On her family background:

TH: So you were born, was it right in the City of Chicago?

Dunn: Right in the city of Chicago, on the Near South Side. Then, when I was 9 months old, my parents moved, briefly, to California because they had family there. Then my father contracted tuberculosis. The doctors suggested that he go to a warmer climate so we moved over to Phoenix. He was hospitalized for a short period of time, but then he worked my whole life. Died young, however. 47.

When I was very small, not in school yet, not in kindergarten yet, so I must have been about 4, I had an altercation with my mother and I remember saying I was going to run away from home. It probably wasn't the first time I'd said it. So she pulled out a suitcase and put my clothes in it and took me down to the corner of our street and sat me there. Of course, I cried and came back home. But I remember some of those things, which tells me that at that time, I was a strong-willed child and probably defiant in many ways. I was not an easy child, I think, to raise.

Sister Catherine Dunn - Bio

TH: You're the oldest of three children. Tell me about your siblings.

Dunn: My brother's two years younger than I.

TH: His name?

Dunn: John. He finished college, went into the military, came out and married a little bit later. Then worked for the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Eventually, his last job was to supervise those prisons in the western part of the country, the whole western, from the state of Washington down to California. I don't know how far east he came. He retired at 50 and lives now in Lexington, Ky. Unlike his sister, he's a strong introvert.

Then I have a sister, Ann Marie Patrick, who lives in California. She is the mother of four. One of her sons, James - Jimmy - graduated from Clarke in 1997. JP, they called him around here.

On how she came to enter the convent of the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary:

TH: In many cases where someone has entered the religious life, it's with the great support of the parish and the family and so on. Not only did you not have that advantage, you also had some negative influences toward ...

Dunn: Right. Now, my brother and sister have always been very supportive. I had their love and support. Aunts and uncles and cousins, all supportive. The only one that wasn't was my mother.

Actually, before my father died, he had said to me, "I'm not estranged from you in any way. You be whatever you want to be. I just want to be sure you're happy. That's all I ask." So my father, because he died shortly after I entered religious life, didn't have that long-term I-will-not-have- any-contact-with-you kind of thing.

TH: Why the BVMs?

Dunn: Well, I knew them out there in Arizona. We had five schools, so they were the sisters I knew. Interestingly enough, I went to public school for grade school. Then when I got ready to go to high school, my parents told me they would not pay for my tuition. So I went and knocked on the door of the convent and said, "I would like to come to school here." Cecelia Lee, who is still living, was the principal. She just celebrated 75 years in the congregation over at Mount Carmel. She came to the door, and she was the principal. I said, "I want to come to school." And she said, "Well, what kind of a student are you?" I'd gone freshman year to the public school. I think I said I was a fair student. She said, "Well, that's not good enough for here." I said, "I'm a good student." They brought me in. That's another gift.

I worked at a cleaners, receiving and giving out the cleaning, and made some money to help pay for that tuition, but it didn't cover it all. So they gave me scholarships.

Here I come out of the blue. They could have taken any student they wanted. I was - what? -13½, 14 years old and I went and knocked on the door ...

TH: Already you were showing that gumption.

Dunn: Yeah, it was there throughout my life, yes. I was very active as a student. I played tennis. I played volleyball. I ran track. I jumped. I didn't run hurdles. Played soccer when soccer wasn't popular anywhere else in the country. It was popular in Arizona when I was a young student. Played golf. Very involved.

TH: Is some of that (determination) reflected in your decision at the young age of 17 of entering the convent?

Dunn: And you know, I didn't think about it until I was about 16. I was about a year of thinking about it. Part of it is, yes, I have a strong determination. It exists within my being, that if I feel I need to do something, then I need to do it. Not that I am not flexible. I think I'm an extremely flexible person. But within my own being, there is a determination and a desire to do the best I can and work at it and set high bars for myself, as well as for others.

On her schooling and subsequent entry into the field of education:

TH: So then, at 17, you came to Dubuque.

Dunn: I did.

TH: Then eventually you went to...

Dunn: Eventually I went back to Arizona. Finished my degree at Arizona State. Because I was from the Phoenix area.

Then I went to Chicago, and that's a very interesting part of my life, too. In the '60s, I taught junior high at a school that's now defunct. Loved the students there, but they were very poor. Very, very poor. Not academically - physically poor. Now, if you go there, it's a very upscale, yuppie neighborhood. But at that time, it was not.

We had a marvelous principal. There were over 800 students in that school. She had a father that was very wealthy and gave her a big check every month and said, "Take care of the poor." So one of the things we did as part of our ministry was we would go home at 5 o'clock for prayers and dinner and then after that, grocery shopping was done by the lady who cooked for us so we always went out with bags of groceries three nights a week to families in the neighborhood that we knew were needy and were in the school.

That was a very sobering experience for me.

TH: How many years were you at that school?

Dunn: Eight years. It was one of the most difficult places for me to leave was there. I then went back, I was sent out to finish my master's degree, back to Arizona State.

TH: You have your Bachelor's, Master's and Ph.D. all from Arizona State.

Dunn: Right, because I happened to be in that vicinity at the time. When I finished my Master's, I started to work on my doctorate. Then came to Lincoln, Ill., where I was an assistant principal of the Catholic school there. Then came to Clarke to teach a summer school course in '73 and then was asked by the Dean if I would come into the education department permanently. I said, no, I signed a contract. So Clarke bought that contract and helped them find my replacement.

TH: They really wanted you, then.

Dunn: So, here I am. Teacher and vice president and now president.

On her reconciliation with her mother, after more than four decades of estrangement:

Dunn: It was that day also that we had a conversation, when she talked about I'm not going to live very long, it was also a day I said, "Are you afraid to die?" And she said, "No, I've always had a wonderful relationship with God." While I know she didn't go to church, I didn't doubt that. I didn't doubt that she had a deep faith life.

She grew up in a family where she had an alcoholic father that was very abusive to her mother and to the children. So I think she was delighted to get out of Ireland and come to this country. She'd had some hard things in her life growing up that she talked about that day.

But then when we talked about dying, she said, no, I'm not afraid to die, I'm ready to die. I'm not a bit afraid to die. So then I said, "Well, do you want to talk about what you would like at your funeral?" Because my sister and I had agreed that we'd have a prayer service and visitation and that would be it. She said, "Yes, I want everything." I said, "You want a Mass?" "Oh, yes, oh, yes." I thought, "Where am I going to find a priest?" Because the priest in the parish was an Irishman that I knew probably would not bury her. Although I don't know. I didn't go to him. But I got a good Jesuit friend from Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles who came to the funeral home and we had a beautiful Mass and I did the eulogy. We had a visitation and the next day, we did our own committal ceremony at the cemetery where my father was buried. It was really very beautiful. Sang the Irish blessing out there overlooking the ocean.

Further recollection about the Clarke fire of 1984:

Dunn: So I took all the information I had. I also wrote down - I just need to put this as aside - I also at 4:30 in the morning, after I listed all the things I thought we needed to do to move forward.

I also wrote down everything I remembered about the fire. Because (attorney) Brendan Quann always said to me - as did Frannie O'Connor - if you ever have anything happen, document it, document it, document it. Those notes were all there so when Brendan said to us, you know, write down everything you remember, I had already written it down. I took that list then and then gathered people with me and said, "I need help."

*

Dunn: Sister McHale and I ran through the buildings and I identified spaces that I thought we could go. Then people divided up and said this could be where the president's office could be, this could be where we put PR, this where we could put, you know... There were people that merged out. Then we decided to meet two hours later. We all gathered back together again. By that time, PR had drafted a letter for me to go out to all of the ... we only had seniors on the campus and a few juniors. So a letter for me to send out, No. 1, to the students. So I reviewed that and edited and we got that letter out that day. That was on the 18th. Saying to them that we would rebuild, we were setting up temporary offices, the classroom buildings were not damaged. We got that out. We also got a letter out to alums. People volunteered to stuff the envelopes. This is all on the 18th, the day after the fire.

Dunn: At the same time, some wonderful things happened, Brian. Xerox machines, without our being asked, were delivered to the campus. It was two days before graduation. I got a phone call from Union-Hoermann (Press). They were reprinting the diplomas.

University of Dubuque had offered to give us any space we needed on the campus. In fact, Walter Peterson and Jacque Merritt, I will never forget it. As I'm pacing the street on the 17th, they came over to me and said, what is ours, is yours.

Loras offered us their academic attire for our faculty. It's probably the most moving thing I have ever lived through. That people just gave and gave and gave and nobody asked them to give. It was a very moving experience.

Then I called Dr. Peter Whitis and said, "There are people who have lost everything here. Sisters lived in this building, they lost their personal effects, they lost their professional items. I think we need some help." And Peter said, "Let me get some people." He got some psychologists and some psychiatrists and we held sessions, group sessions. They met with people individually. We did that for about five days, which was a wonderful thing to do. Then Peter and a group came back two weeks later for anybody else that wanted to do this.

You know, we were never sent a bill. People just did it. It was one phone call to one person ... And that's the way that was. Sometimes one phone, sometimes never a phone call, they just came.

Dunn: When we salvaged the library, that was everyone in the city. It was amazing, the people that were out on that line.

TH: Just shuffling those books.

Dunn: Absolutely. Once we could get the library shored up because it wasn't safe. Then Paul Roberts, who was new as the librarian, running out to me saying, "I've called all these places and if the books are smoke damaged or water damaged, this is what we've got to do. We've got to send them down to St. Louis, but it's got to be done in 72 hours." Well, we didn't have 72 hours because we couldn't get in there.

Then he said, "Well, I think we can try our own freeze-dried method.

The chairman of the board at that time was Skip Haas. And Skipper said, "I'll bring over some refrigerator trucks and a belt." So we developed our own freeze-dried method. Stacking the books so high, with fans in there, lowering the temperature so much every day until it went down to freezing for two weeks, then raise that temperature. We salvaged about 60 percent of the library. Threw away only about 34 books from the freeze-dried method.

It was things like that. Staff members saying, "We can do this, I can do this." It was a very collegial thing.

Then, of course, there was a battle with the insurance company. A horrific battle with the insurance company. My calling the board together again and saying, "I think we need to bring in some structural engineers that deal with disasters and hurricanes and those kinds of things." We got a company outside of Chicago and for $65,000, we got about $6.5 million more than the insurance company was offering. But it was those kinds of things. I never felt alone.

Francis O'Connor belonged to St. Andrew's Club in Scotland. He went twice a year to play golf. He kept saying, "I don't think I should go, I don't think I should go." This is in maybe September, October. I said, "Francis, go, there isn't anything..." "I don't want to leave you alone." I said, "I'm not alone. There's lots of people here." Well, Francis went, and about six days later I look up and there he's standing in front of my desk. I said, "You didn't go." He said, "I went out and shot one ball on the green and he said, I couldn't do it."

TH: Well, for anybody who remembers him and his love of golf, that's pretty amazing.

Dunn: He came home. So those were just some miraculous, magnificent things that happened.

On Clarke today:

TH: How does the enrollment today at Clarke compare to the enrollment before the fire?

Dunn: Oh, we're much higher than we were before the fire. There isn't any doubt that the fire was a blessing in disguise. I mean, some of my president friends accuse me of starting the fire. I said, "No, no, you never want to go through what we went through."

TH: Those (cooperative) things are going on, but the official Tri-College Program, is that...

Dunn: Yeah, that still exists.

TH: Still exists. It's scaled back quite a bit isn't it?

Dunn: The only thing that's scaled back - and this where I think there was some misunderstanding - was when we had a joint Education Department. When we decided to go back to our own institutions, I think people thought that was the end of the Tri-College when, in reality, that was only one program.

Loras and Clarke have a joint social work program. Our students can go to the three campuses. Our libraries are accessible. We can go on-line. Our library, I can do on-line here and access anything at Loras or UD, so we have a common library system.

As I said, students take advantage of going to the other campuses for classes. I'd like to see that heightened and highlighted more than it is. I think people don't realize that.

And then we happened to do a joint education program. As I said, when that split up, everybody thought the Tri-College Program split up, but that's not true.

TH: Well, if you actually decrease tuition, you'll be on the front page of every paper, because that's totally contrary to what's been going on.

Dunn: Right. I know it. And, you know, it's tough. I know there have been a lot of criticism of higher ed about cost of living, but you know, we have some things to stay state-of-the-art. Look at technology alone and what you have to pay for technology. We don't pass that on to students. I mean, we have a small fee, but it doesn't begin to cover the cost of what we have to have.

There are some things about higher ed that don't fit the business world. There are some costs. We don't pay big salaries, but we pay good salaries to our faculty. We're planning a five-year plan of how we can raise our staff salaries over the next five years to get them above the average in the state. Our faculty are at-average or above of the 27 private colleges in the state. We work hard at all of that. I think we do a marvelous job.

When you look at our budget, our budget's $20 million. Look what we do with that $20 million. It's phenomenal. But people need to hold our feet to the fire. All of higher ed; our feet need to be kept held to the fire. And people have a right to ask those questions, and they should ask them, and we should be accountable and responsible.

TH: As a parent, we're getting ready to send our third child off to college. Just an observation: It seems anymore that the amount of tuition - the amount of pain a family has to experience through college expenses - somehow is now translating to quality or status. With your peers, do you see some of that same thing? "Well, we must be good because we're charge X, and we must be better than this other school because they're only charging 80 percent of X"?

Dunn: Well, you know, I think that was very prevalent back a few years. What I hear my presidential friends now saying is, "We've got to do something about containing tuition."

And that tuition does not correlate with quality. I believe everybody today expects, they should, that your academic programs are of the highest quality. I think in students choosing colleges and universities today, they don't most of the time, choose it on academics. They choose it for all the rest of the stuff.

Now, maybe you've experienced that. "How do I feel when I step on that campus?" Ernie Boyer used to say I can step on a campus and in 10 minutes I can tell you the atmosphere on that campus. I think prospective students, our students have told us, prospective have told us, that they cross that threshold and they made a decision. Just from what they felt on the campus. So they look for extra-curricular things. Some might be attracted to a school that has a winning football team. Some might be attracted to the school because they have a great music program, choir, which may or may not be part of their major. So what we're finding in my conversations is it's more the extra-curricular and the sense of, "Will I be comfortable on this campus for four or five years of my life?" Because everyone expects - they may not always get it - but everyone expects high academic quality.

I say to our people, we're small, we're small. What do we have that makes us a great place? One of those things has got to be academic quality. We've got to hire the best faculty we can hire. We've got to have the best equipment for them. We've got to have the best programs. But I also say they only spend X number of hours in the classroom, so what do we do for them outside of the classroom.

And, you know, the student of today is used to being - how do I want to put this? - not very creative. They're taken to ballet, they're taken to karate, they're taken to soccer. All these things are set up for them. They don't have to create anything like we did when we were kids. I mean, we created our own.

On her leisure pursuits:

TH: In looking through some other articles about you that we've published over the years, we've noted a few spare time pursuits. One of them is cooking. Do you still do that?

Dunn: Oh, I love to cook.

TH: What are your favorite dishes?

Dunn: I don't really think I have one favorite dish. Cooking is a creative endeavor for me. My housemates get a little nervous at times because I'll see a recipe and I'll say, say we're going to have people over for dinner, and I'll say, all right, I'll do this. They'll say, but you've never done it before. I'll say, so? That part of it is the creative endeavor for me. If I've got time, I love to cook. In fact, I've thought I'd love to own a little restaurant and be the chief chef.

TH: That will be your next career.

Dunn: Could be, could be.

TH: You mention, "when I have time." Do you have much spare time?

Dunn: Not a lot. Weekends get filled up now, too. For instance, Sunday, I was busy most of the day, but I fixed dinner that night, this past Sunday. What it does for me, it removed my head from anything I deal with here, which is really wonderful. I put on music and go to work in the kitchen.

I bake, too. So when you say do you have a favorite recipe, a favorite recipe is probably the newest one I found. I mean, that's the kind of a cook I am.

TH: You haven't killed off any of your housemates from your cooking?

Dunn: Not yet.

On her physical condition:

TH: Your health has rebounded a little bit.

Dunn: My health is good.

TH: You had some setbacks a few years ago.

Dunn: Well, I've had back problems since I was a young child. I showed and jumped horses and I was thrown a few times. So I had a back injury that required surgery at age 20. First time. Then subsequently, I've had three other back surgeries. The last was about nine years ago. I'm fused from the thoracic all the way down. The whole lumbar region. I have a metal rod and pins in my spine. I seem to do well.

TH: Do you set off security screener at airports?

Dunn: No, because it's titanium. But my health is good. I occasionally get whatever everybody else gets around here. But by and large, I do very well. I sleep well at night. Some people say they can't go to sleep. I really sleep well at night and I think that's part of what keeps me healthy. I eat very carefully and I tend more to be on the Atkins side than the Weight Watcher's side of the diet. I'm very low carbohydrates, high protein.

The one thing I don't do enough of is exercise. I need to do more of that.
Copyright: Copyright 2003 Telegraph Herald