welcome to the new academic year
Aug. 27, 2012
Dear students,
I hope summer for you was a period of new discoveries, rekindled friendships and perhaps some reflection in a quiet place where it was possible not to hear the song “Call Me Maybe,” if only for a little while. Now it is my pleasure to welcome you to this new academic year at Marquette University.
Whether you are returning to campus or here for the first time, your arrival this past week — with the talents, dreams, and vast promise that each of you brings with you — represents a proud moment in the life of this university. The contact you’ll make with a university community devoted to your personal success makes it a time of great expectations, as well.
Our faculty and staff stand ready to engage you in an educational experience that prepares you thoroughly for your chosen career, while changing you personally in ways you previously couldn’t imagine. This experience can’t be a passive one, however. Only by investing in it with your entire mind and heart will you receive everything that this university has to offer.
To help encourage new students along this path, we initiated a new tradition at this year’s Convocation. It’s called the Missioning and it asks students to commit themselves in their own way to Marquette’s mission of knowledge, faith, leadership and service. I’ve come to think that this invitation is something all current students deserve to experience, so I ask each of you to reflect on the following questions and make the answers your own.
- Are you willing to commit yourself to the pursuit of excellence in your studies and in all that you do and all that you are?
- Are you willing to deepen your faith by actively seeking the truth about God and the world in ways that are inclusive of the diversity of seekers around you?
- Are you willing to demonstrate leadership that is both ethical and informed as a member of the Marquette community?
- Are you willing to be of service to others, actively entering into the struggle for a more just society?
A university community bound by this profound Catholic and Jesuit mission can’t help but have a rewarding year ahead of itself. And this year promises to be significant for another reason, the involvement of our entire community in the creation of a strategic plan that will identify our priorities for the next five to seven years. Please know that your voices as students will be among the most important in the process. When the plan is presented next spring, everything in it will connect to the larger goal of assuring you the best possible experience of Marquette University.
God bless you,
Scott R. Pilarz, S.J.
President
Marquette University
Office of
the President
Rev. Robert A. Wild, S.J., to serve as interim president
The Board of Trustees has chosen Rev. Robert A. Wild, S.J., to lead Marquette University as interim president. Wild, who served as president of Marquette from 1996 to 2011, will take over for Rev. Scott R. Pilarz, S.J., who announced on Sept. 20, that after 10 years as a university president at Marquette University and the University of Scranton, he was resigning to pursue other apostolic opportunities.
Father Pilarz will assist Father Wild with the transition, while traveling back and forth to the East coast to care for his ailing father, which he noted in a letter to the Marquette community on Sept. 25. Father Wild is concluding his duties with the Wisconsin Province and will take over as interim president on Oct. 16.
Wild will serve as interim president until August 2014. A new permanent president is expected to be in place for the 2014-15 academic year.
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