I think John Nunes would be a great new President. Former Valpo professor, man of color, led multi-million dollars organization as well as being a President of a Lutheran college and a sports fan! His son JJ was a star DB at Valpo a few years ago.
I had the opportunity to spend some time with JJ a while back. He’s a world class guy, and I’ve heard nothing but great things about his father. I would fully support that.
Tied to the articles on the junk rating move, I've also seen references to the lack of religion-affiliated youth. I've been saying this for a few years now on this forum, but it is a real problem that Valpo will have moving forward. Most youth are not moving towards religion, they are moving far away from it.
I said it in the other thread, and I will say it in here.
There are two ways to grow revenue. We need a competent enrollment leader. We need a competent development leader. And we need a competent president to hire both. I sincerely hope this president’s cabinet are polishing their resumes, because the new prez needs to clean house.
@regionrat03 nice guy, good person. Not sure he is the person to solve the problem that needs to be defined.
Tied to the articles on the junk rating move, I've also seen references to the lack of religion-affiliated youth. I've been saying this for a few years now on this forum, but it is a real problem that Valpo will have moving forward. Most youth are not moving towards religion, they are moving far away from it.
Where are they moving to? I have a suspicion — it’s away from “organized” religion and more toward personal spiritualism. I know I lost respect for “organized” religion a long, long time ago, but I never abandoned my spiritual beliefs. It’s the organized part that is driving some young people away, the politics within sects, the hypocrisy, yadda, yadda. That doesn’t mean, however, that a faith-based institution like Valpo can’t be attractive to the spiritual needs of young people. But I don’t know quitehow to package it.
yes, the resume looks very good and aligns. Just too bad that he took that job in 2024. And the schools are remarkably similar in sizes of enrollment and annual budget. They are more leveled in enrollment and operating money. And there is that nice view of the Pacific ocean a few miles away....not a long drive from Malibu and Hollywood etc.
@vulb62 Valpo and other denominational schools are in a tough bind.
On some level, I agree with you that students are wary of 'organized' religion, so there might be some benefit in a more open-ended framing that presents Christianity as a way of life rather than an organizational club. To find some more compelling "Christian" pitch would probably be more successful than a denominationally 'Lutheran' pitch (even if that's where a lot of the donors may be).
But more generally, I don't have much hope for the 'spiritual but not religious' folk to meaningfully change society (or make decisions like enrollment based on it). My general sense is that people who claimed it, say, back in the 1970s, really may have been engaging in personal spiritual practices like prayer or meditation or participating in some kind of interesting alternative spiritual community. But today most the students who say they're SBNR are mostly just trying to avoid the perceived extremes of saying they either do or don't belong to a religious tradition/aspiration, and I don't get the impression that it means much on the ground... they don't necessarily act or live any differently than any religious or secular student who is trying to make money, scrolling their phone, buying stuff of Amazon, etc. In the great flattening of the American citizen into the American consumer, I just don't see many interesting Spiritual-but-Not-Religious folk out there bucking the trend of anything. So it's not like that gives Valpo any kind of concrete or enlivening prospective population to target for enrollment.
@vuindiana @vulb62 , at risk of quoting myself here, there are similar discussions earlier in this thread: https://www.valpofanzone.com/community/postid/5374/
Denominational-only schools might be especially challenged, yet that has never been VU's selling point at least in the last 50 years. I still maintain there is room for VU to be attractive to students who might consider Jesuit schools like Marquette, Creighton, Fordham or Gonzaga, or non-Jesuit schools like Baylor, Saint Louis or Notre Dame.
Agree fully with valpo95, though I will point out that Saint Louis is also Jesuit.
