Schlegel made time for students

Creighton student Maria DeMeuse had a problem, and so, like countless Bluejays over the past decade, she called the Rev. John Schlegel and scheduled a sit-down.

She expected maybe 10 minutes of the university president's time. Instead, they debated whether Creighton had strayed from its Catholic mission and the meaning of Catholic identity.

They discussed the school's class offerings and its faculty.

An hour passed, then 90 minutes. It got so late the president's secretary went home.

Schlegel stayed. He listened.

“It's very easy, being in this atmosphere, to cater to the administrators, to the board,” DeMeuse said Wednesday. “He sees his mission as being here for the students. ... We're definitely going to miss him.”

Schlegel, the longtime Creighton president, announced Wednesday that he planned to retire in July 2011.

The announcement wasn't wholly unexpected. Schlegel, a Jesuit priest, turns 67 next week. He's spent the past decade as Creighton's president, longer than he ever expected.

But the news still jolted Creighton administrators, professors and students, who can't glance around campus without seeing tangible evidence of the university's improvement.

“What did Reagan ask — are you better off now than you were four years ago?” said Neil Norton, oral biology professor and president of Creighton's faculty senate for the past four years. “Well, I'm better off now than when he started.”

Creighton is bigger, both in size and enrollment, since the university inaugurated Schlegel as its 23rd president a decade ago. The college enrolled 7,385 students last fall, a 17 percent increase from Schlegel's first year on campus.

It's more prestigious. U.S. News and World Report has ranked Creighton the best Midwestern university of its kind for seven straight years and counting. Applications to the college have nearly doubled in that time.

And it's prettier, longtime Creighton administrators and professors say. A renovated campus pavilion. Big things like a new science building, a giant new student center, a state-of-the-art soccer stadium. Small things like more trees, plants and flowers.

“Before, this felt like a small campus,” said Barb Braden, an award-winning nursing professor and now the dean of Creighton's University College. “Now it feels like a small town.”

If Creighton is a small town, then Schlegel has long been its mayor.

He pushed the campus eastward, adding 40 acres of land and then building, using money from a $400 million fundraising campaign he spearheaded.

He hobnobbed with politicians and Omaha business leaders, stumping for earmarks for Creighton projects and connecting the college more closely to the city around it.

He lunched weekly with professors and agonized over their pay — on Wednesday, Schlegel labeled it “his greatest disappointment” that he hadn't been able to raise professor salaries more, and he vowed to try to build an endowment specifically for salary increases during his final year as president.

Mostly, students say, Schlegel was around.

He played racquetball against undergraduates and attended college plays, even narrating one.

He held weekly 8 a.m. breakfasts with different students — over coffee and croissants, he would hear their life stories and listen as they brainstormed about ways to make Creighton better.

He lived in Heider Hall, an apartment-style student residence hall. He kept slightly different hours than his fellow dorm dwellers, though.

Jay Moore, a graduate student, used to work the graveyard shift at the Heider Hall front desk.

“He could come by at 5 a.m.,” Moore said. “He'd say, ‘How's the morning going?' It would still be dark outside.”

Schlegel's presidency has weathered its share of controversy.

Soon after Schlegel assumed the presidency, a Creighton student sued the school, alleging that she had been raped during a stay at the college's Dominican Republic institute. That lawsuit, eventually settled out of court, followed years of complaints about the priest who ran the institute.

In 2007, Archbishop Elden Curtiss publicly dissociated the Omaha Archdiocese from Creighton's Center for Marriage and Family after two of the center's instructors wrote a magazine essay arguing that unmarried Catholic couples should have the option to live together and have premarital sex if they planned to marry.

Later that year, Schlegel canceled a planned on-campus speech by author Anne Lamott after some Catholics complained to the archdiocese because Lamott had helped a friend with terminal cancer commit suicide.

Schlegel said Wednesday he's proud that Creighton has maintained a good relationship with the archdiocese. He's also proud that the Creighton community has sometimes challenged the church.

“That tension is always going to be there ... and that tension is healthy,” he said. “Nobody has a lock on the answers to everything. Everything is open to study. ... That's what a university is all about.”

Schlegel, a native of Dubuque, Iowa, and son of a truck driver, has taken a long and quirky route to his retirement from the presidency of one of the country's top private colleges.

He shocked his parents and five brothers and sisters when he abandoned plans to become a lawyer and instead joined the priesthood and the Jesuit order.

He eventually studied at the University of London and Oxford University, where he befriended Benazir Bhutto, a future prime minister of Pakistan, who was assassinated in 2007.

He taught his first class at Creighton University in 1969, joined the political science faculty in 1976 and served as the assistant vice president for academic affairs before leaving in 1982.

Then he returned to Creighton in 2000, a move that surprised many family and friends because Schlegel was already president of the prestigious University of San Francisco.

Schlegel said he isn't yet sure what he will do after leaving Creighton next summer, though he's adamant that he's not retiring.

He might work with refugees, he said. He might take a job outside the country. He'll definitely travel, with South America being the first continent on the list.

Plans to replace Creighton's longtime president are similarly unsettled.

The school's board wants to hire another Jesuit priest to lead Creighton, said Bill Fitzgerald, the board chairman. But Jesuit administrators are getting harder and harder to find, particularly in the Midwest, he said. Four other college presidents are departing Jesuit colleges, making it even more difficult to replace Schlegel.

“More of the same,” Fitzgerald said when asked what he wanted in Schlegel's replacement. “You couldn't have had a better president of a university than Father John.”

World-Herald staff writer Zack Colman contributed to this report.

Contact the writer:

444-1064, matthew.hansen@owh.com

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