DePaul President Rev. Dennis Holtschneider, C.M. sat down with The DePaulia last week to discuss his sabbatical and return to the university. Here are excerpts from that interview.
The DePaulia: What did you do on your sabbatical?
Fr. Holtschneider: I had 48 graduate students, all of them doing their master’s degree in higher education policy, which is my field. And I co-taught that with the head of the program at Harvard, and so she and I just had a great time. DePaul doesn’t teach my field, so if I want to teach my expertise, I have to do it at other universities.
Harvard has a great program in that field; it’s where I studied myself. And I teach there every summer, but it was nice to go back and have an entire fall just working with the students and working on those issues.
DP: What is you field?
FH: It’s government policy in higher education. So that’s why you see pictures of me down in Washington. I go down to Washington with the major higher education associations and work on what government policy should be for you guys, so that you can get financial aid, so that you can get support services of all different kinds. And I especially do a lot of lobbying down there on Capitol Hill, with senators and representatives asking them to please change policies, especially for students who come from families with need to try and keep those resources up and keep them available because they’re always among the first things in every budget that people are trying to cut.
A lot of times success in a year is just keeping what we’ve already got. But I spend a fair bit of time doing that. But it’s actually nice to think about it and teach it. So I was talking to students about how that all works.
DP: Did you find time to relax? I heard you were writing a book. Did you finish it?
FH: I did. Book is a grand word. It’s a small piece part of a series on boards in universities, and there’s a different book for each committee, and I wrote one of them for the series. So that was done, I sent that out. It’ll be coming out sometime end of spring.
But in addition to that, I worked in healthcare on another board I’m on called Accension. That’s the largest private health system in America. And I am chair of that board and we had to redo that board and governance for the entire company.
And so being away from DePaul gave me some time that I could dedicate to that organization. It’s the largest Catholic health system in America, but it’s actually the largest private health system in America. So I wouldn’t have had that kind of time if I had been spending a lot of my time on DePaul things. That worked out nicely.
And my sister and I headed to Hawaii for a week. We actually took vacation around Thanksgiving. That was a nice little break in the midst of all it.
DP: You mentioned board of trustees a few times. Speaking of that, the DePaul board just extended your contract (through 2019). What are your thoughts on that and what do you hope to accomplish in that extended time span?
FH: I’m thrilled. DePaul is one of the great universities in America. It has such a nice culture. It has such committed people, both faculty, and you talked about how committed the students are, to kind of looking at the world and going ‘how can we take all the resources of the university and try to improve the world around us?’
It’s both fun and it’s really satisfying to work here, to wake up in the morning and say ‘ok, I’m going to work really hard’, but it’s really worth it. I consider myself very fortunate to have been given an opportunity to work here back in 2004. And then to be allowed to stay longer.
The average length of a college president in American is somewhere between five and six years. So I’m very fortunate to have this sort of length of involvement at DePaul.