war, went back to the parish, and the Dominican said to him you
should think about Providence College. So I don't think he applied to any other
school. He got in, obviously, to Providence College and the GI Bill was what really
changed his life and the life of so many people, and even the whole families.
Because, I was looking at, my father was a newspaper reporter after he left
Providence College, and I have his old clippings at home. And we had family in
this weekend for my niece graduating. And I was looking at some of my father's
columns, and one of the last ones he wrote was a tribute to his mother. And so
he interviewed her, almost in a mock interview. And she told her story to
him, and she said I only went to school for three years. She was born in Longford,
Ireland in farm country, and she said then I had to work. And she said I
delivered milk. And so my father's parents had very little education. My
father finished high school here, and then if it weren't for the war and the
GI Bill, my father would probably never have gone to college. Instead, he ended up
here, got a great education, he was an English major. He went to the Columbia
School of Journalism, came back to Providence, and was a newspaper reporter
for 15 years. And then I think when my twin and I were born, he decided with
five kids he needed to make more money, went into advertising. And when my mother
had us and we were in school, she went back to school to get a librarian's
degree, a master's in library science at URI. She worked at the Spanish Town
Library for a while, then the Providence job opened up and she was 25 years
working as the cataloger here at Providence College. So between my dad and
my mother, I guess I was fated to come here. But I've had lots of family here. My
niece just graduated. I have two nephews who have graduated. I have another niece
who's here and in continuing ed. I have a brother who graduated from here,
so we've had, this has been a very meaningful place for my family. Well your
mother was certainly familiar to many of us, a generation or more of PC students.
Somebody who was so always around in the library. It's worth
pointing out too that Duffy and Shanley, the business your father founded with
Mr. Duffy is still thriving, doing very, very well. Yeah, Dave's
a PC grad, and you know my father's advertising firm was kind of like the
Mad Men of the 60s. So this is in the 60s, and their big client was Zayre
department stores. And my father was the account exec for Zayre, and when Zayre
decided to shift its advertising account, that firm that my father worked for
basically was like in shock. And my father decided, I need to reinvent myself
And he didn't really know what he was gonna do, and he ran into Dave Duffy and
Dave said you want to share office space? And, the next, a year later Duffy and
Shanley is starting and still going strong today.
I've heard you say that you didn't really expect that you would become a
Providence College student. Tell us about what led you here as a student in the
late 70s. Well when I was in high school, I was really good at school, and I
thought I could go anywhere I wanted. I had a really good GPA, I'm a good test
taker. I had the brochures for Ivys and all this stuff. And going into my senior
year, my parents sat me down. The summer before my college senior, excuse me, my
high school senior year and had, what in my mind, for the rest of my life I've
always referred to as 'the talk,' and I can see it visibly today. I'm sitting in the
living room, my parents were sitting across from me and my father was the one
doing the talking, as usual. And he basically said, look, Brian, if you want to
go to some of these fancy schools that you're looking at, here's how much money
we'll give you and you're gonna have to earn the rest and take out loans. But he
said if you go to Providence College, because your mother gets free tuition
there because she was faculty member, we will pay the room and board so you get
out of here and then we will pay for your law school or help you pay for law
school, which was my goal at the time. And I remember sitting there, thinking to
myself, my father is making eminent sense. And I still remember one thing,
my mother said to me: "They have a great Honors Program at Providence College."
You're gonna get a really good education there. So, as I reflected on my parents'
offer to me, and in those days there was no real merit money. If your family could
afford it, you were gonna pay. And so I scrapped my plans to go to a
big shot school, and settled in my mind to come to Providence College. And I
thought I was bigger and better than Providence College, and I was bowled over
when I got here to realize that this was the perfect place for me. So it was
divine providence in hindsight, but at the time I remember being disappointed
that I couldn't, or that I was not going to go to some of the schools that my
friends were going to go to. But I ended up getting the best education of anyone
that I knew. And as you said before, it was during that time when you realized
that God was calling you to the priesthood and to the Dominican Order. And you've characterized that
as having been a surprise to you. You said you were thinking about law school,
and then all of a sudden that a very big turn. Yeah, I came here wanting to be
to be a lawyer. I wanted to change the world. get into politics. Actually my
nephew Evan is kind of living out what I thought my life was gonna be like and he
went through here, poli-sci, went to law school, now he's in the he's a state rep
That might have been my alternative universe life but what happened to me
when I was here is, I started to get a little more serious about my faith but I
still didn't think I was going to be a priest. I just started to go to church a
little bit more. The Dominicans that I met were incredibly impressive to me as
preachers and one in particular, Tom Coskren, was my first theology professor
here and he was amazingly smart and he took an interest in me and he's
the first one, sort of somewhere in my freshman year, he said you should think
about being a Dominican and I remember saying to him
"Thank you, Father. I'll give that some thought, but I don't think so." And I won't
go through all my trials and tribulations but I waxed and waned for
the whole time that I was here. There were moments when I thought the
Dominicans were the thing I was supposed to do and then there are moments when I
thought and, "I don't think so," And I literally went right up through my first
semester senior year still not sure which way God wanted me to go and ended
up joining the Dominicans and here I am. Some of that contemplation certainly
happened in this space where we're sitting right now the Center for
Catholic and Dominican Studies when we were students it was a primary chapel. Do
you remember anything about in your prayer or worship and in this space, as
you were, as you were considering this vocation? I can remember a lot of
brilliant homilies here. Father Heath was certainly a memorable preacher.
Father Cunningham, Father Coskren, and just a lot of the Dominicans that I got to know.
They just really ... I'd not heard sermons like I heard when I was sitting here and
that made a deep impact on me and I used to stop, especially when I was wrestling
with God my senior year. I lived on Veazie Street and I used to walk home from the
library past this chapel and very often I would just sit in the dark in here and
just say to God, "Just tell me what you want me to do. You're driving me nuts
right now." And I told this publicly so I'm not telling tales out of school —
I used to stare at that crucifix right there. It's the same one that was always
here and I would say, "Would you just nod your head? Tell me!" And I tell people that
you know, we often look for some kind of what I call a 'burning bush' moment, where
you get the voice in the cloud, you know, "I want you to be a priest." And instead
what happens is, God talks to us in much more ordinary
and quiet ways, and as, the more I reflected, not having a voice from the
heavens, it was like I began to see little signs in what was going on around me,
things that I read. I remember once something Father Ertle said to me when I
was talking with him about this. He was the chaplain at the time and I just
began to realize, no, I think this is what I'm supposed to do and you know, people
always ask you, "were you certain?" and I said, "No, I wasn't certain. You don't have
to be certain. You just have to believe that this is what God wants you to try."
And, so I did. Your connections to PC remained intact in the early part of
your career. You worked in Residence Life here. You were a member of the Board of
Trustees, but then, in 2005, you're president, the 12th president of the
college. What sort of characterized PC when you became president? What did you
see as the strengths and the challenges you were facing? Yeah, when I
became president it was a pretty big surprise to me. I knew I was in the
running but I thought somebody else was going to get it and I still remember
getting the phone call. And what they tell you, they sent me to Harvard
University for a school for new presidents and they said that your first job
when you become a college president is to assess your institution. The worst thing
you can do is go in right away thinking you know exactly what this institution needs.
So I did spend my first year assessing here and trying to figure out
what are the things that were going well, what were the things that were not going well,
what personnel I thought were strong. I had to make a couple of
decisions about some VP positions and you know, I could see at the time that
that fundraising wasn't near where it needed to be and so fast forward 13
years later, we're really good at fundraising right now. I don't think we
were when I started and I think it was because we didn't invest and so that was
one of the things that early on was a big learning curve for me because I'd
never had to raise money before so that piece of things, I thought, was something
that we really needed to invest in. You know, I think the the curriculum ...
We had not been able to revise the core curriculum in 15 or 20 years and so
trying to lay the groundwork for that early on, as you remember, it took us
five years to agree on something and that was a project I thought: I better
try this now when I'm a new president and they there's not enough ill-will
against me that I might be able to get this thing through. So I think was
probably the academic piece, I think it was the fundraising piece, and also you
know admissions. You know that's been, because we're a tuition-driven institution,
that's always a concern for a college president, is "how are we doing with
admissions?" And, you know, we've had some ups and downs in that but we're doing
really well today. It's seen you, the College and the
country, in fact, and the world, weathered an economic downturn and then we moved
toward 2011, which seems to me, was a turning point in many ways — a new
strategic plan, the launch of the Our Moment fundraising campaign, which turned
out to be a tremendous success. What were some of the dynamics at play there when
the college leadership was making decisions about taking these big steps forward?
Yeah, I think in the aftermath of the economic downturn, everybody was just
trying to hold on and I'm proud to say that we didn't lay anybody off and we
kept hiring faculty so that you know one of the things I'm most proud of is that
we've hired over 65% of the faculty since I've been here and we have a very
strong faculty and that was a period where a lot of colleges, particularly if
you were endowed, heavily endowed and reliant on that, people were laying
faculty off, they made a lot of cuts. You know, we had to tighten our belt but we
got through without having gouged ourselves in any way, so it was like, as
we came out of that downturn and things started to look quasi-normal again,
you could see a future where like, "Okay, now, we need to go forward with this fundraising."
You obviously weren't going to start a capital campaign in 2008 or 2009.
So, as the economy started to return to normal,
we were able to start planning for the future of Providence College and
that's what we've been celebrating the last year so is. We've accomplished a lot.
The result is really a college transformed.
Yeah. What are some of the things you think about first, when you think
about the progress. You mentioned faculty but over the most recent seven years,
what comes to mind? Well, the academic buildings, having spent a lot of time in
the Ruane Humanities Center and having David McCullough back who did the
dedication there ... The fact that we have that building, which every single
Providence College student goes into when they're freshman and sophomore,
that sense of continuity, and the beauty of the building, you know, one of the
things we said at graduation is that you guys take the Ruane Center for granted
because it's been here the whole time you've been here, but five years ago,
it didn't exist, so the Ruane Center and sort of,
you know, the Ryan Center for Business Studies is another. I've considered that
building as such a beautiful building and the business school has grown since
we've been here and it's one of the challenges we have is in this
environment: the liberal arts people feel a little bit beleaguered because the
number of majors is going down, the number of business majors is going up, but again
all those business majors are going to Ruane for two years and taking Western
Civ and they're taking theology and philosophy and they're getting this
well-rounded education and the building is beautiful and it makes a huge statement.
When you drive up Huxley Avenue now and you see this beautiful new rink,
this unbelievable stadium and then, you see the Ryan Center,
now this beautiful circle that looks like a million bucks
and that now that Huxley is gone, behind there, the campus really feels like one campus,
and I think, you know, the visuals coming in right now are just amazing and
I look out my window every day and I see the Ruane Friar Development Center being constructed,
I walk past the new Science Complex every morning going over
to the Priory and I've walked through it. It's gonna be spectacular and it's just
I just walk around and go, "this is amazing." And you know, I was in Concannon
at lunch today with you, and I was thinking about, I think about Bill Concannon every
time I go in there and it's like, that was the first big project. You know,
we used to have a fitness center in the basement of alumni that looked the same
from 10 years ago when I was here. When I came back, I'm like, "well, we got to do
better than this." So I'm, just the transformation is the most obvious piece.
It is. It is stunning. I still have trouble getting over the
disappearance of Huxley Avenue the idea that that just ... Oh and that softball
field looks great now, and these kids in Guzman have no idea how good they have it.
You mentioned construction that's
underway right now or ongoing. The Science Complex just outside,
Ruane Friar Development Center and the first stage, the first part of
the Ruane Friar Development Center I should say, that's the the construction
project underway, still a lot to happen there. Another strategic plan imperative
was diversity. You have described that as a work in progress. So, when you look at
sort of the near-term goals you have and the things you hope to see accomplished
before very long, what kinds of things come to mind?
Well, this class that we've just recruited is the most diverse class in
the history of Providence College. Over 19% of the incoming freshman class are students
of color. When I first started, that number was 8%, so we've gone from 8% to
19% and we've become more diverse and ... what you realize in, in the, in the work
that we do is that numerical diversity is one thing but inclusion is something
very different. You can have a high number, but if those students don't feel
like they're really a part of the community, then you haven't achieved your goal.
And I think what we've discovered is, we've been successful with diversity
but we're still working on inclusion and that's a work that we're doing in
the classroom, it's in the residence halls, it's in our workforce, it's with
our professoriate, so that's a work, that's an ongoing work and it's, it's America.
And we have the same tensions and challenges that that our country does
and one thing that is really salient in all this is that the fastest-growing
population in the Catholic Church and in the United States is the Hispanic
population and now our numbers there are up, and the future of our church, and
of Providence College, is tied to that population group and so I see that
number just going up in the future and it's something that has to be an
intentional focus of our recruitment efforts. What are some of the biggest
challenges in being the president of Providence College in 2018?
I would say most college presidents would tell you a lot of it's money. You know, they do
surveys with college presidents: "What keeps you up at night?" And we're very
healthy financially but I always were ... you know, I wish we had more resources
and, as we look to our future, trying to get to the point where we have an
endowment that can support more of what it is that we're trying to do here so ...
the financial piece, I do worry about admissions all the time, even though our
applications have been going up every year and our yield is going up and
everything looks good. Still, the northeast college-age population, which
is our home market, is in decline, so that makes you worried like how we bucking
this trend, and how long can we continue, you know, to do that going forward.
I worry about the old buildings on this campus. We've managed to put in a lot of
new buildings and we've renovated a lot of old buildings but I know, you know, in
the next three to five years, we've got to upgrade our residence halls, you know,
if I walk into Joe's or Guzman where I was as a freshman, that kind of looks the
same and this furniture's maybe a little bit different, so we're gonna have to
take a look at the part of the campus that used to be the Chapin hospital and
go, "okay, how are we going to invest, and what's our strategy going to be for
enrollment going forward. You know, America's, in
an interesting phase of life and we see some of the same political tensions on
campus that we find in our country. You know, there's tension about what does it
mean to be Catholic these days. There're people that love Pope Francis and the
people who think Francis is a little out there. I happen to be a Pope Francis guy
myself, so you know there are lots of things to be concerned about but that's
just part of being a college president. You're supposed to worry.
There's also a dimension of spiritual leadership in a role like yours. What, what are your
thoughts on your role as, with respect to pastoral care for our community?
Yeah. I mean, I try to say Sunday Mass on a regular basis with the students because
I think it's important for them to see that we're all priests and preachers
first of all, and I love to preach so any chance I get to do it like, at
Commencement, it's a great blessing for me so I think it's important for me
to continue to have that pastoral presence. I wish I had more time for the
nitty-gritty of it all but the job is pretty consuming and I think you
have to have some sense of spiritual leadership because this is, in the end,
it's about getting people to God and education is a really important place
with everything that's happening here and even based on my own experience,
I know that if we can hook you when you're in college, you're likely to stay
in it for a while. If we don't, it could be until you have kids or you get
married or you know, baptisms, that people fall out of the church while they're
here people fall into the church while they're here and that's as important
to us as getting you out with a degree, is getting our students in line with God
You said you love to preach. I don't know anybody who would dispute the notion
that you're a particularly gifted preacher. What is it about that thing you love?
How do you feel when you're preaching? It's the happiest thing that I do
but it's, in some ways, it's harder than it used to be for me because
I know people don't see that, but I don't have the time that I used to
have to think things through so I've gotten better able ...
It's like I tell people, "I just need an idea. I need an angle." And when I get one,
I know how to kind of flesh it out and do it that way but I wish I had time to
preach more because it is, for me, the most enriching thing that I do and then,
God bless the Holy Spirit, comes through sometimes when you're there. You know every
priest says the experience of sometimes giving a homily that you thought wasn't
very good and somebody says, "I really needed to hear that," and then you think
you're brilliant and nobody says anything. It's like, "Okay it's not my
control, it's the Lord, so." You have a number of outside interests. You read an
awful lot, you like to play golf, you mentioned you're planning a trip with
your brothers ... martial arts. Tell me about that
aspect of your life, how you came to that interest, and what does that do for you?
Well, that goes back to my time at PC as a young priest. When I came back here
after I was ordained, I was put in charge then Steven Hall as the hall director.
I was teaching philosophy and I got involved in a lot of clubs and orgs on
campus. I was the Rugby Club adviser for a while and but one of the clubs that
approached me was the karate club. There was a club on campus and they asked me
if I would be the moderator and I said sure and I said, you know what, I'm gonna
I'm gonna try a class because I've always been kind of interested in that
and so I took a karate class for the three years that I was here and by the
end of my time here, there was a recent grad who was the instructor and
he and I became very good friends and he was branching out from karate to a thing
called jeet kune do, which was Bruce Lee's invention, and so he taught me some
of that while he was here and then when I went to grad school, I found an
instructor in Toronto, and every Tuesday and Thursday night, I'd go to Jeet Kune
Do class about a mile from where I was living, and then when I got to Washington,
I found another Jeet Kune Do instructor and studied it for five years or so. So I
did that for almost ten years, and then I had a issue with a disc and I said, you
know what, I'm gonna stop fighting and do something that doesn't put that
stress because jeet kune do is a lot about fighting. We were sparring all the time
but I missed it and so I walked away from it for a while
and then I saw a flyer at Catholic you for an obscure martial art that I'd
never heard of called Xing Yi and it said this is an internal martial art so
I said well I'm gonna try that and it turns out I was the only one that
persevered through the whole semester with the instructor and we became
friendly and he gave me some extra time. And, you know, I I really like this so he
left school and I found a teacher and so I started studying Xing Yi, and I've
been studying Xing Yi for probably 20 years right now, and when I got here, I
found this great martial arts school with my teacher, Wen-Ching Wu, so he
segued me through Xing Yi and then he taught me a thing called Ba Gua,
which I've been doing for 10 years, for the last five years is another martial
art called lu hay bagua, and I'm butchering all the pronouncements, and it's just for
me, it's a form of exercise ... It is ... I take a private lesson with him. He's one of
the he's like ... I tell people it's better than paying for therapy, he's such a good
guy, and it's trained me to use my body differently. I think I'm healthier as a
result of it. It's very challenging, the movements and getting them down right so
for me, it's just a chance to do something that's healthy and that you
know makes me more supple and stretched. And I have a heavy bag in my
basement and I tell people I pound it several times a week and it helps me
with my stress management. On the subject of things that are physical let's talk
for a bit about sports which you and I rarely have a conversation that doesn't
involve sports, a big interest of both of ours but Friar sports. There's been
tremendous success in the area since you've become president. What's the, what's the
basic value of having varsity athletics program like this one?
Well, I always answer that question by saying the primary value has to be for
the student-athletes. If that weren't the case, there's, we have no business having
sports teams here and I really believe and I've seen it playing a varsity sport
at a high level like we do here provides character benefits for our
student-athletes that they would not get doing something else and I've seen it
time and time with what you learn about teamwork, what you learn about discipline,
what you learn about making sacrifices, what you learn from a good coach, about
life? Talk about transferable skills because most of these kids are not going
to play pro sports but they're gonna take what they learn from their athletic
experience and add it to their life, to their kids' life. Most of them are gonna
go on to be coaches and that's such an important role in a young person's life
is finding a good coach. So first and foremost, I think there's educational
benefit for our student-athletes Secondly, it provides a marketing tool
for Providence College, which is huge. I mean, for a lot of people, when I go
around, I'm always wearing PC stuff. It's like, "Oh you guys play basketball."
They don't know anything else. They just know we play basketball or if
they're hockey fans, they're like, "Well, you won the national championship." So I think
that high-powered sports and particularly basketball, because of the
television contract that we have with Fox, the fact that you know we get the
name out there, that we're in the NCAA tournament, what is that worth from a
marketing point of view, that we're on national television playing in the NCAA
tournament or that Ed Cooley is splitting his pants at Madison Square
Garden on again, on national TV, the most-watched championship in Big East
history, so there's tremendous marketing benefits that come from this and finally
there's a sense of it builds community. Some people stay attached to PC
through following sports and some folks only come back to campus because they
want to watch a sporting event and they see what we've done and
say, "Wow, can I get more involved?" So I think athletics brings a number of
really important benefits to PC. I've heard you referred to coaches as being
teachers. The specific context I remember is Nate Leaman. You talked about what a
great teacher he is. Could you talk a little bit more about that and what
a coach's role is, in terms of teaching and developing a young person? Yeah when
I first was here Dave Gavitt was a great mentor to me about athletics and his
mantra always was it's "The coaches are the most important
decisions you make, because they're the ones touching lives of the
student-athletes," and when I sit in on sometimes on recruiting, if they think
it's gonna help that the president is there, and I do this for any of the
coaches but more for Nate and Ed, I always look into the parents' eyes, I say
"The most important decision you make is not about the college president or
even the school. It's who do you want your son, in your son's life, 365 24/7, and
what impact do you want it to have on them and I say to the basketball player I
would trust Ed Cooley with my kid and I say the same thing with Nate. I've seen
what Nate has done for these guys. So you see them as teachers of their sport but
also, they're both really good men, and so are our other coaches but there's this
more to a student-athlete than an interaction with a coach, than just, "I want you to run
this play over here or get it to the corner over there or there's a lot of
life that goes on and then eventually some big decisions that they may have to
make about their own future so coaches are really the most — it's people because
I also think Bob Driscoll has been a huge part, the leader of what we've been
able to accomplish in basketball and you know, in my time here, we've had some low
moments where we weren't real good in athletics, at least not in the way that
we are now, and now we're consistently across the board and sustainably good
Bob was here then, Bob is here now and Bob has grown
and he's become a great athletic director but again, his coaches trust him.
And they trust his leadership so I think I don't take any of this for granted
because I know it could go away and the other piece that needs to be told, too, is
the commitment we made for facilities, When we were hiring Nate, the big
sticking point for him was that rink. We hadn't really renovated that rink since
we built it, and now we've got one of the best rinks in the country and the
facilities that you know we've been able to get the Dunk redone, this new Ruane
Friar Development Center, for Ed, it's going to be a game-changer on the
recruiting front, Ed's going to have all the toys now so and the philanthropic
support that has made that possible is amazing, again, compared to where we were
ten years ago, so when you get really good facilities and really good coaches
you can be really good and we are. This idea of coaches as teachers kind of
brings us to where I wanted to land this discussion — fundamentally, this is a place
of teaching and learning. You mentioned the faculty, two-thirds or
so have joined the faculty since you became president 13 years ago. When you
think about what's happening today in our classrooms and laboratories at PC,
what how proud are you of the level of the scholarship and the teaching
and learning activity that you see? I think teaching and learning here has
changed so much from when I went through because the model when I was a student
was you sat there and you wrote down notes and then you kind of memorize what
you wrote and spit it up on an exam and you might have raised your hand to ask
some questions but it was fundamentally a passive model of learning. The teacher
is the source of all knowledge and throws it out there to you and you try
to get as much of it down as you can and while a great lecture of a brilliant
teacher is still an incredibly powerful and educatable moment, what has
happened on college campuses, and you see it here, is that
active learning on the part of students is really the critical piece for the
transformation that you want, so our professors are still doing a lot of
brilliant lecturing but in the sciences, for example, especially the new building
where I have, it's experiments, it's hands-on, it's doing research, and our
science programs are very strong and you see the interactions between the
professors and the students. You see them working together in labs that and
they're writing papers together and there's just a lot more than ... you think
of biology and sitting in the old owl law and Albertus Magnus and looking at
slides and writing notes down. Now it's very hands-on. The business school, you go
in that school, and that's the beauty of Ruane and Ryan and the other classroom
buildings that we, we built, including the Science Complex, we've been able to build
to the specification of the teachers. What do you want?
What kind of spaces? And you go into Ryan, you see all these classrooms would that
you can be, flip immediately and say, "okay, I want you working in a group," like,
"You're gonna trade this stock over here, this for you," or "you're gonna give me
advice over there," and you can do that the thumbs flip around and you can use
the electronic media. You can get Bloomberg in there there's just so much
more stimulation and interaction and the beauty of all these new academic spaces
is it we can tailor it to what they want. And students involved in real research.
Exactly. Conducted by faculty members. Really interesting stuff. Oh yeah, yeah.
It's very different from the more passive model that that we went through
And you're one of the teachers so you teach a class every fall semester. What
do you get out of that? It's like therapy for me because it reminds me of the
central activity of Providence College, which is teaching and learning because
those two things go together. If the students aren't learning, you're not
teaching. You may be talking but you're not teaching. So I have carved out, after
the first couple of years when I thought, I kind of know what I'm doing, I can get
back in the classroom. I teach ten kids in the honors program
and it's a required ethics course because we still, all of our students
have to take ethics, and for me, it's the high point of my
week because I just love being able to shut the door, go into my conference room,
which is where I have the class, and go, "I don't need to think about the college's
problems. Let's talk about the meaning of life.
Because that's where Aristotle starts and says, "What would it mean to live a life that
turns out well?" and that's the fundamental ethical question and because
they're honor students, they're really really smart, and they come prepared and
you know, it's just, for me, it's a great experience and personally very
enriching and rewarding and it's one of the things I'm gonna miss the most about
being on sabbatical is not teaching but I'll take it up again when I get back.
Last question: what are your fondest hopes for PC in its future? You know I
see us on this trajectory where I've been saying this for my whole time
I want to be in the same sentence as Georgetown, Boston College, Notre Dame,
Holy Cross, Villanova, Providence College. When you think about, you know, leading
Catholic schools that we're in that first sentence of those kinds of schools
and I've seen us make a lot of progress to get in that sentence these days and I
want to, I want to solidify that. I want us to be a nationally recognized
premiere Catholic liberal arts college and I think we're on that road but we're
not there yet and that's my hope and prayer and dream going forward is if we
just keep moving in that direction because I think we've made a lot of
progress but as David McCullough said in his address yesterday there is no
foreordained future. History is made by the character and choices of human
beings and that's the beauty of human history and that's the future of
Providence College, is the character and choices of the people here who are part
of it and hopefully we'll get the right characters and make the right choices.
Father, thanks for your time. I enjoyed this very much. And thank
you for joining us. Providence College podcasts are available all the usual
places and they're on the colleges YouTube channel. Feedback is
welcome at podcast@Providence.edu. For our producer, Chris judge, I'm Joe
Carr, until next time.
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