Five Questions with Rev. Robert Sullivan 

Notre Dame’s efforts to advance its Catholic mission were strengthened last summer when University President Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., named Rev. Robert Sullivan associate vice president for Academic Mission Support.

Father Sullivan is responsible for assisting ND’s colleges, schools, institutes, and centers with their academic programs that advance the University’s Catholic mission and character. He supports these programs in collaboration with one another, and assists them with mission-related initiatives—all in an effort to advance the academic side of ND’s Catholic mission.

Here, Father Sullivan sits down to answer a few questions for ND Today readers:

ND Today: Since your appointment as associate vice president for Academic Mission Support, what are some of the early successes for your recruitment and retention program?

Robert Sullivan: [One early success was] getting it up and running, first of all. Some background may be useful: Academic hiring is not like hiring in the business world, which usually follows a top-down model—a manager chooses a person to fill a slot. In Notre Dame’s colleges, hiring requires negotiation involving departments and their deans, and, ultimately, the provost. There’s no one-size-fits-all model. In the College of Arts and Letters, our biggest college, departments seek to fill specific positions.

Say economics and econometrics wants a microeconomist, for example. The dean reviews the request, consults the provost, and then, according to available resources, allocates “faculty lines”—jobs—perhaps including one in microeconomics. If times are good, more lines can be allocated. Now fewer lines are available. But unlike several other major universities, Notre Dame is blessed to be able to recruit new faculty again this year.

There are two ways of approaching any academic job search. The passive way is sifting. You advertise and wait for people to come to you. The active way is searching. You start working during the summer—maybe even years earlier—to identify strong prospects that a chair should invite to apply. Being invited doesn’t guarantee anything except that your application will be vetted. Recruiting academically strong, Catholic mission-specific applicants, as we do at Notre Dame, is complex and requires careful searching.

So, people submit their applications, which are examined by a search committee, the departmental committee on appointments, and by the chair. Some candidates are invited for interviews at conventions and elsewhere. A few of those interviewees are invited to campus. All of them give scholarly talks, meet with students (grad students and undergrads) and then the department or its committee on promotions lists recommendations, often in order of preference. The dean reviews it and approves (or not), and the provost signs off (or not). If offers are made, negotiations usually follow. If the first person doesn’t accept, an offer may go to the number two choice, or the search may be redone a year later.

All of this may help explain the limits of what we can do. “Office for Academic Mission Support” is a mouthful. What does it mean? We’re still finding out. There’s no model for Notre Dame to adapt, and our office has been at work only since November 2008. We must invent it as we go along. But “support” is our emphasis. We can’t go to a department or school and say, “you must hire in this field.” Much less can we say, “you must hire this person.”

NDT: What approach are you taking to hire more Catholic faculty?

RS: Notre Dame has been at this since the ’70s. Our office’s goal is to give aid and coordination to the effort, as well as to the University’s broader project of enhancing the Catholic intellectual and cultural tradition.

Remember, we’re interested in hiring only top-flight teacher-scholars. We canvas fields and see who’s academically appropriate and available. In some fields, that may be relatively easy, but in others it’s more demanding. Take engineering, for example. In the United States, about 60 percent of all Ph.D.s are granted to foreign students, very few of whom are Catholic. Additionally, most Ph.D. engineers don’t become professors. Our saving grace is that in a given year, Notre Dame doesn’t hire huge numbers of engineers. Fulfilling the University’s commitment to maintain a preponderantly Catholic faculty could require a department in engineering to recruit only one Catholic faculty member every other year.

Getting specific is dangerous because in naming names, you’ll seem to slight folks who are making terrific contributions. I apologize to them in advance.

The success of the new Department of Economics and Econometrics is impressive. Rich Jensen, the chair, is a superb entrepreneur. A couple of years ago, he recruited Bill Evans (now Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Economics) from the University of Maryland. A very serious Catholic, Bill is a prominent scholar and an energetic recruiter.

In August 2009 at the senior level, economics was joined by Robert Flood, formerly the senior economist at the World Bank, and a distinguished scholar, who specializes in bubbles, crises, and speculative attacks.

Another mission hire this year was at the junior level: Eric Sims was the top-ranked Ph.D. in Ann Arbor in economics. It probably did us no harm that Eric is married to a Domer—a physician now on staff at Memorial Hospital. In the case of Professor Evans, as with most of our mission hires, there was no personal Notre Dame tie. For many of them, the prospect of building a preeminent research university that’s also seriously Catholic, is profoundly appealing. For colleagues like Evans, Sims, and Flood, that means the chance to share in building a major program in econometrics.

Because of the size of the College of Arts and Letters, most of our successes occur there, but other academic units are actively and successfully pursuing mission hires. The Law School has recruited a distinguished scholar named Stephen Smith. He was the John V. Ray Research Professor of Law at the University of Virginia. He is Catholic and African American. Virginia is a top-10 law school. Professor Smith has been on the Law School’s radar screen for several years, and it hosted him as a visiting professor, along with his family, during the fall semester last year.

I can boast a little about an assistant professor whom the Law School added this year. Dan Kelly ’02 was a summa cum laude in economics. He took a couple of courses with me and seemed born to become a professor. From Notre Dame, he went to Harvard Law School where he graduated with honors. Then he clerked for a federal circuit judge, worked on Wall Street, and had visiting fellowships—first at the Yale Law School and, last year, at the Harvard Law School.

NDT: What approach is the University taking to hire more Catholics?

RS: We’re becoming even more proactive, doing research, and supporting the efforts of particular hiring units. Two of the folks with whom I work are exploring all the lines authorized in the College of Arts and Letters for the coming year. They’re culling prospects from the database, and identifying new prospects from public sources. It’s time consuming, and not always productive. I started experimenting with the “how to” of finding prospects in June 2005, at the request of Mark Roche, then dean of the College of Arts and Letters. A couple of recent alumni spent the summer searching the Web. They quickly discovered that you rarely discover professors’ religious affiliations there. Absent personal knowledge, it’s usually necessary to look for correlations and try to calculate probabilities.

Personal knowledge is the best means of identifying prospects. Regardless of religion, many professors are committed to the hiring project because they are committed to Notre Dame. Special tribute belongs to Scott Mainwaring, the Eugene Conley Professor of Political Science and director of the Kellogg Institute, who has been teaching here since 1983. At lunch recently, I asked, “what’s your secret?” He said, “it’s no mystery. I go somewhere to give a paper and talk with people. Often they want to chat about Notre Dame, and frequently self-identify as Catholics.” A couple of months ago, Scott came back from Cornell with two promising names for our database.

This year, we’re launching a more targeted approach. About 25 Ph.D. programs produce the great majority of Notre Dame’s faculty. Our “feeders” vary from field to field. If you’re hiring in English, you might not automatically think of Purdue, but you would if you’re looking for engineers. We’re going to undertake site visits and establish working relationships with all the Catholic chaplaincies and parishes serving those 25 institutions. We want them to know who Notre Dame is and what we’re doing.

One tactic stems from a smart idea of Carolyn Woo, dean of the Mendoza College of Business. Working through the chaplaincies and parishes, we’ll invite doctoral students at the advanced level to tell us who they are and what their fields are. They send us an e-mail with their name, academic discipline and subdiscipline, and dissertation title. This guarantees nothing, but it’s totally voluntary and almost always accurate. We’ll incentivize participation through a donation of, say, $10 in their name to Catholic Relief Services or a similar charity. A year from now, I expect that our database will have grown substantially from the present 1,225 active records. Should any ND Today readers wish to identify themselves or another qualified potential Catholic mission recruit, please let us know.

I can’t stress enough the importance of hiring units taking ownership of the project, of seeing its value, both for the University generally, and for themselves, so that they will participate in searching for academically superior mission candidates.

The classics department is a case in point. Last year, Liz Mazurek, the chair, had a two-year visiting appointment. She identified David Hernandez, who was finishing a Ph.D. in classical archaeology at the University of Cincinnati, as a brilliant prospect and possibly a mission hire. As an undergraduate at Berkley, David studied quantum physics, but also acquired good Latin and Greek. For several years, he has managed the excavation of a city in Albania that existed from antiquity through the Middle Ages. He speaks Albanian and is a charismatic guy. Professor Mazurek told me and others, “we should give him a tenure-track appointment.” I read Hernandez’s letters of recommendation from the directors of the American Academy at Athens, Penn’s University Museum, and so on. Colleagues agreed that they were credible and enviable. Prof. Mazurek approached John McGreevy, dean of the College of Arts and Letters, who found the money for a tenure-track appointment. This fall, David will be teaching undergraduates intermediate Latin and ancient Roman history.

Building ownership within hiring units will involve, in some cases, departments moving from sifting to searching, for the ablest and most diversified—as well as mission-specific—professors. Recruiting Catholic faculty can strengthen the diversity of Notre Dame’s faculty. This year, we will be blessed not only with the hiring of a talented young Latino classical archaeologist and a African-American who’s a prominent legal scholar, but also by the hiring of Margot Fassler (formerly the Tangeman Professor of Music History at Yale and, for 10 years, director of its Institute of Sacred Music) as the Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy in the theology department. We’re doubly blessed: Professor Fassler will be joined by her husband, Peter Jeffery (formerly the Scheide Professor of Music History at Princeton University) as the Michael P. Grace Professor of Medieval Studies in the music department.

NDT: How are you helping to enhance the Catholic intellectual tradition?

RS: Here, our major task has been trying to create a kind of “inventory” to get a handle on exactly what we’re doing. Notre Dame does a terrific amount, but very often, our left hand doesn’t know what our right hand is up to. There can be overlap, duplication, and lack of publicity. But there are also successful collaborations.

This summer, the Cushwa Center co-sponsored with the American Bible Society (ABS) a conference called “Camino a Emáus” (“The Word of God and Latino Catholics.”) Cardinal George came from Chicago to open it, and Cardinal McCarrick, the emeritus archbishop of Washington, also participated. ND’s Snite Museum, in cooperation with the American Bible Society, mounted an impressive exhibit of translations of the Bible into English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Native American languages. A few years ago, I had a pipedream about such an exhibit. All credit to Cushwa, the Snite, and the ABS, for joining forces to make the exhibit a reality.

Notre Dame needs to know what its units are accomplishing, and to encourage them to undertake new initiatives. It’s not telling them what to do, but noticing, congratulating, and encouraging their efforts.

NDT: Why is this important?

RS: The University supports academic activities that strengthen Catholicism culturally and intellectually. As a result, distinguished, seriously religious professors who are not necessarily Catholics join ND. They’re here because they want to participate in creating a world-class, seriously religious research university. One example is Christian Smith, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Sociology, and director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, who joined ND from Chapel Hill.

It is humbling that there are also excellent non-religious colleagues who are working to make our project succeed. I’m excited that the English department has recruited the literary scholar Terry Eagleton (sometime Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford University) as a distinguished visitor to lead an intensive graduate seminar during each of the next five fall semesters. In his new book Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, Professor Eagleton numbers himself among the “unlikely” people “suddenly talking about God.” A reviewer in the New York Times noted that Professor Eagleton sometimes sounded “angry”: “I think, at having to expend so much mental and emotional energy refuting the shallow arguments of school-yard atheists like [Christopher] Hitchens and [Richard] Dawkins. I know just how he feels.”

Very big stakes are involved. Before 1940, a consensus existed that secularization was the way to the future for American higher education. You want to modernize the world? Secularize it. Mercifully, that prophecy has failed. You may not like every form of religion—the Islamic Republic of Iran is rather disinviting—but religion isn’t going to disappear. The question is, how do we reintegrate religion into the academy?

A couple of years ago, there was an attempt at Harvard to introduce into the undergraduate curriculum, a vanilla required course on faith and reason. It was voted down by the faculty on the principle, “it doesn’t belong here.” In contrast, at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, long a proudly secular place, a group of professors created a Christian Studies cluster. It’s not theology or religious studies, rather, they teach courses in their own disciplines with a Christian intellectual resonance.

What makes Notre Dame important for American higher education is that we have the resources—human and financial—to try to reintegrate religion into the academy in a uniquely systematic and sophisticated way. We may not be able to pull this off, but if we succeed, it would strengthen the academy and the Church.

NDT: What’s the role of the Catholic University in the world today?

RS: It’s evolving. Lots of places call themselves universities because they offer master’s degrees. They do admirable work, but aren’t among the few schools that offer enough doctoral programs to qualify as the highest category universities. Why does that cohort matter? Because it sets the tone for the rest of higher education, both directly and indirectly.

Directly, these places train the people who teach in most reputable four-year colleges.

Indirectly, consider how many institutions that used to be “colleges” now call themselves “universities.” To have a university that is vigorously Catholic and also is among the preeminent research universities would mean that there is finally a Catholic voice at that table. Absent such a university, the Church remains silent there, and generally weaker.

NDT: What aspects of Notre Dame attract outstanding Catholic academics to the University?

RS: In some cases, it’s loyalty to the University. My colleague Patrick Griffin ’86, the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History, is an alumnus. He was a full professor at Virginia and wanted to come home. Along with others, he applied and competed for the position, and got it.

More often, it’s loyalty to the Church. Witness for example, Professor Smith in the Law School and Professor Evans in economics. For a lot of newer colleagues, it’s the challenge of our experiment: “can we really do this?” Think of Professor Smith in sociology.

NDT: What do you like best about your position?

RS: Discovering interesting people who may be good fits for Notre Dame. That’s how I backed into this work at the old Erasmus Institute. We sponsored a number of long-term visiting fellows and other programs. There are, if memory serves, now on the faculty seven people who passed through one or another of those enterprises. They range from Sabine McCormack, the Hesburgh Professor of the Humanities, a world-class scholar, to the Italian-born Maurizio Albahari, a promising assistant professor of anthropology.

There are many great and potentially great Catholic-mission supportive academics out there who would like to know more about us. Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn’t. When you can identify such folks, and in some small way help with matchmaking, that’s satisfying work.