Dr. Susan Donovan took the helm as president of Bellarmine University five years ago, after serving for more than three decades at Loyola University Maryland.
Before COVID-19 changed the landscape, she spent the first few years getting to know the university and the city, discovering what she called the “foodie town” nature of the Highlands and attending athletic, theater and music events.
She joined St. Agnes Church, though she often attends Mass at Bellarmine’s Our Lady of the Woods Chapel.
These touchpoints with the community helped inform Donovan when it came time for her and her team to create a strategic plan, she said.
Published in May 2019, the plan — “Tradition and Transformation: Focusing on student success, inclusion and academic innovation” — included six strategic priorities.
Those priorities involved diversifying the student body, faculty and staff; increasing retreat opportunities for student athletes; expanding the interfaith campus ministry and furthering strategic partnerships with corporations and nonprofits.
Diversifying the campus
Donovan said close to 70 percent of first-year Bellarmine students are from Kentucky. About 40 percent are native to Jefferson County.
When she joined Bellarmine in 2017, the student body was approximately 13 percent students of color. Now, she says, that number is up 10 percentage points.
“In recent years, and we think it will be the same this year, it’s been 25 percent in the first-year class and the overall student-body diversity of color is 23 percent,” she said during an interview in her office late last week.
She credits several diversity, equity and inclusion efforts with the increase.
The Dr. Patricia Carver Office of Identity and Inclusion calls students, faculty and staff to develop their identities through focusing on cultural humility, identity exploration and social justice. In 2019, the office doubled its space and received funds to create an endowment.
Three years ago, the school created a President’s Advisory Board on Equity and Inclusion.
“That board is faculty, staff and students and they meet monthly and continue to work on programs and policies to ensure
that we are inclusive and equitable so it’s a really dynamic committee that’s formed,” she said.
In May, Bellarmine hired Dr. Tomarra Adams to be the new Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer, a role that was established in 2020. She’s the second to hold that office. Adams will be a member of the President’s Cabinet and will co-chair the Advisory Board on Equity and Inclusion.
“I think she’s going to really take us to the next level with this,” Donovan said of Adams. “She’s a person of faith herself and she’s very focused on the whole person, developing the whole person — body, mind and spirit.”
Donovan would also like to expand diversity on campus by offering more services to veterans and service members.
“When you say you want to diversify the student body, it is a group we felt like we could do more with,” Donovan said.
The school’s Office of Military and Veteran Services now has its own space in the library and operates under “a director who’s worked very hard,” Donovan said. “She’s a veteran herself, and they’ve just made it a very hospitable place.”
She said of veterans, service members and members of ROTC who become college students, “I think their contributions in the classroom is invaluable.”
Partnering strategically
Donovan prioritizes community partnerships because they satisfy “a mutual need,” she said.
“Our students need jobs, so it’s great for them to get experience prior to graduating. But it also opens up their horizons to other things,” she said. “I always say you’d rather know while you’re in college if you’re not in the right major or profession than after you get out of college.”
Bellarmine has strategic partnerships with corporate and nonprofit agencies, including Catholic Health Initiatives, St. Joseph’s Catholic Health Network, GE, Kroger, Norton Healthcare, Nativity Academy and the Louisville Urban League.
She said partnerships with healthcare institutions help address the shortage of nurses in the community and also support the students.
“We have a couple programs where they grant tuition remission or help to subsidize tuition and (the students) agree to work there for a couple of years after they finish their degree, so it’s sort of a win-win with that.”
To connect even more, specifically to local nonprofits, the university introduced its Center for Community Engagement in 2021, Donovan said.
“It’s something that I think both students really want and faculty are really motivated by because you can make an impact and these nonprofits very much need it,” she said.
Bellarmine’s partnership with the Louisville Urban League gives Exercise Science, Sports Management and Athletic Training students the opportunity to explore experiential learning and community outreach at the Urban League’s new Norton Healthcare Sports and Learning Complex.
“We’re not a bubble. I think our students need to face the grit and realities. That’s why I think community engagement is so important. It’s great what they learn in the classroom and you do see transformation, but it’s also taking the next step to now use that knowledge and transform the community in which you live and it’s really powerful,” she said.
Student opportunities
In 2019, Bellarmine announced its move to the NCAA Division I level for 17 of its sports teams beginning with the 2020-2021 season. Although COVID-19 hindered much of the season, Donovan said the school struck a deal with Freedom Hall, a nearly 19,000-seat multipurpose arena, to hold its basketball games there.
“It was a bright star in some challenging times for people,” Donovan said of the school’s first season in the ASUN Conference.
One of Donovan’s goals going into Division I play was to maintain high academic standards.
“We’ve done very well,” she said. “We were academic champions the first year in the ASUN Conference. This year we’ve just received the results, we were second.”
Plus, after just three years in the division, the men’s basketball team won its conference tournament this year.
Although expanding retreat opportunities for student athletes was one of Donovan’s goals for this strategic plan, she said they weren’t able to focus on it as much as she would have liked due to COVID-19.
“But we have expanded our retreat programs athletes can participate in,” Donovan explained.
The university doesn’t have a retreat center on campus, but it recently opened an interfaith space available to students for retreats, speakers and for use by other faith traditions.
“We also have been able to accommodate our Muslim students during Ramadan and provide space for them, and that’s been great,” Donovan said.
Looking forward
On the horizon, Donovan said she and her team plan to gather for another strategic planning session soon.
“Certainly the world changed when COVID came, but we’re really looking to the future and how we can continue to be an anchor in the community to people of faith, and also be leaders in our communities, in our churches and in our schools,” she said.
She plans to continue focusing on affordability and accessibility, she said. One such initiative is the Public Price Promise “which basically guarantees every student the cost of the total package — tuition, room and board and fees — to match the flagship of each state.”
Kentucky’s flagship college is the University of Kentucky, so for students who qualify, a Bellarmine degree will cost what a UK degree costs.
The university has also added scholarships for Catholic high school students to “encourage them to look at Bellarmine and we’ve seen some results there as well,” she said.
She said the university is working on how they “package support to our students and we know that we can always do better,” so there are plans to launch an initiative addressing that.
“We want them all to be successful and to thrive and that’s challenging because not everyone starts from the same place in terms of preparation,” she noted.
“We’ve been really working on that and that’s a tough thing to do,” she said. “It really stretches your faculty and staff but the thing I love about Bellarmine is the faculty and staff are here, and I think that’s where you get the ethos of care that we have.”
