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In the twenty-seventh episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Katia Passerini, the President of Gonzaga University. Passerini begins by drawing upon her expertise as an information system management scholar, thinking through academe’s successes and failures to date in relation to online learning. While such opportunities came with greater access for populations previously underserved by higher education, Passerini contends one challenge is those efforts were not personalized to the point that students had access to immersive experiences that often allow for deep learning or personal formation. The rapidly accelerating presence of AI may allow for greater personalization. However, Passerini cautions rapidly accelerating forms of technology such as AI may also come with accelerating costs for the foreseeable future. Passerini then shifts to discuss her own calling to education and educational leadership, beginning with her student years in Rome and DC, appointments she accepted at in the Tri-State region at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, St. John’s University, Seton Hall University, and now her appointment as the president of Gonzaga University. When considering that current appointment, Passerini shares what she sees as jewels in terms of Gonzaga’s Jesuit charisms, relationship with the Catholic Church, and commitment to global engagement and service. Passerini concludes by exploring her hopes for relations shared by Church-related colleges and universities and the Church, noting, in particular, inspiration she draws from the practices embedded in Pope Francis’s commitment to synodality and the habits of discussion and common discernment.
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.
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Our guest is Katia Passerini, the President of Gonzaga University. Thank you for joining us.
Katia Passerini: Hello, thank you for having me here.
Todd Ream: Shortly before he passed away, the economist and former president of Princeton University and the Andrew Mellon Educational Foundation, William Bowen, published Higher Education in a Digital Age, and while he was optimistic online learning could contribute to efforts to control costs and make higher education accessible to wider groups of previously underserved individuals, he was also cautious about the applicability of large monolithic efforts.
As an information system management scholar and educational leader, what’s your assessment of his claims? Is online education helping to control costs and making it more accessible?
Katia Passerini: Thank you. I think that’s an excellent question that we can answer on multiple levels. I would say yes to the first statement. The democratization of information is really a result of having access to online education capabilities, that started even before with, with the internet and with the Google of the world. If you remember Google tagline is “Put the world information at your fingertips,” which means anyone now has at least the same starting base access to information.
So online education did that for several populations that could not, for example, come to campus and have a residential experience. So if you have a family, if you work, now, you can kind of source knowledge at your own time. So in that respect, it gave access to people who needed flexibility of the schedule. And if we look at a global macro level, it provided content that was available in one country also easily accessible to another country. So the excitement as being around, really democratizing access to information and knowledge.
The hope for that was well, that access though will be, you know, free of charge. And to some extent for some companies—I want to go back to Google. Google has found its own way to monetize in the backend that access, right? They provide very low cost entry to that information. And then of course they’re assembling data about yourself and your personal privacy is somewhat extinct. And we accept that because we are getting a big service and big value in return because of that.
However if you want access to specialized content, if you need access, for example, to learning management systems, those are costs that exist. Um, and in fact, instead of lowering the cost, we have escalated the number of people that need to help producing high quality video. Uh, we have escalated the amount of development training information that we have to do to produce content that is easy to access, but also engaging and interactive to use.
So it’s not democratization of the cost. Cost in the long run ended up being the same. Or in some cases when sometimes you have the monopoly of the tools, if we, if we think we, if we think about learning management systems, you see the kind of cluster around two or three big large firms, then you’re kind of subject to the escalation of costs. But I think it’s always a trade off. And if you look at technology evolution, we see that over and over.
Even with AI now, we are extremely excited with what is happening. We are getting access to tools that help us be more productive. And at the same time, we know that costs are escalating because it takes a lot of power and processing computational capability to be able to run these large computational processes that happen in, in, you know, in the large data lake happening in the background. So we are seeing a lot of costs going back to data center, power, energy, and consumption.
And we’re also seeing that different organizations have to pay to have limited access within their own structure, otherwise if they just use AI without guardrails, they’re putting all their confidential information online. So to avoid that, you need to buy access that is limited to your own organization. So I think we have learned with technology, it gives you higher productivity. It doesn’t necessarily give you lower costs.
Todd Ream: Thank you. In terms of his concern about these, the monolithic nature of these educational efforts, do you think that has become the norm or have we become, thanks to technology, better able to personalize or nuance offerings to the individual?
Katia Passerini: I think that’s the greatest promise of AI now. Uh, it’s really individualized to the end user. You can ask a specific question and get an answer that is customized to the persona that you have created in your interface. Uh, you can say, I am a college president and I want to know about this, and you will get a response that is customized to your role. But if you say I’m a student, or you know, I am a CEO corporation, X and Y, you will get some generalized answer that fit that persona. So I think that personalization is happening much more easily than in the large monolithic structure that we hoped could help us and ended up to be. If we think about the large, the Moodle and the large courses, the one that had thousands of students enrolled in a course.
And it was a phenomenal democratization tool. I mean, you could see those very large scale course, the massive online courses, starting with an enrollment of thousands of people from all over the world, and then you looked at completion rates, they were very, very low, right? Because you were competing for attention and you were delivering only a standardized experience that didn’t necessarily fit the reality of those around you.
And we know because we go, if we go back to the Socratic method, that learning is not just accessing content and looking at it. But content needs to be interiorized and it needs to be discussed and it needs to be shared to be able to become from, from information that someone else provides to you, to real knowledge that you can apply in other situations. So I think the great promise that we have now, and the great challenge, you know, the jury is still out there, can AI still really help us get that personalized experience? Personalized experience, but for a very large group of people at the same time. And the early signs is that, you know, it’s getting there.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As an information system management scholar and an educational leader, I want to now ask you about your own formation for the service that you have provided and continue to provide. You were born and raised in Rome, Italy, the daughter of parents who served both as educators and educational leaders. You earned an undergraduate degree in political science from Rome’s LOUISS University and a Master’s degree in economics from Rome’s II-Tor Vergata University.
In what ways, if any, did those experiences shape your interests, your experiences at home, but then your experiences as a graduate student and an undergraduate there in Rome?
Katia Passerini: Yeah, so I think my experiences at home with my parents who were, you know, I remember growing up, they started being elementary school teachers then they moved as it happens usually in one’s career to headmasters of elementary schools or middle schools. And then they became superintendents for the Ministry of Education. So they evaluated program effectiveness across regions in Italy. Uh, I was embedded every single day in discussions about education, educational reform, learning.
Um, I remember, you know, as a child following my mom to her elementary school class where she was, you know, teaching math or literature, and I was just sitting there and observing, so I think my passion for education as being socialized through all of those experiences.
When I got to to the university, my first love I thought I had was journalism. I want, I wanted to really be someone who I loved writing and I wrote about what was happening in the world. And I chose LOUISS University because they had an undergraduate program that led to the school of journalism which was a post undergraduate specialization. And I thought my, you know, my path was set was set there.
And then in my political science classes, you talk about policy, government relations but you also talk a lot about economics. And it’s not just the microeconomics that excited me, it was the macro, to see how things are interconnected so that actions at the micro level of a single firm affect the economy as an all. And I was blessed to have exceptional professors that made me fall in love with economics. And that’s why my path changed.
When I graduated in political science, I said, well, I need to get another degree. And that’s where I landed in II-Tor Vergata and, and started paying attention to this um, connection between systems and how they affect the institutions at, you know, at a holistic level. With that, I think you know, it was clear that I wanted to study systems and that’s why then at the end of uh, you know, when I left Italy and, and came in the U.S. I, I focused on disciplines that looked a lot and focused a lot on system sciences.
So I think being embedded in that culture and then being socialized in a context that takes this economic view also from a perspective, I know you want to connect this to the vocation, but the perspective of economics when you, when you, at least the economics that I studied was very much connected to welfare economics, which is the wellbeing of a large scale, you know, of people as a whole. So the notion of public good, the notion of common good, and now you use individual actors for the benefit of the whole.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Along those lines, were any particular authors or scholars more impactful on you than perhaps others?
Katia Passerini: I think some of my professor was blessed. LOUISS had this um, teaching and learning style where they really brought people that were working in industry to, it’s a, it’s a, a university that is connected to the Italian Chamber of Commerce, Confindustria so they took people that were actually working in, maybe the Bank of Italy or some of my professors of economics were ministers, ended up being ministers of economics for the country.
So those were really exciting things for a student who’s learning to learn from the best and from the people that are taking the theories and then going to their regular day job and applying it and maybe making institutional reforms or changing organizations based on those models. So that, for me, was, was, was exciting.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As you echoed just a few minutes ago, you then came to the United States to continue your education in part and earned at that time an MBA and a PhD from George Washington University in Washington D.C. and establishing your emerging expertise as an information system management scholar.
What compelled you to come to Washington D.C. to complete your formal education? Actually, occasionally I might ask anybody, regardless of how they came to, what would compel you to come to Washington D.C.?
Katia Passerini: Well, I mean, it’s, it’s a little bit of an interesting story and I, I, I wish I could tell you this was my grandiose vision, right? Um, but what happened during my undergrad study in, within Europe, there is an exchange program called the Erasmus um, students easily transfer credits and go and study in other European countries. And I had an opportunity to go and study for about six months in the United Kingdom. And uh at the time that I selected, I remember I was, you know, first one in the rankings. Uh, I could choose wherever I wanted to go, and I remember everyone wanted to go to the London School of Economics, and I was like, okay.
So that is where I will go. And then I had a couple of colleagues, you know, peers that we usually studied and worked on, on exams and preparations together, that were going to a smaller university in Colchester, which is about, you know, 60 to 70 miles from London. And I decided, you know, this is my first experience abroad. Uh, I don’t want to go alone, so I kind of passed on London for Colchester, which was phenomenal, University of Essex in, in Colchester, but I didn’t have the opportunity to go to to London. I spent a lot of time in the smaller town studying very hard because the education was really rigorous.
So I made a promise to myself. I said, next time I go somewhere, I’m going to go to the capital. And so it happens that in the U.S., the capital of the United States is Washington D.C.. What I didn’t expect from that choice, which was really emotional as opposed to you know, intellectual and intentional, is what I found in Washington D.C. uh, which at the time I came in, you know, 1993. So you need to understand a lot of excitement about reforms. And very exciting at that time was the healthcare reform that Clinton was trying to do, didn’t work out, but there was all that great excitement on uh, public versus private systems. I was really fascinated by that discussion.
But what I fascinated even more is that in Washington you have a microcosm of the entire world. So you have government organizations, you know, the politicians and that represent all of the country of all of the U.S. But next to that, you have embassies and you have international organizations, the World Bank, the IMF, the International Development Bank. So you have also a lot of leaders from different countries across the world.
So if you had an opportunity to experience their world in a small place because Washington’s not that large, right? It’s that little, um square there. Uh, and you didn’t know to, you didn’t need to go anywhere. You could see and look at different ideas, context, and perspectives. Just from where you were.
Todd Ream: Yeah, yeah, yeah. All you need is a metro pass.
Katia Passerini: Exactly.
Todd Ream: Yeah. And you can get there. Yeah, that’s great.
Uh, in what ways did your interests converge then in the research agenda you established? You had these experiences and came to also George Washington, which I assume leveraged faculty in comparable ways as what you experienced as an undergraduate and a master’s student in Rome where you have policymakers in the classrooms.
Katia Passerini: One thing that got me excited when I arrived in Washington is, was one of my faculty was an economist at the RAND Corporation and she became my advisor. Uh, I had to do a master thesis for the degree in economics at II-Tor Vergata. She became my U.S. Advisor for that degree, and I was comparing the healthcare systems in the U.S. versus Italy from an economic standpoint. And so having someone who was in an organization, nonprofit organization doing policy studies on economics was fascinating.
Todd Ream: How, how did your research interests then emerge and sort of converge into, into the manner in which you pursued them through that graduate experience?
Katia Passerini: So I, like, again, to pretend that I’ve been very intentional in my career choices, but things just happen and sometimes I’ve learned something is coming to you and it looks like an opportunity, you just have to go with the flow. So I came to the U.S. starting with economics and businesses, that’s where my MBA was in international business.
And then you know, we finished MBA in ’96, ’97, remember, at that time we were talking about Y2K and the doomsday of the world. There was a lot of interest in information technology, a lot of, you know tech bubbles, startups this faith uh, and question on, on where technology is going, but also this fear that technology could just stop the end of the world because of this, you know, little bug that we didn’t code dates predicting the future. And so the entire world and computers across the world, were going to stop.
Studying in Washington D.C. at JW, you’re just, you know, a couple of blocks from the World Bank. I was fortunate to have an opportunity to work at the World Bank on projects related to Y2K. We went to the Sub-Pacific Islands to prepare, to prepare them for, you know, what was going to happen and make sure that, you know, you have to do some coding changes for things not to fall down. It wasn’t just a hoax. It was a real problem. It needed to be solved with coding and upgrading systems.
But we had this incredible experience around people and, and technology and how a good use or a bad use of technology could really change course. And that fascinated me a lot. And so being that it was also a tech boom, it was very easy to be admitted to, you know, a PhD program, think about opportunities for research funding. I was so fortunate because I got more funding that I needed to do my studies, to do my research just because that was the hype of the market.
But for me it was also fascinating because it wasn’t just the technology, coding, and development part. It was really how people make decisions that can make technology that is perfect work and not work, and that that is what led me then to, to stay and focus in information systems, which is really about the study of people, processes, and technology.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I often think of the conversations we’re having today about AI as having certain parallels with conversations that occurred in the 1990s, late 1990s, concerning dot coms.
Katia Passerini: Mm-hmm.
Uh, and the more so though I think the ethical uses and our awareness that this technology is much more powerful than anything that we have seen before. Because, I mean, I remember the early days of, you know, expert systems. You had a lot of control even if you were creating expert systems that could take, you know, the input and transform it into something new based on the expertise that you brought in. Uh, you still had control of what you were feeding into the systems and the way the rules for cognition were established. And now we are in a completely different paradigm that those rules, thanks to machine learning, get created on the fly, depending on the different types of input.
So I think it’s a, it’s a similar situation in terms of the hype curve, meaning everyone is believing that this is the transformational technology and the world will, will change dramatically. And we see that in every technology we have this growth and then, you know, it starts normalizing. I think we will see some of that in the AI world. But the cognitive capabilities embedded in some of those systems are something new that we need to tackle very carefully and we need to be able to understand when we need to switch off that power plug, yeah.
Todd Ream: Thank you. You shortly after we passed through, safely through Y2K you served on the faculty, the New Jersey Institute of Technology from roughly 2003 to 2013. Faculty and administration at St. John’s from 2013 to 2020 and the faculty and administration at Seton Hall University from 2020 to 2024, including serving as Seton Hall’s provost and interim president. So the educational path there in the, in the tri-state area, you were south of Manhattan, in the Bronx and then back over Manhattan to New Jersey there serving at a public university, a Vincentian university in St. John’s, and then a diocesan university over at Seton Hall.
Can you talk about the discernment process that led you to begin embracing administrative service, as well as service as a faculty member?
Katia Passerini: The administration, once again, came as an opportunity. Um, I felt I was, I call myself a professional student, and as a faculty you’re continuously learning new material, especially if you’re teaching technology. Um, there isn’t, you know, a semester later your class is going to look completely different from the one that you took the semester before. It’s just the pace of technology. In fact, at at certain point I decided to move a little bit more into project management. At least there was a body of knowledge that was constant instead of changing continuously so I loved what I was doing.
Uh, you know, as the typical assistant professor to associate to professor, I had a lot of opportunity to decide my own agenda, what I wanted to get involved with. Uh, I love teaching. I love doing research at the level that fortunately got me to my different career opportunities. And then when I became professor, I recall that the provost then at NJIT, asked me to consider a position, an open position in the honors college. So as an interim dean.
And I thought that was a safe way for me to experience administration because an honors college is an entity that has students, you know, but they’re technically dual citizens. They’re, you know, completing a degree in engineering, management, architecture, or whatever is their college that they rolled in, but because of their, um GPA and other scores, they’re all unified in another unit in which then they have an advanced curriculum. They do additional service, they do additional research and et cetera. So you don’t have faculty, you work only with the students, and that was amazing.
And what I realized is that I could meet with the students. We were working on a new strategic plan with, with the board, the, the advisory board for the college. And I will bring in students and they had terrific ideas and we will present them to the board and, and they will get executed. So I realized that there was a time to completion that wasn’t so much faster than what you see in your academic life. Sometimes you, you know, you submit an article and it takes for a year for an article to be published.
Or sometimes you teach a class and you don’t know if you made an impact. But then five years later you get that email from the students, that tells you, oh, I really remember what you taught me in the class. But it’s such a big gap, right? And you’re always worrying that you’re not influencing change in, in the way that you could. And so what I saw in the honors college is that collaborating with students, board members, and then of course faculty we could influence change in what we were doing in a much more impactful and effective way.
So that’s where I got the bug is well, you know, I’m a dean of a college without faculty then St. John’s came up, and it was the largest undergraduate college with a lot of faculty and students. And that gave me an opportunity to experience that. Um, I loved St. John’s because they had a, they’re on campus in Rome, and I said, oh, I would love to be teaching and I ended up teaching in some classes also in Rome.
And what happened at St. John’s was transformational for me. Um, one, I love the Vincentian and Vincentians. And so I, that really captured my heart. But also what I realized is that you can, in a faith-based institution, you can be your whole self. You know, there is a professional aspect of you and you never bring faith into what you do because of course, you know, you’re, you’re teaching disciplines that are not necessarily connected.
But in a faith-based institution, there are other options, in which you can feel also and feed your spirituality, your need to also focus on bigger questions of life and God. And that to me was so fulfilling. It wasn’t a taboo. Sometimes in a public institution, you put, you know, religious faith away from, you know, your daily operations. So we, in a, in a faith-based institution, it’s actually an announcer and an enabler of who you are.
Todd Ream: Yeah, and you found that in an environment such as St. John’s and then also at Seton Hall, which with apologies to New Yorkers, I mislabeled St. John’s earlier as being in the Bronx. It’s not in the Bronx, it’s in Queens. Uh, and as you noted in Rome. Also, they have a main camp or a campus in Manhattan, so apologies again to New Yorkers for that.
Katia Passerini: No, it’s so funny because now it’s some campuses um, have been um, collapsed. But actually the Bronx was the only place where St. John wasn’t because there is a campus in Manhattan Queens, Staten Island, this is the one that was closed a couple of years ago Long Island. Uh, and of course in Europe, you have Rome, Paris, and at the time in Spain there was an additional campus which now moved to Ireland, so, yeah.
Todd Ream: Oh wow.
Katia Passerini: The interesting thing is it takes less to go from the Queen’s campus to Rome than from the Queen’s campus to Staten Island, so, you know, the traffic experience was.
Todd Ream: Having, having made those drives, I can, I can certainly imagine that’s true, so.
Katia Passerini: Yeah, Seton Hall, of course was the next logical step diocesan, but faith-based institution. Elizabeth Ann Seton what, what an incredible story. Uh, the first American-born Saint, and that mission and that passion that you put in everything was also a transformational for me as well. And that’s how I knew I loved to stay in faith-based institutional Catholic higher ed.
Todd Ream: On January 15th, 2025, you were named the next president of Gonzaga University, historically Jesuit institution Catholic Jesuit institution now, succeeding Thayne McCulloh in July 2025, and then you were formally installed on September 26th, 2025.
Would you describe the discernment process that led you to submit your name for consideration as the president at Gonzaga, all the way across the country in Spokane, Washington?
Katia Passerini: Yes. Yes. So, again, um intentionality in, in this case, you don’t take a presidency without wanting to be a president. Uh, so I, of course, I had through my experience as one year interim president at Seton Hall. Um, what I realized is that that was really the area where I could make and effect change as a provost that did that within the academics. But as a president, you have the opportunity to really look at the university holistically. So I know that a presidency was something that I was really interested in.
Um, Gonzaga came as the logical next step because if I knew I wanted to be in Catholic higher ed as well. And the Jesuits have that reputation of being a little bit rebels. Uh, and uh what I liked about learning and listening to the stories about the Jesuits is this idea of um, going and setting the world on fire which is what Ignatius did and then just scatter this group of people all over the world. And the way they did their acculturation was not to pretend that everyone in every place that they went to had to adjust to who they were, but rather they were able to adjust to the culture that they found and that flexibility, that sometimes you might not see in more structural and hierarchical structures, like, for example, at a diocesan university, as a follows a very, you know, and ecclesia in a, in a more rigid way that you would see in charisma type, you know, the Vincentians or, or the Jesuits have additional, a degree of freedom on the way to structure their work.
Um, but what I love is that their work is based on the community. And so there isn’t, I wouldn’t say there isn’t a Jesuit university that is the same because they’re all located in different communities. While the foundations are the same and we all you know, share that those, and learn them over and over the biggest impact that the Jesuit universities can do is to really understand what the local is and how you interact in your company, you know, the local environment to the journey that could be a faith-based journey or it could be simply an educational journey, which is one of the missions of Jesuit universities, making sure that everyone has the tools and means to become then men and and leaders that serve other people.
Todd Ream: Thank you. And together, just within the United States alone, they’ve built one of the arguably largest educational systems, I believe, 27 institutions total stretching from Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts to Mobile, Alabama to Los Angeles, California, to Seattle, and of course Spokane, Washington.
For individuals discerning whether they are also called to accept an appointment as a president and a president of a Church-related university such as Gonzaga, what advice would you offer?
Katia Passerini: Uh, so my story is mostly one on learning by trial, by fire. Uh, I had the opportunity to step into the interim presidency in about 24 hours. And so that’s where my discernment was day-by-day by doing the work. Um, I also know though that that’s not the typical opportunity, but also, especially the network that you have described, is a very strong network that is very much focused on formation. So there are different types of programs that I, like the nation’s colleagues programs or leadership programs, that are designed to specifically bring leadership in different universities to come together and discern what the next steps are.
And so you learn what the work is. You are usually mentored by sitting presidents and you understand whether that’s something that you’re called to not only academically but also spiritually and, and uh, from a, from a vocation standpoint within this network.
Outside of this network many organizations that are within higher ed have their own programs for discerning, it’s called Discerning the Presidency. Uh, I’m thinking the ACCU, the Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities as a great program. Um, also consulting organizations like EAB, the um, which is based in Washington D.C. as steps to the new presidency, AGB, the Association of Governing Boards as similar programs. So I think for someone who’s going through that thinking and discernment, if they don’t have an opportunity to actually go and do it directly, they can always join some of those programs as a first step.
And the second step, I will also encourage people to reach out for mentors. Um, so probably there are a lot of things affected my decision, but the biggest element of my decision was talking to another president and understanding what he was doing and also, looking in the confidence that this is work in me, that this is work that I could do. So also that one-to-one mentoring.
Although a schedule of a president is very busy, there is one thing that I will never so say no to, a student who’s working on his dissertation and needs to do research. I take the time to you know, to be interviewed and, and, and really help because I think that’s the next generation coming up and someone who is looking for mentorship because they want to understand what the next step in their career.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. That’s a wonderful offer for people to note. And you may have some, some inquiries then from students at Gonzaga here pretty quickly along these lines.
Katia Passerini: Great. Great.
Todd Ream: Uh, prior to accepting the appointment as Gonzaga’s next President, in what ways did you assess its strengths as a university? What did you see in it in terms of potential that then you’ve tried to tap and capitalize and perhaps even accelerate over the course of this first year that you’ve been in office?
Katia Passerini: So I think you know, I saw a jewel because there are so many great things about Gonzaga that you could the process starts from looking at a website, right, first and, and talking to a, maybe to, to the people in the search firm because you know, as you know, presidency, you have to do a confidentiality agreement. So you can’t do a lot of talking. So mostly is, you know, the search firm and their experiences, the position profile, as well as uh what you see online, on the website that speaks about the institution, what has been written, what the prior presidents wrote about, who they were. And, and, and what I saw is, is really a jewel.
Um, I first said, oh gosh, what do I add to a university that is already doing so many great things. And then well, as I started researching and seeing I love the tagline, right? Uh, I mean, it’s, it’s three attributes. Um, Catholic, Jesuit, and humanistic, which is very important to, for the formation of the all person. And I felt while there is a word that I would add, which is global you know, Catholic, Jesuit, humanistic, and global.
And it’s interesting, you know, Spokane might not be the center of the world, but yet, it might create best practices and opportunities and, and that my outreach well beyond the limits and the boundaries of the city. If you take the example of the basketball team nationally, everyone knows about the Zags, Gonzaga, and Spokane, thanks to you know, a very intentional path that brings these athletes not only to be successful in the court, but also in the classroom and in the community.
And that story can be replicated across many of the units that we have here. We have exceptional schools that are really making tremendous impact locally. And what I thought I saw is something that can be amplified, I think not only nationally but also internationally. And I’ve been involved with the International Federation of Catholic Universities for a long time. Um, and the Jesuit themselves have an international Jesuit network. And I think creating those connections with those networks so that it’s not just the 27, but it’s really the world that is, um connected to you and offering additional opportunities for connection.
And, you know, knowledge sharing is really something that this university I think is ready to do in spite of the fact that we are now in, in a global environment where mobility and uh, international education is, you know, is probably posing until we know what the next level of internationalization could be.
But you can do internationalization by using technology as we talked about in the beginning. Uh, and you can do internationalization by connecting people in, you know, in different ways than than the traditional one. So I think we have a lot to explore and things that we can work on, especially because we’re blessed with a beautiful campus in Florence. And so we also have a hub and connection in Europe and we can continue to, to, to do our internationalization program with, with this great connection to other campuses.
Todd Ream: Yep. And as someone who views the Pacific Northwest and the Northern Rockies as home also, I think the world would be better served by coming to and realizing what that region also through institutions such as Gonzaga has to offer. So yeah, bringing them to Spokane and to the Pacific Northwest.
Katia Passerini: It’s beautiful. It’s not only nature and environment, but also I think what nature environment to do to people and people to people interaction is completely different from what I have experienced in other parts of the world. So I’m really having a blast in learning about the people, learning about the spaces and the history.
Todd Ream: Different than perhaps when you were working in, serving in Queens at St. John’s.
Katia Passerini: Yes.
Todd Ream: Unfortunately, our time is beginning to become short, and I want to make sure I ask you, as someone with these well-formed scholarly habits, who’s eager to continue to be of ongoing service to students, but also serves as a university president and eager to mentor the next generation of university presidents, how have you come to understand and perhaps even define the academic vocation? What characteristics are critical across disciplines in your estimation for it to be defined by?
Katia Passerini: I think there are many. Uh, I think though the most important one for us is humility. If you’re humble you know that you have to learn more. And so going to every place that we encounter as a space where we can learn from everyone that we connect with during that encounter. Um, and maybe thinking that we have an opportunity to also, as they change us, for us to change them and help them self-actualize by sharing the knowledge that we have in capturing their knowledge is something that I think is really important.
And I think if, if I think about education as a vocation, it’s really a vocational, taking a person and helping them in their journey to become their best self and empowering them to self-actualize and then go ahead and change the world in their own way. So I while my vocation has not been, you know, a priestly or on clergy-related vocation, I do believe that the work that we do in Catholic higher ed is really work that we do for people, but also for the Church.
Todd Ream: Yeah. Thank you. What forces are in existence today that you think threaten such an understanding of the academic vocation and about which we need to be vigilant and address?
Katia Passerini: Yeah, I think there is a lot of discussion, especially in the U.S. on what is the value of education, the cost. We started in this discussion with costs. So let’s go back to costs because a lot of the questioning of higher ed nowadays is because of the costs that uh, it takes to really make sure that the students are able to graduate. And those costs are being passed to families and students and to some extent are also subsidized by the government.
And so I think the difficulty here is that you frame everything as a cost and return on investment. You’re missing the point that this is really the formation of a whole person. And while a short-term cost might be substantial, you have to look at your entire life, and the way you will then use that investment to really develop your career and what you will do, you will do, and how you change your life.
And I think the difficulty that we have right now is because of the questioning, the reduction in funding, and a lot of people are moving away from higher education. But I also suspect that a lot of people will return to it and maybe we will have to continue to consider that if we look at the rest of the world, a lot of the developed countries offer and subsidize education not only at the primary, secondary level, but also at the tertiary level so that they can offer that access, that here in the U.S., unfortunately, is costly in different way. And they create the larger possible educated population that they can in the place where they operate. Because ultimately an educated population is uh, you know, better for the country as a whole. And I would argue for the for, for the world as a whole.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. For our last question then today, I want to ask for universities such as Gonzaga, Catholic universities, Church-related universities, such as Gonzaga, in what ways can they be of greater service to the Church? But then also in what ways can the Church be of greater service to such universities?
Katia Passerini: Yes for us to be of greater service, I think we also sometimes have to question some of what the decisions are and always keep everyone real. Ask questions on that might be important to continue to ask on in an intelligent and educated way. So I think our role is to be locally speaking and, and enabling the Church to be present, but also to be providing feedback on what locally, the perception of this, the Church, and the questions that come from the people that we interact with are, and, and how we can transfer them back.
And I think how the Church can help, I was actually reflecting about this a couple of days ago where I heard, well, the Church has been, you know, shrinking because of vocations, at least the clergy vocations are diminishing. And I’m like, oh, wow. We are having the same problem with students. We have a demographic cliff, and the number of students is decreasing. All of a sudden, all of a sudden I said, what can we learn about what the Church is doing that we could replicate? And I thought about Pope Francis in the process of synodality that he started and that Pope Leo is continuing in different way.
And it’s very interesting. I think what we can learn is when you are struggling and you are losing you know, the number of people that then become your ambassador, one way to actually reenergize, maybe a different group of people is bring them together and have them tackle difficult question. Listen to them, which is what the process of synodality had done all over the world. Brought all of these questions together. Then we sent them to the Vatican. We are getting responses.
Will we see a lot of change? I don’t know, but it’s the process of engagement that is really bringing people back and saying, we can have a conversation. We can share what we are thinking, what we are seeing locally, and then we can affect change. And I think that process, if I’ve had the opportunity to go to Rome a few times during this Jubilee year, and I was mesmerized by the number of people and especially young people that were coming back and going to Rome for the Jubilee.
Uh, I see that every day you know, young people going to Church. There is something happening here that is bigger, that even if we see shrinking numbers in some areas, we also see a lot of people coming back. And I think this process of communicating and, and bringing them together is really having an incredible impact. So if there is one lesson that I will take from the Church to the university is when things are difficult, bring people together and have them tackle that difficulty through discussion and through common discernment.
Todd Ream: Yeah. That’s wonderful. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Our guest has Katia Passerini, the President of Gonzaga University. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Katia Passerini: You are welcome.
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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.
