I’ve been trying to understand what’s been happening here–how we could be restructuring ourselves with so little regard for our history and charism as we move into the twenty-first century. And, of course, how we are losing one of the markers of that charism, City College.
Not to claim too much for ourselves, but Loyola has had a founding commitment to this region and state, which offered few other opportunities to have a Catholic, much less a Jesuit, education. As an institution, we have also taken those Jesuit values very seriously and tried not just to teach them but to enact them: from our efforts to treat staff justly to SORC salary adjustments, from LUCAP to the evening law program and the Twomey Center. We have tried never to forget our dependence on the people of this city and our need to serve them, too.
With some purposeful policy shifts in the last several years, our student body has become brighter, whiter, richer and mostly from out of state; we have aimed at becoming a nationally-known, elite Jesuit institution of higher learning. But we did keep some visible remnants of our relationship with our poor and under-educated city–including City College, a marginalized division, with some innovative (and not well understood) programs in nursing, ministry, computer information and criminal justice and some (even less well-understood) experiments in online and accelerated learning.
Katrina has clearly offered an opportunity to implement radical changes. We are now reeling from a major restructuring that, while it might reflect the configurations of many successful universities, has been developed with very little appreciation for our particular history and mission and place. Even more disturbing, as the plan is being unfolded (one painful jolt at a time), it’s becoming clear that there has been very little consideration for detail at all. There was a lot more planning and thought in setting up the QEP than has been given to this redefinition of the institution, much less in how such a drastic transition will be executed. Few people who understand how programs really work and what students need were consulted; even the academic deans were shut out from the process.
But here we are. I am particularly saddened because I was part of City College, a part of Loyola that I thought might help maintain our charism and our historic relationship to our city even as the other undergraduate colleges did most of the necessary work of collecting the higher tuitions and profiles that would keep us solvent. The new restructuring pretty much casts all of our part-time adult students into the mix of young folk and wishes them luck. They may do well. They may go to UNO or Holy Cross or Phoenix instead. Whatever. Some of our most promising and carefully structured programs–like LIM or Nursing–may or may not survive the transition. Many of our most capable faculty, unwilling to risk their careers on such an ambiguous future, may go elsewhere.
About all the rest of us can hope for now is damage control. Judging from the inundation of inquiries by former and prospective City College students, many people already believe that Loyola has simply terminated its programs for adults. Correcting that mis-information will be no mean feat, since our enrollments have depended almost entirely on the strong reputation we have earned among our students-in this city and in our extension programs around the world.
It is perhaps not too late for the faculty to have some input about how to mitigate the harm to our programs and students that these unthought-out designs are likely to cause. But even that assistance will be minimalized by the evident desire for speed: to implement everything next month, this summer, this year.
Students in City College, for example, have been routinely advised about their options for several years in advance; adult students plan (and budget) their educations carefully, and that degree of certainty (and efficiency) is how we have competed in a tough market. But we can’t even promise prospective students the same curriculum beyond January ’07-and we ourselves have little clue about how and when such “details” will be worked out.
The loss of City College is one that cuts to the very heart of Loyola University New Orleans and its dedication to the spirit of Ignatius Loyola: to meet people where they are-a challenge that we have tried to meet for nearly a century. If this university will be restructured as others have determined, so be it. But if there is to be any hope for a smooth transition and “buy-in” (as the managers like to say), we are going to need more time to work out the details, to think some of these changes through, to minimize the losses. Indeed, if this train isn’t at least slowed down, we are going to lose a lot more of our valuable cargo–students, faculty, staff, charism–before we ever even manage to switch the tracks.
(Dr.) Barbara C. EwellDorothy Harrell Brown Professor of EnglishCity College
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