Campus Communications

Welcome to our annual state of the university. Each year, we take time to reflect on the year so far—our collective progress, successes and challenges—and share the factors shaping our shared vision, goals, and plans for Santa Clara University.

We are emerging from a year that has truly challenged and changed us. This year has also revealed in new ways the depths of our community's commitment to our students and each other. The lessons we've learned as we've navigated the difficulties of COVID, the tragic losses of three students in a short time and other challenges, both global and local, have been heavy, but they've made us stronger. Our resilience and common ground of putting our students first will serve us well as we stand on the brink of some profound transitions ahead.

First and foremost, in the coming weeks, we will learn who will be the 30th president to lead our 171-year-old institution. He or she will take the helm of a university whose time-tested values have perhaps never been needed more in our world.

Santa Clara's values serve as a beacon to more than 16,000 students who've applied to attend in both recent years, and they serve as a source of hope and inspiration for the alumni and supporters who've donated record sums recently to ensure the continued success of our mission.

Our next president will join a campus that has had its resilience and our hearts tested after some periods of deep darkness. But it has come out stronger, smarter and fortified by the care and contributions from our entire Bronco community.

This year has also demonstrated that as a university, our commitment to increasing the diversity and inclusion of our faculty, staff, and students is not just lip service, but is being taken to heart and put into action across campus, as the examples I will share today demonstrate. We take heart and great pride that our campus, god willing, has reached a turning point in the pandemic, with students back to in-person learning and the fullness of their Santa Clara education.

We have loved seeing them fill our campus this year in labs, on stages and in classrooms, studying in the library or joining immersion trips or studying abroad once again. Hundreds of students a day are now using our Malley Fitness Center and partaking in our recreational offerings.

As time goes on, we'll have more social and club sports events like our recent volleyball competitions or the Office for Multicultural Learning’s Lunar New Year celebration. As many of you know, this year we are celebrating the 500-year anniversary of a key moment in the life of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Society of Jesus.

Our Vice President for Mission and Ministry, Alison Benders, has shared in her campus messages how, 500 years ago, as a soldier in the battle of Pamplona, Ignatius was struck by a cannonball. His spiritual awakening began during a long, painful convalescence.

Ignatian spirituality invites all of us to look for our own cannonball moments, events that disrupt our normal routines and make us attentive in a new way to the deeper desires of our hearts and what we are called to be.

It was nearly one year ago when I was asked to take on the role of acting president after having been named provost just one year earlier (and just as COVID emerged). This transition was highly unexpected and a cannonball moment for many of us.

Yet what I learned is that God and our supportive community carries us at the hardest times. The light of others prepares us well for the unexpected. Together, we possess the tools and compassion to forge ahead through all manner of changes and challenges.

The months that followed featured amazing moments of deep Bronco Pride, which shone through even in the darkness of COVID or the losses which challenged our campus so deeply. Our professors continue to be recognized as pillars in their fields of study, including being named fellows and scholars by esteemed organizations such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation, National Science Foundation, or the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, just to name a few. Our schools and scholars have received grants and funding from across the country to help solve pressing problems facing our world.

In January, Haley Howard, our 2021 valedictorian, won the Gates Cambridge scholarship. That prestigious honor is Cambridge University's version of the Rhodes Scholarship. We also have 12 students or alumni who are Fulbright Program semifinalists. We learn in the coming weeks which of them will join the legions of previous Santa Clara Fulbright winners.

Congratulations to our students, as well as to Naomi Levy and the Office of Student Fellowships and to the many faculty and staff who support our Bronco Fellowship applicants. This past year, our student athletes sent our Bronco spirit soaring just when we needed it most. After last May's thrilling women's soccer team triumph in the College Cup Championship, both our women's and men's soccer teams captured their respective West Coast Conference championships in November. Our women's team went on to compete again in the College Cup right here in Steens Stadium, and our men's team made it to the second round of the NCAA men's soccer tournament.

In October, we had a joyous ribbon-cutting for our new 270,000 square feet Sobrato Campus for Discovery and Innovation, joined by our alumnus, Governor Gavin Newsom. In addition to elevating STEM for all majors on our campus, SCDI is opening up vast opportunities for new collaborations and fields of study in areas like robotics, environmental engineering, and artificial intelligence.

Academically, our accomplishments continue to be reflected in strong rankings. We earned the number 55 spot nationally in US News and World Report— in the top 15% among nearly 400 national universities. And we are ranked number 37 among national universities for undergraduate teaching.

A Georgetown report ranked Santa Clara in the top 2% of universities where low-income students get the best return on their investment. We are also proud of our stellar retention and graduation rates. I am also inspired to see our campus really coming together behind our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion and to becoming an anti-racist institution.

Our first ever vice president for diversity, equity and inclusion, Shá Duncan Smith, has been a warm and inspirational presence, building relationships across campus so we can appreciate each other's differences and collaborate effectively. The new Division of Inclusive Excellence brings together six key units on campus to centralize and scale our DEI efforts, and they will partner with our new Division of Mission and Ministry and many other partners across campus. With help from three advisory councils of students, faculty and staff, the division has begun a Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion strategic planning process. We abbreviate this as JEDI, which seems appropriate for the powerful force for change this process will be. We had a very constructive Diversity Forum two weeks ago where we listened to students who shared their DEI action plans and their concerns. We are excited by the joint initiatives they and campus administrators are working on collaboratively.

Students also shared concerns and hopes about safe spaces and mental health for BIPOC students and the ways our entire campus is helping to reimagine our Campus Safety Services. Leaders from the president's cabinet and other administrators shared ways in which DEI is being incorporated into their daily operations.

We are seeing some progress as well in recruitment. Our class of 2025 comprises more than 50% students of color and 12% are first-generation students. Among our newest cohort of tenure-track faculty, 75% identify as BIPOC, and more than 63% are women.

We do have much more work to do- specifically when it comes to the recruitment and retention of Black members of the Santa Clara family. Such progress makes our Santa Clara University community look more like our increasingly diverse world.

We have a long way to go, especially when it comes to representation, equitable treatment and inclusion of historically marginalized and minoritized members in our community. But I am heartened by the committed trajectory we are on. This commitment will be ongoing, as DEI is so important to our Jesuit mission, to the campus we want to become, and to the successful future of Santa Clara University. Our next president will join a university that is in a very strong financial position, thanks especially to the hard work and strong stewardship of our finance and investment, University Relations and admissions teams. The responsibility and good work of everyone on this campus has also contributed greatly.

Our financial discipline has enabled us to meet some important goals in the budget for next year, which was just passed by the Board of Trustees. Our Vice president for Finance and Administration, Michael Crowley, will host a budget forum later this spring for a fuller picture.

But I do have some highlights to share today. We are providing a 4% merit pool for faculty and staff for the second year in a row. We committed to this larger-than-normal merit pool to acknowledge the sacrifices and hardships our faculty and staff experienced during COVID 19. And I'm so glad we're able to provide it.

As we set tuition rates for the coming year, we must balance affordability with the rising costs of delivering a world-class Jesuit education. That includes increased costs and commitments for student mental health and new investments in student success and programming.

Last year, during COVID, we were one of only a few peer institutions that did not raise tuition. For the coming year, we've set a 3% increase in tuition— in line with our historic averages and a rate we believe will be on the low end of our peer institutions.

We have also budgeted for additional financial aid to help us assist families of our current students and recruit a talented and diverse group of future students. I want to return now to some of the cannonball moments that Santa Clara has endured in the past year.

The ongoing impacts of COVID. Devastating student deaths. Increased mental health needs, and sexual violence directed at our students. We learned ways to improve our responsiveness in the midst of cascading challenges. And I'm proud of how our community held each other up, creating circles of care and moments of light that provided strength, hope and progress.

After last fall's student deaths, caring staff from CAPS, Cowell Center, our Jesuit Community, the Administration, Student Life, Campus Ministry, and Residence Life were present in the residence halls and campus neighborhoods to provide pastoral and practical care. Staff from Campus Safety, where a consistent presence. Many staff have followed up to care for students academically and psychologically since then.

Our faculty collaborative offered professors creative ways to teach while emphasizing wellness and compassion. Students rallied for mental health care for their peers. Our Board of Trustees, the President's Cabinet and the University Budget Council committed new resources and renewed our strong commitment to student wellness.

Parents and concerned alumni made donations or offered their professional services for student mental health, and a devoted group of Bronco parents has shown up time and time again with cookies, pizzas and hugs for students and Swig and across campus. Our campus has also shone brightly in the response to the ongoing challenges of COVID.

We are so grateful to the dozens of staff and faculty from across campus who took on additional responsibilities to help us respond to wave after wave of COVID-19 impacts. They have worked hard every day to analyze trends and changing guidance, assess university needs and capacity, and find creative solutions —all in very short time frames.

They have brought us to this moment where positive cases are declining and more manageable. Our campus is vaccinated and on its way to being fully boosted. And our students are enjoying the fullness of their Santa Clara education in person following protocols that will see us through safely together.

Our Bronco Health ambassadors also have been inspiring, educating and serving their peers with knowledge, joy, and grace. Many of them are also gaining wonderful experience for their future work. We are so proud that the public health program at Santa Clara was just named the seventh best program of its kind in the nation.

For families whose finances were impacted by COVID, the entire Bronco community, including our alumni and friends, provided donations and volunteer hours to keep the Bronco pantry operating this year and provided additional financial aid through the Heritage Fund. It is in times like these that we're reminded that Santa Clara is not just a transitory place of learning.

It is a family bound by love, shared values, and a commitment to accompany our students for their well-being in mind, body and spirit. When we felt strong, we've risen to the words we heard at numerous vigils for social justice and remembrance this year: To be a light in the darkness for others. When we feel low, we turn to the light of our colleagues, peers, alumni and Bronco community for support. Now, as we stand on the brink of exciting and significant transitions in our leadership, advances in STEM, advances in our goals for anti-racism and diversity equity and inclusion, I want to thank all of you who've been shining lights to one another, and to me.

As we said at the vigil for Healing at Grand Reunion this year, I am light. You are light. We are light. Let us continue to bring light to each other. As acting president, I have been honored to serve this special community, and I'm grateful for the strength and deep bonds that have sustained this university through its 171-year history.

Thank you. God bless. And Go Broncos!

Feb. 15, 2022