News Roundup

From Loyola’s new podcast studio in the College of Music and Media, students have the opportunity to record, produce, and distribute their own podcasts. Students Vanessa Alvarado and Rhon Ridgeway have launched “Being Boss Babes,” a podcast that explores the lives of women in leadership.

Mia X, the legendary Southern rap star, chef, and activist, now teaches courses on hip-hop in the School of Music Industry. Veteran journalist and Times-Picayune / The New Orleans Advocate reporter Will Sutton has joined the School of Communication and Design, and renowned WDSU reporter Gina Swanson is the new Visiting Professional in Residence in journalism. Sutton and Swanson joined the school to lend their expertise in media and diversity in the newsroom.

Madeleine Landrieu, J.D., Dean of the College of Law and Judge Adrian G. Duplantier Distinguished Professor of Law, received the 2019 Hannah G. Solomon Award from the Greater New Orleans chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women in October. This prestigious award is given to a community leader who exemplifies the qualities of Hannah G. Solomon, founder of the National Council of Jewish Women.

Dean Landrieu has spent a large part of her career advocating for improvements in laws and policies that impact children who come before the courts as a result of abuse or neglect. She is a founding board member of the Louisiana Institute for Children in Families, and was instrumental in the launch of Louisiana’s Quality Parenting Initiative and Louisiana Fosters–efforts to raise awareness about the needs of abused and neglected children and their families.

Current CEO of Pathfire, Eckert is a seasoned early-stage business executive. He served as president and CEO of The Weather Channel for 14 years and is the chairman of the NO/LA Angel Network of investors. An active mentor, Eckert has served on the board of the national Angel Capital Association, Start-Up Atlanta, the New Orleans Start-Up Fund, and the Propeller Accelerator.

With $150,000 in new grants from Entergy, AT&T, and others, Loyola students and professors are partnering with local schools, industry leaders, and community organizations to create a new learning laboratory at Mirabeau Water Garden, a FEMA-funded environmental showcase located in New Orleans’ Gentilly neighborhood.

The water garden — part of the city’s resiliency plan — is an innovative stormwater management system that demonstrates how water gardens can help reduce neighborhood flooding and subsidence. At “Loyola Academy,” Loyola students and scientists, together with industry and community professionals, will mentor local high school students and teachers, introducing them to new ways of handling water in our city. The Mirabeau Water Garden project was recently featured in an article from The Hill titled, "Nuns are turning a convent into a wetland to fight flooding in New Orleans.

BY TONYA JORDAN-LOHT

These funds were needed in service of the university’s larger goals—to serve students’ development through authentic inquiry in the Jesuit tradition on an enterprising campus engaged with New Orleans. The campaign's mission ensures the university's ability to provide holistic Jesuit education for the next generation.

Faith in the Future raised $101 million and created more than 100 new endowments which will fund programs, scholarships, and faculty positions year after year. Loyola now has more scholarship dollars to award than ever before, and the campus has benefited from $22 million in renovations and enhancements—with more to come.

The university called on alumni, friends, and supporters to have faith in Loyola’s future. And they did. Nearly 20,000 individual donors gave over 70,000 single gifts to Loyola over the course of eight years. And campaign volunteers worked over 20,000 hours. Because of their faith and support, Loyola students receive an exemplary education and graduate from the university transformed and ready.

The campaign capitalized on the campus’ existing strengths and used renovation and new construction to create spaces ideal for learning and collaboration. Donors gave over $22 million to remake major parts of Loyola’s physical campus and upgrade infrastructure with first-rate equipment and facilities.

MONROE HALL RENOVATIONS Monroe Hall is Loyola’s largest and most multifaceted academic facility. Its classrooms, laboratories, studios, and workshops are home to 40% of all of Loyola’s undergraduate classes. Faith in the Future raised over $6 million for Monroe Hall renovations. Improvements include three new design studios, new laboratories, and two teaching studios with updated projection technology and surround sound. Nunemaker Auditorium has undergone technical and aesthetic enhancements that create an environment worthy of visiting scholars, leaders, and artists who enliven the intellectual discourse of the university and city.

RESIDENT ARTIST PROGRAM Campaign gifts established a new Resident Artist program to attract worldrenowned artists to spend an academic year at Loyola working with students and faculty. Internationally acclaimed violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg began an artistic residence at Loyola in 2016. She established the Loyola Strings conductorless chamber orchestra, leads master classes, gives concerts, participates in Loyola’s Music Industry Studies forums, and works with local high school musicians. After serving as resident artist for two seasons, Salerno-Sonnenberg joined the faculty of the College of Music and Media.

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Community Development (CECD) helps students from all backgrounds explore entrepreneurship and business as a potential career path. Started with $1.8 million in campaign funding, the center and its programs position the College of Business as an integral part of the local entrepreneurial community, training students through experience to launch their own businesses, support other founders with their startups, and create innovation from within large companies.

Available to all freshman, the CECD's First Year Experience course introduces students to the fundamentals of starting a business-- guiding them from idea to soft launch-- and gives them opportunities to consult for working entrepreneurs from the community. Undergraduates from all colleges can also compete for $1,500 in business capital in the annual Pitch Competition. The CECD places College of Business students in Startup Internships with new local companies so they can experience entrepreneurship first-hand and learn how to drive collaborative innovation.

CECD programming available to M.B.A. students includes the Ignatian Consulting Group, where graduate students serve as operational consultants for local startups and businesses to gain professional experience and increase capacity for those businesses. The center also offers a Lean Launchpad graduate course and a week-long intensive IDEAcorps MBA Consulting Challenge, wherein teams of M.B.A. students are assigned to local companies and compete against one another in developing their assigned business.

Campaign donors have given almost $600,000 to create a state-of-the-art professional news studio where Loyola students train to become news and public relations professionals. The Early Studio functions as a “communications hub” where content from experts on campus can be streamed to local, regional, and network television outlets using IP technology. High quality audio connection to radio stations across the world is made possible through the studio’s comrex audio interface, and the facility also features Bonded Cellular technology which allows students to do live, high-definition shots in the field. Other key features include 4K laser projection, a 23- foot cinema-grade screen, 5.1 surround sound, conference-style seating for 60, a podcasting room, and a production area.

Students enrolled in journalism, public relations, visual communication, advertising, and digital filmmaking classes will use the studio as part of their coursework. The space is also rented to outside professional organizations. “The Early Studio is one of the premier educational multimedia facilities in the country,” says Sonya Duhé, the A. Louis Read Distinguished Professor of Communication and Director of Loyola’s School of Communication and Design.

Loyola is, above all else, a Catholic and Jesuit university, and reinvigorating all aspects of mission, ministry, and service were central to Faith in the Future. In service of the Jesuit ideals of academic excellence and concern for others, over $46 million was raised for endowed scholarships, programs, and professorships. And donors have given over $11 million for the new Chapel of St. Ignatius.

CHAPEL OF ST. IGNATIUS The campaign has ushered in a new era of faith-based education, ministry, and service guided by a profound reaffirmation of Loyola’s Catholic, Jesuit roots. Thanks to a leadership gift from the Gayle and Tom Benson Foundation, the Chapel of St. Ignatius will serve the spiritual formation of Loyola students, faculty, staff, alumni, and others by providing a welcoming place of worship in a vibrant Catholic ministerial and serviceoriented community. The Tom Benson Jesuit Center will ensure Jesuit spirituality remains central to Loyola’s identity. The Chapel of St. Ignatius will be a home for Masses and services, individual prayer and meditation, and public events that increase Loyola’s prominence as a venue for interaction within the regional Catholic community.

PROGRAM ENDOWMENTS Opportunities for experiential learning transcend disciplines. Endowed university programs provide annual funding for innovative educational equipment and experiences. The campaign increased Loyola’s program endowments by $5.7 million and students are already benefitting from the expanded guest-lecture series and access to new technology these funds provide. Program endowments also provide real world professional experience by allowing students to attend conferences and present undergraduate research. All of these enhancements allow students to compete nationally with graduates from other top universities. Key programs funded by recent endowments include play therapy training, an undergraduate archaeological dig, and an ongoing citywide study of local bat species.

ENDOWED PROFESSORSHIPS The campaign created over 20 new endowed professorships. The campus community now benefits greatly from newly endowed professors including Thomas Ryan, the Marjorie R. Morvant Distinguished Professor of Theology and Ministry, who coordinates the FaithActs Summer Youth Theology Institute and provides programming for students, staff, and alumni. Todd Bacile, the Clifton A. Morvant Distinguished Professor of Business, is an award-winning instructor whose teaching methods have been highlighted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and U.S. News and World Report. The $4.5 million raised for new endowed professorships and chairs also includes the Reverend Emmett M. Bienvenu, S.J., Distinguished Professorship in Classical Studies currently held by Karen Rosenbecker; and the Augustus Elmer, Jr. Endowed Professorship in Chemistry, currently held by Clifton Stephenson.

EXTENDING OPPORTUNITY Being men and women for others lies at the heart of Jesuit teachings, and Loyola University New Orleans’ mission statement reflects this. The university “welcomes students of diverse backgrounds and prepares them to lead meaningful lives with and for others.” Extending the opportunity of a transformative education to students from all backgrounds was a critical campaign focus, and donors gave over $36 million in scholarship funding.

The largest single gift in Loyola’s history came as a bequest from Maedell Hoover Braud, who gave $10.5 million for endowed scholarships. Mrs. Braud worked in the College of Arts and Sciences for over 30 years and was a strong believer in the value of a Jesuit education. Her generosity will transform the lives of many individual students for generations to come.

Experiential learning, student-centered support, and academic programs that challenge students, all delivered according to the Jesuit value of cura personalis, create talented professionals who think critically, act justly, and live meaningfully. This final result—Loyola graduates transformed and ready—was the guiding goal behind every dollar raised by Faith in the Future.

PAN-AMERICAN LIFE STUDENT SUCCESS CENTER The mission of the Student Success Center is to help undergraduates meet their personal, academic, and professional goals by offering resources and support that ensure graduation and a bright future after Loyola. Thanks to $1.2 million in funding from the Pan-American Life Insurance Group and other donors, Loyola students now have easy access to individualized tutoring, study groups, academic development programs, career services, and other support programs.

WOLF PACK ATHLETICS Educating the whole person is a fundamental tenet of Jesuit education. Vibrant on-campus athletics programs are important ways for Loyola to build both character and community among students. The Faith in the Future campaign secured $1.5 million in funding for the renovation of the basketball court in the university Sports Complex. This gift provided new flooring, new bleachers, and a host of additional facility improvements. This support greatly benefits the entire Loyola community, enriches student life, and improves the fan experience.

Launched in 2018 with $2.5 million in campaign funding, the Advocacy Center reinforces the ongoing and comprehensive nature of advocacy, from the early stages of negotiation and litigation, through mediation or arbitration, pre-trial and trial practice, and finally with appellate practice. The Center builds on the law school’s rich tradition of advocacy within the Center’s five programs by offering an expanded, cohesive, and seamless vehicle for advocacy education yielding stronger and more complete advocates.

• The Becnel Trial Advocacy program prepares students for pre-trial and trial practice.

• The Moot Court program focuses on the legal and factual arguments presented on appeal.

• The Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) program explores negotiation, mediation, arbitration, and settlement discussions to provide for the swift resolution of issues.

• International Advocacy focuses on international tribunals available for disputes that cross oceans and borders.

• The Legal Research and Writing program develops students’ skills in the foundation for all advocacy— the written word.

The Advocacy Center houses a broad array of resources for law students, including core courses, skills courses, and online content to build knowledge and skills. Students can practice their skills in mock trial, appellate, and negotiation competitions, and in their third year, represent clients in one of our eight Clinic programs.

Each competition team within the Advocacy Center partners with experienced practitioners with expertise in the subject matter and style of the competition to serve as Adjunct Professors of Advocacy. Each year, in coordination with Loyola’s CLE Department, the Advocacy Center will host the Fedoroff Lecture to be given by a nationally-renowned speaker on oral or written advocacy.

For over 100 years, the College of Law has educated students in the Jesuit tradition of academic rigor, pursuit of justice, and a commitment to service. These core values continue to guide the law school in preparing attorneys for the modern legal profession. The Advocacy Center is a key component of the College of Law’s strategy to provide a comprehensive education yielding practice-ready attorneys who are well-equipped to succeed in the highly competitive job market for new attorneys.

MISSION BY COLLEEN DULLE

Every day, sometimes twice a day, Jesuits pause to consider the joys and challenges the past few hours have brought. They evaluate the choices they’ve made, ask forgiveness for the places they’ve fallen short, and pray for God’s help to do better. This reflection, called the examen, dates back 500 years to St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and it keeps today's Jesuits grounded in the kind of thoughtful discernment that has characterized the religious order for centuries.

Loyola University New Orleans is now undertaking its own community-wide examen to reflect on the ways in which the university is already living its Jesuit, Catholic mission and envisioning ways in which it could do that better.

Fr. Justin Daffron, S.J., Loyola’s Vice President for Mission and Ministry and co-chair of Loyola’s Mission Priority Examen steering committee, explained it this way: “With reflection being at the heart of Jesuit education, really the Mission Priority Examen is a process that allows us to engage in that deep reflection, deeper thought, and hopefully come up with some findings that would allow us to deepen our commitments towards mission.”

Fr. Daffron recently led St. Louis University through its own Mission Priority Examen, which every Jesuit institution has been invited to do emerging from two questions that Very Reverend Adolfo Nicolás, previous Jesuit Superior General, said that universities should ask themselves when undertaking this process: “Do you want to continue to be a Jesuit, Catholic University? If so, what are the two to four mission goals (and accompanying strategies) that you will prioritize for the next few years?”

The process of asking these questions looks different for each institution. In the United States, each Jesuit school designs a process to reflect and solicit input on how well the school is living its mission and where it needs to improve. At the end of that period, the university draws up a report outlining its findings and the two to four areas of improvement it will focus on. That report receives comments from a peer review team that visits the campus, then is passed onto the regional Jesuit leader, called the Provincial, and on up to Fr. Sosa in Rome. Once the report and goals are approved, the university gets down to business implementing its plan.

For Loyola, a university that prides itself on its boundless creativity and intimate, inclusive community, the open-endedness of the Mission Priority Examen’s reflection stage presented an exciting challenge. While other universities undertaking this process might quietly ask for input from the typical groups of involved students and faculty like the Student Government Association or Faculty Senate, Loyola decided to launch a campus-wide campaign to ensure that everyone’s voice is heard. The steering committee planned listening sessions with students from every corner of the school, along with groups of faculty, staff members, the Jesuit community, alumni, donors, and trustees. They advertised these listening sessions all over campus. (“Oh yeah, dude, everybody knows about it,” my sister, Loyola senior Claire Dulle, told me when I asked if she’d heard about the Mission Priority Examen.) Signs attributed to a “secret society” called 1540 encouraging people to participate in the listening sessions even appeared in the Loyola bathrooms.

It seems that the wide-ranging awareness campaign has paid off: As of December 2019, roughly 450 people had participated in 35 listening sessions, and around 600 more—mainly alumni living outside of New Orleans—had responded to the online Mission Priority Examen survey.

Like the classic Ignatian examen, Loyola’s Mission Priority Examen includes elements of looking back on past actions, looking inward at where we are living our mission well and where we could improve, and looking ahead with resolve to do better in the future. Each of these elements were brought up in the listening sessions and the alumni survey, providing a comprehensive view of Loyola’s mission efforts.

Begin with Gratitude When explaining how to do an examen, every Jesuit spiritual director will say, "begin with gratitude"—or, in the words of Ignatius of Loyola, “render thanks to God for the favors we have received.” The idea is that by recalling the gifts we’ve been given, we will remember that even as we prepare to take a hard look at the places where we’ve fallen short, we are still deeply loved and blessed.

Gratitude has been a key theme of the “looking back” portion of Loyola’s Mission Priority Examen, Fr. Daffron said. “People have spoken about that in different ways: students’ gratitude for the rich experiences that they’ve had working with faculty and staff on campus, gratitude for their friendships, gratitude for the opportunity to be in New Orleans to study, gratitude for retreats, and gratitude for classes that have challenged them intellectually and helped them grow.”

Faculty and staff, Fr. Daffron said, have expressed gratitude for their colleagues, students, and the sense of purpose their work and scholarship at Loyola gives them. Alumni have expressed gratitude for the education they received. “It definitely is something that's emerged across all stakeholder groups and is an important part of what I've been hearing,” Fr. Daffron said. After expressing gratitude, Ignatius says to ask for God’s help to prepare us to look at ourselves and our actions with honesty and humility. For Loyola, a crucial part of ensuring the university was adequately prepared to begin its own self-examination was completing last year’s search for a new university president. Now that Tania Tetlow has been inaugurated, says Dr. Carol Ann MacGregor, vice provost and co-chair of the Mission Priority Examen steering committee, it is the perfect time for the university to evaluate its mission activities. The self-evaluation will conclude just in time for President Tetlow to include its resolutions in her strategic plan.

Looking In In addition to her responsibilities as Loyola’s vice provost and co-chair of the Mission Priority Examen steering committee, Dr. MacGregor is a sociology professor and has researched Catholic education, religious non-affiliation, and the ways religion intersects with civic engagement. With this background, Dr. MacGregor was able to lead the mission examen team to look at how each constituent group at Loyola understands the university’s mission, where it believes the university is doing well, and what it seeks to improve.

The team summed up its findings in a few categories: First, it found that Loyola’s leadership and board of trustees hold that the university’s Jesuit, Catholic identity distinguishes it from other universities and

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are willing to make incremental financial investments to strengthen that mission. The leadership hopes in particular to offer more opportunities for students, faculty and staff to learn about the Ignatian spiritual tradition. Specifically, they hope to offer more opportunities for participation in the Spiritual Exercises, the set of meditations and prayers that St. Ignatius created for the first Jesuits, which less than half of the respondents said they were familiar with.

In terms of academics and campus culture, the survey and listening sessions revealed commitment across the institution to the university’s liberal arts tradition, small class sizes, large number of first-generation students, and diverse student body, but noted that the faculty and staff did not always reflect the same diversity. Alumni expressed appreciation for the Catholic theology courses they had taken, and students and faculty requested that there be more opportunities to study theology and the Catholic intellectual tradition in the future. In addition to making more explicit links between the school’s diversity and mission and strengthening the theology course offerings, university leaders are considering how to introduce Jesuit values in first year seminars in order to expose new students to the Jesuit tradition.

Students consistently pointed to service trips and service learning courses as strong points in Loyola’s mission work and hope to increase both the number and accessibility of service opportunities. “People really see walking with the poor and marginalized as being central to Loyola’s identity,” Dr. MacGregor said. One challenge facing students, she explained, is transportation to New Orleans’ vulnerable neighborhoods where students want to serve, so her team is considering ways the university can support transportation to service sites.

The university also evaluated its relationship with the Archdiocese of New Orleans. The local Catholic community, respondents said, benefits from ministers educated by the Loyola Institute for Ministry and from justice initiatives headed by the Jesuit Social Research Institute and the Stuart H. Smith Law Clinic & Center for Social Justice which advocate for and serve marginalized communities in the area. Despite the good these institutes do, they have little name recognition among students, so the university hopes to increase awareness of these mission-focused organizations. Perhaps most obviously, Loyola’s mission is supported by the Jesuits on campus, so the university hopes to find ways to increase their presence, even as the number of Jesuits in the United States declines. Some ideas the university is considering include a speaker series or assembling a pool of potential spiritual directors to lead community members in the Spiritual Exercises. The Jesuit community has requested that Loyola support its vocation efforts, encouraging young men to think about becoming Jesuits themselves.

Next Steps In the next few months, Loyola will consider the many suggestions that were raised in the listening sessions and mold them into a set of priorities and action points for the school, which will then be reviewed by AJCU and Jesuit leadership. Despite this focus on resolutions, Dr. MacGregor said, the Mission Priority Examen is not a problem-solving exercise; it is a self-evaluation undertaken in the spirit of Jesuit discernment, which begins with an understanding of who each person was created to be.

“It’s not like, ‘Oh, we have a problem with our Jesuit Catholic identity, let’s get together and brainstorm ways to solve it,’ ” Dr. MacGregor said. “It’s more about, ‘What do we do really, really well? What do we love about ourselves? What are we trying to do for students? What do we hope for alumni? Who do we want to be?’ ”

The end of Ignatian examen invites each person to “resolve to amend my life with the help of God’s grace.” These resolutions are sometimes very specific and sometimes more general, according to what the retreatant needs, but always with the understanding that growth is incremental and that they will evaluate their actions and re-evaluate their resolutions the next day, or at the next examen. In spring 2020, Loyola will work to develop its own resolutions, deciding on general focus areas and specific action points. The university will not attempt to meet every need at once, but will commit to incremental progress that will be evaluated in a few

years, when the peer review team returns to see how the university has done. In the meantime, the question to guide the university’s discernment process will be the same question Loyola, following the Jesuit tradition, guides its own students to ask: