Focus is on immigration reform

A group of roughly 100 protestors gathered in downtown St. Louis on Monday morning demanding that the House of Representatives vote on a comprehensive immigration reform bill. The demonstration was part of a national day of action promoting the reform bill passed by Senate earlier this year.

If signed in to law, the bill would enact a full overhaul of American immigration policy, dedicating billions of dollars to increased border security and establishing an amnesty policy among other initiatives.

The 100 block of south 10th street was barricaded at both ends by police vehicles as the rally took place in front of the Eagleton U.S. Courthouse.

Six protestors, each with a sign that read “We demand a vote! Immigration reform now!” pinned to their backs, sat in the street and were arrested and charged with failure to comply after multiple speakers shared their experiences with immigration.

Juan Montaña, the leading speaker at the demonstration, made the crowd’s message clear.

“We want a vote, we want it now,” Montaña said, pressuring Rep. Ann Wagner R-Missouri and Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer R-Missouri to bring the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act, or Senate bill S. 744, to a vote in the House.

Speakers at the demonstration focused primarily on the adverse effects the current immigration policy has had on their families and the families of others, urging Congress to help immigrants find a better life in the U.S.

“This is a real thing. There are people whose families have been separated… [and] destroyed by the immigration system,” Montaña said. “These are people that come here to work, to grow and to give back to the community.”

Norma Andrade, a Mexican immigrant, said that she lived in the U.S. for 19 years as an undocumented immigrant. She said she had to run away from her husband rather than turn to the law before she was legal citizen because police would ask her for documentation when she reported domestic violence issues.

The immigration bill the group rallied for was authored by a group of bi-partisan U.S. Senators and passed Senate by a vote of 68-32 in late June.

It has since lain dormant, as the other half of Congress has been reluctant to take up the bill, attempting instead to draft its own iteration of immigration reform. However House Representatives have seen little success in establishing a unified piece of legislation.

As it stands, S. 744 would create a new amnesty program for undocumented immigrants living in the States in addition to providing $46.3 billion fund to implement new border security measures including more personnel, upgraded fencing and technology along the border and implementation and expansion of the E-Verify system, an electronic system used by employers to verify the legal residency of their employees. Further, all employers would have to utilize the E-Verify system within five years of the bill’s passage.

Luetkemeyer has maintained an opposition to any policy that provides amnesty to undocumented persons currently residing in the States, arguing that amnesty is unfair to those who have gone through the process or are in the process of becoming legal immigrants.

“Blaine believes the House needs to take a step by step approach to immigration… and the Senate bill doesn’t do that,” a spokesperson for Luetkemeyer said. “He believes immigration reform is necessary… [but] he does not and will not support [an amnesty policy].”

Ann Wagner’s office was not available to comment at the time of publication.

Saint Louis University released an official presidential profile on Oct. 29. The presidential search process is now in it’s second phase as the search committee and AGB Search, the search firm hired to assist in the process, will begin to recruit a pool of candidates over the next two to three months.

The presidential profile is intended to define what qualities the best possible presidential candidate will have in addition to communicating the unique and essential parts of SLU. Members of the search committee and Jamie Ferrare, the managing principle of AGB Search, spent most of October collecting data and meeting with various university groups to get a holistic view of what the university desires in its next president. The information gathered in those meetings formed the backbone of the final profile.

The profile maintains a strong focus on the Jesuit character of the university, in addition to collaboration amongst the various university groups and the financial wellbeing of the university.

Amongst the presidential attributes listed in the document are “a commitment to support the ideals of the Catholic, Jesuit mission… a deep understanding and appreciation for the role of faculty and what goes into excellent teaching, learning, and scholarship,” and “a focus on students with a genuine enjoyment in interacting with them and in participating in the life of the campus community.” Additionally, the profile calls for a person with a history of “significant and successful senior leadership experience in higher education.”

Steve Harris, the president of the SLU chapter of the American Association of University Professors, was appreciative of the transparency and communication in the search process thus far.

“What [the faculty expects] is the committee to take advantage of the wisdom that we collectively, the faculty, can offer… and that is precisely what is happening,” Harris said.

However, he expressed concern that the research mission of the university wasn’t given enough attention.

“We are a research university,” he said. “We should highlight that! That should be in the first sentence.”

Harris also thought the profile ought to mention shared governance and academic freedom, as well as emphasize a candidate with experience as an academic.

“Among faculty, we want… someone who knows first hand what it is to do research and what that means for a professor to be a person who’s motivated by research,” he said. “Also, I think it’s a bit odd that there’s no mention in there about a dedication to shared governance, academic freedom, that’s what brought all this to pass in the first place.”

Interim President Bill Kauffman expressed appreciation for the work of the Search Committee and the participation of the members of the university community in the process.

“It is my judgment that the views expressed during [the last month] were heard and reflected in the position profile,” Kauffman said.

Allison Walters, a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences, stated that the process had been a positive experience for her thus far, and expressed hopes that communication between groups would continue throughout the rest of the search.

Colin Pajda, a first-year graduate student, was very optimistic about the profile’s message.

“If the committee sticks to this document, if they find someone who fits each of [the profile’s] attributes, we will have a president that every member of the SLU community can look to for leadership and guidance,” Pajda said.

The full profile is available on SLU’s website.

The second phase of the process is expected to last until Dec. 20, 2013, which is the deadline for applications. AGB Search, in conjunction with the Search Committee, will actively recruit and converse with prospective candidates with the goal of narrowing the pool to 10 to 12 strong candidates. The third phase is expected to begin in January at which point the committee will attempt to narrowthe pool to two or three final candidates, at which point the presidential hopefuls will be publicly announced.

Saint Louis University has a sinister past: 54 years ago, the parents of a 15 year old boy came to SLU’s campus seeking an exorcism. They claimed their son had been possessed.  Thomas B. Allen, the author of “Possessed: The True Story of an Exorcism”, spoke to a overflowing audience on the second floor of Pius Library concerning what transpired on campus all those years ago. Allen made sure to establish that evidence of the teenager’s actual, factual possession is unattainable. Yet what follows is constructed from witness accounts of the 1949 possession.

The boy, whom Allen called ‘Robbie’ to maintain his anonymity, had an Aunt Harriet who introduced him to a Ouija board. She thought it was a conduit to speak to the dead. On a night soon after eerie sounds began to ring through the house, the walls shook and sounds of scratching came from inside them. Soon Robbie was acting strangely, and the parents made an association between Robbie’s behavior and Aunt Harriet’s death.

They sent him to Reverend Luther Miles Schultz, a psychiatrist and Jesuit priest, who took the boy in to his home for a time. Unexplainably, supernatural things began and Robbie’s bed shook uncontrollably. Schultz created a makeshift bed for the boy on the floor out of a comforter, but the comforter slid underneath the bed and Robbie, unconscious, repeatedly bashed his head against the bedsprings.

They went to priests at Georgetown University for help, but Robbie only became more violent. Robbie and his parents then went to St. Louis where they had family and hoped to find a solution. They came into contact with Father Bowdern, Father Halloran and Father Bishop, whom would become the priests that would attempt an exorcism.

Robbie’s behavior only escalated during the exorcism, and he entered a trance every night. Scratches appeared on his body, the most distinct of which were the words ‘hell’ on his chest and the image of the devil on his leg. He reacted violently to prayers, nearly always with his eyes closed, but when they opened the boy seemed to be in between humanity and some other state.

Little progress was made over the following months.The parents eventually returned to Maryland with Bowdern in tow, still looking for a solution. The night before Easter, the priest tried to get the boy to go to mass. Suddenly, a voice came out of Robbie claiming it was Satan and that it would never leave because Robbie would never speak a certain word. Then the voice changed, and Robbie uttered, “Dominus.” The voice was Michael, Robbie later claimed, who appeared to him in his mind with flowing hair and a flaming sword and destroyed the demon with a word. “Dominus.”

An examiner later concluded that the boy never underwent a diabolical possession, and instead offered up a paranormal theory. Halloran never made up his mind about what really occurred.

“I simply don’t know,” he said.

A new bike-share program called Billikens on Bikes (BOB) was approved in a vote by Saint Louis University’s Student Government Association in their Oct. 2 meeting. The initiative is expected to place 10 bikes outside of Busch Student Center that students will be free to use throughout any given day.

Under the proposed rules, the bikes will be available starting at 8:00 a.m. every morning until an hour before the BSC closes. Before participating in the program, interested students will have to sign a liability form. Checking a bike out is as simple as giving a school I.D. to one of the desk workers in the Student Center. A helmet will be provided to each student that checks out a bike and the helmets are to be cleaned and disinfected between check-outs.

Billikens on Bikes is expected to begin in the spring once contracts and payments are finalized. Ann Kneztic, the student planning the initiative and SGA’s vice president of academic affairs, intends to purchase bicycles, locks and helmets from Big Shark Bike Company. Big Shark is a St. Louis-based organization that has helped other groups start bike-shares in the past.

Use of the bikes will be granted on a first-come-first-serve basis. The $7,818 initiative is being funded by Wellness Fee dollars, a pool of money generated by a semesterly ‘Wellness’ charge of $90 for every student. Wellness Fee funds are governed by SGA’s Wellness Committee and allotted to students or groups that request support for initiatives that focus on health in a broad sense: physical, mental and spiritual health initiatives all fall under the purview of Wellness funding.

The amount allotted for Billikens on Bikes includes funding for bikes, helmets, bicycle racks to house the program’s bikes exclusively, extra money for repairs to bikes should they be necessary and cleaning supplies for the helmets. The proposed style of bike is the electra-townie, and Kneztic plans to purchase five men’s and five women’s bikes.

According to Kneztic, plans to expand the program depend on how students respond to its initial launch, though she had positive expectations for future growth.

“I have a feeling from getting student interest… [that] even after a semester there is going to be need for expansion,” she said.

Multiple senators expressed concerns that students might game the system by taking a bike every morning and keeping it through the day, denying equal access to others. Kneztic acknowledged the concern and presented the possible solution of placing a time limit on each rental, though she qualified the option by stating that it would be hard to know how to best solve certain issues until BOB was actually in operation.

She expressed hope that the administration might pick up the initiative if it had a large amount of success. When asked about how bike-share programs at other schools operate, Kneztic pointed to University of Loyola-Chicago as an example.

“The way they started it was through the administration,” Kneztic said. “[It’s] a $25 fee to get the bikes, it’s kind of an insurance fee, and if you return the bike with it being perfectly fine within the semester they get that $25 back.” She said that she was hesitant to have SLU students pay for the program directly as it might hamper its initial success.

Kneztic mentioned a possible launch day for BOB to drum up student interest and garner extra exposure, although an opening date won’t be available until the start-up process comes closer to completion.

Trustee C.S. Huh receives key to the city

Saint Louis University’s Center for Global Citizenship (CGC) was dedicated and blessed on Friday, Sept. 27. President Emeritus Lawrence Biondi, S.J., and Mayor Francis Slay spoke at the event, amongst others.

The renovation of what was formerly West Pine Gymnaisum and most recently the Bauman-Eberhardt Center cost $8.8 million. The new center, built with the intention of providing an environment for the various national and cultural groups of SLU to come together, features the 1,000-seat C.S. Huh Auditorium, a new cafe and lounge and study space. It also houses the Cross Cultural Center, which used to exist in the Busch Student Center, and the offices of ethnicity-based student group.

Kent Porterfield, SLU’s Vice President of Student Development and emcee for the event, praised the CGC for giving SLU a new level of international recognition.

“[The CGC] marks SLU’s place on the global stage,” Porterfield said, also noting that SLU hosts roughly 1,000 international students annually.

Ellen Harshman, the Vice President of Academic Affairs, stated that the CGC will provide new opportunities for cross-cultural education and involvement, both locally and around the world.

“Saint Louis University is committed to bringing the world the next top scholars and bringing scholars to the rest of the world,” she said. “It’s the work that takes place inside these walls…that will enhance the educational experience of our students and make them more culturally aware of the world around them.”

Garvaundo Hamilton, the Student Government Association’s Vice President for International Affairs and Jamaica native, thanked SLU for building the CGC, stating that it made a strong statement about the university’s dedication to making international students feel at home.

“This building serves as a reminder for our achievements and a challenge for us to grow,” Hamilton said. “Saint Louis University will never be Jamaica, but because of the efforts of all these people, Saint Louis University can be my home.”

Interim President Bill Kauffman thanked AT&T Inc. for their $1 million contribution to academic, research and service programs that will be held in the center. The building’s lounge space has been named the AT&T Student Commons in honor of the contribution. He also thanked John Sondag, the president of the corporation’s Missouri branch, for his work on the project.

St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay also spoke at the event, thanking SLU for its work in building an international community and attracting talent to the Saint Louis University.

“I’m very proud of this institution [and] I’m very proud to be an alumnus,” Slay said.

Slay gave C.S. Huh, a member of SLU’s Board of Trustees and the chairman of South Korean conglomerate GS Group, a key to the city in recognition of his contributions to St. Louis’ economy and the construction of the CGC. The C.S. Huh Auditorium was named in honor of his donations to the CGC renovation project.

Biondi was the final speaker at the event, recognizing Chair of International Business Seung Kim for his work in enhancing the university’s international influence.

He also claimed that the CGC was the SLU’s flagship structure.

“This center represents our diverse and international group… It’s our flagship building, denoting SLU as an international community,” Biondi said. He closed the dedication by blessing the building.

Jamie Ferrare, Senior Vice President of the Association of Governening Boards and Principal of AGB Search, appeared in front of Saint Louis University’s Student Government Assocation Wednesday night to gather student opinion on what sort of president will most benefit the university in th ecoming years. AGB Search is the search firm that SLU’s Board of Trustee’s contracted to help the Presidential Search Committee (PSC) in selecting the next university head. The PSC, comprised of faculty, administrators and students, has been tasked with finding the most qualified president for SLU.

Ferrare began his time by explaining the three phases of the presidential search process.

He stated that the university is currently in the pre-search phase, during which AGB will gather the opinions of  various SLU groups concerning what the University wants in its next president. To that end, two open fora will be held on Oct. 14, with one meeting held in the morning and another in the afternoon. The locations of the meetings have yet to be announced.

Once they have finished gathering data, AGB will put together a position description for their recruitment efforts. They will then begin to recruit presidential candidates across the country. Ferrare stated that they expect 40 or 50 candidates during the recruitment phase, which the Presidential Search Committee will narrow to 10 to 12 potential candidates. The Committee will hold extensive interviews with each of those candidates.

“The candidate will also have an opportunity to interview the committee,” Ferrare said. “They’re going to want to know this is the right job for them.” Ferrare expects that portion of the interview process to happen in mid-January with the goal of having two or three candidates to announce publicly to the campus by early spring.

After his presentation, Ferrare opened the floor to the Senate Chambers, allowing those in attendance to ask questions and asking them what values they thought would be important when choosing a new president. In response to a senator’s question about whether preference would be given to Jesuits, Ferrare said that the general opinion he had heard thus far was a preference for the best leader possible, though special thought would have to be given to the Jesuit mission of SLU.

“I think everyone agrees that the identity of this Jesuit mission here is critical, and whoever is president has to buy into that, support it and grow it,” he said.

Many senators expressed a desire for an open and communicative president. There were also multiple calls for careful attention to developing a diverse pool of candidates, both in terms of the campuses the search pulls from and the candidates themselves.

“I would hope that you all would look for a candidate that comes from a diverse university, and by diverse I don’t just mean racially but socioeconomically and a lot of different majors,” Black Student Alliance Senator Gold Gladney said.

Ferrare said that the Board had tasked him to develop the most diverse candidate pool possible. Ferrare called attention to the fact that student involvement in a presidential search is not always part of the process. In terms of how to appeal to potential presidents, he said consistent involvement was key.

“Stay tuned, stay involved,” Ferrare said. “Keep your president informed as to what you think is important.”

DSC works to help those with disabilities

The Disability Services Club (DSC) started to take form in the spring of 2011, when Morgan Elliott, the club’s founder and president, realized that SLU lacked a safety net for students with temporary physical injuries.

“It kind of happened due to my own injuries and the injuries… of others,” Elliott said.

She came to SLU with a broken ankle and found herself in need of help navigating campus. Her friends were kind enough to help her get to most of her classes, but without that help she would have a more challenging first semseter. When her friend Kate Sulkowski experienced similar troubles after dislocating her knee, Elliott decided that a change was in order.

Elliott, Sulkowski, the club treasurer, Vice-president Lizzie Puzniak and Sonam Vyas, the group secretary founded the group in the spring of 2012. It started out as a volunteer organization primarily concerned with temporary injuries.

People who suffered an injury that required them to use crutches or a wheel chair could ask the DSC for help. Members of the club would then be assigned to help a student across campus by carrying their books or pushing a wheel chair – anything to help ease the process of travelling across campus in a comfortable and timely fashion.

Margaret Hennessey, a junior at SLU said. Hennessey was coming back to school in January on crutches and she was looking for help getting around campus during the winter. Her mother called the school looking for assistance and they were directed to Elliott.

“My experience with DSC was better than I could have ever imagined,” Hennessey said. “At first, I thought it would just be an awkward walk to class with someone I didn’t know. Everyone was so friendly, though, and it was never awkward.”

The members of DSC did as much for Hennessey’s physical difficulties as they did for her peace of mind.

“No one who walked with me ever rushed me or was annoyed that I was moving slower than them,” she said.

Inspired by the compassion the members of DSC showed her, Hennessey joined the club this year to give back to those that might share her experience.

In the spring of 2012 DSC became a fully chartered organization, and since then have been able to acquire funding for to hold a host of events on campus designed to educate the SLU community about people with disabilities and to help those in need.

This year the group joined the Student Success Center in hosting “Allies for Inclusion: The Ability Exhibit,” an interactive display designed to increase awareness about people with disabilities and provide historical information about the disabilities movement.

The Exhibit includes an ‘Ability IQ’ quiz that evaluates one’s knowledge about disabilities in law, communication and pop culture as well as a ‘Space Rope’ which is meant to emulate the communication distances of those who are blind or have low vision.

The Ability Exhibit was born from an idea put forth by then-graduate student Anne Marie Carroll as a project in Director of the Higher Education Administration program Karen Myers’ class. Carroll and Myers have since developed the exhibit into a travelling display, and high demand has generated the possibility of creating a second exhibit.

DSC will also hold the Friday Fast to Feed on Oct. 11, an event dedicated to raising money for the SLU chapter of the Feed My Starving Children (FMSC) charity program. The Fast to Feed asks people to first consider the average price of a meal compared with the $0.22 cost to provide a meal to a child in need somewhere across the globe, and then to experience missing a meal while giving what they would have spent on food as a donation.

Donations collected from the Fast will fund the FMSC event, held as part of Make a Difference Day. The club is the first SLU group to host the event and their goal is to package 100,000 meals in six hours, all of which will be sent to children in need.

While an emphasis on feeding the starving may not seem to fall under the umbrella of disabilities services at first, DSC is working to change that.

“We are trying to expand the definition of disability to nutritional and financial [disabilities],” Puzniak said. “We also look at awareness on campus.”

In addition to expanding definitions, the group hopes to expand the purview of the club in more concrete ways.

DSC is working to add a learning disabilities component to their organization, offering to help students by taking notes. Additionally the group hopes to gain access to club carts so students in crutches or a wheelchair have a way to get to class on time with less hassle.

Counted amongst DSC’s other successes are the renovated sidewalks on Grand leading from Reinert Hall to the rest of Frost Campus. They went to SGA to request the walkway be fixed. After the request moved through administration through to the city, construction began.

“Before you may remember they were really, really tiny and uneven and kind of fell of a cliff,” Elliott said. “Having those sidewalks change was we think one of the best things that could happen.”

The Saint Louis University Philosophy Club hosted Douglas Hofstadter, the Pulitzer-prize winning author and renowned academic on Sept. 20. He started his talk on being a ‘strange loop’ by commenting on how bacteria perceives.

“[Bacteria] sorts the world in to two things, directions I want to go and directions I dont,” Hofstadter said.

Building up from the most basic level of perception, a binary form, he considered the perception of a mosquito, stating that they have certain likes in that there are places they land to get nourishment, and they are more likely to bite some people than others.

He moved on to the perception of his dog.

“I don’t think my dog… is thinking about solutions to equations of general relativity,” Hofstadter said, jokingly. However, he said dogs can form a vocabulary, which is an important part of higher intelligence. From there he embarked on the core of his discussion by considering how what one perceives the most affects what has the deepest vocabulary, using as an analogy the false but common saying about Eskimos having 50 words for snow.

“We have more categories for what we experience most,” he said. He then contended that what we as humans perceive the most is ourselves.

As an example he talked about how people with severe mental disorders like her sister are often instantly recognizable in a photograph.

“[Abnormal people] seem to have no awareness of what they look like nor any interest,” he said. “They have no interest in internalizing styles.” He posited that human’s are naturally inclined to notice other people’s mannerisms, and that this was in many ways unique to the species and important for our sense of ‘I’.

He gave the example of a moment he remembered from first grade.

At show and tell he showed his ability to mimic his friends signature smile. For Hofstadter, the ability to compare oneself to another and to alter ones image or thoughts accordingly is a necessary part of the concept of self-perception.

“Perception is deciding what box something goes in by using analogy to prior experience or what is programmed into us by evolution,” Hofstadter said. In this respect humans sort their experience of themselves into certain bins, he argued. As we continue to gather information about ourselves through our experiences, our self-perception develops weight and depth, which he called an “emergent effect.”

“The perception we build up of ourselves has to do with certain properties,” Hofstadter said. “[Our] perception of who we are becomes a very real thing.”

However, he posited that who we are wasn’t entirely within our control.

“[I’ve] never been comfortable with the term ‘free will,’” he said. “ I’m comfortable with will… To call it free is a massive delusion.”

He stated that while we like to attribute causality to our will, it is a series of physical and chemical interactions that drives what happens in the physical world.

“Real causality happens at the microscopic level,” he said.

Here he reached the crux of his term “strange loop.” For Hofstadter, while we perceive the world around us in addition to our own sense of hunger and emotion, we don’t have knowledge of how the neurons in our brain are firing or what functions are occurring in our kidneys.

“The nominal ignorance [the self] has about itself… that’s the strange part,” he said.

DSC founder talks community, engineering, lacrosse

Morgan Elliott came up with the idea for Disability Services Club (DSC) because of an unfortunate series of injuries during her first year at SLU.

“Freshman year I came to campus with a broken ankle and was on crutches and had a really hard time getting around from class to class,” Elliott said. “I lived in Fusz and all of my classes were in the lecture halls or Ritter, the opposite side of campus. I was extremely lucky because I have a great group of friends.”

After breaking her ankle again and hearing from other students with similar issues, Elliott thought of a way that she could help people suffering injuries like hers that made it hard to get to class on time.

“I was thinking if I didn’t have that system I might have been stuck, and in a lot worse straits, especially with how much time it takes to get across campus,” Elliott said. “I decided something needed to be done.”

That something was the DSC. After getting her friends Kate Sulkowski and Lizzie Puzniak on board, she went to the Student Government Association to get the new club approved. A year later she was the president of the  newly-chartered Disability Services Club.

Elliott hopes to expand her work of helping those in need by working in the industry as a biomedical engineer (BME).

“I want to… design either surgical tools or prostheses,” she said. “I really like engineering; I like math, but I also like how that applies to the bod.”

Her decision to go into biomedical engineering followed a moment of clarity when she was on vacation with her parents.

“My parents are… civil engineers. And after 18 years… of following my parents on all of my family vacations and looking at all of these old houses and… buildings, I decided I hate buildings,” she said, laughing. “I will not design a building.”

So she decided to look for a line of work that would combine her appreciation for the discipline of engineering and her interest in becoming a doctor. An interest in biomedical engineering followed naturally for her.

Part of her choice to attend SLU was the city feel of St. Louis. Elliott was born in Chayenne, Wyoming and eventually moved to Chattanooga, Tennesse.

“It’s a beautiful city,” she said of Chattanooga. “Very scenic, a lot of outdoors things, but also a lot of city things… Chattanooga’s not tiny, but it’s not St. Louis.”

Elliott counts lacrosse as one of her favorite activities,  which has been the cause of multiple injuries for her.

“I actually got my thumb shattered senior year [of high school] during our rivalry game senior night. Played half a game with a shattered thumb,” she said. “Not my smartest move.”

Elliott also watches a lot of Disney movies with her friends, Mulan being her favorite.

“We all have our own Disney movie that we like, so we just end up watching them all,” she said.

Wolf Howard/News Editor
Kauffman: The interim president on West Pine mall.

Sept. 2 marked the first day of Bill Kauffman’s tenure as interim president of Saint Louis University. Motivated by a passion for the University and years of experience, Kauffman is nothing but positive about the future of SLU and the anticipated search for a new president.

He claimed that his 18 and a half years serving as General Counsel and Secretary of the Board of Trustees became the primary factor in his decision to accept his current position as interim president.

“I believe in Saint Louis University,” Kauffman said. “As we transition to the next phase in the University’s life, we have a spectacular opportunity,” referring to the presidential search process, which he sees as the primary concern for the University’s future in the coming months. The search committee for a new president is expected to be formed following the Sept. 28 Board meeting.  Kauffman will not serve in any official role on the committee, though he intends to provide his advice where it is desired.

He said that he holds high hopes for the search process and the future of SLU as a whole, calling himself “euphoric” about the university, inspired by the dedication and talent of the faculty, staff, administrators and students of SLU.

“Saint Louis University is well regarded in the higher education community,” Kauffman said. “We have very strong faculty, very talented students, and we have very strong academic programs… That coupled with… the buildings we have here makes me think we will have very well qualified [presidential] candidates.”

He expects that some candidates will be sitting presidents at other universities, though he was careful to stress that the search process was a two-way street, and that SLU also has to work to appeal to the best leaders available.

With that in mind, Kauffman plans to work to address recent issues on campus, in addition to any lingering concerns from years past, in order to make SLU more appealing to potential candidates.

Kauffman’s appointment and the upcoming search process follow a year marred by controversy between former President Lawrence Biondi, S.J., and faculty, staff and student groups.

Over the course of the academic year the Faculty Council of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Faculty Senate and the Student Government Association individually voted No Confidence in Biondi as President of the university.

The conflict between the SLU administration and the faculty, staff and student groups centered on the concept of ‘shared governance,’ with no confidence supporters claiming that Biondi exercised too much control over university matters and had created a ‘culture of fear.’

Kaufmann hopes to help unify the SLU community under the mutual cause of finding the best possible president to lead the university into the future and has already set meetings with various faculty departments.

“I intend to be accessible to all of the university constituents,” he said.  “I can’t guarantee that when we engage in a dialogue… that we will always agree, but I truly think the ability to have a conversation will advance our common purpose as an institution.”

Kauffman has already had experience interacting with various university groups during his time as General Counsel and said that his work with student leadership and SGA has encouraged him in the ability of the university to move in a positive direction.

“If I have any success it will be because of the university community pulling together for our common purpose,” Kauffman said. He also stated that he foresees a series of focus groups forming over the course of the presidential search so that all of campus can be heard, though he clarified that the final decision on appointing a president rests with the Board.

According to Kauffman, the administration generally expects the search process to conclude within the academic year. However, he placed priority on the quality of the president rather than the timing of the search.

He will remain available in his capacity as interim president should no suitable successor be found by the end of the year.

“Some people would say [it was a] failed search if the first try doesn’t work,” he said. “A failed search is appointing the wrong person.”