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In the eighth episode of the third season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd C. Ream talks with Robert K. Vischer, President of the University of St. Thomas. Vischer opens by exploring how encouraging and resourcing his colleagues to live in a larger story became one of the commitments defining his service as a university president. Too often, educators lower their gaze, pursuing efforts of little interest or benefit to anyone but themselves. In the end, efforts exercised within such story yield little to no joy and thus only accelerate the desire to repeat the cycle. In contrast, the Gospel yields a story in which educators step into roles on behalf of their students and their disciplines in ways that yield abiding joy. Vischer then discusses how his calling as an attorney evolved into a calling to serve as a legal educator and scholar. At St. Thomas, he began as a faculty member but eventually served as dean of the law school and now as the president. As president, one of the efforts Vischer highlights is the Claritas Initiative, a program that seeks to draw upon the transcendentals of truth, goodness, and beauty as a means of orienting members of the St. Thomas community to live in a larger story. Vischer then closes by discussing other ways St. Thomas seeks to form educators to embrace the largest possible expressions afforded by the Catholic intellectual tradition.
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 Robert K. Vischer, President of the University of St. Thomas. Thank you for joining us.
Robert K. Vischer: Great to be here. I appreciate the invitation.
Todd Ream: The leadership university presidents offer includes service as chief storyteller, and you frequently contend you want members of the St. Thomas community to live into a story that is larger than themselves.
In what ways do you believe presidents are called to serve as chief storytellers for the communities they lead?
Robert K. Vischer: That’s a great question. So, you know, I think our primary role is to steward the mission and the story of the institutions we’ve been called to serve. We, you know, we run a particular leg of the race, but we have to keep in mind this is a longer race than just our tenure in these leadership roles.
So, at St. Thomas, we just concluded our 140th academic year and as president, I’m best positioned to be in a relationship and to be accountable to all of our different stakeholders. An incoming 18-year-old is gonna have a very different perspective on the world than someone who just celebrated their 50th reunion, but I need to be able to integrate their experiences and their perspectives into some coherent narrative.
I think for any university, but especially for us as a Catholic university to the extent that we become just an arm’s length collection of individuals all seeking to maximize their own self-interest through their engagement with this thing called a university, we will be so much poorer for it. I think we’re, we’re called to our best selves when we are able to lift our gaze and see something bigger that we’re part of.
And certainly I get a lot of help in telling that story every day, but I can’t, I can’t delegate it completely to someone else because I’m the one who’s charged to keep everybody’s experiences, perspectives in mind. And I’m the one who, at the end of the day, has to be defining the parameters of the story. Who are we? Who do we aspire to be, and how do we want to leave this community in a stronger position when we move on than when we came in?
Todd Ream: In your estimation, what qualities or dispositions do presidents need to cultivate in order to lead in the manner that you just described?
Robert K. Vischer: For me, it was important that, you know, if I had tried to take on this role when I was 30 years old, it wouldn’t have worked. And partly because I think you need to develop the confidence in yourself, that it doesn’t have to be about you at the end of the day, right. So part of this telling a story is I’m not at the center of the story. And if I’m always putting myself as the protagonist of the story, I’m getting it completely wrong.
And so in many people, I think in my, in our younger years, you’re insecure, such that you, you need to be proving yourself and you got to show, hey, I’m enough. I can do this. I matter. And, and then for me anyway, you get to a stage of life where you’re like, no, I, I really do think I’m confident enough in myself that I can lead from a place of strength where it really doesn’t have to be about me. And if I’m not getting the attention right.
So I would put it this way, as a president, I have no qualms about being the center of attention. I don’t want to be the object of attention, right? Like I, I’m the center of the attention to bring visibility to those around me, to our students, to our graduates, to our benefactors, and so I think that’s a, that’s a key virtue, which is, which is why I think you’re not gonna find many young adults who are great presidents because you just have to grow into confidence where you can sometimes recede into the background and bring others to the fore.
Todd Ream: Thank you. That’s a fascinating distinction between being willing to be the center, but not seeking to be the object of the center there. Thank you.
What do you mean then when you contend that you want members of the St. Thomas community to live into a larger story than themselves?
Robert K. Vischer: You know, it’s a difficult environment for higher ed now. We’ve got demographic challenges. We’ve got challenges with rising financial need of incoming students such that it puts a squeeze on net tuition revenue. We’ve got challenges coming from the government. We’ve got, I mean, there’s, there’s all sorts of reasons to feel anxious and uncertain and exhausted by the work, but I’m missing out on something if I’m just focused on the task in front of me and just getting that task done.
I also, anybody who works in higher education, whether you’re in the classroom, whether you work in building services, whether you work in the business office, anybody needs to have top of mind the fact that any interaction they have with a student could be a moment that they remember for the next 40 years, right. And so we know there’s been lots of research done, there was just a study maybe three years ago, a nationwide study of college and university alumni trying to identify the, the variables that were most important, to an alum, of any age, an alum’s likelihood of saying that their experience of college was rewarding, the key variable was did they have significant relationships with a faculty or staff member?
And if they could even get one, that made such a huge difference, and the more you had, the more likely you were to say it was rewarding. And so, you know, sort of lifting your gaze to saying, am I gonna have an opportunity to be meaningful in this young person’s life, whether it’s because they’re stressed about their tuition bill or they really need some help, you know, getting this conference room ready for a big event they’re hosting, or whether they’re trying to understand their calculus or problem or whatever it is. It’s not just am I getting the task in front of me done.
It is, am I genuinely encountering this person in front of me and making the most of this relatively short window of time we have to have an impact. And so that’s part of the bigger story is, you know, in higher ed, we’re building legacies that extend far beyond what any of us can see in the future. But it’s such a privilege. And what are we gonna do with that privilege? Are we gonna show up and step up and be present for the folks who have entrusted their futures into our care.
Todd Ream: In terms of that investment in the future and preparing for that future, you know, that to us is still, we know it’s coming, but yet unseen. When we think about leadership succession, how can an institution prepare members of subsequent generations of leaders to serve as storytellers? To move, you know, from proving themselves and gaining that confidence to being able to then deliver in ways that then helps bring other people along as you’re describing.
Robert K. Vischer: I don’t know that I have any magic formula, but a couple things I would say is one, you know, show some grace and patience and you know, when we’re dealing with a 22-year-old, it shouldn’t be shocking that they’re the center of their story. Right? Not always, but sometimes and often the case. And that can be a healthy and natural part of development of growth, you know, first growing into the confidence to put yourself in the story. But some patience and grace.
And then I think what’s important even when they’re 18 years old, is that they have models of sort of a joy-filled storytelling that’s other centered. And if we’re living out the mission and we’re sharing the story of mission in ways that are animated by joy, I think that’s very captivating.
Rather, and especially for, for Christian universities, living out the mission should not be drudgery. It should not be, oh, we got to, you know, make sure we’re working for God’s Kingdom and here—woe is us, the weight we carry. No, it should be animated by joy and helping them see the joy that comes through connection and contribution as opposed to self-aggrandizement, right? The self-aggrandizement, again, it could be natural as part of your own development, but it’s not a sustainable source of joy. The joy comes from connection and contribution.
And I don’t think it’s gonna be that effective for me just to keep telling young people that. I’ve also got to be modeling it.
Todd Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own development and how you came to discern your sense of vocation.
You’re a native of Iowa and earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of New Orleans, and then a Juris Doctorate from Harvard University’s Law School, serving as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
At what point did you know that the practice of law would prove to be a critical component of your vocation?
Robert K. Vischer: Even when I started law school, I wasn’t sure that it would be. Coming out of college, I was interested in the world of ideas. I loved writing about ideas. I hadn’t yet become confident enough in myself to be speaking out and engaging in debates and things like that. But I loved writing.
And so I was, I was trying to choose between grad, I knew I wanted to go to graduate school. I enjoyed being in school and I was choosing between poli sci, theology, and law school. Theology, I think I had you know, nightmares of being 30-years-old and trying to conjugate Greek verbs in an unairconditioned department somewhere, trying to figure out what to do with a graduate theology degree. No offense to our graduate theology degree holders.
And poli sci, as I got more into poli sci in my upper level classes, even in undergrad, it was going, it was moving definitely from political theory to empirical political science, and that became less interesting. So part of it was by default, I saw that law school was a way to keep more options open rather than choosing a particular track, which is one thing I try to tell our students is not that many people coming out of undergrad know exactly what their career track is going to be.
I certainly didn’t. And so I wanted to continue in ways that maybe postpone me having to make a definite choice of one track or another. And I knew law school would bring me even deeper into the world of ideas and engaging in debates and advocacy and trying to figure out how to win the contest of ideas. And that was very attractive to me. But I couldn’t say I had a firm conviction of the practice of law.
In fact, the summer before I started law school, I was working for an organization and the head of the organization was a lawyer. And so before I left, he invited me into his office and was talking about law school. And he said, so do you think you might be interested in litigation? And mind you, this was about a month before I started law school. I wasn’t sure what litigation was. I knew it had something to do with court but I kind of bluffed my way through that conversation.
So I also try to reassure students, you don’t need to have everything figured out when you take that next step. And so when I started law school, I wasn’t sure. And then I got into it and I knew the practice of law was gonna be part of it.
Todd Ream: Were there any mentors along the way who helped you with your discernment process?
Robert K. Vischer: There were not at that stage to speak of. In college I was very involved in InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and there were a couple of staff workers for InterVarsity who were very helpful to me in my spiritual development. I mean, one of the things that I was late to figure out was how to integrate who I am as a person of faith with who I’m becoming professionally.
In the tradition in which I grew up, the messages we received were, whether intentional or not, the messages that I picked up were, you know, the best thing you can be in this world is a foreign missionary. If you can’t be a foreign missionary, then be a pastor. If you can’t be that, well then just get some other job and make money to support the pastors and the missionaries. I think that tradition has gotten better on this in, in having a vocation of work, but at that time it didn’t really have one.
And so I had this mindset that my, because I knew I didn’t want to be a foreign missionary or a pastor, and so kind of what I’m doing professionally, that doesn’t really have much to do with who I am as a person of faith because I didn’t, I’m not on the pastor track. I’m not on the missionary track. So what is there to integrate? And so I had faith development, and then I had to just figure out what I wanted to do to make a living. And so it was very separate in my mind to my loss.
And so it wasn’t until later in life until I was able to sort of bring them together and say, oh, you know what, what I’m doing is relevant to who I am as a Christian, whether I’m a pastor or a missionary, or working as a corporate litigation attorney. So I didn’t seek out much mentoring in my young adult years.
Todd Ream: Are there authors who have proven to be helpful in terms of you thinking about your sense of vocation or perhaps even still help you nurture it to this day?
Robert K. Vischer: Well, like many others, C.S. Lewis was great. Dallas Willard, super helpful, Tim Keller, super helpful. Those would probably be the main ones that just getting their sense of the world and what I would say it was a, for all of them, it was a much more integrated sense of the world and it took a while to come to the conclusion of, you know, God loves and takes joy in my work as an attorney, just as God would take joy in my work as a pastor, right. Now it seems obvious, but that was hard to come to. That took a while.
Todd Ream: You served as a clerk for three federal judges. In what ways did those experiences contribute to your understanding of the law, but also your discernment in terms of your vocation?
Robert K. Vischer: Yeah, it was, so when you’re working as a clerk, you’re working closely with a very experienced, excellent lawyer who has become a judge. And I think one of the best, the most powerful benefits for those who don’t know what a clerk does, you work on the opinions that the judge produces. And so it’s sort of like a year long writing tutorial where you’re writing drafts for someone who cares deeply about the writing and who knows that what is produced is adjudicating disputes that matter very deeply to people affected by whatever that dispute is.
And so this notion of, well, I can just crank through this opinion and, you know, one day or I can no, no, no, you are, it’s painstaking levels of attention to detail, which I think is great training and getting feedback and doing multiple drafts.
For me, a takeaway is just how much care to take in my writing if I’m, if I take my writing seriously and I’ve got to put in time and energy and care and thoughtfulness and reflection. So that was a wonderful benefit from those experiences.
Todd Ream: You also eventually did serve in litigation, corporate litigation in the head home office of Kirkland and Ellis in Chicago.
In what ways did that experience then also contribute to your sense of vocation? What sort of joy did you find in it, but also perhaps, you know, what components did you find less fulfilling?
Robert K. Vischer: Well, I think that the joy was as I discovered the centrality of relationships, even in a context like that. The hard part is it was an environment that put a lot of strain on your ability to keep relationships front and center.
And this is true in a lot of organizations, but when the metric is the billable hour, and everything is subservient to that, for understandable reasons, it can be not a place where the investment is being made in relationships, so it can be hard, and I enjoyed my time there, but it can be hard and that’s fine. Long hours pressure, that’s totally fine. But if it’s isolating, that’s where you run into trouble.
But one of the things I really loved about it is, as I’ve gotten older, and this was my first real experience with it, I believe that the ministry of accompaniment is so central to any Christian life today. And so even as a young attorney, I’ll give you two quick examples. You know, you’d look at the papers that we were working with and be, well, this is a pretty dry case. Like the first case that I ran myself, it was a contract dispute between the manufacturer of plastic packaging and a customer.
And I read the complaint, I’m like, this is gonna be the most boring case in history. It’s so dry. And I went out to the clients and I met with a mid-level manager whose work was at the center of this lawsuit. I meant to just go over the discovery plan with him, but he was an emotional wreck because of this lawsuit. And his marriage was under strain and he wasn’t sleeping and all these things.
And I realized, oh, I was viewing this lawsuit as just some boring technical breach of contract. This has upended this person’s life now, and I’m coming out here like I can just check the box and go over the plan in here, but I really need to spend time with him just listening to him.
Or another case, we represented companies that ran the nuclear weapons facilities during the Cold War, and we were being sued in a class action of neighboring residents who claimed that their cancers were caused by the radiation emissions. And I was the young person on the, on the team. And so I would do the preservation depositions, meaning you, you go and you take a deposition of someone who is not gonna be around for trial. So usually people who are about to pass away.
And so one of them, especially, I remember it was a I literally took the deposition in a hospital room of a woman who was on her death bed, just, you know, who was gonna pass away shortly. And I realized in that time that for her, because I represented the corporations that she believed caused her imminent death, that I was an evil incarnate in her eyes. I was the corporations. And so nothing in law school had prepared me for that.
And I’ve tried to figure out, okay, as a Christian, what do I do in this situation? And for me, it really became a ministry of accompaniment, of just spending time and listening and yes, asking some of the questions I needed to, and trying to get information other ways.
But the takeaway from it, from these and other examples, even at a large hard charging corporate law firm, the takeaways for, it’s all about relationship. It’s all about relationship. And for someone who who wants to be a follower of Christ in the workplace, it’s all about relationship. And, and not all of it, but most of it is simply about accompaniment, of showing up and being present and listening and befriending and just walking difficult journeys.
And as a lawyer, especially, a lot of the people you’re accompanying are in the midst of some of the most stressful circumstances they’ve ever encountered. So I grew a lot from that experience, even though I only stayed a few years.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much. In 2002, you accepted an appointment to serve on the faculty for the St. John’s University School of Law. The discernment process that led you to accept that appointment at St. John’s?
Robert K. Vischer: So I decided over time to leave the practice of law, to leave the big law firm. And I had always been intrigued by teaching, partly because of the teaching, but a lot of it because of the opportunity to write. And there were a few signposts along the way, because again, I enjoyed being at a law firm. I enjoyed working hard. I enjoyed being surrounded by smart people doing their best for the client.
I didn’t have time to write things that I was interested in or ideas I wanted to engage on. And I was, there was, so this was back in, this must have been 2000 or around there somewhere. And I’m, I’m you know, at the time it was the Amico Building in Chicago. I’m up on the 60th floor and it’s late at night. I’m working and I’m looking down from my window and I can barely see these little people moving on Michigan Avenue there. And I had music playing in my office and there I was listening to what at the time was a very popular song by John Cougar Mellencamp. And the song, the course of the song is, your life is now.
And I’m looking out over, over people and it’s like 11 o’clock at night and I’m, you know, toiling away on something and I thought, huh, my life is now. And I started putting through what I needed to do to figure out a change and to, to make the move into academia. But it was a series of things and it wasn’t really a rejection of the practice of law. I want to see if I can earn a livelihood in ways that still give me time to explore the ideas that I want to explore, not just what the client has presented.
Todd Ream: Three years later you accepted an appointment and began your service at the University of St. Thomas, beginning as a member of their law faculty, as a scholar and a teacher then, going with what you were just saying, what contributions did you believe you were called to make to your students, but then also to your field?
Robert K. Vischer: So in terms of the field, I had always, I had been writing even when I was at St. John’s, I was writing, about sort of the intersection of faith and law and faith and professional identity. I am starting to write some about Catholic social teaching. In writing on things that I think had been wildly under theorized and underdressed in, in the literature. Like, you know, the traditional understanding whether it was explicit or not, this is the effect of it was, is when you come to law school, you leave your personal identities at the door and you come in to learn to think like a lawyer.
And it was sort of this fiction that you could just drop off every other aspect of your identity, whether it was religious or, or racial or ethnic, or your socioeconomic background or your political perspective, all that’s irrelevant. You just come in and think like a lawyer and you’re gonna, we’re gonna put you on the conveyor belt of law school and you’re gonna come out as a lawyer.
That obviously is not true, that we just pretended that it was and so not explicitly addressing what it might look like to integrate who you are as a person with who you are as a lawyer had a profoundly damaging effect on lawyers. I think it was one of the reasons why lawyers had been so unhappy with their professional lives because it felt like they were leading a disconnected life. It was just like all that stuff you’re doing is irrelevant to who you are as a lawyer. Like who wants to go through a career feeling like their own values, beliefs, life experiences are irrelevant to who they’re as a lawyer?
So a lot of my writing was addressing that. And part of my contributions to students was the same thing. We, we, the reason we came to Minnesota to join the law school that St. Thomas just opened in 2001 was because that law school was explicitly dedicated to the integration of faith and reason and the formation of professional identities, bringing it all together in a way that I hadn’t seen any other law school try to do.
So I joined the faculty to try to pull it off and we designed a law school completely different than most law schools, and we put mentoring at the center of it and we put community at the center of it. And so you were going through the law school experience, always in relationship and always with a clear signal that bringing your own faith, whether it was Christian or Catholic or whatever it might be that’s always welcome. And so the conversations that that sparked with students were very personal and very profound, and I love that environment. So yeah, we had a wonderful time helping build that law school.
Todd Ream: Thank you. After serving then as dean of that law school for 10 years, on January 1st 2023, you began your tenure as the 16th president of the University of St. Thomas. Would you say a little bit about the discernment process that led you to accept that appointment as the university’s leader and make that transition from the law school?
Robert K. Vischer: Well, I wish I could say it was a long, gradual discernment process, but so when we moved here, so my wife is from Omaha. I was born in Iowa, but grew up just outside Chicago and we moved around a few different spots early in our marriage. And so when we were in New York, we talked about getting back to the Midwest at some point.
My wife said, well, just so you know, I’ve got one move left. So, so make it count. We’re not gonna keep moving every couple years, because at that point we had three kids. And so I was looking for an opportunity to settle in where I could really build something. And so we stayed at St. Thomas and we’d been there for 17 years.
We were starting to think about whether we would ever move to pursue a college presidency because I’d been dean for 10 years and I loved it. But, you know, after a while, you get into a comfort zone and I really do think people need to make sure they’re moving out of their comfort zone periodically. So we’re just starting that conversation.
And I, one afternoon, I got a, it was a Thursday at the end of the day, I got an email from the then president of St. Thomas saying, hey, will you meet me and the board chair for breakfast tomorrow morning? Which was, you know, like 12 hours later. And I thought, huh, that’s a strange short notice. And it ended up, she told me that she was, she’s the president at Santa Clara University now in California, which is where her family is. And so she was gonna move out there to take that presidency after nine years leading our school.
And they asked me if I would be the interim president and then would I be willing to throw my hat in the ring for the permanent role. So this was Friday morning and I said, and, and I knew they needed to know right away, and I said, I’m so honored by this invitation, but I would love to have you know, I could tell you on Monday. This is Friday morning. I could tell you on Monday, so I have a weekend to talk about it with my wife and pray about it. And the board chair said that that is great, but tell us by the end of the day.
Todd Ream: You don’t get the weekend.
Robert K. Vischer: I don’t get the weekend. I don’t get the weekend. We need to, we need to move on this.
Todd Ream: Yeah.
Robert K. Vischer: Which was fine.
And I mean, I didn’t have a long period of discernment, but I knew already that I was interested in taking that next step to pursue a college presidency of some sort. And so the fact that that opened up here in the Twin Cities at a place I love and knew well in a, in a city I know I love and knew well that that was awesome. So it was an easy yes.
But part of it, it goes back to as you started telling the story of an institution. I mean, I know, and this is something I think young people should be attentive to as well, what, what are the things that energize you? What are the parts of work where you really, you’re like, yes, this is it.
And for me, and I spent some time on this. I mean, I spent time on this several years ago when I was going through a period of some depression and talking with a therapist about really distilling what it is that energizes me about my work, where I feel fully alive and engaged. And it came down to three verbs: connect, inspire, and encourage.
If I’m going too long between opportunities to connect, inspire, and encourage, I’m gonna start going sideways. But if I can do that, I’m on my game then. And I was doing it at the law school, but I also knew as a university president, the scope and scale of that connecting, inspiring, and encouraging just expands significantly. So part of the discernment was what I knew about myself already. Whether or not I was gonna be good at it, I knew that I would be energized by it. And so that made it an easy yes.
Todd Ream: Thank you. My hope is your wife was in town and available for lunch on that Friday for that conversation.
Robert K. Vischer: She did take my call. It was a rather urgent call that we probably need to talk about sooner rather than later.
Todd Ream: And I’ve got till 4:55 or 5:00 here. Oh, that’s great. Thank you. Thank you very much.
Perhaps one of the most creative ventures occurring at St. Thomas is the Claritas Initiative, which involves retrieving the rich reflection on the transcendentals—truth, beauty and goodness—that has taken place throughout history, and has deep roots, in particular, within Catholic intellectual tradition. Such an effort of retrieval is not simply focused on re-identifying sources from the past but also ways those resources can address contemporary challenges through various interdisciplinary projects that are underway at St. Thomas.
Would you share a few details concerning the establishment of that initiative and then highlight maybe one or two examples of those projects?
Robert K. Vischer: So the impetus for this is my concern, and it’s not original to me, lots of people share this concern, that there’s so much pressure on higher ed to deliver a strong economic value proposition. And that’s an understandable pressure, right? You have families and students that want to know, are they, are they getting equipped for jobs as efficiently as possible? And we do that at St. Thomas too, we’ve got great employment outcomes. That’s all good.
My concern is that when that becomes the sole focus of colleges and universities, they become transactional. And what we, in other words, you give us, we’ll, we’ll keep the tuition price as low as humanly possible, and we’ll give you exactly the skills you need to for this career track. So it’s really just, know, pick a major, fulfill the requirements, get a job. No more questions. Keep moving.
And what we know about this generation of students, Gen Z, we know a majority report not having a sense of purpose or meaning in their lives. We know a majority have the feeling that something bad is about to happen. We know that so many of them have reported not having a sense that anybody in the world knows them well. They spend so much more of their waking hours alone, compared to past generations.
And so for this generation’s needs, if all we respond with is, well, hey, we can help you get a job, we’re falling so woefully short of the mark. And so for us, we’re named after St. Thomas Aquinas and the transcendentals—beauty, truth, and goodness—I thought would be just, I mean it is about beauty, truth, and goodness, but it’s also about, let’s just get an entry point to go beyond the transactional, to lift your gaze where it’s not simply about are you learning everything in mechanical engineering you need to get a job. Yeah, we need to do that too.
And it’s, you know, maintaining this non-transactional focus might be easier if you’re a, you know, a, a small liberal arts college with a thousand total students. For us, we’ve got, you know, 9,500 students. It’s a comprehensive university with all different schools and colleges. And how do we do that? And can we, can we have sort of an umbrella effort that people can connect with in whatever way they can? So what does it look like?
I mean, it’s really not rocket science. So we have a beautiful chapel on campus and a wonderful liturgical choir, wonderful music programs and things. So we have a chapel art series where it’s a concert every month or so in the chapel that the whole community and members of the public are invited to.
And so one thing we added as part of the Claritas Initiative is one of our theology professors during the, whatever the concert was, would get up and give a five-minute reflection on what they’re hearing in the context of beauty and how should we understand that, bring some intellectual heft to it.
Or we’ve had beauty walks where anybody can come and we get together and we go to different spots on campus just to observe whether it’s a piece of art or some part of nature or something. Just to take time. We’re just going to appreciate this beauty and then get together and have hot chocolate and some cookies or something and just to relax. There’s, there’s, so it’s doing something where there’s no, like, there, there’s no outcome we’re trying to, you know, achieve. There’s no assignment. It’s just, can we reflect on this.
Or we’ve had lectures from folks who do serious academic work on these topics that we invite in. So it’s trying to connect. We had a community art project where people were invited to come in and partake in creating this piece of community art. So it’s a whole variety of things.
It’s really just trying to tell students, faculty and staff, hey, lift your gaze, right. We’re all focused on this stuff, but man, look at the beauty around us. What is goodness? What does virtue look like in your field? How do we cultivate virtues? We do a lot on character building here, which I think connects to goodness and the truth.
We had a lecture talk about the how the beauty that you observe in science in the form of simplicity often is reflective of truth because nature often conveys its truth in very simple, beautiful forms. So it’s all kinds of conversations, but the main point is, you are not just future employers being trained here. We are interested in your professional success, but we are just or more interested in equipping and empowering you for lifelong flourishing?
Todd Ream: Thank you. In what ways have the transcendentals then, through these efforts and practices that you described, perhaps woven themselves into this larger story that animates St. Thomas as a Catholic and diocesan University?
Robert K. Vischer: Well, the question will be whether it stands the test of time. I do think it has become more natural for our students to get out of their silos and connect on bigger questions. So it’s closely connected to Claritas for reasons I can explain a little bit.
The other thing we emphasize a lot here is the culture of encounter. That was a phrase that Pope Francis used a lot where he called all people of goodwill, not just Catholics, but all people of goodwill to commit to pushing back against the culture of indifference by doing whatever we can to ensure that those around us have the experience of being seen and known and loved.
And when we’re doing that, we, you know, we are noticing the beauty not just in the natural surroundings. And we have, we have a really beautiful campus here not just the Neogothic architecture, but the beauty in our classmates.
I’ll give you an example. So we had a, our international students did a kind of a, a coffee fair, a coffee contest almost, where they had groups of students from Vietnam and Colombia and there were maybe five different countries that had had Ethiopia, their, their coffees that they were producing together, and they were being helped by friends who were American friends, and it was just in the student center and just them engaging and encountering each other and making very carefully this handcrafted coffee in the way that their own home countries had taught them to do so.
It was just one of the most profoundly beautiful sites to see these students. And as they’re practicing these virtues, and that could have happened anytime, but I think what we’re trying to do now is help the students be more self-aware of what they’re doing in these moments, that this isn’t just kind of a fun thing to do, before your next class starts.
Like this is it, like this is the heart of the human experience. You are building relationships and trust across cultural boundaries and producing something that is just exquisitely beautiful to share with others in the broader community. So, so part of it in all this is we’re just, we’re lifting the gaze and say, let’s step back and reflect.
And, and the other thing I tell students all the time is, we don’t grow from experience, we grow from experience, followed by reflection on that experience, right? And so part of it’s just creating space, creating a moment, it’s a pause to reflect and to have someone speak into you about the significance of what we’re trying to do here. And so it’s a, you know, as at any other university, you’re gonna have a thousand different perspectives on it and different efforts to push it forward. But I just try to set out the vision and the umbrella and you know, let a thousand flowers bloom.
Todd Ream: Thank you. As our time begins to unfortunately become short, I want to turn now to asking about the educators who come to be part of this story at the University of St. Thomas, curricular and co-curricular here. And in what ways do you define the characteristics or qualities of the academic vocation? Realizing still there’s many different sort of ways of that that gets expressed, but perhaps do the transcendentals work their way into this process, across the board for all of them?
Robert K. Vischer: Yeah, so again, you know, we’ve probably got a 100 or 450 full-time faculty in all different disciplines, and as you know, faculty hiring is very faculty led. And so it’s a very diverse faculty from lots of different perspectives. Not, not all of our faculty are Catholic, and that’s never, that’s never been a requirement for St. Thomas.
I think one of the, from my observation where when you’re not gonna get hired is if you come in and the error you give is, it’s about you, right? That we’re not an R-1 university, nor do we ever want to be an R-1 university. They do great things and they contribute in meaningful ways to the common good. But I think those, an R-1 has terrain that is more conducive to an empire building mentality for some faculty of you’re building out your labs and your research operation.
And we have great research here, but it’s more undergrad centered and we have some graduate research, but it’s not, we have limited PhD programs. So if you’re giving an air that it’s about you more than it’s about you’re students, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have some trouble.
Now for those, we have lots of faculty seminars and summer seminars and gatherings, and there we try to do a deeper dive into what this vocation means. We just had one last week, a week with a bunch of faculty coming together saying, what is, what is the role of character building with the university? And again, lots of different perspectives on it, but if you’re not interested in the question even, might not be the best fit for you.
Todd Ream: Thank you. Perhaps it’s implied in some of the reflections that you just offered, but when seeking to exercise such an understanding of the vocation, what virtues do you believe are most important to cultivate? And then what vices do you believe are most important to confront?
Robert K. Vischer: So one of the key virtues I think is hope, because this is, there are a lot of reasons to, to not have hope today. And our young people can remind us of those reasons. And we need, you know, hope as a virtue, you’re, you’re pushing back against the vice of despair, but you’re also pushing back against sort of misplaced hope or over exuberant or naive hope like it’s, it’s appropriate hope on the appropriate objects. And so I think professors, by virtue of their expertise, are able to offer great guidance and authentic reasons for hopefulness about our world, about life, about the future.
Also, I would say temperance and prudence are key virtues, like we’re in a culture where everybody’s trying to get as many eyeballs on what they’re producing as possible. And that can be toxic for a scholarly environment where we have to follow the facts and the evidence. And even if it’s not the, the shiniest conclusion or gives the most sizzle or the most hits or clicks.
Or so again, and I think it comes back to that confidence we have, like I’m, I’m confident in who I am and who I’ve created to be whether or not this piece I’ve labored on for the past year ends up getting the most hits of any piece in that journal this year. You’ve, you’ve got to be a faithful steward of the gifts you’ve been given and not be constantly clamoring for the attention. Not that attention is bad, but if that’s the root of our identity, things have gone sideways. So I would say temperance, prudence, and hope are absolutely key today, perhaps more than ever.
Todd Ream: Thank you. For our last question then before we close, I want to ask you this understanding of the academic vocation then that you’ve described. In what ways, if any, is its health related to the health that the Church-related university shares with the Church?
Robert K. Vischer: So one of the things I was just reading the other day, you know, we all know that the old adage that politics is downstream from culture. And I was just reading somebody saying, well no, now politics is culture and we see that some in the Church and we see that some in higher ed. And uh, I think it’s absolutely essential both for the Church and for Christian higher ed to be a place that can be a venue for building trust and building relationships across difference of all kinds.
And still, so part of it’s the story. What is the story that we’re telling here? What is our narrative? And is that narrative excluding, excluding, excluding and becoming driven by factors that should be secondary or tertiary in importance as opposed to what is our call as Christian universities or as the Church.
And, you know, obviously universities are in the headlines for a lot of these reasons, as is the Church, and I think that’s gonna be a challenge for this generation. Can we at least make headway where the Christian higher ed does not succumb to the line drawing and the just rapid tribalism that is afflicting so much of the Church today, and that’s gonna be decided one university at a time, year by year.
What kind of effort are we putting in to bringing folks in, staying true to our mission, but not falling prey to the easy assumptions and exclusions that we see so much in our culture.
Todd Ream: Thank you very much.
Robert K. Vischer: You’re welcome. Thanks for having me.
Todd Ream: Our guest has been Robert K. Vischer, President of the University of St. Thomas. Thank you for taking the time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
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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.
