Sister Joanne Burrows

Now, at Clarke College, she is experiencing it.

The successor to Sister Catherine Dunn, who retired in June after 22 years at the helm, Burrows is a newcomer to Clarke and to Dubuque. In her first year, she places a high priority on listening.

The Telegraph Herald recently interviewed Burrows, a member of the Sisters of Charity. Here are excerpts of that conversation. How does someone with a graphic design degree end up in college administration?

It's the most important degree I have. It is the degree that teaches you how to deal with problems within a defined space or context. So when you're dealing with a graphics problem, you know what your goal is and what you're trying to do and you have line and color and latent form and those kinds of things and text. Then you try to create a visual image that addresses the problem.

That's actually what I do every day, is to take the resources that I have and try to achieve a goal with what I have to do within a particular context or confined space. It's just not two-dimensional anymore.

I will tell you that I am not the greatest graphic designer in the world. But it was a great venue from which to jump off and start doing other kinds of things. Earlier, we talked about your friends' and college classmates' reaction to the news that you were going to enter religious life. How about your parents? What did they think about that?

My father always said he didn't care what I was, as long as I was happy and good at it. He was sometimes real blunt about his examples, so I won't give any of those.

My mother was greatly distressed when I entered. She thought, I guess it felt like a rejection of her lifestyle. But I think it's true of all, many Catholic parents, they'd be happy to have a son who's a priest but not a daughter who's a nun. That's a really interesting thing. But she got over it relatively quickly. My brothers and sisters were like, "You've got to be kidding. What are you doing?" I mean, they were OK, too, eventually. Different ones appreciated it in different ways.

When you first arrived at Clarke, you said you intend to spend the first year listening. What have you been hearing?

What have I been hearing? Oh, tons of things.

I've met with all the staff departments. I've met with all the academic departments. I've met with students. Met with business people on the outside.

I asked people the same two questions every place I go. You have to tell me first what's good and great about Clarke. Then I ask people for challenges. You can imagine the different groups have different things.

I can tell you that I hear across the board about what's good and great about Clarke, and they fall into three categories. People talk about the quality of the place. They talk about the quality of the academic programs. They talk about the quality of the people. They talk about the quality of the kind of services that we give our students. That's a really important piece. People are proud of that.

All small schools talk about the quality of their relationships. I've been in enough of them now to know that. But it is interesting. And one of the small things that may not sound huge, but, for example, everybody calls everybody here by their first name. Students call me Joanne. When I first heard it, I was like, "Who are they talking to?" But it's not about an over-familiarity, nor is there any lack of respect in that. It is an expectation and something that they experience from staff and from faculty that there's an equality and a respect that comes by calling someone by their first name. There's a kind of exchange and honest that happens with that. A lack of pretense.

Another thing is passion. People keep saying I'm passionate, but I don't think I'm passionate by myself. I mean, there are people here that are really passionate about what it is that they do and they get really excited. I met Tim Boffeli one day, the psych professor, in the hallway and he was just like, "I just taught Intro to Psych. It was great!" And I thought, who could be excited about teaching an Intro to Psych class? But he was delighted with it.

People here have a real passion for what it is that they're about. It's not just the faculty in the classroom. The IT people back here are passionate and so as we look at making decisions around technology, the watch them be really passionate in going out and researching and then coming back and saying, "No, this is the better thing for the college."

Now, what do people want? Students want a bridge across Clarke Drive that's covered so they never have to go outside.

You laugh at that.

I keep telling them that I understand it, but their desire to wear flip-flops all winter long is not at the top of my priority list. But a lot of people think that that's a great idea. There used to be a tunnel underground.

That's right. But not all the students would use that tunnel.

No, but they all know about it. Campus legends are incredible.

Clarke Drive is not terribly busy.

No, it means you have to put shoes on. You have to put clothes on to go outside. So that's one.

That's one thing. We're a small tuition-driving institution and that's an important thing for everyone to keep in mind. We don't have state dollars behind us. We don't have huge endowments. So it's very, very important that our enrollment, I mean, that's where our income comes from, through our enrollment.

People here are looking always for improvement in terms of our facilities. We haven't done remodeling in the science areas in a number of years, so that's a major agenda item for us. We've done a lot over recent years to improve technology in the classrooms. We have smart classrooms, but they want us to take it to the next level.

Technology in general - that constant keeping up with how that expands. I haven't quite gotten consensus that they want a laptop campus, but I do hear from the adult students that they want lots more in terms of course work online, degree programs online, with the use of hybrid models that have much larger components of online classes that allows a synchronous learning, but also retain, at least at some level, some face-to-face instruction.

Arts are a major issue here at Clarke. I mean, they're a major part of our life at Clarke. We claim to be the college for the arts in Dubuque. We've claimed that now for the last year and no one's shot us yet for saying that.

This article hasn't come out yet.

That's correct. Well, we did it in all our ads, our ads around the arts, but the visual arts, the bachelor of fine arts, the bachelor of arts, the majors in art history and graphic design and art education are some of our biggest on campus. That's a really good draw for us. We have an excellent reputation. We have good facilities, but they need to be expanded.

We have huge growth in the health areas, nursing and physical therapy. Our doctor of physical therapy will be up to 100 students next year. That's a significantly large program in providing the facilities for doing that is an important thing for us.

Growth is pushing on our needs, but people are really pushing for us to have the kind of quality facilities that we've enjoyed and that we need to continue to enjoy.

Fitness is the other area that they keep telling me we need. Kehl Center is really nice, but it doesn't have the fitness, so we're working on that.

I read in an article that you had indicated that it is paramount for the fitness and recreation. I'm thinking, "That building is brand new." It was only in the early to mid-90s when it opened. Still, it looks great.

It's a beautiful building.

So what's the problem?

It doesn't have the fitness component to it. In other words, we have one gym with two teams. It's really tough for two teams to practice in there. On top of that, look what's being erected at the two other institutions in town. It's partially about that competition. But we've added so many sports teams, athletic teams, and they don't have a place to do the kind of fitness work that they need to do.

We have some things that are great. The basement of the Kehl Center was never finished. It's dirt downstairs on the bottom and the ball teams, baseball and softball teams, think it's the greatest thing in the entire world because they can play ball all winter downstairs in the dirt. They can pitch. They can slide. They can hit. So they have that. Nobody else has that, but we do.

What is the enrollment at this time?

I'm going to tell you it's around 1,200. It may be a little bit higher than that. We saw growth. Normally you see your enrollment decline from fall to spring; this year, we saw growth from fall to spring and it was in graduate and Time Saver.

In your years in higher education, have you seen a trend in the value students place? Have you seen changes over the years?

I think they are less engaged in organized religion. People here, if you go to mass on Sunday, it's not a huge population. Lot of that is because we have commuter students or students who live within 100 miles and they haven't come back yet. They're still at their parents' house and we have no idea whether they went to church or not.

I think students are hungry for spirituality, that kind of sense of meaning. We live in a society where people don't like to tell us what to do or what to believe. Young people today don't like to be labeled. I think they've changed in what they're looking for. I think they ask spiritual questions, as much as they did in the '70s. Before that, who knows?

People think that somehow that there was this Golden Age in the '60s where college students were much deeper. I wasn't there. I was a little young for it, but I was there in the '70s and I'm not sure I was asking any deeper questions when we rioted on campus and closed Maryland's campus, you know? I think most of us thought it was fun more than anything else.

I think they're different. I think they don't have a great deal of religious education so they are different. Many of them haven't attended Catholic schools. That's a different kind of experience.

So tell me about the rioting on the campus at the University of Maryland. Was that over Kent State?

That was right after Kent State. I was in college in 1970. The University of Maryland was closed in the spring my first two years. They closed the semester early. I was certainly not a leader of that. It was not my thing. But you couldn't help but - I mean, it happened all over campus, when you walked out, you learned to know that, "Uh, oh, there's the National Guard, there's got to be somebody doing something." You got tear-gassed whether you wanted to get tear-gassed or not. It was a sense of excitement.

At night, they had curfew. I lived in a sorority house. I had curfew. It was the big thing to see if you could get from the sorority house to the fraternity house and not get caught by the police. I think people remember this deep values-based younger generation. I think we were having fun.

More a lark than...

Well, it had some politics to it. I don't know whether young people today... We always read every morning when Watergate was happening. In the sorority house, that was read out loud at breakfast. We had the Washington Post and we read everything out loud, so we were very versed in that. Now, that could be as much having to do growing up in Washington, D.C., as the age, but we were very engaged in that. I don't know whether young people today are as engaged in. I don't suspect that they are. But I think we believed that we could do something different. They may be so disillusioned with what they've seen over the last 30 years of American politics that I don't know that....

It would be hard to blame them.

Yeah. Well, it's hard to blame them for their suspicion of much of the major institutions in our society. Even the church. The church's handling of sexual abuse. I don't want to point fingers at anyone, but that's disappointing at best, if not disillusioning for adults. What do you think that 18-year-old takes away from that?

When you look at the world since the Vietnam War, you wonder. We've been involved in lots of follies since then. No wonder they feel disillusioned.

Earlier, you referred to Clarke and like other many other colleges as a tuition- driven. What steps is Clarke taking to try to keep education here affordable?

One of the things we're proud of this year is that we once again got named in U.S. News and World Reports Great College, Great Price. We rose to No. 5 in our category. It shows that we're working really hard at that.

When we talk about tuition raises, we don't start with, "How much money do we need?" We don't do that. We talk a lot about that we have to cover costs. We have non-negotiables. You have salary increases, you have insurance increases, health care increases, utility increases. All of those are part of it.

But we struggle. We had a process this year. We started in September looking at what our costs are; how we could keep them down. Last year, Clarke's cost of operations only increased 1 percent. That's pretty darn good. They did a lot of cutting last spring of extra positions so that we would pull our budget in ever tighter. That's an important piece for the college. I don't think we can cut too many more positions. I think it's important to look at real cost-containment kind of initiatives. But we really worked not to raise it a lot this year. We did not this coming year. We will not raise room and board.

At all?

Nope. Because we think it's important to continue to give students access to that lifestyle, which is something that we think is really important. The opportunity to live on campus.

In your first seven or eight months on the job, what has surprised you the most?

People keep asking me if I was surprised at what I didn't anticipate. No. 1, I have a doctorate in higher ed. My one area of research is the presidency, so I've spent a lot of time studying presidency and presidents in the presidency, so I probably came with a better expectation of the job than a lot of people.

I think the fact that the things that came true for me that people said would happen, but you can't know until you get, is how public the position is. You are never not the president of Clarke, so when you're at Hy-Vee, you never know who's going to pop up and say, "Sister." Anything you do in public is always something that someone's going to look at. You may never know who it is, you may never know it happened, but you know, "I saw Sister be really rude to a person in the grocery store," so you're really being quite careful all the time. It is the public face of the job. I mean, I've never eaten out this much in my whole life, and it's just part of the fact that you are the face of the college. I mean that it has a whole lot more meaning than you could ever imagine.

And that is more the case at Clarke or in Dubuque than other places?

Well, I mean, it isn't such a small town. I mean, if you were in a big city... The day that I was announced, I stayed at the Best Western over on 20. The next morning, I came out and I walked down the hall and I had guests saying, "Good morning, Sister." I thought, "What is this?" I got down to the front desk and everybody goes, "Good morning, Sister." I thought, how does anybody know who I am? Well, it was on the front page of the paper. It's not likely that in the big town, the inauguration of the president of a small college the size of Clarke would be on the top fold of the paper. So you do have a more visible position.

I think the perception is that my life is all that travel, and I do a lot of that and out, but I spend a whole lot of time knowing what the budget is. I spend a whole lot of time knowing enrollment. I look at all of those kinds of things. I spend a lot of time looking at our HR policies and making sure that they are where they should be.

I think that I was probably more prepared for the dinner part than I was for the public part than the internal part. I enjoy the internal part so that's not a problem for me.

The thing is, I love Dubuque and my friends are surprised that I like Dubuque. But I liked Terre Haute. I like a small town, even though I grew up on the coast. The interesting thing is though there's such stability here. It is not a university town. Terre Haute was a university town and it didn't have the depth of family business that Dubuque does. Dubuque is amazing in the depth of who's lived here for generations. That's just amazing.

You can't say anything about anybody in Dubuque, because you're talking to their second cousin.

Right. So that's a new experience for me in that everybody knows everyone. Some of the fun things are: I'm a nun with a country club membership. I've never had a country club membership in my whole life. My family didn't belong to a country club. We belonged to a swim club but not a country club. So I kind of laugh when people say, "Meet you at the club." That just seems for foreign to the life that I've lived, but it's part of the job.

Earlier, you mentioned walking as one of your activities. And then did I hear something about scuba diving? Yes, I'm a scuba diver.

Tell me about that.

That's my great release in life. I do two things regularly for myself, I walk and exercise. I try to do that multiple times a week. I get a massage every two weeks out at the Franciscan place.

I swam competitively as a kid, all the way until I was 18. I was a lifeguard and did all those kinds of things. So I love to swim. I'm a good swimmer.

I started going to the Bahamas with a friend who is now deceased. She had a home down there. Probably started going down there about 10 years ago, maybe 12 years ago. Then I started going with her once a year after she had chemo treatments. I would go down with her. We snorkeled all the time. Then I have two friends in Indiana who were scuba divers and were really into it. So I tried it one time when I was in the Bahamas. Wasn't thrilled with it but thought I could adjust. So now I love to do it.

You mentioned earlier that your father said that he'd support you whatever you did, as long as you were happy and good.

And good at it.

Do you think he would say that you met that mark?

Uh, huh. Yeah, he'd be delighted. Yeah, he really would. He was a great man. I loved him lots. My mom would be thrilled, too. She knew I got the deanship. She was dying when I got the

deanship at Saint Mary-of-the-Woods, but I have no doubt that she would be thrilled to death. No, I'm happy, and I think I'm good at what I do.

Age: 54. Occupation: President, Clarke College, Dubuque. Religious affiliation: Roman Catholic order Sisters of Charity OF Cincinnati. Education: Doctorate, The Ohio State University, Columbus, 1998; master's degree, Graduate Theological Union and Jesuit School of Theology, Berkeley, Calif., 1990; bachelor's degree, University of Maryland, College Park, 1975. Current professional associations: Council of Independent Colleges, Association of Catholic Colleges and Universities, Higher Learning Commission of The North Central Association. Academic awards and honors: Through The Ohio State University: Maude A. Stewart Award, 2006; Dai Ho Chun Graduate Fellowship, 1997; and Earl W. Anderson Memorial Scholarship, 1995. Student Research Award and Lecture, Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley, 1990. Who's Who in American Colleges and Universities, 1990.