USD President Provides Lesson in Excellence

Senior Trong Nguyen feels that University of San Diego President Author Hughes has time for the small student issues that many college leaders might not, like a new safety crosswalk or additional dormitory lighting.

Biology Professor Hugh Ellis admires Hughes for protecting academic freedom amid the occasional tensions that arise at a Catholic university between free inquiry and religious doctrine.

Shopping center magnate Ernie Hahn, chairman of the university board of trustees, attributes USD’s well-respected stature today to Hughes’ “absolute integrity” and “straight-shooter” vision of what higher education should offer.

No matter where you turn or whom you talk to at the University of San Diego, the influence of Author Hughes during the past two decades--from strong management to family values--quickly comes to the fore.

Under Hughes, the 160-acre campus overlooking Mission Bay and Old Town changed dramatically in appearance, adding a dozen major classroom, dormitory and library buildings during a $50-million construction boom that began in the late 1970s.

Under Hughes, the university surmounted the financial red ink he found on arrival at what was then a humdrum, religiously homogeneous college. His success has stemmed in no small part from persuading key members of San Diego’s business and professional elite to become trustees, and by recruiting strong administrators and giving them authority to act in their areas.

Under Hughes, there is an improved School of Law, new schools of nursing, business and education, and a solid undergraduate liberal arts college that was ranked by U.S. News & Word Report last year as fourth overall among Western regional universities--behind Trinity in Texas, Santa Clara, and Puget Sound in Washington--and ninth in academic reputation among the top 60 regional campuses nationwide.

Under Hughes, the university, operating in the shadow of its world-renowned neighbor, UC San Diego, has a young, growing faculty, now numbering 310, contrasted with 121 in 1972, and the faculty is involved in community issues ranging from the ocean environment to environmental law to the ethics of war. The only apprehension found at USD these days regarding Hughes is that the tall, athletic, soft-spoken 61-year-old president might decide not to complete a third decade. In August, he marks his 21st year as campus chief executive officer and takes the helm as chairman of the board of the National Assn. of Independent Colleges and Universities.

The silver-haired native of Hoopeston, Ill., gives no indication that he will be leaving USD any time soon, having already set in motion another ambitious turn for the 41-year-old campus: toward a more multiethnic student body and faculty and a greater non-Western tone in its curriculum.

That new direction means not only battling the strong competition among top universities for promising faculty members of color, but persuading potential donors of the value of creating faculty chairs, increasing student scholarships for economically disadvantaged students and increasing the $13-million endowment--grown from almost nothing 20 years ago.

“There’s no phoniness about him,” said Msgr. I. Brent Eagen, a former USD literature professor and now head of the San Diego Mission parish in Mission Valley and secretary to the board of trustees.

“He’s a very charismatic leader, not only in bringing disparate groups on campus together--students, faculty, and administrators--but in bringing outside groups into the university family, including people of all faiths.”

When Hughes arrived at USD after 10 years at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, where he was dean of the business school and academic vice president, his first task was to put the institution on a sound financial basis.

Chartered in 1949, it consisted for about 20 years as the small College for Men and the School of Law, both funded by the Catholic Diocese of San Diego, and the College for Women, operated by the Society of the Sacred Heart. At the time Hughes was recruited to complete a planned merger, there was a $1.5-million deficit at the College for Men because the Diocese had ended its direct support.

But, although his strong fiscal and budget reforms helped prune the deficit to zero by the mid-1970s, Hughes considers it a greater accomplishment that he forged a campus-wide consensus defining USD’s mission within the context of the multi-year Vatican II assembly of world Catholic Church leaders in the mid-1960s. That watershed convocation redefined the church’s mission as being less for evangelism and more for nondenominational ecumenism, for the betterment of all mankind.

“We began to talk about value-based education and about the importance of smallness in terms of the student learning environment, of what it meant to have a strong emphasis on liberal arts, on the dignity of each person as a whole person and the sense of concern for them as international citizens,” Hughes said in an interview.

“At first, in 1971, I was talking to the wall because there was no idea of the need for a mission, to know where we were going with this place, and, beyond that, there was no agreement on what that mission should be.”

After long discussions, the university now defines its role as a modern independent American Catholic university by emphasizing the human and social values that grow out of Catholic tradition.

That includes small classes--an average size of 20 students--all taught by professors; required courses in philosophy and religion; strong encouragement to students to carry out volunteer work on projects ranging from adult literacy to primary-student tutoring to building homes in Tijuana, and a tight sense of campus community.

“We are Roman Catholic by definition, that’s not up for debate,” said Hughes. He himself, from boyhood Methodist roots, converted to Catholicism at age 26 shortly before marrying Marjorie, his wife of 35 years, whom he met while both were studying at Eastern Illinois University.

“But we are not teaching doctrine, we’re doing something beyond that,” Hughes said.

So, while there may be “more crosses at USD than at the Vatican,” in the words of Sister Virginia McMonagle, an assistant to the vice president for university relations, the USD mission statement also made Sheldon Krantz, the Jewish dean of the law school from 1981 to 1989, feel right at home.

“The way Art and others define a Catholic institution, with a focus on values, on ethical concerns, on public service--he is able to balance the role of the Church with that of an academic institution,” said Krantz, now teaching in Washington. The law school has several programs and an extensive curriculum in ethics and public-service law.

There have been a few instances where what Hughes calls the “special tensions” at a religious-based university bubbled to the surface. But those resulted from inappropriate Diocesan pressures on USD, in the view of longtime trustee George Pardee, a noted Southern California home developer.

“Those things rubbed off on the university,” Pardee said, referring to public criticisms in the past from the diocese, and now-deceased Bishop Leo T. Mather, over campus speakers taking a pro-choice position on abortion. (The bishop of the San Diego Diocese is a permanent member of the Board of Trustees.)

Hughes has long backed the right of faculty and students to have such speakers as long as they are balanced with subsequent appearances of persons having opposing viewpoints.

“But that was Bishop Maher, he drew from the hip,” said Pardee, reflecting the view of many that the new bishop, Robert H. Brom, will be less public and confrontational in conveying the church’s viewpoint about academic matters.

About one-third of the 3,700 undergraduates, two-thirds of graduate students and more than half the faculty are not Catholic. There are no religious-based admissions requirements.

The Catholic tradition, as Hughes interprets it, manifests itself in a variety of ways.

“It’s not possible to walk down the street and not know someone,” Stefanie Strategos, a junior from Fallbrook, said, adding that freshmen preceptorials--small interdisciplinary classes only for first-year students--enhance a close-knit feeling. “There’s a real sense of family. . . . You see Dr. Hughes in the deli, he smiles, he says hi, he asks about your courses.”

The offices of Hughes and other top administrators are in Maher Hall, which also serves as a large men’s dormitory. “He’s a brave man, to have his office there,” Strategos joked.

Father Jim O’Leary, on special assignment to USD from Marquette University in Milwaukee, said “the fact it is an enormously friendly campus starts right from the top and filters down.” O’Leary is one of many resident advisers in dormitories, which house more than half of all undergraduates on campus.

For philosophy professor Dennis Rohatyn, the key is in the encouragement of team-teaching, interdisciplinary courses such as his science and technology in society, and in the increasingly international perspective brought to courses.

“In some ways, Art Hughes has been ahead of the faculty on that score,” Rohatyn said. “Art Hughes has built a very strong faculty and has allowed us to experiment, and given us a lot of support for new courses and for increasing our research,” said religious studies professor Gary Macy, who will spend next year on sabbatical at Princeton University.

Along with many other professors, he credits Sister Sally Furay, vice president and provost, with supporting Hughes strongly in efforts to recruit and retain a stronger faculty.

But one thing Hughes resists is raising class size, one way to allow more research time by decreasing the heavy teaching load, which remains a sore point--though not a defining one--with some in the faculty.

“Art says that, with the tuition what it is (about $10,000 a year), the students deserve small classes and the ability to speak closely to professors,” Macy said. All professors counsel small groups of students.

Biology professor Ellis, past chairman of the Academic Senate, said that Hughes and Furay complement each other.

“When I was being recruited, I talked with Sister Furay about the fact that an environmental biology course, for example, might include the issue of birth control, the role of the church in developing countries, etc.,” Ellis said. “She simply said, ‘Just teach, don’t preach’ and that will be fine.

“But make no doubt. She reflected Hughes. He runs this place, even though most things are worked out collaboratively.”

Hughes saluted not only Furay but his other administrators for carrying through his overall policies, particularly because of the time he must spend on fund-raising.

“I suppose I have some attributes that allow me to sell effectively, but this is not like selling a Chevy or Cadillac, the university is too human to peddle . . . people have to know that I am emotionally tied to this place,” Hughes said.

That also requires a balancing act at times to insulate the university from particular views of trustees.

When Hughes was attempting to persuade Ernie Hahn to join the board of trustees in 1982, he invited the developer to lunch along with trustees Pardee and Bishop Maher. “And, while I was going through my spiel on the university and got to the law school, Ernie said, ‘Yes, I am acquainted with your law school, in fact they are suing me,’ ” a reference to a lawsuit by Professor Robert Fellmeth’s Center for Public Interest Law on campus.

The dispute revolved around the disposition of Kit Carson Park in Escondido, next to the North County Fair shopping center that was being planned by Hahn.

Hahn understood the dynamics of academic freedom and came on the board anyway, Hughes said, and later made the major donation to the $11-million Hahn University Center, a “sort of living room” for students, as Hahn described it.

“But there are a lot of people who end up not donating because of this or that professor, but you (in the public) don’t hear about them,” Hughes said.

Hughes is now nurturing trustees on the need for increased campus cultural diversity, an element of his strategic plan for the 1990s.

“It is the necessity of changing a campus culture from being one driven by white Anglo-Saxon values and customs to one more inclusive of people with different values and customs and traditions,” Hughes said. “Another dimension of that diversity is in letting various groups know of the multiplicity of cultural experiences that exist, rather than just the single white Anglo-Saxon, Western European experience.”

The undergraduate student body is almost 80% white, although the freshmen class this past year was 25% non-white. Faculty percentages are similar, but the university scored a major coup recently by recruiting Orlando Espin, one of the nation’s foremost Latino theologians, for the religious studies department.

“Because we are going to bring in more people from different backgrounds, we also need to make them feel more welcome, because they may or may not fit right in with the ways things are,” Hughes said.

“We are setting the broad stage for what to do here to recognize what is happening in our society and create the potential for leadership in that new society beyond the year 2000.”

Arthur! Arthur! (Don’t Ask Why)

Author Hughes’ first name is pronounced Arthur. Why, then, is it spelled Author ?

Hughes has heard this question more than a few times in his life.

The answer: Hughes was named after his father, whose name was intended to be Arthur, but, because of a simple mistake by his grandmother about 103 years ago, was recorded on the birth certificate as Author. The name was handed down, father to son.

But not from the present Author Hughes to any of his three sons. He did not want them to have to answer the same question.