“Being Open to the Other” ft. College of the Holy Cross’s Vincent D. Rougeau I Saturdays at Seven – Season Two, Episode Forty-Nine

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In the forty-ninth episode of the second season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Vicent D. Rougeau, President of the College of the Holy Cross. Rougeau opens by discussing the importance of being a member of a family with longstanding roots in Louisiana. In his grandparents, Rougeau found examples of people who sought to establish a Catholic parish in their own community. In his parents, Rougeau found examples of people invested in the campaign for civil rights across the South. While Rougeau initially believed he was called to serve as a diplomat, he chose to follow in his father’s footsteps and enroll in law school at Harvard University. Rougeau then explains that his willingness to listen to the wisdom of others led him to value his gifts as a legal educator in contrast to as a partner in a firm. As a legal educator, Rougeau began his career teaching on the faculty at his father’s undergraduate alma mater, Loyola University Chicago, where he encountered an environment in which he could integrate his professional self and spiritual self, leading to a lifelong interest in Catholic social teaching. Rougeau explains that administrative appointments he went on to accept at other law schools (an associate dean at the University of Notre Dame and dean at Boston College) helped him appreciate the role law schools play within research universities but also how he was called to interact with other senior administrators. When Holy Cross asked him to consider an appointment as president, Rougeau contends he found a truly unique place in Catholic higher education where he could serve—a solely undergraduate liberal arts university informed by the Jesuit charisms he had come to cherish. Part of how he seeks to serve that community is through nurturing momentum for the Aspire strategic plan, an effort that seeks to ground each one of those qualities of the Holy Cross community in a unique understanding of excellence. Before closing, Rougeau reflects on what defines the academic vocation and the crucial role a Catholic and Jesuit understanding of hope plays in animating it.

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Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University. 

Our guest is Vincent D. Rougeau, President of the College of the Holy Cross. Thank you for joining us.

Vincent D. Rougeau: Thank you for having me.

Todd Ream: Your family’s roots reside in Louisiana, stretching back eight generations, and your grandparents founded a Catholic parish for the black community in Lake Charles. Would you please introduce us to your grandparents?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Oh wow. Sure.

So my grandparents, John and Laura, John Rougeau, Laura Lartigue, were born in the 1920s in Deep South Louisiana in a little town. My grandmother’s from a town called Mamou, and my grandfather’s from a town called Basile. They were part of a, of a culture in, in South Louisiana that stretches back to the early 18th century and was all, you know, French speaking and you know, pretty much cut off from the rest of the country, until World War II really.

They were farmers and you know, rural people, but you know, deeply Catholic religious folks whose lives really revolved around their parish communities. And you know, they were pretty much, you know, involved, well, rice farmers actually, that was their main thing involved in that. And then the war changed a lot with the oil industry and you know, sort of more mechanized agriculture. So they moved to the nearest big city, which was like Lake Charles, Louisiana and which is a big oil refining, natural gas refining town, where there was a lot of work after the war.

And obviously, it was still a time of segregation in the South. And so they, along with many other people from small rural towns in Louisiana would develop their own churches under the auspices of the diocese. Prior to that time, they had worshiped, everyone worshiped together in the Catholic churches in the South. But after the war, it was understood that for the, the Black worshipers that involved really a second class status sitting in the back of the church, not being involved in any of the actual organization or running of the parish.

So the creation of black parishes in the fifties primarily allowed the black community to have more agency and more control over, over their, their religious life. So I, that was a really important part of their lives early on. And you know, they went from a rural parish where they sat in the back to a parish in town where they were actually, you know, part of the creators of that institution. And there they lived for the rest of their lives and they were married for 72 years.

Todd Ream: Wow.

Vincent D. Rougeau: And you know, they died in the one in 2013, my grandmother and my grandfather, excuse me, and my grandmother in 2015. But I feel very blessed to have had them in my lives for such a very long time. And there were great models for me about faith, hard work, and family.

Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much.

Your parents, then Weldon Rougeau and Shirley Small Rougeau, were involved in the Church and in the Civil Rights Movement. Would you please introduce us to your parents now?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Sure. So my father had to start, since we’re continuing that, that story you know, went to high school, middle school and high school in, in Lake Charles, and then got a scholar scholarship got admitted to Southern University in Baton Rouge, which was one of the, you know, state-supported historically black colleges in the state, which again, at that time was still segregated for higher education.

And it was a big deal. My grandparents hadn’t finished high school. My grandfather didn’t finish primary school. And as I said, you know, they were not native speakers of English, really, so, you know, to have their only son, their only child go to college, it was a big deal.

But my father was also an activist and, this was 1960, 61, and he became involved in the Civil Rights Movement and ultimately participated, ran a protest with another student that ultimately got him arrested and jailed for almost two months in solitary confinement. And expelled from college because of that.

So in the meantime, my mother who was from a town about a hundred miles north of my father, but very different part of the state and an old city in Louisiana, but her family was Baptist and had been in Louisiana, I think, from around the Civil War time, had migrated, you know, with from, originally I think from Maryland through Georgia and across the South over many decades. And she became a Catholic when she was in high school, I believe, and went to college at Southern as well. But she was a few years older than my father didn’t meet there.

She ended up in Miami with a sister when she finished college and, and was working, and my father, after being expelled from Southern, got a job with the Civil Rights Organization Corps that had supported the work he was doing while he was in college, in Miami as it happened. So they met there.

My father wanted obviously to finish his college education. And because of the extreme nature of how he was treated, his story became national news. He was offered a number of different scholarships to attend college in the North and ended up at Loyola University in Chicago with the Jesuits. And that’s where he finished his undergraduate education. My mother was a dietician and working at the University of Chicago at the time.

They moved again and then to Atlanta while my father was working still in Civil Rights work. But then he got an opportunity through a number of contacts he had made over the years to go to Harvard Law School. He was encouraged to apply. He was admitted and so we lived for three years in Cambridge, while he was at Harvard Law School back then an older student, he started at 27. He was considered an older student and he had three children, which I think was more of the issue. But so yeah, so he did law school there, and ultimately the family settled in the suburbs of Washington, DC because my father got a job there with a senator from Louisiana. Ultimately went to the Carter administration.

And my parents divorced, and he ended up in Chicago, working for American Express and then some non-profits back in Washington. But effectively his career as a lawyer was primarily in the nonprofit and government sector and a period of time with American Express. And my mother meantime stayed in Washington, DC area and was primarily devoted to working in government service but the state and local government in Maryland, so.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Their influence and your grandparents’ influence in terms of commitment to the Church but also to social justice, converges, it seems, in terms of your interest in Catholic social teaching, which became eventually a focus of your work as a faculty member and as an academic leader.

I’d like to ask you, if I may, to describe in particular, what led you to write Christians in the American Empire: Faith and Citizenship for a New World Order, which Oxford University Press published.

Vincent D. Rougeau: Yeah, it’s an interesting journey. I was a law professor for my academic career. And I started in interestingly enough with work in financial services and contracts and business law, which is what I had practiced. But in doing that work and in looking at those issues through, through an academic lens, it became increasingly clear to me that there was a part of the conversation that wasn’t happening, happening that really was rooted in what kinds of values do we have as a society when we think about how our economy works and who benefits and who is burdened and how we make choices about regulation or deregulation.

And in the moment I was doing this work, there was a lot of deregulation going on in the financial services sector. And it was pretty clear that that was placing certain burdens on poor people and really middle class people too. They were sort of thrust into a marketplace that had been highly regulated before and now they have to make a lot of their own choices, you know without a whole lot of information about the consequences or the pros and cons. Now over time, things have improved. People are in a better position, I think.

But it also raised for me a lot of questions about, well, what role for me personally but also for others, do our faith commitments play in how we understand our life in a society that is really very heavily dominated by capitalism and the free market. And I got interested in Catholic social teaching because it really offered a critique of free market capitalism without saying it was bad, but pointing directly to some of its failures and really asking us as Catholics and other people of goodwill, you know, how are we going to address those failures? Are we just going to accept ’em as sort of part of the natural order of things? Or do we really look more deeply at how we might, for instance, regulate a market to be more consistent with other values we hold?

I mean, to use a quick, easy example, if we value, say, family and the raising of children, do we introduce regulatory measures to support that that might actually limit the economy in some ways, but actually are pushing forward other values that we care about? And you could use any number of examples in that regard.

And what Catholic social thought offered and social teaching offered me were some really specific ideas about the dignity of the human person, how you do, how you care for the poor and the marginalized—all of these very concrete things that our market economy really did not value and could, could only value if we as a society impose those values on the market. And so what I didn’t see happening when I wrote this book was any real robust conversation about how we push back against not only the market, but really deep individualism and libertarianism that underlies it in this country in particular.

We place such a high value on individual autonomy that we don’t really have a good way, a shared way as a society to talk about how we value things that might be more communal, like families you know, like preservation of communities like people who contribute other kinds of labor that’s not market-based to the life of a society, how we deal with the needs of the weak. All of these questions to me were being pushed aside to promote efficiency in the marketplace and, and a more individualist notion of how we live and live our lives and common in this society, you know, as atomized individuals, as opposed to people focused on the common good.

So the result of all that thinking and, and you know, some other articles I’d written was, was, was Christians in the American Empire, which really brought all my thinking together and really allowed me to integrate Catholic social teaching to how I was thinking about the law, about the market, about affirmative action, about immigration in one place.

Todd Ream: Yep. Thank you.

I want to ask you now some more detailed questions about your own biography then here. You earned an undergraduate degree in international relations from Brown University and then a JD from your father’s graduate alma mater at Harvard University, followed in his footsteps and there’s more, and you did that in more ways than one. We’ll get through here in just a little bit.

At what point did you decide that the law was central to how you understood your vocation?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Yeah, that’s a really interesting question for me because it involves some journeying and some discernment and some, some hard thinking. So I did go to law school after being in college thinking I wanted to be a diplomat or do something in international relations. I spent my junior year in France and mastered French as best I could and I was really excited about that prospect.

But then when I returned from France, having met diplomats and people in the foreign service and, and just thinking about what was going on currently at the time in the economy and the job market, I thought, well, maybe this isn’t the best time to do that. And I did have the example of my dad, having gone to law school, I thought, well, let’s see. Because in his life, you know, law opened many different kinds of doors. And I thought, well, that’s what I think I want, but we’ll see.

So I went to Harvard and found, maybe I didn’t realize this consciously at the time, but that you are kind of, I was sort of tracked like a lot of my classmates into a certain understanding of what you do with this kind of degree. I mean, there were people who were going into public interest and people doing other things, but I found myself kind of being drawn into the big law firm pathway.

Again, without a lot of discernment. I didn’t really understand exactly what that would mean. And, you know, so some of the blame goes to me, but also I think it was just a time—there was a lot of excitement and energy about working in big firms. And so that’s what most of my classmates were doing.

So I did that, but found pretty quickly that that was not my vocation. You know, that was not going to give me what I needed to feel whole and to feel that I was working in a way that matched, you know, my sense of who I was as a person and how I wanted to contribute to society. You know, and that’s a very individual choice. So I made a pivot to becoming an academic and that was a big moment for me. I mean, I had to accept that I had tried something and it hadn’t worked.

I mean you know, as I often say to my students, those personal disappointments or failures are really, really important as a means of getting you to do some of the harder work of self-reflection that you might have to do to make a better choice the next time. And so in a way, I was doing this sort of Jesuit discernment without knowing I was doing Jesuit discernment and then ended up I think where you’re going…

Todd Ream: Right. Following in your father’s footsteps again, in some ways here.

Vincent D. Rougeau: At my father’s alma mater, at least at the university as a law professor, and that’s where it all came together for me. I mean, I was in this extremely interesting legal academic environment at the law school, but I was also now part of this Jesuit university and thrust into this environment that had been my father’s undergraduate environment, but had not been mine. And you know, even though grown up Catholic, got my, you know, religious education and everything, but I had not married my intellectual self and my professional self with my religious self to create a vocation.

And at Loyola, with the Jesuits and my colleagues there, it suddenly all came together. I was able to dive into Catholic social teaching and sort of the Catholic intellectual life, which just sparked something in me that really allowed me then to suddenly feel like, ah, yes, this is I’ve been meant to do, or this is what is bringing it all together for me as a scholar, as a teacher as a, as a person of faith as a member of a community, I see a pathway forward that brings all those streams together in a really rewarding way.

Todd Ream: Thank you. Were any mentors more pivotal than perhaps others in helping with that discernment process and shaping your sense of vocation?

Vincent D. Rougeau: I think a lot of people contributed, contributed in ways that individually didn’t make the decision for me. But when I brought all of the things that were happening, I suddenly realized that, yeah, so for instance, my parents, I felt like, oh my gosh, I’m going to disappoint them because they’ve invested in, in me and in all these ways I’ve gone to law school, now I don’t want to really be a lawyer. And I was thinking, oh gosh, and particularly my father’s going to say what are you doing?

But so from them I got the freedom, I mean, again, your parents know you, and they knew I was unhappy, and to explore, they said, you know, this is not a failure. This is a door that needs to be open for you to really understand what it is you want to do so continue that exploration. Don’t make your choices based on what you think will please us, which is of course, what a lot of young people have to go through vis-a-vis their parents.

I had really good friends and I say this to my students all the time too, your friends can often reflect back to you things about yourself that you don’t see, or that you don’t want to see, or that you just don’t know. I started listening to people who were trying to tell me what they thought I would be really good at and why I was unhappy in what I was doing. I mean, you’re a people person and you are so good with, you know, sharing and explaining information to people.

You’re not meant to kind of sit at a desk all day, you know, sort of digging into the details of, you know, the uniform commercial code. It’s not using your gifts and talents in a way that’s really contributing. And, you know, and then another friend encouraged me to, you know, do some visits to law schools because he said, you’d be a great law professor, don’t you know that? And I was like, no, I’m not. That’s not me.

Now, why I didn’t think it was me? I think it was because I didn’t, you know, the people I knew who had become law professors weren’t, were different, you know, they knew they wanted it. I didn’t. But once I started talking to other professors and being in those conversations and in those environments, I realized that, wait a minute, I really enjoy this. I enjoy the life of the mind. I enjoy being with students. So, you know, listening to those people helped.

And then as through my career, there were so many people. My first dean at Loyola I think was a great influence on me, as were many of my colleagues there, people I met professionally, over time who saw things in me that allowed me to transition from being a professor to being an administrator and becoming a dean myself, you know?

So, I think it’s really important to develop great, you know, relationships and to be relational and to listen and, and offer yourself to others so they can offer back to you. And so, I mean, to put it in very religious terms, that sense of being open to the other, is really an important part of how we discover who we are, that we don’t really fully come into being who we are unless we have the community of others to support us and embrace us and encourage us. You know, I found that to be a constant theme throughout my entire life. And new people emerged all the time, and hopefully I was doing the same back for others.

Todd Ream: That’s beautiful. Thank you.

Authors, any authors shape your thinking and shape your sense of vocation, perhaps more than others? Authors, you know, living authors, but also maybe in the distant past in the Church’s history?

Vincent D. Rougeau: I mean, most recently, I mean, a lot of what Pope Francis has written and said has been very influential for me. He has given me a sense of the Church and what it means to be a Christian, that has really, you know, shaped me in, in, in really profound ways. And so I think that’s been very important. I mean, obviously reading a lot of Catholic social teaching, I was shaped by a lot of, a lot of that papal writing. But he’s done something to me that I think has been really really profound.

I’ve always been a very kind of scattered reader, I, you know, it’s not like I really dig into one kind of read. I love history and I love it. I’ve read a lot of nonfiction and in my adult life, I’m reading a lot more fiction. In my early life, I was really influenced by these realist writers, from the 19th like, Guy de Maupassant, and you know, books like the Tale of Two Cities. And you know, those things really struck me. Studied a lot of French, so a lot of French writers. I mean, the poetry of Baudrillard really, people like that was really influential for me. It’s hard for me to land on one thing.

I mean, in terms of religious, well, I’ve already said the Pope, but, you know, I’d have to think more, because really I read across so many different things. I was of course deeply shaped as a young person of, and an African American by some of these African American writers, like Richard Wright. I think in terms of just identity shaping and, and trying to understand the position I occupied as a person of color in this society, and then trying to you know, understand what that would mean and, and how relevant those stories were over time, you know, because things, change and my parents were close to some people who I think were some early writers in areas that have become more how shall I say it? More controversial today.

I mean, for instance, Derrick Bell at Harvard Law School, who I think was probably on the earlier writers around things that have become known more like Critical Race Theory, was someone that we knew personally and I didn’t always agree with everything he wrote, but I think he did something very profound again, in sort of allowing us, Black people in the United States, to understand their role in society in a different way and to critique it, sometimes in ways that it hadn’t been.

Again to be in conversation with him and sometimes disagreement with him about what that meant and to see how it has evolved into something that is controversial today but also powerful, because it’s raising a lot of questions that people are afraid to ask or have difficulty talking about.

Todd Ream: After serving as a faculty member and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs for the law school at the University of Notre Dame, the Jesuits called you back. And you accepted an appointment as a faculty member and dean of the law school at Boston College.

In what ways did you find your service as an associate dean and then as a dean within a law school context to be fulfilling? 

Vincent D. Rougeau: I think serving as dean allows you to bring a lot of things together. I mean, you’ve been a faculty member and you know what that is. And so part of, obviously an important part of being a dean is overseeing the life of the faculty, obviously with the help of others. So you have some thoughts, right? You have some thoughts about it. When I was a faculty member, these are the kinds of things that made my life better or made me more productive, made teaching more rewarding. Can I create those conditions for others in my role as dean? So there’s that piece.

Then of course, there’s the student piece, you know, is where scholars and teachers and how can I communicate something to these students as the leader of this law school, about what it means to be a lawyer who is deeply ethical, who is you know, committed to a set of values around a profession, that go beyond simply the, you know, the transactional nature of, this is my job. I had an opportunity to take all of the lessons I had learned from teaching students for so long, to, you know, the kinds of things I wanted to prioritize in the life of the school.

And then the third piece, which is really different, I think when you become a, a dean after being a faculty member is, at least a dean of an independent school within a university, is that upward relationship to the rest of the university, you know, the provost, the president, your other deans. And there I felt like, well, here’s an opportunity to remind my colleagues, the other deans of the other colleges, the president, of the important role that the law school plays in the life of the university. If we are building a great research university, we need a great law school, and so I could be an advocate for that. And over time, you know, I was able to become more nationally involved as an advocate for legal education and participate in other organizations.

So, you know, you have a scholarly view, you have a view as a teacher, and you have a view as an advocate for your discipline and your profession in the case of law, in the context of the university, and really more broadly in the context of the society. How should we be thinking about the rule of law in a democratic society? What role should law schools play in that? So I found it very rewarding for, for 10 years to, to be in the position to do that.

Todd Ream: Bringing us then up to the current day, about 45 miles west of Chestnut Hill is Worcester, Massachusetts and the College of the Holy Cross.

Would you describe the discernment process that led you to embrace an appointment to serve as president?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Well, when I think about what was an important foundation for studying the law, you know, I would always come back to liberal arts education. The typical preparation for legal education, but also I think one of the best, and because of the way it gives you a kind of a well-rounded understanding of the human experience.

And if you as a lawyer don’t have that, it’s hard to really be truly excellent at what you do. I mean, there is a need, I think, for lawyers to understand people—we don’t always and, but when we do and how they make decisions and why, you know, their relationships fall apart. I mean, so much of what law’s about are, you know, relational things that don’t work. And so understanding that from a liberal arts perspective I think is really, really helpful.

And then my Jesuit Catholic commitments, you know, throughout my career, led me to think that being in a position to be the president of a liberal, a Jesuit Catholic liberal arts college was ideal. You know, it was bringing all of that together in a leadership role where I could really, I’d have a platform for talking about the value of this type of education. I’d be able to be closely engaged with the young people receiving it and the faculty who are delivering it in a mission-oriented way.

I mean, I think being part of institutions that are mission driven has, throughout my career, you know, been really critical to me and to my work. So this seemed like a unique opportunity at a very unique place. Holy Cross is the only Jesuit Catholic, fully undergraduate institution in the country. So I thought, well, you know, something special like this doesn’t really come along that often, and it seemed to match a lot of who I was and, and what was important to me.

Todd Ream: Typical day, if at all possible, can you tell me what a typical day, or perhaps if it’s easier, maybe there’s a typical week and what you find most fulfilling in terms of your exercise of the duties as president?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Typically for presidents, our days are filled with meetings. You wonder what am I actually doing? I’m meeting with all these people who are doing all these things. But I think a lot of our job is deeply relational too. I mean, we are working with a lot of people who are specialists, subject matter experts in particular areas, you know, the provost and the faculty, you know, someone who’s responsible for student life and development and the mission of the institution. And, you know, making sure that all these pieces fit together. So, I mean, you do meet a lot. I mean, if you’re kind of trying to be as involved with everything going on as you can from your position as the president.

But then I think in terms of things that are rewarding is when I can break up that flow and actually be spending time with students at a student activity. Tonight for instance, my wife and I are having 20 freshmen over to the house for dinner. And you know, we do that with each class and those are really rewarding moments where the students are in your home and they’re relaxed and they’re, you know, telling you what, what’s really going on. And you’re seeing the development over time of these young people. And I find that very rewarding.

Opportunities to engage with the alumni and to see the commitment so many people have to the institution, how it has shaped them, and how they give back, I think those are really, really wonderful moments when you’re out and about with them. And, I mean, be it for fundraising or for, you know, gathering them to be mentors or for activities where we recognize them, I think those are really rewarding.

And then I think the role that you can play as a higher education leader in the community and the country these are not ordinary times, but it’s reminding us, I think, of the important role we have in talking about the value of what we do and pointing to the achievements of higher education in this country. And although that can sometimes be difficult or complicated because of the varying views people have, I think for the most part, most Americans understand that you know, a well educated citizenry is really important to so much of what we’ve accomplished as a society and what we hope to accomplish.

You know, how we do that, people may have different views on it, but I feel honored to be able to, you know, stand up and talk about the wonderful things that my students have done and are doing, and that my faculty is doing and how they’re reshaping young people’s lives in really positive ways. So all of those things give me joy in my work.

Todd Ream: For individuals who are considering comparable appointments then, what advice would you offer?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Well, I mean, I’ll start where we were before. You have to know yourself well and ask yourself is is this kind of leadership role something that really, you know, fills you in a positive way or will it drain you because there are a lot of demands from the, in the job and, you know, you have to be present with a lot of different people, who have a lot of different needs, who aren’t always in agreement. I mean, there’s just a lot of managing of human beings that can be trying and taxing at times, but also can be deeply fulfilling if that’s something that you see yourself doing and, and enjoy.

So know that about yourself, know that sometimes it feels thankless, you know, I mean, you’re the target for a lot of, you know, people who are angry or disappointed or, you know, for the things that went wrong. But you’re also the person when things go right, who gets a lot of credit.

So you have to balance those things. You have to really recognize that, particularly if you’re coming from an academic, a faculty role, that when you enter these kinds of administrative jobs, you are sort of moving out of being an active scholar. And if that’s really your passion, it’s really hard to stay truly engaged with your field once you take on these big roles like president or dean, I mean it’s, and so are you ready to move to another stage in your career where you aren’t as engaged with that?

There are small ways you can do it, but it’s not the same. And I’ve seen a few people who thought, oh, yeah, well, I’ll still write articles in the summer and that’s really hard to do because this job doesn’t stop. I mean, it slows down a little bit in the summer and maybe in the Christmas holiday time, New Year’s, but it’s very demanding, you know, and things happen all the time that need your attention. So those things have to be things that you want to do or feel good about doing, in lieu of doing some other things that you may have enjoyed.

But at the end of the day, when it all comes together and you, you’re looking across all the things that you do, the students, the faculty, the staff, the community, there’s a real sense of I think accomplishment and satisfaction and a sense of gift and gratitude that come from moving a community forward, keeping it engaged and active and seeing the results of that hard work and in our students as they graduate and in the lives of our community and our faculty.

Todd Ream: While the Jesuits cultivated a considerable number of comprehensive universities and research universities, you mentioned that Holy Cross is unique in its singular focus on undergraduate, residential, liberal arts education.

As its president, in what ways do you find the Holy Cross community distinct amongst Jesuit education then? And in what ways do you find it distinct within Catholic education, in terms of how you understand it but also share its story?

Vincent D. Rougeau: The easy question is how it’s distinct, you know, more broadly in American higher ed. I mean, I think a religiously-based higher educational experience is something that, you know, from its inception makes a few commitments that are firm, right? And they stand for certain ideas as being true, not necessarily to exclude, but to kind of create a space where this is what we believe. And we can still do that and allow other people to believe other things and to have conversations about what would be ideal, what works, what doesn’t, and all of that.

But it’s done in the context of, but yeah, but there are certain foundational commitments that we have. We’re part of something larger than ourselves, you know, we’re part of the Church and now we have a particular role in the Church, which I think sometimes people within the faith community might misunderstand. I mean, it is not our job to be a parochial school in the sense of a K through 12 experience. It is not our job necessarily to be a place where, you know, we are reinforcing a kind of dogmatic understanding of the faith. I mean, we’re not a seminary, we’re not a parochial school.

Now there are different spaces along that continuum that can be closer to one or the other. But I think at our best, you know, a Catholic university as some people used to say is the place where the Church does its thinking, the place where the Church engages the world. And in different societies that could mean different things. But I would think in the, in the United States, that means because this is a diverse pluralist democracy that, you know, hopefully not building up walls to hide, but you’re figuring out ways to engage and communicate, allowing people to dig deeply into their own experience as people of faith within a certain tradition but also to do that in a way that isn’t overly sectarian or, you know, separate and at least in the Catholic tradition, you know, that kind of engagement with the world, I think is pretty important now.

That’s where I think I moved to the Jesuits. I mean, the Jesuits have as an order always been outward looking and, you know, engaged with the world that, you know, from their inception. You know, the early Jesuits were traveling all over, and doing their work in all kinds of places with Catholics and without. And so I take that as an important message that we need to understand as a Jesuit Catholic institution that our role is in particular to be open and engaged with the world because that is the charism of the order that we’re a part of.

Yes, we’re still Catholic, but as we well know, there are different ways to live out a Catholic faith tradition. I mean, we could be in a monastery, that’s one way. Or you can be sort of in a more evangelical posture, where you’re opening up and engaging and talking and building relationships across all kinds of boundaries.

And again, I think in the United States in particular, or in a democracy like the United States, that’s particularly important, because if we’re really going to, if we really are committed to the idea of a diverse welcoming society where, and people of any background can feel that this is their home and they are citizens and members of this community, we need great institutions that live that out in a way that’s visible and meaningful.

You can still be who you are, but you can do that in community with others who believe different things and you can do it without losing yourself. But that might mean that you do it differently from a co-religionist who’s in a different kind of environment where there’s, that’s not contested, where everyone’s understanding of what is the same.

Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of that engagement, Holy Cross’s current strategic plan, Aspire, seeks to offer a vision for a hope-filled future. Would you please share what is meant by hope-filled within the context of the College of the Holy Cross? In what ways is hope cultivated at Holy Cross through curricular and co-curricular programs?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Well, we cultivate hope, I think by remembering that, remembering what our core values are. And one of the things that, you know, you ask any Holy Cross graduate and a lot of other Jesuit-educated people, one of the key things they remember from their education, we often talk about being men and women, for/and with others. And what that’s about is it builds on these core foundational commitments about recognizing the dignity of other human beings, recognizing that some people are in positions where they struggle, particularly because they’re poor, because they live in marginal circumstances for various reasons, and that we have a responsibility to be other-focused as we move through our lives.

So this is not an education that is designed to be part of some kind of transactional agreement like you give me the skills, I take the skills. I get a job, I move on with my life. You are now involved in the life of a community that is deeply engaged with the formation of whole people around all kinds of aspects of who they are, what they need, and so we’re taking the Jesuit understanding of formation of, of creating these men and women born with others in a way that allows them to understand what their gifts and talents are but also to understand where those gifts and talents are best used. They’re simply not for you alone.

And something I mentioned earlier, we don’t come into a real understanding of who we are, unless we are living out that ourselves, living it out in community with others. And that’s all that give and take right of kind of understanding and learning how to deal with people you don’t like and you know, all the things that we do. So I think, you know, the Jesuit Catholic mission is about thinking about education in this context and offering it as an invitation to others to join in this conversation and in this, shaping of young people, for the world.

And that’s the other thing. We’re sending them out into the world. We’re not going to like, keep them in little boxes where they will, you know, they’re not going to necessarily be in communities where there are other people like themselves. They’re going to have to learn how to navigate all kinds of situations, hopefully in a way that will keep them whole because they feel they have gotten what they need to understand who they are and, you know, you know what it means to be loved, you know, created in love, you know, recognizing what this great sacrifice of Christ means.

That’s obviously what motivates this institution and how does that translate into who I am and, and, and why I’m valuable and why others are valuable. Those are the kinds of messages we’re trying to pass along. I’m going to stop because I think I might have lost the train of your question. 

Todd Ream: Thank you. Before we close our conversation, then today, I want to ask you about the academic vocation. I asked you certain sort of components in terms of how you expressed it, but how do you define it or what characteristics do you look for and how’s it expressed, you know, amongst your fellow colleagues there in maybe unique ways at College of the Holy Cross as a Jesuit Catholic institution?

Vincent D. Rougeau: Well, when I think about the academic vocation, it’s interesting, you know, I think particularly for us as Americans who we’re very practical people. We like to see things getting done, build things, you know? But being an academic is embracing the life of the mind, embracing the idea that thinking deeply about things is important.

And oftentimes, people may, on the outside, look at what you’re spending your time on and think it’s not practical or it’s, why are you so interested in, you know, what the people in Athens were doing and, you know, at this particular time. But when you dig into that, you realize that, you know, people have been doing the same things for a very long time. You know, understanding patterns in, in the lives of civilizations or the different ways that people responded to problems has a lot to offer us today.

But even if it didn’t, there is some value in just understanding things deeply and the discipline of a passion for ideas or things or places leads us to greater discovery. So the idea of discovery, the idea of self-knowledge or community knowledge and of preservation of knowledge. All of these things, I think, mean that, you know, an academic vocation is incredibly important to others, sometimes in ways that they don’t realize.

And so yes, if you have a passion for this, a gift for this, don’t be dissuaded by those who might say and say, well, you know, really, I mean, you’re studying, you know, 18th-century French literature. Well through that study, who knows what will be found, who knows what will be retrieved, who knows what can be resurrected or what gifts will come to the society from that exploration. And passing on that excitement and love for a subject to students and sharing it with colleagues, that’s an incredibly important aspect of our lives in common.

And I think another thing that I think the academic life provides us with is, there are certain things all of us can benefit from, because there are people in our communities who are so deeply passionate about things that really can offer a lot to others and to the society over the long term. Just because we don’t know what it is at the time doesn’t mean it’s not valuable. And having faith in things unseen, I think is something that we as Christians should understand. And just because it isn’t obvious to us that something has value, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value.

So I think the academic vocation is a great way to demonstrate for those of us with faith in particular that deep and passionate engagement with the world, or with an idea or with a period of time in history has real value and just it’s a gift. I feel it’s been a gift for me to have had that time and that space to, to do that work and to find things and discover things and be led to new things because of it.

Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you.

As we close then, I want to ask you, in terms of this understanding of the academic vocation, what virtues do you believe are important to cultivate, perhaps alongside and in addition to hope, but then also what vices, against what vices should we guard, and perhaps be wary of, in terms of the academic vocation?

Vincent D. Rougeau: I think hope can become a reason not to act. You know, you don’t want to just rely solely on the idea that, oh, if I keep waiting, this thing will happen. So I guess, you know, we have to be aware of, you know, the fact that we need other virtues, you know, like persistence and other ways of engaging with, with other, with the world that, that allow us to balance hope, all of the traditional, you know, you know, thrift and piety and all of these things, are ways that, you know, we discipline our lives to recognize some of the wonderful things that come to us, but that we also have a role to play in ensuring that we are not simply you know, passive actors.

And that, I think, particularly goes to the issues around justice. And something that we’re really passionate about in Jesuit education is the idea of justice. You know, the idea that things are just this way because they’re just this way, is not acceptable. You know, we have a responsibility to act in justice, to seek to make things, to move things forward towards something better that we know exists. We can’t just hope for it.

Now, we don’t want to become hopeless. But we need to use the opportunities that we have to share our gifts with the world to move us in a direction that allows us to hope in a way that is consistent with a life of lived faith, you know, of faith that does justice, you know, it’s an important part of how we understand in the Jesuit tradition, our role in the Catholic tradition.

And giving others their due, not just accepting their fate, to be as part of the way things are. As I said before, we have a responsibility as well as the need to say to people, yes, things can be better. Good things will happen, but you know, we are not passive in that exploration of, or that weight. We wait and we act and we pray and we embrace one another.

And then, yes, that hope is reasonable because we are bringing about the conditions to provide a hopeful future. So that’s why we educate young people, not to be passive but to be active in their shaping of the world, which I think is a good reason to be very positive and to hope.

Todd Ream: Thank you very much. Our guest has been Vincent D. Rougeau, President of the College of the Holy Cross. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.

Vincent D. Rougeau: Thank you.

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Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.