Magis Moment: November 2022
A Message from the Vice President of University Advancement
As I’ve mentioned before, one of my favorite parts of being an alumnus of Loyola University New Orleans is knowing that I’m part of a family of 50,000 Loyola alumni, plus hundreds of thousands of other Jesuit university alumni around the world. Knowing a few things about the variety of Jesuit educational institutions helps me understand Loyola New Orleans better. Our fellow American Jesuit institution in Worcester, Massachusetts, the College of the Holy Cross, is celebrating an important anniversary this year. In 1972, 50 years ago, Holy Cross admitted women as students for the first time, and in 2022 Holy Cross people are celebrating this moment.
I’ve visited Holy Cross several times, and it’s a beautiful place—on a hill overlooking the city, a Worcester mainstay but also a place apart, with lovely quadrangles, fields, and trees of green that change color with the wonderful New England seasons. The campus is recognizably a cousin of Loyola New Orleans’—on the campus you see St. Ignatius and strong evidence of the Jesuit tradition just as on our campus—but it’s also not identical to Loyola New Orleans. Its history is very different too. As an all-male college for its first decades, and as a campus that is in a city but feels otherwise, Holy Cross used its location (I’ve heard it called “Hogwarts”), its academic excellence, and its relative homogeneity to build an amazing esprit de corps among its students and alumni. To this day, Holy Cross rightfully boasts about having one of the highest alumni giving percentages in the country, and their reunion program is outstanding.
I’ve long admired all of that, but I also know that Loyola New Orleans has a different history, and that’s what makes our mission exciting to me. An urban university, Loyola New Orleans spent its first four decades excluding Black students, a historical wrong that we continue to address in many ways, most recently in naming our largest residence hall after the family of Norman C. Francis ‘55, our first Black graduate. Even during those early years, however, Loyola New Orleans served as a way for families without many economic resources or familial connections to start on the path of higher education. Women were part of Loyola New Orleans from its early decades. As an institution, thankfully, since the 1960s we’ve expanded in numbers and in diversity. Students arrive at Loyola New Orleans from many backgrounds and with varying levels of ability, and we measure our success by how much we can change and improve students’ abilities and lives during their time with us—and after when they are alumni.
This is the distinctive calling for Loyola New Orleans, different from that of Holy Cross and each of the other 25 Jesuit colleges and universities in the United States. Our work is our answer to the question, “Can you develop a strong esprit de corps, rooted in passionate love for the Loyola tradition and one another, in the absence of homogeneity? Can we start from different places and end up on common ground?” When I walk Loyola New Orleans’ campus and spend time with our people, I know we are doing just that, imperfectly but relentlessly. The work continues, with your support and prayers.
AMDG,
Chris Wiseman '88
