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New AMU President's Priorities: Growth, Quality, Faith


Jim Towey doesn't officially take over the reins of Ave Maria University for four months, but he's already digging in to begin setting the agenda for the next academic year. Saying that one of his main goals is growth, Mr. Towey indicated, however, that there might be some growing pains as well.

Mr. Towey made his first trip to Ave Maria since the Feb. 10 announcement naming him as AMU's next president and CEO, and he plans to be back every week to continue preparing for the job.

towey-healya"I'm just climbing the learning curve," he said, "and I'll probably be climbing it the whole time I'm president."

"Right now, there's a mountain of work in front of me," he said, including meeting with faculty, staff, students and administrators at the university, working on the budget for the coming academic year, and "making sure our admissions numbers can be as good as possible for next year." Right, Mr. Towey (L) and current university President Nick Healy after a morning meeting Thursday.

Increasing enrollment is a key piece of one of his most immediate challenges he says -- "making sure the budget next year is on a path that will reduce deficits and lead us toward the point when we have a balanced budget, because we can't remain indefinitely dependent on Tom," referring to AMU founder Tom Monaghan, who contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to start the university.

Mr. Towey said some significant belt-tightening is on the way for AMU, although he vowed that the quality of the university's academics will not be compromised.

"This next budget will be a very lean budget," he said. "There will be a lot of cuts, but none of the core services of the university will be affected and the quality will not be affected, because that, to me, will be the focus of my presidency."

"It has to do with growth, quality and faith," Mr. Towey said.

His first official function in Ave Maria was a reception for the faculty Wednesday night, and he said he plans to meet with AMU seniors next week and start getting to know the students, which he described as "the best part of the job."

He said that meeting regularly with the faculty was one of the things he'd wished he'd done sooner in his tenure at St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania, where he was president from 2005-2009. "I started having small lunch meetings with faculty at St. Vincent's," he said. "I didn't do it my first year . . . and I think in hindsight that was a mistake. So I told the faculty I'd be starting those lunches this academic year."

Mr. Towey also said he looks forward to meeting other members of the Ave Maria community and introducing them to his family, all of whom will be visiting in late March around the Feast of the Annunciation. His wife has visited Ave Maria, but for his five children, it will be their first visit to their new home and their first look at the Rhodora Donahue Academy, where four of them will attend school in the fall as 11th, 9th, 6th and 3rd graders.

The community of Ave Maria was one of the influential factors in his decision to take the AMU job, Mr. Towey said.

"I started Aging with Dignity, a not-for-profit, and I loved the intergenerational possibilities here because this really is the future of the 21st century. I love the fact that you have so many families, you have retirees interacting with college kids and attending lecture series and being involved in the life of the university," he said.

Also in March, Mr. Towey said, he's planning a face-to-face meeting with Bishop Frank Dewane of the Diocese of Venice. "I'm going to be sitting down with him and finding out what's on his mind and how we can work together. It's very important to have a good working relationship with the local ordinary."

Above all, he said, his main goal is for Ave Maria to grow without compromising its quality or its Catholic identity. "I'm very optimistic about the future of Ave Maria because it's proudly Catholic, it has a first-class faculty, it has a beautiful campus," he said.

"One of our challenges is to communicate the untold story about how Ave Maria has now arrived."

For additional background, see previous Ave Herald story New Leadership for Ave Maria University.

 

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