Here's a nice snapshot of, Fr. John Jenkins, the new president of my alma mater. Link. Excerpt:
Jenkins wants the campus to be welcoming to all students and faculty. But he doesn't foresee a time when the university supports a club for gay and lesbian students or a pro-abortion rights rally, and protests surrounded last year's decision to host a Queer Film Festival.
He plans to push his deans to recruit more diverse faculty members. That will be a challenge for a university where, of the 357 full professors, only one is African-American and 17 are Hispanic, a ratio that improves slightly when considering all faculty members. Women make up about 11 percent of the full faculty members, and 53 percent of the total faculty identify themselves as Catholic.
Only the third president of the South Bend university in the past half-century, Jenkins follows priests who took Notre Dame from an all-male school focused almost exclusively on undergraduate teaching to a strong research university with a $3.4 billion endowment and a freshman class that graduated, on average, in the top 6 percent of their high school classes.
"In all of American higher education, Notre Dame has a distinct position. It aspires to be, and is, among the leading universities ... It is at the same time the only one with religious character, with all respects to our friends at Boston College and Georgetown," he said, referring to the more liberal Jesuit schools. "The inertia is always to be like everyone else. To be different, you have to chart a course and have a clear idea about where you want to go."
Jenkins' course always has been influenced by religion. For his first 30 years, until he attended Oxford University, he studied only in Catholic schools - from St. Pius X Elementary School in Omaha to Notre Dame in South Bend. The third oldest of a dozen children, Jenkins and his family prayed together in the family room every night before they went to bed. Each child was encouraged to add his or her own special prayers.
Thanks, Irish Elk.
