BRIAN FOGARTY, PROFESSOR OF SOCIOLOGY
I'm a product of big universities. I graduated from LMU (Large Midwestern University) in 1972 and took the doctorate from another LMU after that. My career at St. Catherine has really been my only contact with the small-college environment, and I have greatly valued the distinction between the two academic worlds. I have also tended to view many changes to the academic enterprise with a jaundiced eye, and with good reason, but don't get me started on that.
So I felt a little ripple of excitement when I was asked to serve on the committee that was to explore the virtues and drawbacks of making my beloved college a university. I saw it as a chance to give voice to my reservations about the whole idea. I had several, which most readers will recognize: risk of losing our small-college intimacy, of becoming a more generic, less women-centered institution, of losing market share, of looking like followers rather than leaders. Not to mention, of course, the costs and work involved.
But it didn't take much deliberation around the table for me to realize that this change could be an opportunity to address a number of growing strains at the College. I kept hearing other members say things like "the name change will represent what we have already become," and this made me think about how difficult and complicated it has become over the years to do many things that used to be easy. With graduate programs, two-year programs, Weekend College, the Henrietta Schmoll School of Health and a dozen other ways of slicing the institutional pie, we simply can't run like a small college anymore. We can't be the mom-and-pop organization ("mom-and-mom" would be more apt, I guess) that we were even just a few decades ago.
I also began to see that our identity as a small women's college was already questionable, with more and more programs contributing to our identity and image, many of them admitting men.
So I was gratified when the committee concluded that this could not be just a change in name, but a reorganization. This will be a good thing. Decentralizing the institution's governance will free up the initiative and creativity that an academic institution needs. It will create clearer lines of communication and more opportunities for close collaboration. Best of all, it will preserve the undergraduate college as a true women's institution, thus ending the gradual erosion of its identity, even as other components establish their own identities and serve different clienteles.
St. Catherine University will run better than the College of St. Catherine, and at the same time will be better positioned to make its case to students of varying backgrounds and interests. It's a change we need.
I'm a product of big universities. I graduated from LMU (Large Midwestern University) in 1972 and took the doctorate from another LMU after that. My career at St. Catherine has really been my only contact with the small-college environment, and I have greatly valued the distinction between the two academic worlds. I have also tended to view many changes to the academic enterprise with a jaundiced eye, and with good reason, but don't get me started on that.
So I felt a little ripple of excitement when I was asked to serve on the committee that was to explore the virtues and drawbacks of making my beloved college a university. I saw it as a chance to give voice to my reservations about the whole idea. I had several, which most readers will recognize: risk of losing our small-college intimacy, of becoming a more generic, less women-centered institution, of losing market share, of looking like followers rather than leaders. Not to mention, of course, the costs and work involved.
But it didn't take much deliberation around the table for me to realize that this change could be an opportunity to address a number of growing strains at the College. I kept hearing other members say things like "the name change will represent what we have already become," and this made me think about how difficult and complicated it has become over the years to do many things that used to be easy. With graduate programs, two-year programs, Weekend College, the Henrietta Schmoll School of Health and a dozen other ways of slicing the institutional pie, we simply can't run like a small college anymore. We can't be the mom-and-pop organization ("mom-and-mom" would be more apt, I guess) that we were even just a few decades ago.
I also began to see that our identity as a small women's college was already questionable, with more and more programs contributing to our identity and image, many of them admitting men.
So I was gratified when the committee concluded that this could not be just a change in name, but a reorganization. This will be a good thing. Decentralizing the institution's governance will free up the initiative and creativity that an academic institution needs. It will create clearer lines of communication and more opportunities for close collaboration. Best of all, it will preserve the undergraduate college as a true women's institution, thus ending the gradual erosion of its identity, even as other components establish their own identities and serve different clienteles.
St. Catherine University will run better than the College of St. Catherine, and at the same time will be better positioned to make its case to students of varying backgrounds and interests. It's a change we need.
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