At a time of fear and uncertainty in higher education, what good leadership demands may be as simple as being an excellent human being. Meet Father “Call Me Jack” Butler, the new president of Boston College. The Jesuit priest was a prison minister, administrator, counselor, and spiritual director before becoming the institution’s first new president in 30 years. The week of his much-anticipated inauguration, he was remarkably relaxed, and characteristically modest, saying, “A job doesn’t change who you are.” 

Father Jack, as he is known, may well be the college president of our times. He is discerning, relatable, and refreshingly unafraid of the existential crisis higher education appears to be facing at this moment. For over 15 years, he was the Haub Vice President for University Mission and Ministry, a division of Boston College that invites faculty and students to embrace the school’s formative education mission through retreats and reflection. Grounded in Jesuit educational tradition, BC retains an intentional focus on teaching to the whole person with an emphasis on how to live a good life in many dimensions. 

As a Catholic priest on a multi-faith campus, Father Butler is at once unapologetic about his devotion to his religion and welcoming of all forms of spirituality. He acknowledges the realities of encouraging the practice of personal formation within a highly selective research institution. At the same time, he believes that understanding our roles as humans is more important than ever. In this interview with LearningWell, Father Jack and Winston Provost and Dean of Faculties David Quigley talk about why they are doubling down on BC’s mission in a rapidly changing world.

It's been 30 years since BC has had a new president, and here you are. How does it feel?

JB: The most important thing in all of this is continuing to be who you are. You might have more responsibility, but if you have people like this [gestures to colleagues], the responsibility isn't all that different. The one thing I can genuinely say is the love and support and affection that I've received since the naming and the first day on the job has been hard to process. It's been overwhelming. It’s been wonderful. The rest of it, it's just getting up in the morning and doing what I can do to be the best I can be for myself and for others. 

Do you think your becoming president says something about the direction of Boston College and the importance of formative education at this point in time?

JB: I think that formative education is something that people like David and the deans and the faculty at Boston College all believe in. It is who we are. But formative education didn't come out of a vacuum. The Jesuit, Catholic education that's been going on for 500 years has always been formative. It's always been about the liberal arts: helping us learn how to live life and to become integrated people, the idea that an education isn't just about a job; it's about how to maximize your potential and enjoy the gift of creation itself. 

And it's because we want to be known as a Jesuit, Catholic-faith-based, values-laden school that specializes in formative education that they were looking for a Jesuit to be in this role. I think that's probably the default on why it's me, to be honest. It doesn’t hurt that I love human beings, I love the relational aspect of education, and I believe in formative education. 

What do you think, David? What does Father Jack’s presidency say about where BC is right now? 

DQ: If you talk to the board of trustees, there was an absolute focus that having Jesuit leadership has served us well in the past and is really critical at this moment in time. The biggest change over these almost 30 years, and especially over the last 15, is the way in which the language of formation and formative education has taken hold in really powerful ways with faculty, staff, undergraduate and graduate students, friends, alumni, and trustees. There’s a richness in that conversation and the ways in which it's allowed us to think about how we make investments, how we develop new programs, how we think about hiring, how we think about accompanying our students in light of that kind of broader set of values that Father Jack and his colleagues have created in so many ways. 

I don't think there's any place in the country that has done more interesting work than what Father Jack and his colleagues have done [in University Mission and Ministry] for faculty formation, for staff formation, for expanding undergraduate student formation. Here, we have been intentional and creative in thinking about: How do we meet faculty where they are, with a clear sense of who they are in the eyes of younger people, who are coming into universities and are looking for meaning, a sense of community, a sense of a larger purpose? 

You mentioned the importance of faculty in formative education. This is tricky because isn’t there an unwritten rule in higher ed that faculty and administrators sort of mind their own business? Is it a different story here? 

JB: Boston College is a Jesuit, Catholic university, and I'm proud to say that. And I'm a proud Jesuit. But we're not a church. We're not about the faith development of everybody here. The primary purpose of a Jesuit, Catholic university is in fact the education. But because we're Jesuit, Catholic, we have a different reason for doing the education we do, which we welcome the faculty to buy into. What faculty formation really means is getting them to remember why they wanted to be a teacher: the things that got them excited about their particular discipline, the things that gave them purpose and meaning in life, the things that help organize how they negotiate the world. It’s the same things we're trying to do for the students. 

For us, instead of responding out of fear, we say, “Let's step back. Why do we do what we do? Has that changed?”

Faculty are the primary formulators. If we can help them help our students become fully alive—to enjoy the richness in life, to be able to live out of joy but also have the capacity and the adaptability to deal with sadness, frustration, and disappointment or failure—that's what education is really about. We lost our way in higher ed when we made education seemingly only about getting a job

The stakes are a whole lot higher and more important than getting a job. And if you remind faculty that we want our students to be fully alive human beings, to have the capacity to engage life and explore life in all its tremendous magnanimity, very few will find that strange or unappealing. And if you get them to think about why they became faculty, it's usually because they had somebody like a David Quigley in their life who inspired them. So they are not just teaching math or history or psychology or literature. We're getting them to understand who they are, integrating themselves, and getting them excited about that. 

Is the goal for faculty to really see the students in more ways than just a receptable for knowledge in a particular specialty? 

JB: I don't want education to just be a transmission of a subject, of a discipline. We want cognitive development, but we want that to be integrated into their volitional drives, into finding out who they are as they embrace the liberal arts. Like a pinball machine, we want them to bounce off of history and English and psychology and math to find out what they are really interested in. Because some of them come here already hardwired for a career. I think we win if they change their desires because they are doing so based on what they really want to do with their lives. At Boston College, we ask all of our students to consider three questions: What brings you joy? What are you good at? And who does the world need you to be? To us, these three questions are at the heart of formative education. 

DQ: Father Jack was a key ally and driving force when we renewed the undergraduate core curriculum a decade or so ago. One of the key developments there was that many faculty who were most engaged in helping lead the process came to it with a sense that we needed to up our game because the generation of young people who are coming to our classrooms had different needs and different experiences. 

We can talk about all the overdetermined ways in which social media and the various crises of our time are weighing on these young people. But I thought that there was a wonderful openness in that core process to think about, as a Jesuit institution, what kind of a liberal arts core do we need, but also to imagine it involving a lot of creativity about reflection experiences across many of these courses. This is what the retreat work that BC’s Division of Mission and Ministry took on under Father Jack is all about. It is about getting faculty more attuned to what brought us into this work in the first place—that joy of scholarship—which helps our students come alive. 

Let’s talk about the students. David mentioned seeing a different kind of student arriving on campus about a decade ago. That’s when we were just learning the extent of the college student mental health problem and some of the other struggles like loneliness and fatalism. Do you think about that in terms of everything that you've designed here, from your work in ministry through to your leadership now?

JB: Answering your question honestly, I'd say—is that the guiding principle behind everything I'm thinking about? No. Is it a large portion of what I'm thinking about? Absolutely. Jesuits have been famous for being countercultural, which most people think of as social justice. But the countercultural is precisely what you're talking about. And if you have a sense, as I do, that the human organism itself is self-correcting, then you believe that it's going to be fine. It will move out of loneliness. It will seek relationships. It will have a sense of joy. And I don't mean this from a religious sense but rather understanding what it is to be human so that they can live their lives to the fullest. 

Take loneliness for example. Why are people so lonely? In part because they haven't realized they can have a relationship with themselves or they're afraid to have a relationship with themselves. So we need to get them to be quiet—to reflect. You get the organism to function correctly with the cognitive development. You're giving them resources, you're giving them insight, but you're moving from intellectual growth to wisdom. Wisdom is the way to incorporate this into a life. The intellectual growth is just how to do something. So somebody who's fatalistic falls in love. Love has a way of getting you out of fatalism. You start bringing that together, and the organism starts to function better. 

What about the pressure students put on themselves to pursue certain majors, constantly striving towards their goals? David, do you talk about that with the deans or the faculty at all? Because that can lead to some mental health issues, as well.

DQ: BC is certainly not immune to this. Historically, across the 20th century up until the 2008 financial crisis, across higher education, there was a counter-cyclical relationship between the economics major and the business cycle. In bad times, people rushed to the economics major. As the economy improved, people went to philosophy or history or fine arts. Since 2008, and this goes for BC but it goes for just about all elite schools around the US, that relationship has been changed, and the push towards the economics major has just continued. So there is a desire on the part of students, families who are committing to support their students, to find their way into particular majors. 

As Father Jack said, they've got a certain mindset coming in here. I think why it's so important to have such an extensive liberal arts core is that we really believe that the kind of flourishing that we're after for our young people across their lives will be best developed by encountering great works of literature, reading about the greatest approaches to the big theological questions across those areas. Another element—and it's been part of Jesuit Catholic education especially inventively done here at BC since the late '60s—is a real institution-wide commitment to service learning, to getting our students out into the city of Boston, into neighboring communities, and encouraging them to think about their obligation, what they owe their fellow men and women and the communities around them. 

JB: I’ll jump in here. I'm not the historian; David's the historian. But if you really traced it back, before higher education became overly focused on job placement—that's when we started to lose what I think is the true impact and the essence of what education's all about. When your kids were young, they were asking you, "Mom, Dad, why?" Everything was why, why, why. 

But we sent them into an educational system, and too often it took the why out of them. And then it became, “How many pages do I have to write? What courses do I have to take that will lead to a job?” Don’t get me wrong, BC is an elite university, and 96 percent of our graduating seniors have a job, are attending graduate school, or are engaged in a meaningful volunteer experience like the Peace Corp. But what distinguishes us as a university is that we consider everyone here an educator, and we're trying to get our students back into the wonderment of the why.

And the last piece I’ll say is we need to teach them that it is okay to fail. I want them to fail while they're here because that’s a part of what formative education is about. Because if we don't let them fail, they won’t take risks. And so part of formation is how do we get them to take risks, to teach them that failure isn't really failure—it's the beginning of success.

There is a lot about higher education that needs to be addressed, including affordability. What do you worry about most? 

JB: Sure, we worry about access and affordability. Boston College invested $100 million to establish Messina College, a two-year residential program for low-income, first-generation students on our Brookline campus. It allows people who didn't have access or couldn't have access to a school like BC to come here, in many cases, free of charge and transfer into Boston College after two years of study if they maintain a 3.4 cumulative average or better. I would love for BC to try to join universities like Harvard and MIT that offer free undergraduate tuition for families with annual incomes of less than $200,000, but we are not there, yet. We allocate a tremendous amount to need-based undergraduate financial aid, but we have to do more for middle class families. That is something we are all paying attention to.

Do I think that what's going on at the federal level is hurting us? Absolutely. Do I worry about the distrust of institutions in general and whether or not people believe that a college education really is worth it given the price? Absolutely. Do I think that college athletics—something that I love and is big here—do I think it's gone astray and that it is putting a strain on BC and other Division 1 universities? Yes. 

There are lots of challenges out there, but if we're really about formative education, then my line is, “Where there's love, there can be no fear.” For us, instead of responding out of fear, we say, “Let's step back. Why do we do what we do? Has that changed?” We will continue to be honest about who we are and not try to change our core values for the circumstances of the time. 

We're a Jesuit, Catholic university—that's who we are. This is the kind of education we offer, and this is why we do it. This is the time to double down. This is the time to say, “What we do is really important because we're actually trying to address the issues of the world.” It's a very challenging time in one way, to be in higher education. But if you look at it the way that I think people like us look at it, this is the best time to be in education because now the stakes really count. I think we are well positioned to prepare students who can make a difference in the world.

You can reach LearningWell Editor Marjorie Malpiede at mmalpiede@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.