 Good afternoon. Good evening to all of you. My name is Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies and this afternoon we have a workshop which is the One of the one of living theology workshops that we offer every semester and this one Is entitled and you have to say carefully How do we serve the underserved? We did unfortunately have a misprint in one of our advertisements and it came out as how do we serve The underserved the undeserved which is only one letter wrong Makes a huge difference But raises a question for us about the relationship to the underserved and the undeserved So I'm just going to make a few remarks before I hand it over to our panelists here to my right is Melissa Kwan who is director of the Center for social impact and To her did I say to my left to my right and to her right is Mary de smith who is the Who works in the eyes that works in the associate dean in the office of residents life. I think I got that right Good close enough. Thank you So I'm just going to introduce this and hand it over to them and my job really is to just quickly make you think about the the relationship between Catholic and Jesuit institutions like and including Fairfield and The tradition of Catholic social teaching which really this question lies behind all three of our living theology sessions this semester I find myself starting the conversation each time in the same place Which is to ask people to think about the meaning of the term the common good When you say that generally people often think about what's sometimes called a utilitarian notion Which is the common good is the greatest good of the greatest number if we can get the greatest good of the greatest number Then we are serving the common good. This grows out of 18th century classical liberalism Which today has become the kind of rampant individualism, which is the bugbear of global society in The tradition of Catholic social teaching. This is not what the common good means the common good means the good of the whole community measured by the degree to which it prioritizes the needs of the least fortunate members of society so it's more about the overall health of the community and The health of the least fortunate is the place where the greatest attention needs to be paid Now clearly this is going to be a particular challenge to private colleges and universities of any kind But especially to private colleges and universities in the Catholic Tradition who followed the principles of Catholic social teaching and maybe particularly the Jesuit institutions all 27 of them It's a challenge for two groups of people Especially which are probably not the people you see on this panel the first people. It's a challenge for is senior administration Because they have the issue they have to struggle to balance Recognizing this responsibility and exercising fiscal responsibility For the institution and it's a difficult balance to hold The other people for whom it's a challenge really is the majority of the students on this and other Catholic and Jesuit university campuses which on the whole is not the financially or economically disadvantaged groups of people so To to the average Fairfield student or the average student of another Catholic or Jesuit school talking about Shall we say talking about affirmative action for the underserved? Can be understood To some extent as a kind of threat to the To the economic Viability of the school for those who don't fall into that category the money It's a it's you know how you divide the pie is is important so For Catholic schools in general this is a difficult issue It's in Catholic social teaching, but that's not just something popes dreamed up in the 20th century It goes back to the Hebrew prophets and sometimes I I wonder about a prophet like the prophet Amos back in the Eighth century before the common era in the kingdom of Israel going to the wealthy people of Israel and saying to them I Hate I despise your feasts I Have no time for your solemn assemblies But let justice flow like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream Which I think translates to? Let's not be too concerned about what we look like. Let's not be too concerned about our rituals our Presence of ourselves. Let's be concerned about the impact of our need to be a just institution So I got a couple of other thoughts which I may get to later on for now I'm going to turn it over to the to the panel and I think what they're going to do is talk I don't want to tell you what they're going to do I Looking forward to what they're going to do But I think that they will talk about what should be done and perhaps they'll also talk a little bit about How we are actually doing now one little housekeeping thing before I sit down Since this is a webinar. I'm speaking now to the those of you out online since this is a webinar You have the opportunity to raise a question at any moment in the presentation But you can't do it by voice you've got to do it by typing it into the Q&A Section on your screen and I will be monitoring those questions and I will gather the questions and we will Consider as many of them as we can at the end of our session, which will go for about an hour So without any more ado I turn it over to Melissa, thank you. Thank you, Paul So I'm a bit of a rule follower So we we approached this discussion by tackling each of the three questions that Dr. Lakeland forgot that he had posed in the event description And those three questions are What are Catholic colleges and universities doing to shoulder their responsibilities to the preferential Preferential option for the marginalized What are we doing at Fairfield University? And what could we do better and how can we buck the national trend towards a preferential option for the rich? So we're going to take those one by one and we're going to do a little bit of dividing and conquering a little bit of tag teaming As we move along And hopefully launch us into a fruitful discussion Where we will solve the grave and persistent inequities in us Catholic higher education. I'm sure So the first question what are Catholic colleges and universities doing? So I'm just going to start with a little bit of framing and then we'll move into some more kind of practical responses to the question But in his book just universities Catholic social teaching confronts corporatized higher education Gerald Byer argues that because Catholic thought strongly affirms the right to education for the poor It is important to ask whether Catholic colleges and universities have successfully provided opportunities for advanced learning for those from economically disadvantaged backgrounds And he argues that in a knowledge-based society such as the United States where bachelor's degree holders earn 65 to 75 percent more than high school graduates the right to education must include higher education And he connects the right to education to the Catholic social principle of solidarity in that to be in solidarity with the marginalized It is the duty of Catholics to create the conditions that enable them to become full members of the community And it seems that many founders of Catholic colleges and universities agreed at least in principle The founding missions and current stated missions of many Catholic colleges and universities express a commitment to providing access to economically disadvantaged students Fairfield University's founder, St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, intended for Jesuit higher education to be inclusive of students from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. Initially it was to be free and Jesuits were quote To beg for the support of their works This commitment was restated by the Superior General of the Society of Jesus Peter Hans Kolvenbach in 1986 when he said Jesuit schools should embody the option for the poor both in the students that are admitted and in the type of formation that is given. Early Jesuit colleges and universities were founded in city centers and it's common for us to hear or to say as we're telling the story, the narrative of our institutions that we were largely founded to serve new immigrant populations. Keeping tuition costs low was aided early on Jesuits don't cost as much as lay persons, but of course that's changing now And of course the landscape of higher education in the US has changed dramatically and this includes of course Catholic and Jesuit higher education The higher education boom that followed World War II and through the early 80s led higher education to really digging itself into a hole Bob Dulia and who's Vice Provost and Heather Geiger who's Director of IT Finance both at Seattle University wrote in an article about the challenges and changes in higher education That during this period of rapid growth higher education was both a contributor to and a beneficiary of a rising tide In this context the adaptive strategy for colleges and universities was to climb the ladder By raising tuition and enrollment institutions could increase revenue, quality, reputation, market share, alumni, loyalty and fundraising And this strategy became the default for higher education and it has been the norm for so long that institutions find it challenging to think in different ways So we now appear to be stuck and trapped in this vicious cycle that ties increased costs to increased quality to better reputation etc So going back to Bayer again in the book Just Universities, there's lots of statistics in here And he reports that in Catholic colleges and universities more students from the top 1% than the bottom 60% are enrolled in elites such as Notre Dame, Georgetown, Boston College and Villanova 95% of US colleges and universities are beyond the reach of low to moderate income students 1 in 9 young adults from the lowest income quartile will attain a bachelor's degree or higher compared to 8 of 10 from the top income quartile Nearly 50% of all US students are Pell eligible but are significantly underrepresented in enrolled populations Meanwhile, many schools use financial aid dollars to draw high performing and or affluent students rather than for students with the most need And these realities all run counter to a mission focused on increasing access to underrepresented students including low income first generation and students of color I'm going to turn it to Meredith to move into Catholic social teaching in the practical So those are some powerful numbers and powerful statistics, Melissa So just to reframe that question, why would this be problematic for Catholic social teaching and for Catholic higher education There are a couple of frames of reference that we can look to In Catholic higher education is an amorphous group. We're lucky that we work at a Jesuit institution whose mission is very clear in some respects And we get a lot of direction from the Jesuits through the four Apostle preferences and through their general congregations But one thing to note is that tension that Paul mentioned is between the fiscal responsibility of the institution and its fiscal viability And the actual what's happening on the campus and I think that's a critical point to think about There are a couple of other things of note. It's what's actually happening in our campus communities There are national trends and national narratives. There's a general decline in students being interested in supporting and being with others And contributing to service. It goes back to that classical liberalism that rugged individualism I'm focusing on myself Other trends include seeing students and families as customers rather than students as potential future community members, future citizens in a civically responsible community Questions and costs of purpose around higher education. There's a lot of rhetoric out there that talks about is higher education worth the price Well for some students it's not even attainable because of the cost And then just thinking through institutional cost structures through some of my doctoral studies it becomes very aware that a lot of our operating budget comes from Room and board which is one of the areas it's important that students are living on campus and living in this community And then one other thing to note is students expectations. They're expecting to become their in classroom experience to be academically rigorous But their outside of classroom experience doesn't necessarily look at the whole person One other thing to note is in terms of our carriers of institutional mission there has been a decline and clergy on campuses And folks who are familiar on a deeper level of what working at a Catholic or Jesuit institution means doesn't mean that we're going to fully follow Or fully be very strict about what we do and how we do it but it does mean that we're in conversation So a couple of things just to reiterate. Dr. Lakeland talked about what the meaning of common good is in a higher education setting It's not common good for the most people. It's common good for the community And sometimes that utilitarian definition can get promoted and we lose sight of those underserved students Another piece is looking at who the institution was designed for. Fairfield when it was founded was founded for immigrant communities For GIs. Dr. Lakeland you might inform it was designed for young men Our institution clearly has broadened in scope and who we serve and who comes in through our front gates And then just another final note. How are we contributing to poverty? Some students make tremendous sacrifices to attend college. They are a loss of a revenue source for their families And then we have other students who are incredibly resourceful that revenue source isn't lost But they are really having a very different educational experience They're coming here and hustling and getting what they need to get done but they're not having the same collegiate experience that we're calling the Fairfield experience So I'll turn it back over to Melissa to kind of give us a brighter picture of what Catholic universities are doing well And then we'll dive a little deeper on some of the things we're doing here at Fairfield Thank you So what are Catholic colleges and universities doing? So in preparation for the event I skim the past five or more years of Conversations Magazine which is a bi-annual publication that focuses specifically on Jesuit higher education My brisk research indicated that we give a lot more attention to formation of students with a commitment to serving or advocating on behalf of the marginalized and oppressed Then we do to providing access to the marginalized But you know in Byer's book he references a few practices employed by Catholic colleges and universities and colleges and universities really broadly And they include things like increasing need-based aid Employing need-blind admissions Moving to test optional admissions criteria which many many universities are doing right now And being intentional and strategic with recruitment and going Recruiting from schools that serve predominantly low-income students Many schools including Fairfield University have special programs designed to increase access to underrepresented students These programs tend to provide access for small cohorts of students and often include what we refer to here as academic immersion programs Where there are intensive orientation programs held during the summer to help students prepare for college work And we'll share more in more detail about what these programs look like at Fairfield University a little later And Byer points out that a good number of smaller lesser resource Catholic colleges and universities admit many more low-income students than the wealthiest Catholic colleges and universities Examples include LaSalle University, Loyola University of Maryland, Mount St. Mary's in California And a small Jesuit University in Jersey City that some may know now from March Madness I don't know anyone in our small auditorium here, St. Peters of course, Go Peacocks So a little bit about St. Peters, nearly I think about 2,300 undergraduate students at St. Peters so it's small Nearly 60% of St. Peters undergrads are Pell eligible It's among the most diverse universities in the United States, it's a Hispanic serving institution And more than 50% of undergrads are first-generation college students And in one of those conversations magazine articles that I looked at the author who's a professor of sociology at St. Peters Attributes these statistics to the faculty and administrators commitment to the university's mission To educate a diverse community of learners and to promote justice in our ever-changing urban and global environment So then I thought to look up St. Peters in U.S. News and World Report to see how they ranked Just out of curiosity not that I place a lot of value on these rankings and I compared it to Fairfield University So Fairfield University had been number three in regional universities north and St. Peters is number 58 Fairfield U is number three in best undergraduate teaching and St. Peters is number 24 Fairfield is number 19 in best value, St. Peters is number 7 But this is the interesting one for me that kind of jumped out In terms of top performers on social mobility, Fairfield University ranked 155 and St. Peters ranked number 11 So obviously there's a give and take in all of this And the other thing that colleges and universities do and that actually falls into my area of work is in community engagement And we often have robust campus community partnerships that are aimed towards improving educational outcomes for young people In the communities that surround our institutions and in some case might even serve as pipelines to the institution So these range in development and purpose everything from tutoring programs that we were all probably familiar with To more extensive partnerships that can as I said create a pipeline from the community to the campus Although those are rare So I don't know if you want to talk about universal design or move on I think we can move on a little bit So more about what we're specifically doing here at Fairfield Our colleagues in the enrollment area have a number of different scholarships for some of these community partnerships Including tuition for local communities, the Bridgeport scholarship And the community partner scholarship Those scholarships are great opportunities Those students tend to commute because and we all know gas costs a lot these days But because it doesn't include room and board on some of those programs We have an incredible partnership with Upward Bound And we're seeking new ideas are proposed Bellarmine College modeled after the Rube College at Loyola University to increase access Additionally for our students who are currently on campus We have a pre-college arrival program called Academic Immersion which serves about 30 students Who their high school experience may have had a set of standards that hasn't prepared those students properly for college level work We also have mentoring programs, the Care Personnel Mentoring Program for underserved students And then one final note around what we're doing well I will say as a campus community when we are aware of a student crisis We do have incredibly caring team members who will figure out a way to make sure that student has access to what they need But sometimes there are students who are just on the cusp of the crisis and they're not able to communicate that need So you know that speaks to we could cover what we could do better and some things to think about We are not a need blind institution because we financially can't be at this point But what does that mean? So we have students who we do who are able to access, get full scholarships But they and their families may be one crisis away from needing to drop out of schools I mentioned this before that loss of revenue Many of our students have off campus jobs and balance a lot So they're not able to experience the community or the sense of belonging that other students have As an institution we can make a stronger commitment to representation And ensuring that our campus community is able to support these students It's not just tuition, it's books I know there's a student who their calculator broke the day before an exam And that's a $150 piece of equipment that they need So it's just thinking through what are some of these ways, what are these structures and systems that we have in place that are barriers to our students' success and achievement I think we're on the way there is looking at improved visibility and support of our commuter students We have almost 400 commuter students, undergrads, full time on this campus And ensuring that this campus is a place where they are visible, valued and welcomed We just recently opened a new commuter study collaboration space in the Barone Campus Center Again, it doesn't go far enough, but it's a start And then there's a lot of our commuter students who are also in STEM and nursing, very science heavy majors It's thinking through how do we support these students as they're also supporting their families So those are just a couple of notes of things that we can improve upon There's also a lot of conversation over the word rigor on the national scale And how that word can sometimes be misconstrued and really not help our students put their best foot forward We let them know, oh, you're not academically prepared What is that set a student up for? It doesn't set them up for success When most of these students are very resilient and very prepared Just another quick note, the student experience looks different There are perceived differences for students of different identities Yes, we're a Catholic institution, but how do we look at other holidays? Do we have halal or kosher meat options in our dining facilities? Do we support students as they're celebrating their various faith traditions? They may not be the Catholic tradition It's also awareness and appropriation of other traditions In terms of some of the out of classroom weekend behavior It's appropriation of traditions that are not students own I know we always put additional staff on for Cinco de Mayo Because students are celebrating it even though they have no idea what the origin of that holiday is And what the meaning of that holiday is So I think that's just important to note And then just lastly, we do have crisis resources and emergency resources But they're not necessarily visible if that makes sense So we support students who are housing or food insecure We find workable solutions for financial contingencies But these are things students wouldn't necessarily know And then access for first gen students who may become from a home that English is not their first language Do we have translation services available? So I think those are just some things that we can think about And potentially do better as we move forward and we think about how we serve the underserved I'll turn it back to Melissa to talk about that preferential option for the rich So the final question How can we buck the national trend towards a preferential option for the rich? So 10 or so years ago might have been more Dr. Leglen probably knows more exactly But Fairfield University, the former Fairfield University president, Father Jeffrey Von Arks Advocated that the then 28 U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities band together To make a commitment to need-based aid He advocated that the 28 make a commitment to not stoke competition At least among the 28 U.S. Jesuit colleges and universities by shifting financial aid from need to merit In order to compete for students And unfortunately he was not successful And I think Meredith alluded to this in her comments So we're now kind of in a situation where we can't be need blind But is this something we could revisit? The ability to act in solidarity as a unified front is a power that Jesuit colleges hold as a consortium You know one of the few consortiums within U.S. higher education And the other one thing I want to talk a little bit about here It's not really a solution unfortunately Not bringing a ton of solutions to the table here today It's something that I was introduced to recently And it's a concept coined by scholar Gloria Latsen-Billings And it's a concept of the education debt Which really refers to the cumulative effect of educational marginalization She draws on an analogy with the national financial debt Comparing it, making a distinction between the national debt versus the national deficit So the national deficit is based on short term outlook You could have a year when the national budget is balanced and there's no deficit However at the same time that you have no deficit the national debt continues to grow exponentially Because of the cumulative effect of deficits in past years So Latsen-Billings offers this concept as a contrast or really a metaphor for the achievement gap Which is, we hear this all the time, it's the achievement gap that we're aiming to address But the achievement gap is also a snapshot It places the emphasis on individual student achievement and not systemic problems And the interventions then that we develop to address the achievement gap Tend to focus on programs that while important and beneficial tend to help a small number In proportion to the full scope of the need So focuses on programs and curricular interventions And these unfortunately fail to address the cumulative debt that has built up over hundreds of years of educational marginalization So even the greatest access and affordability programs You know, largely address the symptoms They serve a proportionally small number of students They target deficits in students and individuals as opposed to inequities in the system And they don't fundamentally change the way that we do business Which Latsen-Billings argues is necessary to address the education debt So she writes in this paper Imagine that an examination of the achievement performance of children of color Provoked an immediate reassignment of the nation's best teachers to the school serving the most needy students Imagine those same students were guaranteed places in state and regional colleges and universities Imagine that within one generation we lift those students out of poverty And so I guess I offer a launching off question then since we didn't answer it So how would we want to imagine or reimagine Catholic higher education Possibly using this metaphor that Latsen-Billings offers us That's our question people They're both looking at me so You know, it's funny you should put it that way It goes back to something that we were calling was talking about earlier And that is that the origins of Fairfield are very much were exactly this That when Fairfield's first undergraduates arrived at the university Almost 75 years ago now in 1947, September 1947 This was a freshman class They were more slightly more than two-thirds of them were first-generation students From Bridgeport, New Haven, Waterbury sort of places you would imagine Coming to a university with a very low tuition charge And the other bunch were GI veterans on a GI bill But these students, their parents were mostly people who worked in construction work Or not professionals at all People who were probably many of them functionally illiterate And they scraped together enough money to pay that very small tuition to get their kids into the school There was no room on board in those days, there was no way to stay Five or six students from Waterbury came to school every day for the whole year, the first year Driven by a faculty member who decided he was going to drive them backwards and forwards And if that was the only reason, that would be a good reason for Carmen Donorama's name to be on one of the buildings on campus Because it was an extraordinary thing to do And here's the interesting thing, these students graduated in 1951 And two-thirds of them went into medical school or law school or one of the other professions And the other third did one thing or another But it was an extraordinary move in upward mobility, social mobility I mean, whether they earn more money or not didn't matter so much But educationally and professionally, there was an extraordinary development And this was due to these founding Jesuits and a few faculty And so that makes you think, obviously it's a different place now, we're not going to do that again But it does make you wonder what is the potential impact upon the students that we're talking about And we're able to have them to find them and to finance their education appropriately There's one question here that I think is a pretty good question That sort of looks sideways at what we're saying, but it's useful So largely what we're talking about here is what we ought to do if we could about addressing this problem But the question I have here is, well, can we look at this pragmatically for a minute If we could attract and we could make it financially possible For a much larger number of people, less advantage, less socially advantage people To attend Fairfield University, would that change the school for the better or the worse? What would it do? What would it do to the school? I have a thought, but maybe you do I mean, I'll be honest, I'm a little biased, not to use that word But I know from research, we know students who are in environments that are more representative of a global community, of a diverse community Everybody benefits in that community That said, there's some key lines that we need to be mindful of in terms of we don't want to tokenize our students who are from these experiences We don't want to rely on these students to educate us who potentially are in the majority about their experience But I know, at least speaking from my own experience, going to an undergraduate institution that was more religiously diverse It was all women, so it wasn't gender diverse, but it was religiously diverse, culturally diverse You know, students from different opinions, backgrounds, everything It disrupted who I was as a person and thus helped me grow And I think that's also part of what we need to disrupt a little bit in terms of going to college is not going to It shouldn't be easy from an intellectual standpoint But it should challenge us and help us grow And I think that's part of, we should constantly be in conversation The early Jesuits were always in conversation with people in places that were different And I think it would be going back to our roots a little bit if we were able to do this I agree with that and I think I would say though that if that were the case we would be required to change We would have to And I know Bayer makes the point in the book that even if tuition were zero Students would still face struggles in our community as it is And I was reading recently, someone shared with me a reflection written by a teacher, a Jesuit at Loyola Chicago Who works as part of a Rupe College and so Rupe College is similar to The Bellarmine College that we're looking to create here is modeled on the Rupe College concept And his reflection was about a conversation that he was having with one of the Rupe students And he asked the student, well when you graduate from a Rupe College are you going to come to Loyola? And the student kind of looked at him and kind of laughed and said, no, I don't belong there And so I think we need to really, we need to think about that because we need to make it We need to become an institution where students belong and feel that they can belong So it's a both and. We would be changed, of course, but we would be required to change in order for that to happen You know, I'd add one element to this. I've over the years often bored people by talking about how the university educates obviously in the classroom But to some degree, maybe even more, by what we teach students by the way we live and express ourselves And I've summarized that sometimes by saying, you know, I think the purpose of our educational purpose overall Is to model for students the kind of society that we hope they will contribute to creating in the years beyond graduating And one of the things that is so evident in our American society today is that we all live in silos Now you can pick on the immensely rich who live behind gated communities, but that's just the extreme example We tend to associate with the people we agree with, live in neighborhoods of people with similar lifestyles and so on And the structure of American education now with the very elite colleges and places like ours and state institutions And community colleges and so on sort of replicates that So if we were able to do something to significantly increase the number of under-served students on the campus We weren't making them into tokens, right? We wouldn't just be, we'd be doing what we're supposed to do But we'd also be doing something to ameliorate this very corrosive siloage, silo which is that the word? Siloing of, silage is something different, siloing of American society So I think it's good for the individual students, it's good for this community, it's good for the mission of Jesuit institutions And it's actually good for, it would actually be good for American society right now So there was another question here which I think it's a background question to what we've been talking about But I don't know how easily we answer it and that is, a lot of what we're saying here goes against the grain of fiscal pragmatism What would it cost us to be a sign of contradiction? That's another question from the ether Anyone want to take a stab at that? That's such a tricky question A university's budget should be a reflection of their mission, one's mission and action But the other piece is universities are very complex structures We are complex and there's a cost associated We are a relatively young institution at, oh shoot I should know, well 75 years since we welcomed the first incoming class But at the same time things cost money I have to say kudos to our colleagues in facilities, they make sure we don't have a lot of deferred maintenance Where some of our colleagues at other institutions, name names up in New Haven But have a lot more stonework and things that cost And you don't mean Albertus Magnus, do you? No I don't mean Albertus Magnus, but pieces deferred maintenance that cost a great deal of money that can Not that that institution will ever be in a crisis point But I think there's the very real cost of attending college What students are paying in the overall cost are two different things The tuition does not cover fully believe it or not even though tuition is very high the cost of attending And that's due to really wonderful fiscal planning on Fairfield's part So that's such a tricky proposition to think about But one thing is we look at investing in our students now with the hope that they will give back later As opposed to seeking out those who will give us money now but it's not sustainable for the future So I think we have to think about paying now or paying later Just in general, so I'll stop talking, those are my thoughts It's a hard, difficult, difficult question why, which is why it's really hard for senior leadership I was going to ignore the question but I didn't I think it's also, I mean I've been thinking about this for a while now But it's also not just about financial costs but other costs Because I don't really understand how our current, and I'm not saying Fairfield University General Higher education in the United States, how our measures of prestige and quality Do not go hand in hand with a mission to serve the underserved Not with the way that our, not with the inequities that exist within education in the U.S. in general You know, the measures of the SAT scores of incoming students or the GPA Or all of these things just don't jive with the inequities that exist within K through 12 And so I think that, that whole thing needs to be bucked as well And there has to be some sacrifices or willingness to make some sacrifices there too I think Yeah, I'm trying to imagine too, I mean I think the question is not just about financial issues Right? And I think the question might be looking for an answer that says Well there might be some advantages to doing this Maybe even some marketing advantages to doing this But that will be a difficult issue too How do you market your commitment to serving the underserved Without getting a kind of, not in my backyard, response from those we traditionally serve It's a huge challenge It is, it is And yeah, just to think through, I hate to use that marketplace It's a noisy, you know, our students including underserved students They have a lot of options to choose from And part of it is because we're not potentially marketing to those students They're choosing other institutions, unless making those institutions better places For some students, you know, I don't have a good answer for that question I think we can lean in a little bit more on our Jesuit Catholic history And be okay with it and be okay with the tension I know I love our families and I've had conversations with parents and students It's typically our students are cool with the differences And it's sometimes the families that are not as understanding And I like to look at things from a positive intent I think everybody means well But meaning well and acting well are two very different things Yeah, I do have a sort of, as it comes back to a point that Melissa made That there was a time ten years or so ago when the former president tried to do something about this And I'm not really going to focus on the challenge here Which obviously turned out to be difficult And I think that year we had our lowest enrollment for many years But the fact that the association of Jesuit colleges and universities would not get together And decide to let's get on the same page here All right, let's set a modest total to begin with But let's commit to it That's I think extremely disappointing I know that Jeff was disappointed Anyway, I have another question here So this question from Barry Ryan Who I want to save if I read this question and Barry will laugh He is a good friend of Fairfield University But here's the question There are two Catholic universities in the Fairfield area Fairfield and Sacred Heart Just walking around the campuses Fairfield seems so white, Sacred Heart, so diverse Is it admission standards? Is it admission standards of accounts for this? Or is it a commitment to Catholic social teaching? We should probably ask the people at Sacred Heart about that But do you want to, does anything come to mind? I want to make a guess on that really I don't I shouldn't say this But Sacred Heart in terms of its proximity to our wonderful neighbors in Bridgeport It's, you know, it goes back to potentially marketing as well You know, not to knock, we do have a beach culture We release students to the beach And families do make incredible sacrifices So students can live at the beach their senior year But that feeds into more of this vacation culture As opposed to higher education culture Not knocking the beach, we will not be getting rid of the beach I know that room is always out there But I think we have to look at the both It can be a both and, it's not an either or proposition But that's interesting We should call our colleagues at Sacred Heart I'm going to call out their statistics later tonight I do think, you know, so I run our center for Catholic studies I do, my perception is that Sacred Heart handles the rhetoric Of the Catholic intellectual tradition better than we do That's to say their more of their leadership Even more of their faculty seem to be on that page So the perception, I think Barry's perception is understandable I don't know about the question of whether it's more white or my diverse I don't spend enough time on their campus to know if that's the case But I think he is right They do a lot of things connected to the Catholic intellectual tradition That I wouldn't say they put us to shame But they teach us a bit So that's the best we could do with that Do we have another question here? Hold on No, we have no more questions there So do we have a question from the house? Many people in the auditorium seem not to have a question I'm just looking at one more thing I pop in real quick One thing to note, because we've talked a lot about cost I think higher ed is going to hit a point where increased costs Yearly is just unsustainable So know that that's potentially coming What does that look like for Fairfield? I'm not sure, but we will see these trends where I know colleagues at another Jesuit institution Their price tag is $80,000 a year for attendance And I'm just like, whoa, who can afford that? Who should afford that? So that's also other factors too Does either of you have a last word for our audience? I gave these two people a very difficult task And they've done a remarkably good job here Because it is just everybody would like to be able to wave a magic wand And make our campus more diverse in every respect Including and maybe primarily serving the underserved There's no question, I mean there may be a few hermits in a cave somewhere on campus Who don't agree with that, but I think people do agree with that But it's such a difficult thing to do For all the reasons they've laid out But we have to keep trying Because our mission demands that we attend to this We can never let ourselves sit back and be comfortable And say, well, we did the best we could, we'll just go ahead And those are my last words, anyone else? To build off that a little bit We end the exam and prayer in hope But hope takes work So I just want to echo we can't give up in terms of When we see injustice in front of us addressing it But also thinking, be forward thinking as an institution And just if we get lost in that it's either or we're in trouble So we have to think about both and or other I love how you step sideways on some of these questions Maybe we have to step out of our box of thinking And be creative and examined and imagine what the future will hold We know this past year and a half, two years of the pandemic Was really a huge disruptor in higher education We've made it through But what, if anything, what lessons from these past two years Can we take forward and how we were able to reimagine And ensure that the students that we are serving are served well So just a couple of thoughts there I mean, I like ending with the concept of hope And I think we have some resources and programs in place That are probably underutilized And so we should all learn about them And do what we can to bring our support behind them There's a lot of new things coming through admissions The company scholars program We have the Bridgeport tuition program Which I think could be utilized more And the conversations that we've been having on campus this year Around access and affordability While they have been difficult, they're important And it's not easy work to work through these things And so I'm grateful for the conversations that we've been having this year And look forward to them continuing Because it is the hard work that is the good work, I think Okay, well, just before I close with a little thank you here Two weeks from today in this same place at this same time We'll have the third and last of our living theology sessions For this semester And our topic will be racial justice and the call for reparations So we look forward to seeing some of you, all of you More of you here in a couple of weeks time Finally, my thanks to Meredith and Melissa For a very good conversation Thank you all for being here See you soon Thank you