President's Convocation 2005
Right Place. Right Time
President’s Convocation Address
Robert B. Lawton, S.J.
September 29, 2005
In past years Father Lawton has delivered his convocation address from the podium in Lincy Auditorium (Hilton 100) to an audience composed mainly of faculty, staff, and administrators. This year, because the convocation address served also as the keynote for a series of weekend events launching the public phase of LMU’s $300 million capital campaign (“Right Place, Right Time”), the venue was moved to Sacred Heart Chapel in order to accommodate a larger audience. Trustees, regents, donors, and student leaders, as well as faculty, staff, and administrators, were present. The chapel was filled almost to capacity.
Deviating from his previous practice of speaking from a prepared text (“It’s the seventh-year itch, and I just wanted a change”), Father Lawton spoke extemporaneously. He developed three points in his 24-minute address, the first falling into three sub-points:
• Campaign’s broad context: our responsibilities to the future, past, and present
• Campaign’s immediate context: 2001 Strategic Plan
• What the campaign will accomplish
The following is an edited transcript of Father Lawton’s address.
Before I begin, I want to thank all of you for being here, not simply for being here today, but for being at LMU. And I’d like especially to say that to the faculty, the staff, and the students. Most of you are not going to be directly involved in this campaign. You’re not going to be dealing with donors and asking for money. But the success of this campaign in its quiet phase has depended on you. And it continues to depend on you because you create the kind of institution that it is easy for me to talk to donors about with passion and conviction. Because of the university you create, the campaign has been successful so far and will continue to be successful. Although not obviously and directly, in a very deep way you are responsible for the campaign. Again, I want to say thank you very, very much for being here at LMU and creating the kind of institution that makes my job quite easy.
I. Campaign’s Broad Context
As some of you know, I’ve lived in great cities all my life. I grew up in D.C., moved to New York, then Boston, and when I went to Europe I lived in Munich, Berlin, Florence, and Rome.
I have flashbacks to standing in the hills of Fiesole outside Florence and looking out at the city and wondering what it was like to live in Florence when Florence was really in its youth as a great city, when the Renaissance was flourishing, when it was not mainly a city of museums. What was it like? And I would have similar feelings as I would stand on one of the seven hills of Rome and try to get some sense in my imagination of what Rome was like when it was emerging as the great world city of history. What was that like?
Those moments come back when I’m on the bluff behind the Chapel overlooking Los Angeles because being in Los Angeles now gives me a sense of what it must have been like to be in those other cities when they were in their youth as great world cities. Clearly L.A. is emerging as the great city of our millennium; probably its only possible rival a couple centuries from now will be Shanghai. So L.A. is emerging as a great city, and we have a chance to live in it at this time. If we look into this city, and look into our hearts as we live here, we get a sense not only of the modern world but of the world that is dawning.
As you know, this is the most diverse city in the history of the planet, and that’s a challenge – the challenge of feeling responsibility not only for one’s own group but for the common good, for the larger community, the larger city. There are few cities in the world where the span between unbelievable wealth and real poverty is as broad as it is in
Los Angeles. Mayor Villaraigosa calls this the poverty capital of America. It’s easy to forget here in the Del Rey Hills that there is an enormous span between rich and poor. So this city raises the question for all of us: What are the responsibilities of those of us who are more fortunate and more privileged to those who are less lucky and fortunate?
As you know, Los Angeles is about as beautiful a location for a city as the imagination can frame – with the ocean, the mountains, the desert, weather that is well nigh perfect. So this city raises still another question: How do we respect the beauty of its location, its natural environment, yet create the necessary infrastructure for human living and working? Because Los Angeles is such a wonderful place to live, I think this city more than any place else heightens the modern tension between simply enjoying life (L.A. is a great place to play!) and the demands that high achievement and great aspiration make upon us. How to blend those two—enjoyment and achievement? This city raises that tension to a high point.
Los Angeles truly is the city where the modern values of health, youth, and beauty are the most seductive. So it asks the question of all of us: What does any of this have to do with eternity? What does it have to do with being a good person? And I think if each of you looks within, you will see other questions, even beyond these, that simply being in this city will raise in your heart.
So I think this is a tremendous place to have a university, particularly a university like this – in the Catholic tradition – where both respect for intelligence and the life of faith can flourish; where the honing and refining of human skills can go hand in hand with a concern about the large questions of God – Is there a God? What might God be like? Where all of this is in the air; where young people are doing their undergraduate
years; where grad students are preparing for their professions; where faculty are doing their scholarship and creative work; where a commitment to justice is taken for granted. It’s the best place I can imagine for educating people for the way the world is going to be. And we’re not simply educating them to understand the world; we’re educating them to have an influence on the world – to be the makers of the future.
So Loyola Marymount is a great place, but we have to become even better because we have a lot to live up to. There’s a wonderful title to Delmore Schwartz’s first collection of poems. He called it In Dreams Begin Responsibility. Because of our own dreams for what LMU can be – and they’re realistic dreams – we have a responsibility, and the capital campaign is part of that responsibility, to make the University into the kind of place that prepares students to be people who both understand and shape the future. So that’s one set of responsibilities – our responsibilities to the future. In dreams begin responsibility.
But we’re not the first persons connected with this University to dream large. I imagine you’ve seen the pictures in University Hall of what this area was like when Father Joseph Sullivan brought the University out here in 1928. I especially love the picture of Manchester Boulevard. It’s just a dirt road. It gives us all a sense of what it was like when people moved this University from downtown Los Angeles out to where there was practically nothing. And shortly after the University came out here it embarked on a fund-raising campaign. Let me read to you from the prospectus for that campaign:
“Down deep in every human heart is an inborn desire to do something great and
enduring. Loyola University of Los Angeles is destined to rise to greatness as Georgetown or Notre Dame has risen. Dominating the skyline of the Del Rey Hills, overlooking the Pacific on the one hand and Los Angeles on the other, Loyola University of Los Angeles has a proud future. Loyola University of Los Angeles is a descendant of the first college in Southern California to graduate students, first to receive a charter. Two years ago, it moved from the constriction of a rapidly growing city out to a 100-acre property where its growth and outlook can be unlimited. All eyes in Southern California are now upon it.”
Well, just mentioning the date, 1929, lets you know what got in the way of those dreams. There was a Depression and then a Second World War. And I have such admiration for the people who struggled to keep this University going during those years. And why did they struggle? Well certainly they struggled because of an affection for this place, but also because of that dream, that dream of what this place could become. And in dreams begin responsibility.
If we think of when Sister Raymunde McKay came to this campus and brought Marymount College from Palos Verdes and when the Sisters of St. Joseph came with them, it wasn’t simply to preserve an institution in a different location. There was also that dream that as one looked into the future any great Catholic university would have to be a co-educational Catholic university. And we all know, if you’ve talked to people who were here at the time, the struggles that everyone went through to accomplish that merger. It was not an easy merger to do. And the people did it because of their affection for their own institutions, but they also did it because of their dream for what this
University could be. And in dreams begin responsibility.
And if you think of the years after that, you will recall that when the University was in not as robust a financial shape as it is now, it went ahead and purchased the Leavey Campus with the sense that we had to get more residence halls and build up a residential community if we were going to fulfill that dream. And when we bought University Hall – it seems like such a simple decision now – that was a complicated decision and the University had to borrow a significant amount of money out of its endowment, which is very rare for universities to do. It was a courageous decision, again born of love for this University but also of a passionate sense of all that this University could be.
And I’d like to take us even a little further back. Think about the great cities emerging in the United States right now – Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix, the great cities of Florida – Miami, Orlando, Jacksonville. Not one of them has a major Catholic university. Los Angeles is the only great new city in this country with a major Catholic university. So I think we owe a lot to the Sisters who first came here to the Los Angeles area, to the Jesuits who first took over St. Vincent’s College, to all of them who had a sense of what L.A. would become and of the importance of having a great Catholic university in this major metropolitan area. They dreamed, they struggled, they worked hard, and we have the benefits of all that they struggled for. So just as I think we have a responsibility to the future, to all that this University can become for the good of the world, I think we have a responsibility to all those who went before us, who saw that same dream, who struggled for it, worked for it, tirelessly tried to make it a reality. And now we are very, very close. And so I think we have a great responsibility. It is the
responsibility that comes with place and time.
And our responsibilities, finally, are not simply to the future and to the past. I know in talking to the Board of Trustees, the Board of Regents, and our many, many donors that they feel a great responsibility to those of you who are the students, faculty, and staff of this institution today. They feel a responsibility to help you who are students to have an even richer education; to help the faculty in your teaching and in your scholarship; to help all the members of our staff to grow in their own skills and responsibilities. And so part of this campaign will be about helping those of you who are here today, not simply those who will be here decades into the future, but about what we can do to help you become more fully alive. That is why I say the large and important context of this campaign is three sets of responsibilities – to the future, to the past and to the present.
That’s why “Right Place, Right Time” is not simply a slogan for a campaign. It says something deep about you and me. We happen to be here where past and future come together. It really is the right place and the right time to be, and that gives us an enormous responsibility, each of us in different ways, and those of us connected with the campaign in a very important way, to give the University the resources to finally achieve its dream. So much for the broad context.
II. Campaign’s Immediate Context
A quick word about the more immediate context. The more immediate context is simply that we have a vision and a goal for the University: within a twenty-year period to
be and to be recognized in the company of Georgetown, Boston College, and Notre Dame. And not because primarily we are interested in prestige but because that will be a sign that we are doing in an even more distinguished way what we are doing today. That’s the goal. We’ve put together a strategic plan. It was adopted by the Board in December 2001 – a ten-year plan to move us along that trajectory. That plan spelled out what we needed to do in order to get to that goal. A plan has to be funded. Goals and visions are expensive. And there are two ways a university accomplishes this: through tuition, and through fund-raising campaigns. There is only so much tuition can bear, and so a fund-raising campaign is an absolutely essential element for achieving the vision we have for LMU, the dreams people have had for so long.
As we began to plan for the campaign we did a feasibility study to determine how much money we could raise. Our consultants said that comfortably we could raise about $250 million; that about $300 million would be a stretch, but an achievable stretch. And so the Board – with once again the kind of daring and ambition that are true of our history – said let’s go for the $300 million. And so the campaign was launched with that kind of a goal. Three hundred million dollars does not allow us to do everything we would like to do. There are many things that will have to wait. But it does allow us to address the more important needs we have right now in achieving LMU’s dreams.
III. What the Campaign Will Accomplish
What, concretely, is the campaign all about? Of the $300 million total,
$122.7 million will be for new facilities – the William H. Hannon Library (funding for this I’m happy to say is quite well along); a new facility for the Seaver College of Science and
Engineering; new and expanded spaces for the School of Film and Television; and expanded athletic facilities. These are the important facility needs the University has to meet in order to complete the physical part of our campus, at least for a while. So the campaign will help us take care of these.
But facilities are basically to facilitate the interaction between students and faculty. That’s where the magic happens. That’s where education takes place. So we have over $61.3 million in the campaign for scholarships to attract talented and needy students from around the country so that they can afford to come to LMU. This fund will create over 350 endowed scholarships that will enable young people from all kinds of economic backgrounds – richly talented young people—to receive an education at LMU that will help them to be shapers of the future.
There is also $55 million in the campaign for faculty support. This means money to support the research and teaching of current faculty, as well as money for new endowed senior positions so we can bring distinguished scholars here who can help to mentor the wonderful junior faculty that we’re attracting and also contribute to the larger world through their creative work and scholarship.
There is $36 million for various kinds of initiatives, like our Bioethics Institute, our Center at the Law School for Juvenile Justice, and similar initiatives where we think we can have a particularly influential impact on this city and the larger world.
And finally there is $25 million in what is called annual support. That’s money to help us adjust to and stabilize the University’s phenomenal growth in recent years, money to assist our faculty, staff, and students in so many different ways to take advantage of this time and place.
I hope I have been able to convey that this notion of “Right Place, Right Time” is more than a slogan. It’s something very profound about this University. It’s about our responsibility for our own dreams and for the dreams of those who have gone before us for almost a century. We’re the ones who have been given the opportunity to fulfill their dreams and make real the strategic plan’s vision of what LMU can be.
In conclusion, I’d like to read to you a passage from the beginning of Middlemarch:
“Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? . . . That child pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa’s passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.
“That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no
epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity. . . . Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed.”
We have been given a great opportunity. We have been given the opportunity for our actions – often seemingly small, often hidden, various in all kinds of ways – to be caught up in a long-recognizable deed. We have been given not meanness but largeness of opportunity. It’s something that doesn’t come into every life, and we’re just very, very fortunate because of place and time to have the opportunity to live, each in our own way, something of an epic life. So I’d like to end this convocation with gratitude – gratitude to the members of our leadership boards, gratitude to our benefactors, gratitude to people in the fund-raising operation who work so hard for this campaign, gratitude to all of you – faculty, staff, and students – who make this such a great University and make our future so achievable. And on all your behalf, I would like to say a word of gratitude to those who went before us, whose dreams, hard work, and achievements have given us the possibility of living a life of significance by contributing to an institution of world significance. So in all your names, I would like to thank them. We are fortunate indeed to be at the right place, at the right time, together.