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Sustaining institutional mission through "pilgrimage".

Article Excerpt
I HAVE SPENT THIRTY-FOUR years at the College of the Holy Cross as a professor and administrator. My current responsibilities include foundation and corporate giving, so I talk and write about the mission and identity of Holy Cross literally every day. I have studied faculty development throughout my tenure, written grants for such programs, and trumpeted the positive outcomes. Further, I am an enthusiastic proponent of Jesuit education (I spent my undergraduate years at another Jesuit institution, the University of Scranton) and have witnessed firsthand how students and faculty can flourish intellectually in a community like ours.

Despite having such strong and established connections with Holy Cross, I never expected to come to a fuller understanding of institutional mission while standing with my colleagues on a mountaintop in northeastern Spain during a pilgrimage. Nor would I have imagined that our time together would lead to a crystallized view of a new academic program for our first-year students. But now I know better. My colleagues and I--all senior administrators at the college--returned from this trip profoundly changed, with new respect for what can emerge from intentional work to sustain institutional mission.

First, a bit of background.

Holy Cross is not alone in having been established by founders with specific objectives and beliefs. Indeed, among the distinguishing characteristics of higher education in the United States is the stunning range of founding belief systems and missions. Many of our nation's colleges and universities were created out of passion to educate women, ministers, African Americans, immigrants, the rural poor; to advance causes, to educate within a particular religious framework, to teach in new ways. Today, at some of these very same institutions--particularly, but not limited to, religiously affiliated colleges like Holy Cross, which was...

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