Dean's Monthly Messages

June is a time of “bookends”: both celebrating our distinguished alumni and welcoming our newest students. On the alumni front, the month began with Alumni Awards and Reunion Weekend. For undergraduate students who will arrive this Fall, June is the time to register for classes and to attend SPARK, our first-year summer orientation program. 

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This month marks my fourth anniversary as Dean. I’ve experienced Arts & Sciences at Marquette along the same time arc as an undergraduate student’s four-year plan of study. What an adventure! The highlights have been many and memorable—particularly as I have seen you excel in research and scholarship, teaching and learning, and collective efforts to help our communities thrive.

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March is a month that brings signs of hope: the reaching of midsemester, the end of winter, more sunshine, spring break. This year, March has inspired both gratitude and hope. Women’s History Month provides an opportunity to highlight the achievements and legacy of women across our College and University and far beyond.

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With the New Year many of us set new intentions for what we’d like to achieve in the coming months. A resource to that end, Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, was recommended by an alum who visited my class last semester. The author suggests motivating good habits by giving yourself some small reward, like a short chat with a colleague. Rewards need not be large to be meaningful. Duhigg’s insights recall Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and the social context of virtue formation. It is through community that we form habits crucial to a flourishing life.

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In this season of Thanksgiving, I hope we all can pause to consider our many reasons to be thankful, both at Marquette and beyond. From my perspective, this month has offered an abundance of such reasons.

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Our focus on integration spans many crucial topics in research and teaching, including integral ecology, or care for one another as well as for all of creation. This month, around the world, people of faith have been celebrating the Season of Creation. This is an ecumenical effort to draw attention to care for our common home. Stephen Pluháček and I co-authored a brief essay on this topic that appeared in Marquette Today. In it, we suggest that today’s challenges are not simply ecological or social, but fundamentally spiritual and theological. The essay is available here; I welcome your comments and questions.

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Welcome to a new academic year! For those just joining the community, welcome to Marquette! When I came to Marquette three years ago, it was thanks to the three P’s: Purpose, People and Place. I was drawn to the ways in which Marquette lives out its Catholic, Jesuit mission. I connected with the people here and wanted to work with them every day. And I was drawn to the city of Milwaukee and all of the ways in which our university interacts with the broader community.

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A highlight this month was hosting our annual Alumni Awards events. The awardees from A&S and Education are incredibly inspiring. They have variously shepherded a hospital system through the pandemic, invented green technologies, founded a Catholic high school, developed educational materials in English and Spanish for those living with autism, modeled what it means to own and operate a values-based business, and engaged in the crucial task of fostering non-violence. Thanks to all of these alumni for Being The Difference and illustrating the best of what a Marquette education can mean.

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What a momentous time of year! With Commencement we celebrate the achievements of students and colleagues who have completed their undergraduate and graduate degrees. Many of our departments have hosted end-of-academic year events and honored exceptional students.

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In the College of Arts & Sciences we held our third annual Virtual New Year Workshop on January 13. The workshop is an opportunity for faculty and staff colleagues to gather and build community while articulating our vision for the future. The focus was threefold: generating ideas for the university’s Strategic Planning 2030 initiative, deepening our connection with the college tagline “the difference is in the and” and digging into our strengths and aims, particularly our Catholic, Jesuit mission and our charge to ask big questions.

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This month I was invited to share a reflection at the annual Advent Luncheon of the Association of Marquette University Women (AMUW). My theme was the three A’s: AMUW, Advent, And.

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Marquette has unique opportunities to engage in data science research and teaching from broader and deeper perspectives. Data science, computer science or statistical and mathematical sciences are foundational to a number of projects animated by our mission. In addition to data ethics, examples include community engaged projects in the Near West Side aided by geospatial mapping, the Poverty Research Initiative and the BLEST Hub as well as confidential computing, hazard mapping, solutions to food insecurity, peer health education, medical imaging and mathematics education.

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I hope your summer has been a good one thus far. As I mentioned in last month’s message, for my family this season brings significant milestones. One of them is my husband’s and my thirtieth wedding anniversary. We celebrated this month with a visit to Yellowstone National Park, where we spent our honeymoon and have returned for our anniversaries every five years. In Yellowstone, the earth is tangibly alive, with bubbling mud pots, geysers and geothermal features in a spectrum of colors. The expanse, peace and stunning beauty of the Rocky Mountains, the big sky, the rivers and lakes bring to mind both the preciousness and the precarity of the natural world.  

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As our academic year draws to a close, we have an opportunity to look back and to look ahead. We consider how the path we have taken prepares us for what lies ahead. We can reflect upon what we have accomplished and what remains to be achieved. This particular year has been a special one, as we have celebrated the Ignatian Year, or the 500^th anniversary of the fateful cannonball injury that set Ignatius of Loyola on a path that would lead him to become a priest and found the Society of Jesus as well as the 400^th anniversary of his canonization.

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Both our Fall semester and an eventful year—filled with opportunities as well as challenges—are drawing to a close. Your outstanding work this year has spanned groundbreaking research, transformational teaching and significant community engagement. You have garnered prestigious grants, fellowships and awards. Thank you for your dedication. I hope you will pause to reflect upon all that we have achieved together.

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I hope your Fall semester is off to a wonderful start! This is my second academic year at Marquette, yet in some ways it feels like the first. This year has brought my first opportunity to participate in the Convocation for New Students and other events like our Orientation Open House for New Undergraduates and various meet-and-greets with incoming graduate students. What a joy it is to encounter students just embarking upon their academic journey. The energy across campus with students attending in-person classes underscores the vibrancy of Marquette’s educational enterprise.

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Both our Fall 2020 semester and a most unusual and challenging year are drawing to a close. The past months have compelled us to face a pandemic, racial injustice and economic hardship. This triple crisis has rippled across the globe and affected us right here in Milwaukee and at Marquette. We will hopefully never again experience a year like 2020. 

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"Greetings! I am delighted and honored to serve as your Dean. What drew me to Marquette are the purpose, the people and the place. I look forward to working with all of you to fulfill Marquette’s Catholic, Jesuit mission..."

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