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Sunday’s calendar holds a special Mass at San Fernando Cathedral with an inaugural blessing from its rector, Father David Garcia, and yet another reception. And there are the daily responsibilities of heading a multifaceted university as well.
Dr. Pollack is eager though to carve out a niche in her busy schedule to share her vision for OLLU with Today’s Catholic. Asked about her plans to implement the university’s 10-year strategic plan, she enthusiastically launches into the strategies, which involve four key points: greater student retention; additional off-campus educational sites; increasing the endowment base to $100 million dollars; and greater involvement in the surrounding West Side neighborhood.
She starts off by noting, “One of the things that has been nice about arriving at this university is that it had a strategic plan already. Most places I’ve been to don’t have one — you have to go through that process. This board and the faculty and staff have given some extraordinary thought to the strategic plan.
“In the last 20 months that I’ve been here, we have taken all the thinking of the strategic plan and said, ‘OK, what’s that one thread that we want to start and establish as a university priority to move us to the next 100 years?’ And some of that started with re-anchoring ourselves to the past as a Catholic university and saying, ‘Who have we been as a Catholic university and how do we re-anchor to that in order to launch the future?’"
And that element, for Today’s Catholic, is probably an important place for us to start and to talk. Out of that rich tradition of its Catholic values and faith beliefs, this university has really in the past had a very strong commitment of ministering to this West Side and to students of the region that goes all the way into South Texas, who would not otherwise have had an opportunity to access higher education. So that was an important place for us to go back and re-anchor to that.
“In re-anchoring to that, we also said, ‘Well, who have been our students?’ And if you look back in our past, we had looked to students who came from Central America, from South America, from Mexico, from this region. And we said, ‘OK, how do we launch from that part of our past to the future?’
“And we’ve said that what an important part of this university’s role is now, is to be and to function as a bridge of the Americas — for the opportunities that are there for new immigrants (who are coming into our own city, our own neighborhood, our own region, from the Americas) and for the economic possibilities that exist if we give our students the right tools for leadership and service, to be more mobile economically as corporations also start to set their sites toward the south — like Toyota, who has made it a very clear part of their plans to move into Latin America.
“And another piece that seemed to make a great deal of sense was the fact that our congregation, our founding Congregation of Divine Providence, our sisters who are still scattered in all parts of the Americas, that they will be an important part of the recruitment net of the university as we move toward this new university priority.
“So if I had to summarize for you what our three trajectories are on this new university priority for the university serving as the bridge of the Americas, it is, first, that the university is going to educate students for leadership and service in the Americas.There were these wonderful series of university-wide dialogues with faculty, staff and students and they came up with the most incredible ideas, which was to say, ‘You know, we need to start focusing and doing everything we do around this whole concept of the Americas.’ And one faculty member stood up and said, ‘That’s right, and the languages of the Americas are English, Spanish, Portuguese and French and we ought to give people the facility to move back and forth through those.’ And so we’ll focus a lot of our language curriculum and offerings around that — those are the languages and the cultures of the Americas.
“The second trajectory is what has been historically our commitment to the West Side. And we look to being a part of the renaissance of the West Side in which there will be some places in which we will lead that; there will be some places in which we support others, like Henry and Mary Alice Cisneros, who have made just a selfless and philanthropic commitment to the West Side. And so we’ll be working with them.
“You know, if you look back on the history of universities and cathedrals, back to the time of Aristotle, you would know that universities and cathedrals in Aristotle’s time played a very important role in advancing and developing what he called civitas, the life of community. And so here you have, in Our Lady of the Lake, a cathedral and a university — and what a wonderful place for us to be, when this urban core is changing and has changed to what it is, to be part of this renaissance of the West Side.
“One of the things that’s very important to me is that when the city was growing in such a dynamic and extraordinary way to the far west side, it kind of just leapfrogged over this West Side, and I hold us a little bit accountable for that leap because we should have been participating at a much higher level to have created a seamless growth from downtown to the West Side.
“And so, we will be working hard and will be looking for partners to help us close that gap, close that seal, because no one can come to San Antonio, or no one can have lived in San Antonio, and not have known that this West Side was an important part of the political and educational growth of this city, as you can see in people who came out of the West Side, like Henry and Mary Alice (Cisneros) — I mean, I grew up three blocks away from here — like Evangeline Flores, like Veronica Salazar, like Gloria Rodriguez from AVANCE; and some of my own classmates, like Maj. Gen. Freddie Valenzuela, who’s now himself just come back to the West Side after serving his country through several wars; another one of my old classmates at Christ the King Elementary School, the Honorable Emilio M. Garza, who serves on the 5th Circuit Court of federal court.
“You know, the West Side is San Antonio, and we are thrilled about the university’s role, as you saw in that strategic plan, and the vision of our board in that strategic plan to make this university a key part of that renaissance. It’s very exciting.”
Asked what would be the first step in this undertaking, Dr. Pollack replies: “The first step is to complete an administrative plan that I will submit to our board, the contents of which have been guided by these university-wide dialogues that we’ve been having with faculty and staff and students. And I have to tell you, it’s been really wonderful to see the excitement among our students in particular.
“Students for over 100 years have been coming to this university for a very purposeful reason, myself included. Students now use a variety of criteria to pick the college or university they’re going to go to, and students will choose some universities because they feel they want the social mobility part of going to college or university. Students pick Our Lady of the Lake University as a Catholic university, because they come here for the mentoring, for the modeling and for the values and beliefs that you cannot get at any other place other than at a Catholic university.
“So they come here and they choose Our Lady of the Lake for its mentoring and its modeling. We’re doing some other work with another consultant, and that is what has been the resonating theme of our students. And to have that combination, of students who say, ‘We come here because we want the values and beliefs that this university provides,’ and you combine it with some of these skills around giving them not just social mobility, but professional mobility, to make choices in their careers across the opportunities, is a wonderful complete package of an individual that we’ll be graduating from here — and that we hear the business community needs and wants. They want people who come to their places of business with a sense of values and of proper business and professional ethics.”
Queried as to any differences she has observed in the educational climate here in San Antonio and OLLU, as compared with the other campuses she has led as president (Medical Center Campus of Miami-Dade Community College in Florida and Glendale Community College in Arizona), Dr. Pollack notes, “It’s just what I mentioned.”
She continues, “My first presidency was in 1988. I left San Antonio, I left a deanship at San Antonio College — a wonderful public institution and a community college — to take my first presidency in Miami, Florida, and it was an exciting time for me, I have to tell you, because I was moving into my first presidency. I had my Ph.D. in hand, I had a deanship in hand and I was moving to my first presidency. It was an exciting time, and I spent seven years in that presidency. And then, in my second presidency, I went on because I wanted a bigger challenge; I wanted a more comprehensive college or university. I went from a college or university of 6,000 students in Florida to one of almost 32,000 students in Phoenix, Arizona. I really wanted this big challenge.
“This is the first presidency that, for me, has not felt like just another career move. It has felt for me like that calling that very few of us are fortunate to feel in our careers. And I have many colleagues who are in corporate America, I have many colleagues who are in higher education, and a lot of time I hear in their voices this disconnect between where their own core and their own center is and what they’re doing. And, for me, this has felt like a real integration of who I am and what I believe in and what I get to do here now. So that’s been very different.
“I can tell you all the differences in terms of a public and a Catholic university, in terms of how we’re funded — we’re very tuition-driven here, publics are very state supported — and those are important differences. But to be at a Catholic university that is recommitting to its mission of ministering to people who are in search of a first chance, a second chance, a third chance, that come from all areas — our Houston and our Dallas communities are very different than our undergraduate population here, but they too are in search of something that we provide — that’s very different. And, in large part, they’re looking for convenience, but they’re also looking for what undergirds our curriculum and that’s the values, the beliefs and the ethics that they and their employers perceive as important.”
In reference to tripling the endowment base being an ambitious undertaking, Dr. Pollack’s response is: “That’s ambitious. It’s very ambitious, but we think that that endowment will come from connecting to interests that help us build programs that will be magnets for the endowment.
“And here’s another very important piece. (Now, I use the piece about languages to illustrate for you how it is that we’re going to focus what we do.) We could teach Chinese, we could teach Japanese, etc., but our focus is going to be around the languages of the Americas. Another key anchor for us, is what we’ve just started to do around biliterate, bicultural degree programs, giving people who have fluency in language and in culture — or who don’t — the ability to do that. I mean, it’s moving both ways. So my purpose was to illustrate just the matter of languages.
“Here’s another important piece of our work, when I say that a focal point of our new direction is going to be to educate the students for leadership and service. We have just entered into a partnership with the National Hispanic Institute, which is a community-based nonprofit organization that goes throughout this country identifying Latino and Latina students with reserves of talent and ability to become leaders in the new America — and they can come from Minnesota, from Chicago, from San Jose, California — and those are the students that we’re going to be looking for as well.
“This will be a place where, yes, we say we’re the bridge of the Americas, but our bridge also is as far as our arms reach to this West Side or as far as flights reach for a student from here to within this country —who are students who are looking for a biliterate and a bicultural environment, not only in the university, but of a city that brings that to their education as the new leaders for a new generation. And all over this country, whether you look in Chicago or in other parts of the country, there’s a generation of honored, honored leaders who now need to pass the torch to new leaders who, demographically, are very different than they have been in the past.
“So that’s a very important fact, that the Americas is on our West Side, the Americas is in Houston and in Dallas, where the National Hispanic Institute is helping us to recruit Latino students. But it’s also where we’re beginning to make some exchanges with our faculty and students in South Bend, Ind. — students who are there and who are realizing that the demographics of this country is changing and they want to be at a place where they can live and breathe and experience that in a city like San Antonio and in a university like Our Lady of the Lake.
“We’ve already had some beginning discussions with St. Mary’s of Notre Dame in South Bend, Ind., to do the faculty and student exchanges, bringing their students here and taking our students there.” |