Cover Story

Finding Marquette

Provost John Pauly committed his first year on the job to deep exploration of our academic identity. 

By Dr. John J. Pauly

Back when I was dean of the J. William and Mary Diederich College of Communication, the toughest question a prospective student ever asked me was, “What makes Marquette special?” What indeed?

Thousands of research universities, liberal arts colleges, technical institutes and community colleges now compete for students’ attention. Marquette’s tradition of Jesuit education lends it some measure of distinction (more on that later). But there are 28 Jesuit universities and colleges in the United States, as well as some very good Catholic colleges, including Villanova, St. Thomas and that little place down the road in South Bend, Ind. Similar universities, similar courses and curricula, similarly trained faculty, similar aspirations to teaching, research and service. What makes us so special?

If anyone ever needed to answer that question, the provost does. Prospective students are not the only ones who want to know. So do their parents. So do the faculty, administrators and staff we hope to hire (and their asking often signals that they are just the sort of people we are looking for). Trustees want to know, as do accrediting bodies, donors and alumni, not to mention foundations, grant agencies and the media. In my first year as provost, every one of these stakeholders has asked me some version of that question, with varying degrees of urgency and curiosity.

So I decided last fall that I had better school myself in my new responsibilities. I told each dean that I wanted to spend a day in his or her college, to meet faculty, students and staff, see our facilities firsthand, and hear concerns and questions. I also spent a day in the libraries and Graduate School and a half day with staff and administrators in academic support offices such as tutoring, International Education, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Educational Opportunity Program. Plus two days total in the Helen Way Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, just because it is so big. I did not visit the College of Communication, which I knew, top to bottom, as its former dean. All told, my journey took more than 12 full days, starting with the libraries in August and ending with the College of Nursing in January.

 It proved well worth my time as well as all the energy that faculty, deans and staff put into arranging my visits. Along the way I deepened my knowledge of each college (and met many remarkable colleagues) and began to detect some family resemblances across the colleges that constitute a distinctive and special Marquette approach to higher education. In particular, I noticed three habits of head, hand and heart. First, Marquette’s colleges are all committed to some version of engaged learning, in which faculty and students try to wrap the theories they learn around real problems in the world. Second, Marquette students quickly develop an organizational as well as a theoretical intelligence; they take full advantage of the many opportunities for leadership in academic programs and student affairs and in the process become adept at working effectively in the company of others. Third, a genuine commitment to personal ethics and social responsibility continues to distinguish a Marquette education. Alumni frequently express thanks for the ethical compass that Marquette taught them and say that within their organizations they are often known as the people who ask the difficult but humanly necessary moral questions. That commitment continues today, with students and faculty working in every nook and cranny of the Milwaukee community and increasingly seeking international opportunities for service and ethical leadership.

Let me share with you, then, a glimpse of what I found in those weeks of intense conversation and in my subsequent work with faculty and deans. I will even give away my conclusion, in order to spare you the suspense. In my 30 years in higher education, I have never worked at a university quite like Marquette. There is indeed something special happening here.

Engaged learning is my umbrella term for a style of education that I found everywhere I turned in my trip. Professional groups such as the Association of American Colleges and Universities now strongly advocate for just the sort of approach that Marquette faculty have cultivated for years. This contemporary movement within higher education hopes to energize the classroom, reconnect universities to the communities they serve and encourage new forms of faculty-student collaboration. It rightly focuses on student learning rather than on teaching per se — on our ability, as faculty, to help students marshal what they know in the service of the world’s needs and accept responsibility for crafting their own education. It also breaks down older, artificial distinctions between teaching and research. Engagement requires research; any systematic study of the world, in any field, demands rigorous and appropriate methods of investigation. I believe that the recent trend toward engaged learning moves American higher education closer to the position that Jesuit education has claimed for centuries. Jesuit universities prepare students to be men and women for others. From that basic philosophical commitment, much follows.

This approach goes by several names in Marquette’s colleges. Engineering calls it discovery learning, a way of bringing multidisciplinary teams together from day one to solve problems and improve products. Business calls it applied learning, as in its Applied Investment Management or applied economics programs. Counseling psychology emphasizes the continuity of research-based clinical practice and practice-based research. The College of Health Sciences emphasizes science in the care of others — in the alleviation of human suffering from addictions, strokes, speech disorders, neurological dysfunctions, and physical disabilities. This same approach drives the work of Marquette’s many clinics — in dentistry, law, speech and hearing, psychology, counseling psychology, nursing, and perhaps, in the future, physical therapy. It can be found everywhere in Marquette’s nationally regarded service-learning courses, many housed in the College of Arts and Sciences, in which more than 1,300 students enroll each semester.

Increasingly, this work of engagement occurs upon an international stage. In the past two years, the College of Communication has sent theatre students to Dublin, Ireland, to perform the world premiere of an original play that an Irish playwright based upon their workshop improvisations in Milwaukee; sent faculty and students to teach backpack journalism techniques to 30 students at St. Xavier College in Ahmedabad, India; and now sponsors a four-week summer intercultural multimedia course in Cagli, Italy. Engineering students have designed a bridge for a Guatemalan village, then traveled to Central America to work side by side with the villagers to build it. Medical brigades that include students in biological sciences, nursing, social and cultural sciences, and other disciplines have spent each winter break providing basic health care to rural Hondurans.

Such work requires organizational intelligence as well as knowledge of one’s discipline. Marquette students learn how to work effectively within society’s professions and institutions and even how to build their own organizations as entrepreneurs. The leadership skills developed in student-run organizations make a difference, particularly the remarkable work at the Alumni Memorial Union, where a relatively small staff of full-time professionals coordinates the work of hundreds of part-time student employees who basically operate and maintain that building each day.

Acquiring organizational intelligence means learning firsthand how small-group dynamics, professional norms and bureaucratic structures shape day-to-day decisions and choices. Marquette faculty find innumerable ways to help their students develop organizational instincts. Faculty push students into the world to help them sharpen their interpretive skills against the rough surfaces of life. Dentistry students in a neighborhood clinic must learn strategies for promoting better oral hygiene among families that may have been indifferent to such practices. Student teachers are assigned their own small after-school classes in reading and mathematics at the Hartman Literacy and Learning Center. The students who spend a semester at the Les Aspin Center in Washington, D.C., learn the arts of everyday politics firsthand in what is arguably the nation’s best Capitol Hill internship program. The Law School encourages students to think of themselves as lifelong participants in the civic life of their communities and the nation by inviting experts and community leaders to campus to discuss issues of transportation, politics, crime, education, technology and media. A management professor assigns her students to a cross-national work group, matching them up with students in India on a joint software development project. Marquette student entrepreneurs from every discipline enter an annual business plan competition, learning how to fashion organizations of their own to design, finance and market new products and services.

Through all this activity runs a profound Catholic ethical and social conscience — a fundamental recognition of the goodness of God’s creation and a humble acknowledgment of the ways in which we are constantly implicated in one another’s lives. Moral reasoning claims a place of honor and importance in every classroom discussion and field experience. Much of the credit for this orientation goes to the humanities and social science departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, which contribute so much to the University Core of Common Studies that every student is required to take. That college proudly accepts as part of its mission the preservation of the long traditions of human understanding embodied in philosophy, theology, literature, history and politics. I was also struck, however, by how easily faculty across all the colleges accept that sense of ethical and social responsibility in their own professions and how genuinely they encourage it in their students. Chemists, orthodontists, accountants, physician assistants, public relations practitioners, nurse midwives and clinical psychologists all participate, with equal enthusiasm, in this work. Faculty and students in Marquette’s graduate programs think of themselves as being called to special positions of responsibility and leadership within their professions.

Shortly after I became provost, a student at a public forum asked me what dreams I have for Marquette. I do dream, of a university that stands unapologetically on its own terms, unafraid to claim who it is or explain why what it does matters, respectful of its own traditions and alert to what the contemporary world needs from it. But the provost’s larger role is as the keeper of others’ dreams — as the person who leans forward to catch the whiff of possibility in the air and who urges, celebrates, supports and protects those who imagine the world anew each day. My trip to the colleges showed me what stuff Marquette is made of. Honestly, who would not want to be the keeper of dreams such as these?