Apparently, Saint Louis University is moving up in the world. Our academic standing is decent. We still tout being one of the top five Catholic schools in the nation (even if we aren’t “controlled by a religious creed”). We regularly flaunt our 750,000 cumulative service hours in press releases and as a selling point to potential freshmen.
This week, SLU was once again included among the best institutions in St. Louis-not as an institution of higher learning, but as a business.
Saint Louis University has just been named one of the “Greater St. Louis Top 50 Businesses” for the second year in a row. Not only that: According to St. Louis Magazine, our university president, Fr. Lawrence Biondi, S.J., has been named the ninth most powerful man in St. Louis.
We are gaining status, becoming a bastion of worldly influence. Should we applaud?
We may claim, idealistically, to be a Catholic institution devoted solely to the development of character, where even the lab rats are required to take nine hours of philosophy.
But when you get right down to it, SLU is a business. It provides a valuable service to more than 12,000 students–for a price. SLU employs more than 9,000 people and spends hundreds of thousands of dollars improving the landscape of Midtown St. Louis. Some may wish it were fueled by discussions about Cicero and String Theory, the truth is that SLU could not function without taking in and turning over money.
Every good university must be a good business. Harvard University, widely acknowledged as the premier American institute of higher learning, has a monstrous, $25.9 billion endowment. Our neighbor, Washington University in St. Louis (ranked 12, in case you’re keeping score) sports a $4.3 billion endowment. SLU is trucking along, with an endowment of $750 million. Not bad for the 77th best school in the country. We have hundreds of millions more than, say, University of Colorado-Boulder or Virginia Tech, who also rank 77.
Harvard may be comparable to a pearl-gray Maserati, but SLU is nothing less than a Volvo sedan.
Does it seem ridiculous to rank our university based on such materialistic standards? Maybe so. But, like it or not, SLU is a business. Acquisition and expenditure of funds makes our world go round, and we’re doing a good job of it.
Now all we need to do is balance our fiscal success with our concept of our Jesuit … tradition.
