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In the third episode of the fourth season of the “Saturdays at Seven” conversation series, Todd Ream talks with Xavier A. Cole, President of Loyola University New Orleans. Cole opens by exploring how students have changed over the course of his time serving in higher education and, in turn, how institutions have responded. Those changes often reflect the ebb and flow of generations. While some of the commitments of the university may be timeless, the manner in which those commitments are introduced to members of various generations may need to change. Cole then also explains how those generational changes eventually weave their way into the fabric of the faculty, creating opportunities for different voices and perspectives to intersect. Cole then shifts to reflecting upon the childhood he spent in Biloxi and how returning to the Gulf Coast when appointed president of Loyola New Orleans was a cultural homecoming. The years in between were spent at Ole Miss, Miami (Ohio), Loyola Baltimore, and Marquette. Service at Loyola Baltimore and Marquette introduced Cole to the riches of Catholic higher education as expressed by the Jesuit charisms. While most of Cole’s colleagues were either curricular or co-curricular educators, Cole served in both capacities, giving him a unique appreciation for how the two can work together and even integrate their efforts. Cole then concludes by returning to that Gulf Coast homecoming, about his aspirations for Loyola New Orleans, and the critical role the institution’s relational fabric—one defined by the Gulf Coast hospitality and the Jesuit charisms—plays in the pursuit of those aspirations.
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 Xavier A. Cole, President of Loyola University New Orleans. Thank you for joining us.
Xavier Cole: Thank you. It’s great to be here.
Todd Ream: In July 2025, Johns Hopkins University Press published Kevin McClure’s “The Caring University: Reimagining the Higher Education Workplace After the Great Resignation.” In that book, the ways college universities reimagine the student experience is one source from which McClure draws inspiration. Over the course of your career, one which included a considerable amount of time and investment in student affairs, in what ways do you believe college and universities have reinvented and reimagined the student experience to start?
Xavier Cole: Well, thank you for the question. It’s a real honor to be here with you having this conversation. Yes, students have changed, but this is nothing new. Cohorts of students change every four years. We have these epochs of students. Um, some are more independent or more activists. Uh, they usually ride the crest of what’s happening in the historical moment, the zeitgeist. This particular cohort of students, they are still a product of COVID.
Not as deeply as they were a couple of years ago, but they still are, meaning that they require encouragement in order to engage, to come out of their shell. They spent some time in the basement learning separated from their peers, not really gaining the social skills that they needed in order to basically navigate a very complex world in person.
The other real difference with this particular generation is that they’re deeply influenced by technology. Their interconnectedness is almost immediate. That provides a false sense of knowing of each other and other contexts and a false sense of understanding the depth and complexity of current issues that we now face. So students can sometimes feel that they’re an expert in some sort of geopolitical issue of which they’ve not actually studied historically or otherwise, and they enter in a moment in time where they’re only getting a snapshot and sometimes begin to make some assumptions about what they’re seeing that’s slightly uninformed.
And so we accompany those students into a good sense of knowing. That’s a, that’s a lot of what we do here as educators in higher education and at our Jesuit Catholic university here at Loyola. But all that is to say is that this generation needs more mentoring. They need a little bit more guidance. They rely a lot on their own collective knowledge, which is also a good way of knowing and learning. But there’s a reason that we, as mentors and teachers, and wisdom holders, are available to them, and we continue to set up structures where that can be more intentional, so their formation just doesn’t happen, happenstance.
It happens through intentional encounter, whether it’s in the classroom, outside the classroom, on retreat, such as our Catholic context, or just out in the world trying to prepare them for what’s out there, and hopefully giving them a philosophical frame from which to act and think and work and make decisions.
And in our particular case, it is Catholic, it is flavored Jesuit. And our students, this particular generation of students, like ideas of connectedness, social justice, care for the person. So that’s what I see. That’s what we try to strategically plan for. That’s how we try to shape and direct our faculty and, and staff and how they engage them.
But generally, if one sets up a pretty caring mentoring and teaching environment, which we have here at Loyola, a lot of things sort of take care of themselves. And if you wrap that in a very clear and directed mission and values that all can understand and maybe adopt if they have no particular philosophical frame then we can basically produce a Jesuit and Catholic-educated person that can go into the world, try to do good, try to seek justice for injustice, and try to serve others, and particularly the poor and excluded.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Over the course of your career then also, in what ways do you believe the experience of faculty members and staff members have also changed?
Xavier Cole: Well faculty, it’s run in cycles. So there wasn’t always student affairs. And so when universities started and American universities started, and even before these big research universities, the faculty were all the things. In our particular case, in Jesuit education, the Jesuits were all the things.
They were the teachers, they were the mentors, they were the dorm fathers, in other cases, dorm mothers when there was co-ed. They were in 24 hours of the students’ lives doing all of the roles. And the professionalization of teaching and scholarship and research necessitated that the faculty focus on teaching, on learning, on research, and left some of those other formation activities in life outside the classroom in a residential campus to this new professionalization of student affairs people or student development people who would walk with students in those hours outside the classroom, which were significant numbers of hours.
And so in that time, faculty have figured out that the classroom is their space in many senses, and the other spaces are other people’s spaces, and sometimes those spaces would not meet. And in some ways, that makes sense. If a student is trying to get a good grade and they’re trying to be their best student, show up as their best selves in class, when they get away from class, sometimes they’re just trying to be human, and they’re fallible, and they make mistakes, and they’re part of that growth that happens also, in this undergraduate and graduate experience. And those are two very different worlds.
And so faculty over time have fallen out, away from responding to being adept in addressing a lot of those outside of the classroom issues. And that provided me with a job for many years. But now we’re seeing these relationships come back together, that faculty and administration that work with students are working more closely together to try to understand who our students are, what their current needs are, what role does each have, and how do we basically complement each other and support particular types of learning that outcomes that we want for our students. And I see much more of a collaborative work. There’s work that needs to be done there. There’s still some distrust that exists between and among faculty and staff groups.
But I’m very adept in saying in my leadership that we all have the same goal. We’re all working with our students towards the same goal of graduation. We all care about their access. We care about their retention. We care about their health and safety while they are with us. All those things are true, but we all have expertise, and let us allow for the experts to lead in that work at different times. And we’ll try to defer to you when it’s your expertise, and you should defer to us as a staff member when it’s our expertise. And in that way, we can work well together to create the experience that we seek to have.
Todd Ream: Within the context of the Jesuit Catholic experience at Loyola New Orleans, in what ways, as you sort of draw people together into a collaborative relationship that is met depending upon the needs of a particular group at a time, it’s led by the expertise of a particular group.
In what ways have you enhanced curricular, co-curricular relationships, and thus the vocation that educators experience at Loyola New Orleans?
Xavier Cole: Well, I, I think one of the things pretty early on in my career, I worked in a first-year program at Loyola, Maryland. And there it paired together a student affairs administrator and a faculty member who was also an advisor, academic advisor of students to teach a first-year experience course. I actually taught that course and also administered that program for probably a decade.
The most beautiful thing that happened via that relationship, and not just the development, development of our students in support of them in their first year, is the relationships that it built across faculty administrator lines. When we talked about how we’re building a syllabus and what we’re thinking about as far as the student life cycle and what they may need at a particular point in time, or how that may change over the year, and how do we help our students basically claim their own agency about their decision-making in those early days in their first year, 18 and 19 years old.
We learned, and particularly one, one of the colleagues I taught with for very, for a lot of years, Dr. Bernadette Roche, actually a biologist at Loyola Maryland, she is still there. We learned that our approaches to students were very similar. Whether it’s teaching biology in the classroom or, or teaching, you know, civility outside of the classroom, what we desired for our students were very much the same, and how we cared about our students were very much the same.
And I think before we had an encounter with each other and could talk through these things and talk about our frames and our philosophy of dealing with young people and why we even chose this profession to work with this age group. We realized that we came to it for some very same, the very same reasons. We saw that this is a very fertile period of time of growth. If encountered and directed well and intentionally, you could really produce a person that could go out into the world and do a tremendous amount of good.
And once we realized that our approaches were very similar and constant with each other, we’re able to share that learning with other faculty and staff members about, you know, these relationships aren’t that scary. They aren’t so different from us. They’re not coming at this from an entirely different lens. We are here in the same moment for a reason. It is because we care equally and in very similar ways about our students’ development, interpersonally and academically, and in our particular case, spiritually and morally.
And so that was a breakthrough for me, how I saw faculty. It absolutely influenced how I understood and encountered the faculty role as a leader of a university, how I engage my faculty, how I listen and respect their experience, but also how I can ask them to respect others’ contributions, knowing that I’ve seen it from both sides.
I also taught for several years uh, history of higher ed at Marquette University, so in the classroom with graduate students, not undergrads later. So I taught undergrads in this first experience for a long time, and then I taught graduate students in an academic setting in an ed school. And so I understand both sides of that coin. And I’m also married to a faculty member who is absolutely a person who understands the world from a faculty frame.
When I’m in this space, you know, I understand all four corners of this and, you know, it’s, it’s a real empowering space for faculty to be in when you have that closed square, I guess you could say, of, of a classroom and what can happen in encounter with students and how you move them. So because of that it allows for me to understand where, what faculty are thinking about and also be in conversation with them with authenticity about where we should go together about this, and not seeing this vast separation between, you know, administration and staff.
And I’ve reminded multiple times faculty members and staff members when they see their colleagues as the other, that, you know, and particularly in the faculty who see their dean and presidents even, you know, as the other that they used to be you. They’re still the same person. They just have a different administrative role, but they’re not the other. Not turned into something else, you know? They’ve just chosen to approach the work from a slightly different frame. So how do you help them understand how the role has changed since they’ve been away from the teaching seat, and to help them understand why you believe what you believe? So all of it’s about good communication. A lot of it’s about respect. And with intentional and sustained encounters, you can also build significant trust.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own formation from the very beginning as an educator that led up to the experiences then you were talking about and that you’re experiencing now. With Biloxi, Mississippi as your childhood home, you grew up just less than 100 miles to the east of Loyola University New Orleans.
In what ways is the Gulf Coast home, and what qualities may distinguish Biloxi from New Orleans, but in what ways do they reflect a common culture there that it intersects with and animates who you are?
Xavier Cole: Well, absolutely. This Gulf South region, the Gulf Coast, is a very special place for me. I was born and raised in Biloxi Gulf Coast area. Went off to school at Ole Miss at eighteen. Did not understand even within the bounds of the state, just how different the experiences were from a Gulf Coast kid to a North Mississippi space that had nothing to do with the folkways of the Gulf Coast, which are absolutely linked from Mobile, Alabama over to New Orleans with a particular folkway that includes the Catholic faith, that includes Mardi Gras, that includes the celebration of food and family and tradition, that includes ways of eating, you know, that is very coastal, lots of fish, red beans and rice on Monday, you know.
All those things create a particular culture of deep, deep radical hospitality and welcoming that exists all over the South, but in particular in the Gulf Coast region stretching to New Orleans. These are some of the most hospitable people in the world. That’s why people from all over the globe want to come down to us, and I say that very broadly, to experience that type of welcoming and belongingness that almost seems immediate. And Southerners, you know, we want to share the best of what we have with you immediately and freely. It’s not something that we hoard or hold to ourselves or hold as a precious. It is something that we want you to experience to understand why we live the way we live. Why would you live below sea level? Why would you live in a hurricane zone? I grew up marking, the other thing that connects us is, is that. Not just as hot and humid, and we survive it and flourish in it.
We also mark time by hurricanes. You know, growing up I was born in 1970 and understood big storms, you know, born just after Camille. Then Hurricane Frederick in ‘ 79, Elena in ’86. You know, these are big storms. Then I went off to university in ’88 and didn’t count hurricanes anymore. So you need to understand. And then when I came back, I came back into a culture in New Orleans where Hurricane Ida was just here. And then we, luckily, we’ve not had another big one, you know, since then. But I dropped right back into the counting of time and defining eras by how we traverse, survive, bounce back from bad weather, that bonds a people. It makes us particularly resilient, which is another reason that people love New Orleans, Louisiana, and the Gulf Coast.
Not to say that our faith, our Catholic faith, absolutely influences Mardi Gras is Catholic. You know, this is about our liturgical calendar, and people understand that, and we respect that. So I love being back in this space, and it’s always been a part of me. I’ve always brought that with me no matter where I was, whether it was Baltimore, Maryland, or Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I was a Southerner somewhere else, bringing those folkways of proceeding to other spaces to add to the space and not necessarily change the space.
Todd Ream: Now, I can’t help but ask at this point before we move on, ’cause you mentioned several dimensions of the culture of that region of the country, but you didn’t mention music yet. Can I ask you in what ways music might also add to the culture there and perhaps even the culture that you experience on campus when you visit a place like Loyola New Orleans?
Xavier Cole: Well, first of all, I am a musician, and I’m from a family of musicians. And music was always, I didn’t talk about it. It’s just always just been part of who and what I am. It absolutely provided a comfort, something to look forward to coming down into this space and being around a place that actually appreciates the arts and culture in this way, because then it means it appreciate persons that develop that, that lean into that, that have that as a profession. There’s a respect for that. And it really rounds out the culture, whether it’s, you know, a known second line.
And when people found out I was a trombone player, it was almost like, “Oh, you’re coming home. You have opportunities to play your horn.” You know, and the trombone isn’t exactly, exactly a campfire instrument like a guitar, you know? But they’re like, “Oh yeah, we need a trombone player,” and that’s great. You know, here in New Orleans, and particularly at my university that has a, just excellent, college of music and media and a fantastic music school that teaches all forms of the music art form from classical through jazz, and commercial and hip hop even, you know.
So they know that I respect that, and that has truly influenced me. And so part of my experience here, if my students ask me to be part of their second line, I do it. I’ve strutted out in front of a second line in convocation playing my trombone with, with students. It’s a great way to connect with my community and help me understand that I’m not just sitting above them, I’m of them. I’m in this experience with them.
And that creates great connection and a form of humility and keeps an ego in check because sitting at the perch of a leadership at an institution, you can lose perspective about what things are and what they aren’t, and how people on the ground are experiencing things, and this helps me stay grounded.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. You mentioned you went to college in Oxford at Ole Miss. Then, you know, studied history, and then you did graduate work in history at Miami of Ohio.
I want to ask why history, but also the thing, the thread that runs through your experience at in Oxford as well, and Oxford, Ohio,
Xavier Cole: I didn’t make it to Oxford, England. There’s still time.
Todd Ream: Exactly. But is service in residence life. So why history? And then in what ways did service in residence life in the co-curricular sphere then contribute to your vocation?
Xavier Cole: Well, it actually defines how I’ve really approached my career. I’ve never been held inside of a box. “You’re a historian, so you can only do this.” And I’ve been noted to say many times to my community, privately and publicly, “What can you do with two history degrees?” Uh, you can be president of Loyola New Orleans. You could be whatever you want because you’re liberally educated, read, write, and critically think. But that story about not just doing one thing was just my choice.
I got to Oxford, Ohio and I went to an interview for a history assistantship they had just given out the last one, and the person I was talking to in the history department I think Mary Frederickson, Dr. Mary Frederickson, who may be retired now said, “What else do you do?” I said, “Well, I was an RA at Ole Miss for three years in an all-male residence hall across from Fraternity Row.” And she’s like, “Oof. You’ve got some skills that we could possibly use. Maybe you should talk to our people in res life.”
And at that point, there was never a question of whether or not I could do both things or I had to do one or the other, that this was the path. I decided that I would not give up history and do a college student personnel degree, and they had a fine higher ed program there, but I didn’t know what it was. I didn’t understand it. One’s not going to commit their academic life to something that they don’t understand. I understood history, and so I still had a deep love for that.
So I decided to stick with my history degree, but also work in residence life at the same time. And what that created was the model of what a liberally educated person is, you know, that create the adaptability for me to use multiple skills and have one set of learning inform the other. That has always been an asset for me.
And so when it came down to, could a student affairs person be a president? The answer is yes, because I’ve always been curious about other sides of a coin and curious about other people’s roles, and very curious about how all parts of the university work and how they feed into the center to create this very complex organism. That if you pull one lever on your left, three levers on your right move. What are those levers and why do they move? And why do they move in different directions?
So if you’re curious about how something actually works, and that’s just how my mind works also. I’m a person in my hobbies. I’ll collect relatively vintage stereo equipment that no one wants, from laser disc players to CD players to cassette decks and stereos, and I will tear them apart, fix them and I will put them back together. I want to understand how it works. So I very much could have been an architect or an engineer perhaps, but I just really, but I can do that as a hobby now.
With all that said, doing both things and honoring both things allows for you to have freedom, allows for you to be a model and example for others not to put themselves in a box. And it also allows for, particularly folks who are studying liberal arts, to see themselves as more than or differently than and adaptable. Something that I tout all the time when people are trying to be narrowly educated for today’s workforce.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Any mentors along the way that helped shape your sense of vocation or perhaps also authors whose work had sort of an outsized influence on you?
Xavier Cole: Well, let me start with, with mentors. And, I had several Dr. Kathy Clark Peterson at Loyola Maryland, who picked me out of a sea of thousands of people vying for student affairs jobs at NASPA in Boston in 1995. And I had this non-traditional background of a historian rather than a counseling degree or higher ed degree. And she picked me anyway because she saw something in me that was worth developing. I thank her, and I worked for her for several years and took over her job eventually.
One of the largest ones is Dr. Susan Donovan, who is a sitting president of Bellarmine University, in Kentucky, in Louisville. Uh, I worked for her directly for probably around 15 years. And she is bright, strategic, very person-centered, thoughtful, spiritual, caring, and mentoring in a very non-invasive way. And the thing that Susan used to do with me is allow for me to listen to her talk to people on the phone or be near or in the room when conversations, when she was solving problems, so I could just listen to her and watch how she interacted with, cared for, and basically paid attention to people, listened to them very deeply, whether it be on the phone or in person.
And then how she would respond with an ethos of care that allow for her to make the best decision for the moment with care for the person, but also care for the institution, the cura apostolica and, and the balance of those things. And I learned so much from Susan. I still learn from her. We’re now colleagues as presidents. We interact with each other that way, but she’ll always be my mentor, and she had hers.
My job then was to create more mentoring relationships like the one I experienced, fortunately, as a president, I have the opportunity to do at every level of a university. From a student or janitor on campus to a staff member to a faculty member, I take time to engage them all, and our alumni very intentionally and give them the time that they deserve and that they require in order to have real relationships. That has been a hallmark of my leadership, that’s time well spent. And one of the things I’ve done recently is I was having a town hall convocation open this semester, and I was talking about visiting a classroom. One of our English faculty invited me to their classroom, their first-year writing course, and she was one of maybe two faculty members over three years that invited me into their classroom. Now, granted, you’ve gotta be on your game to be wanting to invite the president into your classroom. I get that.
But I ask my faculty to invite me into their classrooms. This is how I understand, not only the teaching and learning at the institution, but who our students actually are, and how they’re receiving the product that we’re here to provide for them. It is invaluable to me as I talk about this university outside of these walls and these boundaries, and it is just absolutely wonderful. And so that for me, has been just also part of that.
But it’s the access, it’s the encounter, it’s wanting to be in relationship, deep in relationship with your community that makes this job very easy in that particular regard. Not the other things, not dealing with geopolitical politics, not dealing with, you know, federal regulations, not dealing with all the things that can stymie, you know, the politics of the role, but much more about the relationships.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. While you were earning your doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania, your discipline, your dissertation, excuse me, explored the outcomes of mission identity programs at US Jesuit universities, analyzing their effectiveness for preparing future lay leaders for service in such institutions.
You mentioned your service at Loyola, Maryland, eventually served also too at Marquette. What about the Jesuit experience also drew you to focus your work there? And then in what ways did you learn to appreciate the charisms? A couple of which you’ve mentioned already in terms of care for the person, but also care for the institution.
Xavier Cole: Well, it’s, it’s everything. It’s frankly everything. And it happened from the very beginning. The minute that I stepped on Loyola’s campus, Loyola Maryland’s campus, back in 1995 to interview in the spring, I wasn’t just met with questions about what’s my leadership philosophy and how do I understand how to use an Excel spreadsheet. It was about, what do you care about? What are your values? What are the things that you hold dear? Who shaped you? Who mentored you and formed you? What is your heart? Why do you do this work? These are questions that came from Jesuits.
They came from religious like Jesuits like Father Tim Brown, religious like Sister Mary Jane Kreidler, who has now passed away. They saw me, and they also asked about my academic research at that time. So I thought that folks would not care about that because they’re trying to figure out how do I run a residence hall coming out. But they really cared about me as a person, cura personalis, and it was immediate. And that shaped my entire experience at Loyola.
I stayed there for seventeen years. This is something that wasn’t happening. It still didn’t quite happen a lot, but I stayed there because that’s how I experience the world. I stepped away from Jesuit education for maybe just a couple of years, just to see if I would fit in a different environment and actually work there. While I could be effective in that environment, I didn’t necessarily fit because so much of my tools on how I was a teacher and an administrator and a mentor were wrapped completely up and inextricable from Ignatian spirituality, from this charism, from the gospels, how I saw the world how I sought God in all things. These were very specific frames that worked in very specific environments.
And I know that these are the tools that I use to do my work, to do my mentoring, to do my teaching, to make my decisions, you know, taking time for discernment and reflection. You know, all these things created the balance of my philosophy of how I not only led my professional life, but also my own personal life.
So I studied how do we form that practically because the number of Jesuits are declining year over year, and eventually there will be very few of them. We won’t have enough to be at every campus. So then who carries this charism that, for me, in this way forward for another five hundred years? That’s laypeople. That’s the legacy of Vatican II. This is what we’re supposed to do, is to understand and have the lived experience of this charism that for me is Jesuit and Catholic, so we can then share that. It is a very subtle proselytization, that is not meant to be one that forces you into a frame, but introduces you to a concept.
And then what do you do with it? And Jesuits, you know, famously say, you know, “We bring you in your door, and you leave out of ours.” And so that type of way of proceeding is absolutely central to the work that I do and the work that I continue to do forming, you know, professionals now. I’ll be with AJCU talking as a president to mid and upper management leaders about how to be more engaged laypeople with this charism that basically is a differentiator for us in this current time, but even before this time.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In what ways then did those charisms animate your experience as a co-curricular educator? And in particular, what did you find most vocationally satisfying?
Xavier Cole: I think, seeing God in all things, in people. One frame of that helping you recognize beauty in difficult moments and people and things and nature and music, and children. I remembered I was speaking at a Mass probably around six months ago, and I was in a particular head space that day, just busy, busy, busy. And I saw a little girl with her parents in the audience, and she was wearing a little T-shirt that said, “Hope and joy.” And I was like, “That’s it.” This isn’t by accident that we form people who think in this frame. It is taught. It is experience. It is what parents intentionally do. It is how we frame this.
And I was able to talk to that audience of young people who are worried about the world that they’re in today that seemed like there is no hope. Lots of hopelessness, lots of despair, lots of concern about how the world is going and how we interact with each other, and not from a frame of love. And I was able to talk about that, but the inspiration was actually seeking God in the people in front of me that allowed me to do that. So that’s one way. The other way is just how I govern. I lead with people. That is seeing God in people, even when they’ve been their worst self.
So what’s gives you the patience, the grace to listen, to ask the question before accountability, what’s going on? What is happening with you, and how can I help you? And if a person opens up in that moment and accepts the help that you’re providing and the inquiry that is from a place of love, then you could change the whole trajectory of what’s happening. Now, if they refuse that, then you realize that they’re, they are misplaced, not you.
And this is the frame that we have, and you can counsel them away from this environment before they influence it in ways that have desolation rather than consolation. And so all of this comes from me understanding and reading about the charism. Jim Martin is a favorite. Everything you need to know. I think that’s the want to know, need to know about Ignatius spirituality, Jesuit education, we’re afraid to ask type of thing. I’m not remembering the exact title, but that’s one I’ve read over time that has helped me not just understand how to do these things, but also to get into concepts about how to live, like, you know, Ignatian indifference and disordered attachment.
I’ve talked to people so many times about what are the things that you are using to fill the void in your life that aren’t God. That are things, money, food, you know, luxury trips, you name it. It doesn’t exactly fit the bill, right? It doesn’t actually wipe out the feelings that you’re trying to mask. So, how do we do this differently, and how do you recognize these disordered attachments and let them go?
And I tell them my own story about my disordered attachment. I was, if you’ll allow me, this is very quickly, you know, I grew up with a little less than, we were a working class family, and we worked hard. And I, as I said before, I was a musician, but I never had my own instrument. I never had an instrument that my family could afford to buy for me brand new out of the box and, and develop that as my own. I’d always been given or borrowed instruments, and I was a pretty good musician.
And as I became older and recognized that it was like a deficit in what I thought was my upbringing, and I was very kind of hyper-focused on it for some reason. I ended up collecting instruments, but not new instruments, old instruments that I would then get fixed and love and care for and bring back to life. And I would play them over years in a big band. But I looked around one day, and I had over 12 trombones. What am I going to do with 12 trombones? And this isn’t filling that void.
I had to deal with what was the deficit first and understand it once I recognized it. I appreciated that, I was able to start to give those instruments away to kids who needed them, so they would have their own instrument. That brought a tremendous amount of joy and fill that need, whatever I felt was a deficit. But that is a frame that helps you understand what’s happening in your life. And if you don’t have that frame, you could wander in the darkness for a very long time, about who and what you are.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. In 2023, you were appointed president of Loyola New Orleans. Would you describe the discernment process that led you to accept that appointment and what you also as a candidate saw in terms of the potential that that community had when it came to your leadership?
Xavier Cole: Well, I was coming out of COVID, and I oversaw the COVID response for Marquette. It was not an insignificant job. And once you have led, worked, witnessed a university or anything, frankly, at that level, panoptically seeing all corners understanding what your leadership could do to shift things when you did have that vantage point, I understood what the possibilities of my leadership could be.
And I did have a philosophy of leading, and I did have a way of leading that I thought was person-centered and effective, excuse me, at the vice presidential level where I was for many years. And I thought, well, this is a time. And also you can’t put a genie back in a bottle. And so once you’ve led at that level, you can’t go backwards and just say, “This is your box. This is all you need to worry about.” Because my awareness had been raised, you know, a curtain had been pulled back. I know the other things that were happening on the other side of that student affairs curtain.
And so, that’s how I knew that I need to do that. Why I wanted to do in a Jesuit and Catholic environment was what I talked to you about before. I believe that that frame is one that fits for me, and that is where I wanted to contribute, and that’s actually what my study was about. I didn’t accidentally study about Jesuit higher education. I wanted to serve Jesuit higher education academically but also practically. And as far as Loyola Orleans, my second Loyola, my last Loyola the people. I had been away from home for 30 years.
I was much more the way I lived my life, a Marylander and a Wisconsinite than I was a Mississippian at that point. I had lived outside of my home state longer than I’d been inside of it. And I had forgotten all the things that I loved about what I am as a Southerner. My frame, how I approach people, how my openness. I experienced all of that when I got back, and so it was like it was coming home. And if you have a good and supportive and caring home, that’s a good place to come back to. And so it was an easy choice.
I fell in love with the people, almost immediately. Kind of like a puppy love, like a crush. And now, after three years of seeing us all at our best and at our worst and, and all spectrum in between, it’s a real love that’s based on real encounter and experience, and I love them regardless of how they show up. And they love me regardless of how I show up. And I actually say the word love to them.
And as a leader who can be that vulnerable, and we encourage that type of authenticity in how we show up in our experience, whether you’re a first-year student or you’re a faculty member a lot can be done in the community that exists that way. So I’m building something here that I think that’ll last, hopefully will last well beyond my tenure. When I came in, I told them, “I want to be here for 10 years. If at five years you still like me and I like you, let’s do this another five years. If you don’t, I understand. I’m not going to hold it against you.”
So I’m at the end of year three. Things are feeling pretty good. Loyola’s made a significant turn in all the ways that one can, the accreditation, enrollment, culture, you know physically our environment, we’re doing extremely well at least from where I sit, certainly from where I came in. And I do think that that’s because we’re building something together. It’s not perfect.
Like a marriage, you have to work at it and pay attention to it and actually want it to do well. And you have to be able to compromise and sacrifice and whatever your desire is, to make sure that it’s helping as many people as possible. But mainly that we have the grace with each other to forgive each other when we make mistakes with each other.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. As our time begins to become short, I want to shift now to asking you about the vocation of the university president, and in particular, the vocation of a university president who also is a layperson leading a Jesuit Catholic university. How have you come to understand that in this particular context as you’re now finishing year three?
Xavier Cole: Well, I had a Jesuit ask me a year ago, “Xavier, is this a job or is it a vocation?” This is coming from a man who had led a Jesuit institution for several years. It was clearly a vocation for him as a priest. He saw timelines and long duration differently than I did in leadership of these institutions, this Apostolic, you know, higher ed Apostolic venture, this Catholic apostolate.
But what we saw was that we want to continually do good and better the magis. And we’re going to want more and excellence for our place. And we know, and what we talked about, if we do that consistently through the ups and downs, not treating it like a stepping stone, building your own success, you know, not seeking success somewhere else. And I’m not saying that won’t happen at some point. I’m just saying that that’s not the intention. It’s not the way I approach the job.
I approach the job as one is that I build the environment that I seek to enjoy. And I said very plainly and quite naively that, you know, first four years are going to work really hard to get this place where it needs to be in, in the right direction. And maybe the second five years I’ll enjoy a lot of it. And that’s just speaking to the difficulty of the role, nowadays it is different. I mean, I’ve talked to presidents from the ’80s and the ’90s, and it was a different job. And presidents didn’t last as long, and nobody, not many people last 10 years in a presidency, and provosts last much less. They’re very difficult roles.
But, if you’re building towards something that people understand that you have a vision in mind that’s longer than a three-year turnaround then they will commit to you and they will commit to the work. And I’m not saying that they’re doing the work for me. I’m not that, you know, navel-gazing, you know? They see the work as important, and they say the product. And the thing that I say to folks now is that, you know, coming on graduation season and on Saturday, and, you know, this is what you should show up for.
The Masses leading up to graduation and graduation, there’s no other reason that we’re here. If you are not there for that, you’ve missed the whole point of the reason that you’re doing this work. And if you’re only doing it for the paycheck involved, you can get paid doing something else and possibly paid better, you know? But if you miss that, you’ve missed the whole raison d’etre. And so don’t miss it.
And, you know, we rent out the Superdome and Smoothie King and these big arenas, so we all can be there and faculty and staff can be on stage. Otherwise we can just graduate out here in the quad. Show up, show up for yourself, show up for these students and the families. Honor them, around what the sacrifice has been for you and for them. And then help us to remember why we do the work that we do. It is for these students, their access, their attention, their success, and then watch them go out and set the world on fire.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. For our last question today, I want to ask you, as a university president and as a university president of a Jesuit Catholic institution, in what ways do you believe presidents can be of greater service to the Church in the years to come? But also, in what ways perhaps can the Church be of greater service to university presidents, knowing that the loads that you all carry are as hard as they are, the loads the provosts carry are also as hard as they are?
Xavier Cole: Well, I’m fortunate to have a couple of Jesuit consiliaries that I rely upon. I just mentioned one that helped me reframe why we do the work as a vocation and not just a job. I believe that it is our responsibility as lay leaders in Catholic education to understand, live, be continually improving our understanding of the Gospels. The more grounded reason of why we do the work. You know, some parts of Ignatian spirituality are more attractive to people who are not Catholic because of the service and justice pieces of it. But those are grounded in something that is grounded in Catholic spirituality and theology and the Gospels that people don’t always understand.
And so when I talk about love, it’s coming from there. When I’m talking about the care for people it’s coming from there. When I’m talking about seeing God in all things, it’s not just a catchphrase, it’s coming from there. It’s a way of living. So what my job to do is to more deeply develop as many lay leaders as possible to understand what this charism is, and not just by accident and osmosis, by intentional reading, studying, application of the knowledge of this charism in walking that path.
What Jesuits can help us do while we still have several of them around, is to help us understand it in ways that a more deeply formed person can that we can’t. You know, I did not go to seminary for X number of the years. I did not go to tertianship. I was not formed in that way.
I am married with a wife and other responsibilities and other things that pull my eyes away from the goal. So, they help you refocus as a lay person with different distractions, you know, on what this goal is and helps us clarify what we can give. It will not be the same thing as a priest. But it can be informed in that spirituality in a deep way that allows for others to unlock their potential, their understanding, and their desire to know us more deeply as Catholics.
Todd Ream: Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. Our guest has been Xavier A. Cole, president of Loyola University New Orleans. Thank you for taking time to share your insights and wisdom with us.
Xavier Cole: You’re 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.
