by Paula L. Keogh

Editor's note: Father Shanley satdown with providence magazine to reflect on topics ranging from the historic foundation of the Dominican ministry in higher education, to his role models as a priest and a scholar, to his new challenges as the 12th president of Providence College.

How does the ministry of higher education fit into the overall mission of the Dominican order?

From the beginning, there were probably two things that drew Dominicans to universities. One, which is directly related to the founding of the Order, was the idea that St. Dominic wanted his preachers to be educated themselves, in order to address the Manichean heresy and the Albigensians in southwest France. To eradicate the heresy, the Church needed well-educated preachers to persuasively present the truth and refute views that are inimical to the truth.

That was the original reason St. Dominic went to the universities and why we spend so much time educating Dominicans. We then came to see a ministry in being devoted to the unity of truth in the harmony of faith and reason. And so the universities became a place where we saw a mission for the Dominican Order in terms of its devotion to the truth. It was important to educate people to see for themselves the coherence between what reason gives us and what faith teaches us.

This has become part of our charism, to evangelize the university itself. We do that through teaching and taking part in the normal things that academics do. St. Thomas Aquinas and Albert the Great are the enduring models of this ministry.

How does your role as president allow you to fulfill your calling as a Dominican priest?

When you're a priest, it's not about having a career; this is part of your vocation. You approach a job like this differently when you think of it as a vocation. A vocation literally means it's a "calling." It's a ministry, not a job in the conventional sense. I believe that God wants me to do this and that is why I accepted the position.

Part of the process leading up to this job was discernment: How do I figure out what it is that God wants and is this a good fit for me? A lot of discernment is responding to what other people tell you and in the way that events transpire. The Corporation of Providence College told me God wants me to do this. My greatest confidence in the job is not my abilities but that God is going to work this through.

When I came to PC, I wanted to be a lawyer and then I wanted to be a history professor-because I came to see what a beautiful and a powerful thing teaching is. It's a wonderful way of transforming people's lives. I had such really good teachers here that I came to see teaching as a noble vocation in life and an immensely satisfying one for the teacher, both intellectually and emotionally. You realize that teaching is not just about imparting information in the classroom but about helping students learn who they are, what they should value, how to think for themselves. It's a generative process.

Then I also became very much attracted by really good preaching and it went with really good teaching. As your mind is being stimulated from an intellectual point of view, your faith needs that same kind of stimulation. I began to see those two things as interconnected; that what was needed on a college campus was not just really good professors but really good professors who were also really good preachers. And there are some great Dominicans who modeled that for me.

I came to see that the preaching and the teaching are two different sides of a common vocation to develop people into what it is that God wants them to be. And because I'm a priest and a president, I have a concern about students in perhaps a more holistic way than other college presidents. As a priest and a president, you are looking at developing students not just academically but also as people of faith. It gives the job a different perspective.

What experiences have prepared you for your new leadership role as president?

One of the strengths that I have in this position is that I am a product of the College. I am grateful for what started in me here. When I want to talk about what the school is and where I think it needs to go, I talk about it out of a sense of what it did for me. I can connect my own experience here as a student, my own experience here as a teacher, and as a trustee.

But I also come back to PC with a different perspective from being someplace else [The Catholic University of America]. So I know the school intimately from an experiential point of view but I also have not been wedded to the way things are done.

One of the things that I was intending to do in my inaugural address was to look at what we are trying to do at Providence College. An important part of leadership is to have some kind of a vision that inspires people to want to help you to realize that vision. You can't make them help you; you have to inspire them. Inspiration, together with vision, is a very important part of leadership.

The other thing that is really important with respect to leadership is listening. People won't let you lead them-particularly on a college campus-if they don't feel like you are bringing them into the process as partners with you, rather than giving them marching orders.

One of my important goals this year is to initiate a process that leads us, as a campus community, to a shared vision about the future of the College, a strategic, collaborative vision. My job is to provide some inspiration to that process, but if we are going to get a vision that people will want to follow, they have to be part of that process.

Has there been any particular aspect of your life that you feel gave you the most meaningful preparation for your role as president?

Teaching has been an invaluable preparation for me. My years in the classroom have been enormously helpful to me because I understand that everything that we are doing here is to allow for the classroom dynamic to happen the way it's supposed to. My years in the classroom will hopefully help me to be a good communicator and a good educator on the most important questions that we face as a College. Also helpful is that I did a fair amount of scholarly work. I believe very strongly that good teaching and good research go together.

Very helpful, as well, in terms of preparation for this job is my role as a trustee of the College for the last six years. Even though I don't have the administrative experience that many people do, as a trustee I had to look at the big issues facing the College. Since I was the chair of the strategic planning subcommittee, I enter into this job thinking about strategic planning. I look back on what I did as a trustee and I see that as part of providence helping me to learn the things that I needed to learn to be a good president.

What is your greatest challenge as president?

I usually talk about three challenges.

First, we're going to have to educate, invite, excite, and inspire people to want to collaborate with us in the Dominican mission more than we ever have before. PC is a unique Dominican institution in the U.S. There is no other school like ours run by Dominican Friars. We are the biggest institution that the Dominicans have so-given the number of people who study here, who work here, who ramify out from here every year as alumni-we have more opportunities to exercise a leadership role in terms of advancing the Dominican charism than any other college in the United States.

That's why I named a vice president for mission and ministry. We need to explicitly and institutionally say this is our priority. Advancing the Dominican charism is probably the biggest challenge for me, because it lies at the heart of our ministry here.

A second major challenge facing the College is to continue the trajectory of academic excellence. PC has improved itself academically by attracting better students and faculty. In a marketplace where our traditional pool of applicants has been drawn largely from the Northeast and the demographics are such that this pool is going to diminish, we are going to have to recruit continually better students in a more competitive marketplace.

The third challenge in the years ahead has to do with financial issues, especially endowment. We don't have an endowment that is worthy of PC and its aspirations. The endowment is what gives an institution financial flexibility. It also is the principal source of scholarships and professorships. The endowment directly subsidizes teachers and students in a way that the College needs to depend on, in order to compete with the schools that we want to compete with and be who we want to be. When I talk to trustees, they rank our endowment as the College's biggest weakness. One of my challenges is to fundraise to build the endowment.

You stated in your inaugural address "Dominican education should above all else seek to cultivate students who are contemplative."  How should this happen?

We live in a world that doesn't value thinking for its own sake. We live in a world marked by modernity where producing products that have marketplace value is more important than thinking. We are supposed to work and make money and spend money and consume goods. This is the message of the culture that we live in. And just reflecting, thinking, trying to make connections between things and just enjoying the sheer joy that comes from knowing something is not valued. 

The Dominican tradition has always been that you won't love the right things unless you know what's true, that our desires and our loves need to be informed by knowledge. The Catholic tradition is that heaven is some kind of knowing God and that when we come to know the truth, we're also knowing God. At the heart of this lays reflection and thinking. In promoting that here at the College, we are promoting what lies at the heart of the human vocation.

I make it clear in my inaugural address about the intrinsic value of a Catholic, liberal arts education. I think the market is there for the kinds of students we areeducating. I'm hearing from CEOs that they don't want kids who are narrowly focused in terms of some kind of pre-professional education. They want students who think critically, are creative, can synthesize things, write clearly, and who have strong, moral values. We need to talk about the intrinsic value of a PC education but also reassure students that there is life after a liberal arts degree. In doing the right thing intrinsically, we are also providing something real important that employers are looking for. 

What I'm trying to do is counteract the mentality that the reason you come to college is to get a job and to therefore let the marketplace define what education is all about. What employers want from students after college is not necessarily people who know the practical things but people who have the right kinds of minds and have a strong moral core to make principled decisions. This all comes from a good liberal arts education like weprovide here at PC.

Also in your inaugural address, you urged faculty members to be"lofty like the mountains."  How willyou encourage this?

I'm going to encourage faculty to pursue research and scholarship. That's part of what it means to be "lofty." One of my tasks as president is to challenge the faculty to do research, to challenge them to do interdisciplinary thinking. That's part of being lofty. Too many academics are narrow. I want to encourage our faculty to help our students to make the connections between what they are learning in their classes and what they are learning in other classes. That's part of being lofty.

I want our teachers to be inspirational to our students, to make our students climb up the mountain with them, to see things at a higher range than they have before. Good teachers-and I've had them here myself-lift you up. You start to see things at another elevation.

What do you think the youthful energy and perspective of your administration will mean for PC in terms of management style and outreach to various constituencies?

While we don't consider ourselves all that young, there is a generational shift. In religious life, we tend to think that with age comes wisdom. Father Izzo [Prior Provincial V. Rev. D. Dominic Izzo, O.P. '88], however, is one of the youngest provincials. The demands of leadership are such that you need to take a risk, to wager on the promise that you see.

One of the advantages that we have-Father Sicard, Father Guido, and myself-is that we come from very different backgrounds: business, psychology, the humanities. We have very complementary minds. They don't think like I do; they provide me with perspectives that challenge and complement my own. We've all been involved with students directly as priests, having been in campus ministry. We are closer to the students in terms of our direct experience of their aspirations, their needs, what they struggle with. The students will find us user-friendly because we are used to ministering to them.

The same is true of our relationships with the faculty. Since Father Guido and I have both been teachers, we bring a perspective on teaching and faculty. Since none of us has had senior administrative experience, we have some fresh takes on things and maybe a willingness to try some new things. When you are younger-and not sure you have all the answers-you're willing to take some chances on new ways of thinking and new ways of doing things.

As president, you are the "keeper" and interpreter of the College's mission and will set its strategic direction. How will you approach this obligation?

The mission is our core, our base. It's the statement of who we really are at the most fundamental level, what we value the most, our main objectives and goals. One of my responsibilities as president is to always be thinking about the mission and asking myself, "How does this enhance the mission of the College?"

One of the roles the president has is looking at the view from the highest point, because you have to take into account the needs of the whole and prioritize them. You're always asking, "Tell me how you see this fitting into the mission of the College. If you've got some new educational program, tell me how it enhances the mission of the College, or tell me how this is going to be distinctive from what's done at another school because of our mission."

My most sacred responsibility is to have the mission foremost in my mind. Part of my educational role as president is to educate people about the mission and to get them thinking from a mission-centered perspective. When you think about strategic planning, for example, this presupposes the mission. You don't plan the mission; you get the mission first and then the strategic goals and everything else comes out of it.

You've mentioned that PC needs to go back to its roots by reaching out to the children of recent immigrants. Why is this important?

Historically, we were founded to meet the needs of the immigrant Catholic population that had come to Rhode Island to work in the mills. We met those educational needs. Education enables people to move up the social ladder, so as the Catholic population has been assimilated and lives the American dream, the students who come to us reflect those changes.

My father came to PC as the first member of his family to go to school. That was true of a lot of people who came to Providence College. Those who got educated wanted their children to have as good or better an education than he or she had. As Catholics have become educated and moved up the socio-economic ladder, the demands for Catholic schools have been to keep pace with where the Catholic population has been. Working-class poor Catholics became middle-class Catholics and they produced middle-class kids and we educated those kids.

There's a new immigration in this country of a significant Catholic population from Latin America. The tension that I see for the College is that as we've ridden the wave up with the earlier Catholic immigrant population, there's a temptation to leave this other population for somebody else because we don't want to see our rankings going down.

I think we can do both-serve the new immigrant population and maintain our position. But it's going to require a lot of strategic thinking. The most important thing we can do strategically is to collaborate in the endeavors of the city of Providence and the state of Rhode Island to improve education from K-12. We need to participate as much as we can in community and educational outreach. The danger is to forget where you came from. As a Church and as a College, we have to figure out ways to help these immigrants realize their aspirations.

This goes back to endowment: if we want these new immigrants to enjoy a Providence College education, we are going to have to provide scholarships. That's an important part of what an endowment does, to allow you to make it possible for people to come to the College. We talk a lot about diversity on the campus, which is another strategic issue that we need to improve on, and I think by reaching out to the now burgeoning minority population of Rhode Island, that's going to help us.

Tell us more about how you hope to promote greater diversity at PC.

Diversity means a lot of different things on the campus. The obvious thing is to have a student body that is more diverse in terms of its racial or ethnic makeup. We've tried to get more campus diversity but we're not where we need to be. We need to do more recruiting of minority students and talented minority faculty members. Also, there is not a lot of socio-economic diversity on campus. Because of the high cost of the College, getting people of diverse economic classes is a real challenge.

Sometimes diversity has to do with diversity of religions. We're a predominantly Catholic population. This is always going to be part of PC; we also have to make people who are not Catholic feel welcome. When some people hear me talk so much about our mission, they get nervous about the place of non-Catholics in terms of the future of the College. When I talk about strengthening the mission of the College, I don't see that as implying that we're not welcoming to people with diverse religious views from the Catholic view.

One of the strengths of the College historically is that PC is not a school where there are only people who think like Catholics. We've always welcomed students who are not Catholics to our ranks; we've always been enriched by faculty who are not Catholic. Our mission has been embraced over the years by people of diverse faiths and that has strengthened us.

When I talk about strengthening the mission of the College, I see it as something that has been and will be embraced by people who do not necessarily embrace the Catholic faith themselves but who want to be at an institution that does promote those sorts of beliefs. Our Mission Statement talks about the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I think about this broader tradition in which Catholicism sits.

Diversity also has to do with points of view. What diverse points of view are permissible on a Catholic campus?  I expect our students to get diverse viewpoints in the classroom. I don't see diversity and Catholicism as antithetical at all. Catholicism with a small "c" means universality and that is something that I think we can embrace on this campus as well.

Who were your role models, academically as well as spiritually?

There were people who were very important role models for me when I was a student. One of them was Richard Grace [Dr. Richard J. Grace, professor of history]. Ray Sickinger [Dr. Raymond L. Sickinger, professor of history and current director of the Feinstein Institute for Public Service] was someone else. I had some wonderful lay professors who modeled a life of learning and a life of faith that was very attractive and powerful to me. It got me thinking about pursuing a professorial life.

In terms of the Dominicans, Tom Coskren [the late Rev. Thomas M. Coskren, O.P. '55, special lecturer in humanities at the time of his retirement] was the big influence on me as a teacher and a spiritual mentor. He pushed me hard to be a Dominican. He modeled for me the things I became most attracted to; he was both a brilliant teacher and a terrific preacher.

Father Cunningham [Rev. John F. Cunningham, O.P., 10th president and a professor of philosophy who still teaches at PC] also was an influence on me. I never had him as a professor but hewas an excellent preacher. And the Dominicans in general were an impressive group of men. The community as a whole was really a model for me.

In terms of what's been the biggest Dominican influence on me, it's without a doubt the life of St. Thomas Aquinas. From an intellectual point of view, I've spent my entire adult life studying the thought of St. Thomas. He thought about everything; his mind was always driving toward a synthesis and an integration of the whole. The kind of mind that he had has been inspiring to me.

For me, he is a model of an intellectual and a Dominican life. Aquinas was thoroughly steeped in the tradition but right in the forefront of the contemporary debates of his day. He was known for stating the view he was going to oppose sharper than even those who were proposing it. He had this incredible intellectual capacity to get his mind into the other side of the debate. I've used this as a model for the faculty on how we're going to proceed at PC-to have both sides of questions debated vigorously.

How can alumni more fully share in the College's mission and advance the Dominican charism?

One of the great privileges of having this job is that I go to alumni events and graduates come up and they tell me what the College has meant to them. They love the College because something transformative happened to them here. They remember PC fondly as the place where they matured as human beings. That's how we know we're doing what we're supposed to be doing here.

What alumni can do most for PC is to talk about their alma mater. We're a better school than most-even many of our alums-realize. Name recognition is important. I also encourage alums to come back and see the Smith Center, St. Dominic Chapel, and what a beautiful campus we have. We're still the same school that we were but we've also grown in many ways.  

I will ask alumni for support in whatever ways they can give it. For some, it's financial. For others, it is to promote us in their communities as ambassadors for the College. Everyone can do this. I'm doing this job to give back because of what I've received here. That's part of giving thanks to God. If alumni are happy about Providence College, any way they can give back would be great.