August 15, 2004
College changes lives of those ‘in the margins’

Catholic New World staff writer Michelle Martin talks with Vincentian Father Dennis H. Holtschneider.

 

On his eighth day of work, the new president of DePaul University settled in at the conference table in his still-bare 22nd floor office to consider the role of Catholic higher education, especially in urban settings such as Chicago. Vincentian Father Dennis H. Holtschneider, 42, a Harvard-educated professor of education, said Catholic colleges face the same issues of rising costs as all universities—undergraduate tuition at DePaul is more than $19,000 a year. At the same time, Catholic colleges have a unique contribution to make to the church and the wider culture, he said.

 

The Catholic New World: Why did you take this job?

Father Dennis Holtschneider: First and foremost, it was DePaul University itself. This place engages two sides of my heart at once. I have loved education since I was very young; I joined a religious order that works in education for that reason. I love what this moment in a student’s life growth can be. It’s wonderful to be part of an institution that really engages hard questions about the world and isn’t afraid to throw them open and look at them, to kind of give students a three-dimensional take on the world, instead of what they know so far. That’s one piece of it.

Another piece is that there’s a large part of my heart that really cares about people in the margins, and that’s what the Vincentian order does. We were founded by Vincent de Paul, and for 400 years plus, everything we do is about people in the margins, and what can we do to make a difference in their lives.

Universities are not our largest work. We do have three in the United States, and others beyond and all of them are looking to see how they can make a difference in each student’s life, where that student might be the first person in her or his family to go to college. You watch what happens to that family when someone’s gone to college, and what happens to that individual. People can get stable jobs and move out of neighborhoods where it’s tough to raise families. At DePaul University, 38 percent of the students are the first ones in their families to go to college. It’s an extraordinary project.

 

TCNW: How does that contribute to the education offered at DePaul?

FDH: This is among the most diverse Catholic institutions in the United States. There are people here from many nations, many racial and cultural groups. I think we’re 30 percent students of color. It’s a place where people come and are exposed to a larger world, and they grow because they meet people from all different backgrounds and they feel comfortable doing that. We talk about words like diversity, but when it works, it’s wonderful for a student’s education, and it works here. The truth is, DePaul actually lives what it preaches. It actually makes the difference in people’s lives.

 

TCNW: How does being a Catholic university make it different?

FDH: The person that we all turn to in Catholic higher education when that question is raised is Cardinal (John Henry) Newman. When he was starting his college in Ireland back in the 1800s, he kept reminding people that at a university, you should be able to explore all areas, and really study the world and study human experience fully. He said you can’t do that fully if religion isn’t in the mix.

Let me use a modern example: If you were to study right now what’s happening in the Middle East, you would have to study economics, because oil and economics plays a part. You would have to study politics, because the structure of the politics affects what’s happening in the Middle East. But you’ve got to study religion. You can’t understand the Middle East if you don’t understand the religions, and the hopes and the fears and the aspirations that go with people’s beliefs about God.

One of the wonderful things about a Catholic university, as a opposed to a state institution, is that we can talk about religion freely, and not just in the abstract. We can talk about it as it shapes people’s hearts, and we can talk about it as it shapes our own. We can actually explore religion in our own lives, say what role does it play, or doesn’t it play? We can have those conversations freely.

 

TCNW: What benefit to Catholic universities bring to the church?

FDH: This is a resource for the Catholic Church itself to be able to reflect on its own issues and to reflect on the ways in which religion influences the way we think about the world, whether that has to do with the death penalty, or politics or the way that we set up economic systems that either help or hurt people at the margins. This is an opportunity for the church to begin a conversation with the larger world about how does what we believe about God affect what we believe about the world and the human community? We can initiate those conversations. It’s also an opportunity for the church to study itself and ask hard questions about itself.

That’s theory. On the ground, you say to students, you’re going to do research. What kinds of things do we do research on and what kinds of things do we not do research on? For instance, if we respect human life, do we do research with human embryos? It gives the church an opportunity to engage with questions the students are facing and bring a set of values and discussion to them.

 

TCNW: You’ve spoken about people at the margins. How do you keep Catholic higher education accessible to them?

FDH: To be truthful, some Catholic colleges and universities have done a better job of that than others. If you really want to set up a mission of accessibility, as Vincentian colleges do, then you have to put your money where your mouth is. You have to find ways to get students financial aid. You always live more simply as an institution. If at home you were going to save money, you might not buy that BMW. You might buy a Ford instead. I shouldn’t say that; my father works for Ford. … You try to run your organization in a way that you’re not throwing money at fancy extras. You put your money into things that make a difference for students, that make it accessible. We put our money towards financial aid, and then we put it towards the quality of our faculty, so that the students have an excellent experience.

 

TCNW: What do you see as the challenges and opportunities facing DePaul?

FDH: The challenges at DePaul are not unlike the challenges facing almost any college or university these days across the United States. Higher education is very expensive to deliver. Number one, 80 percent of your costs are faculty and staff—they’re human—and just benefits have been going up 25 percent a year. You can’t raise tuition as fast as those costs are rising. The cost of computers and all the new software, the way that we teach, there are extraordinary expenses that the college somehow has to find a way to pay that can’t all be passed on to the students, or no students could afford to come. That’s true for most every university, and it’s certainly true for DePaul. We have to find a way to get students financial aid, whether that’s from the state or federal government, so they can have help attending school. We have to turn to our alumni and other friends of the university who themselves received scholarships once and ask them to help a student today. That’s a start.

The opportunity here is the city of Chicago. This is an amazing place to have a university. The whole city—in fact the metropolitan area—is your classroom. DePaul has been so tied into the city since its foundation that the two work together really well. We have students in schools across the city tutoring. Can you think what those schools would have to pay to bring those tutors in? To have our students out there doing it is a real service to those peoples’ lives and to those schools. At the same time, our students are learning how to be better teachers, and they’re learning about a larger world that they might not have seen. It works for both of us.

Whether our students are helping out in political campaigns or an accounting firm … they have all these amazing opportunities to learn, and when we put that together with what they do in the classroom, it’s an extraordinary education. DePaul is known for providing—let me use my word, because I think it captures the sense of it—an engaged education. You come to DePaul because you want high-quality education, and you want something where you’re ready to step into the job market tomorrow. It’s a very practical education here. You’re going to study theory, but you’re going to walk out prepared for the workforce.

We have classrooms that are literally the city, where students are learning about their fields, and that can just be grown over time.

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