HCH photo by Patrick Downes
Marianist Brother Bernard Ploeger, Chaminade University’s ninth president, near a statue of the school’s namesake, in front of the university’s new Sullivan Family Library.
A wonderful momentum
Chaminade’s new president, Brother Bernard Ploeger, can’t imagine Hawaii without its Catholic university
By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald
“Like a lot of things, factors come together.”
It was a typical Brother Bernard Ploeger statement — lowkey, matter of fact, modest — like the man himself.
He used it to explain how he became a Marianist Brother. The factors — an older brother who was a priest, good parents, a Marianist high school, a personal invitation, among other things — had merged to produce a 43-year career in the educational religious life.
Now, more factors have come together to make him the ninth president of Chaminade University of Honolulu at a pivotal time in its 54-year history.
He stepped into the position on March 19. He is preceded by the 13-year administration of the charismatic Mary “Sue” Civille Wesselkamper, who died on Jan. 3.
It’s a hard act to follow, as they say.
“When I was asked, ‘What’s going to be the hardest thing about being president,’” Brother Ploeger said, “my answer was that everyone, including me, wishes that it was Sue.”
Well, maybe everyone except Sue herself who in 2001 handpicked the Marianist brother, a childhood neighbor of her husband Tom, to be her right hand man as the university’s executive vice president and provost.
Brother Ploeger had a lot to do with the success of Wesselkamper’s presidency, which has been widely described as “transformative” for the university. He is now poised, as he put it, “to maintain that momentum.”
He sat with the Hawaii Catholic Herald for an hour in his office at Chaminade on April 8 to explain how.
Good things in motion
“I really do believe we have wonderful momentum,” he said. He cited multi-million dollar grants, those already received and future ones headed their way, that are enabling new projects and renovations.
As he speaks, a smile is never far from his face. It’s easily triggered by a fond memory, a funny fact, a wry observation. If anything, the Chaminade president’s office will continue to be an optimistic place.
“We have set a lot of good things in motion,” he said.
That said, with the country in the middle of a recession, Chaminade is proceeding with realistic caution.
“It’s a tuition-dependent school,” the president said. That means that the financial pressures falling on families and students are resulting in lower enrollment projections.
Chaminade is doing what it can to keep tuition affordable, he said. More than 92 percent of the students already receive financial aid.
And because of certain benefits and credits contained in the federal stimulus package, “it should actually be less expensive to go to school this coming fall,” he said.
“It’s a message we’re trying to get out.”
So despite the lowered expectations, there are real reasons to be optimistic. The new president explained that this fall’s incoming class has “30 percent more accepted students than at the same time last year.”
“That is certainly where I’d want to be,” he said, though he is not ready to count any chickens before they hatch.
“It’s so hard to say that models from the past are going to apply to the next class,” he said. “We are all nervous until we actually know what actually happens.”
Teaching is a terrific occupation
When Brother Ploeger was still in grade school, his brother, who was 12 years older, was a seminarian with the Glenmary Fathers, an order working in the extreme rural regions of the country.
That created in him a “certain socialization” comfortable with religious life, though not necessarily the temperament needed to be a Glenmary priest.
“It was fun for me to visit a place like West Virginia for a week, but I am actually an urban person,” he said.
Instead, Ploeger discovered he got a thrill to be in front of his fourth year Latin class teaching the language of Virgil to fellow classmates at Moeller High School in Cincinnati.
“I enjoyed teaching. It is a terrific occupation and I haven’t changed my mind about that at all.”
He joined the Marianists, “because they asked,” right out of high school, as was the custom in those days. He made his first vows in 1966, after one year of novitiate, and embarked on a career as a Marianist educator.
He received his bachelor of science degree in 1971 from the University of Dayton and, from Ohio State University in Columbus, a master’s in 1973 and a doctorate in 1975.
He taught mathematics at the University of Dayton and at Wilberforce University in Ohio and also served as a councilor on the Marianists provincial council.
Brother Ploeger was the senior vice president for administration for the University of Dayton, another Marianist institution, from 1986 until 2001, the year he came to Honolulu.
Capitalization of the campus
If you haven’t visited Chaminade in the past five or so years, you are in for a surprise.
The multi-terraced campus on the rocky slopes of Kalaepohaku in Kaimuki has changed.
“If you remember in the old days what this place looked like, it was terrible,” Brother Ploeger said with a mild grimace. “It was an embarrassment to come here. There were broken sewer pipes, exposed …” His train of thought trailed off into a sigh.
That was before what he called “the capitalization of the campus,” a multi-million dollar drive to renovate and modernize existing buildings and add new ones, and to landscape the grounds.
“I am really proud to show people the campus now,” he said.
“I think the worst you would say about any area is that it’s orderly,” he grinned. “It goes up from there.”
He cites the elevations, the views, the new and renovated facilities, and concludes, “It’s really beautiful.”
Giving credit to the Clarence T.C. Ching Foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies and other generous donors, he said Chaminade is “very close to having funding to renovate all the existing buildings.”
“That has gone extremely well,” the Marianist said, “better than I thought was possible.”
Still, “your work is never done,” he said. “We are working right now with one donor with whom we have a verbal ‘yes’ to do a residence hall.”
“We can still use more residence halls.”
Four areas of strength, growth
President Ploeger presents four academic areas where he believes Chaminade does very well and has potential for greater growth.
The first is in the field of pre-kindergarten through grade 12 education.
“We are viewed as a flexible provider of quality preparation for teachers,” Brother Ploeger said. “We do have a number of alliances with Hawaii’s Department of Education for things like educational assistants.”
“And one out of every three school counselors in the DOE has their degree from Chaminade,” he said, proud of that statistic.
The second area is bio-medical and health sciences.
What began as a renovation of the science programs will culminate next year in the opening of a brand new nursing program. Chaminade will be offering a bachelor’s degree for those seeking to be registered nurses.
“I think it is going to be very important to the community. It’s high need, high demand,” he said, “and an enrollment driver for us beginning in 2010.”
The school has already recruited “a very good person” to head the program, he said.
“We’re looking to begin with a first year class of 40, and a transfer class of 20 (for those with associate degrees from community colleges or elsewhere),” he said.
With some attrition, he said, it should balance out to about 200 nursing majors over four years, or about 15 to 20 percent of Chaminade’s enrollment.
Letters of support have come in from “essentially all the hospitals” and a “high degree” of funding from government and private donors.
At first, Brother Ploeger did not want nursing at Chaminade.
Conventional wisdom said nursing was expensive, clinical placements hard to get, and a faculty hard to hire, he said.
But his mind began to change when members of the school’s board and others sought to learn why the school was not attracting more Catholic Filipino students.
“The answer was nursing,” he said.
Around the same time, Chaminade hired a dean for natural sciences and math who was an immunologist with strong local medical ties. She had similar conclusions, namely that “this is very high community need; that there would be a lot of people very pleased if Chaminade had a nursing program,” he said.
“It’s the most asked for major of seniors graduating from public schools in Hawaii,” Brother Ploeger said. “It tops business.”
Public safety, Hawaiian values
The third area in which Chaminade shines is that of law enforcement and public safety, a broad field that embraces such disciplines as forensic sciences, criminal justice, community corrections and, most recently, homeland security.
“We were trying to do initiatives around homeland security, not so much because Hawaii is a big terrorist threat, but from the point of view of responding to such things as natural disasters and pandemics,” the university president explained.
This would help local school administrators in need of such emergency training, military base personnel, and people seeking post-military careers in a military-related or law enforcement-related field.
Brother Ploeger said that the fourth area in which Chaminade has been growing in strength is its identity as a native Hawaiian-serving institution.
He said the university has “quietly emerged” as the “kind of school where a person of native Hawaiian descent can do well in,” where the culture is “valued and validated,” and the form of education is “holistic” and a good match for the Marianist family spirit.
While the school does not have any degrees in Hawaiian studies, one of its deans of Native Hawaiian ancestry has created a Hawaiian leadership program, which uses the Hawaiian word “kipuka” to describe its objective.
The Hawaiian Dictionary translates kipuka as “a calm place,” or “a clear place or oasis.”
Brother Ploeger uses a phrase from Isaiah to explain it: “On the shadow of your wings I stand secure.”
But he pointed out that it is not a passive or refuge-seeking initiative, but an active effort seeking partnerships in the broader community — from teaching projects for Palolo public school students to a community center for native Hawaiians being developed in Kapolei.
Government grants have aided Chaminade, a federally designated Native Hawaiian-Serving Institution, in these projects. About 12 percent of the university’s students are of Native Hawaiian ancestry.
Hawaii’s Catholic university
Chaminade is Hawaii’s only Catholic university. What does that mean for the rest of the Catholic Church in Hawaii?
There is a healthy crossover of people from the university serving on diocesan committees and vice versa, including Brother Ploeger himself.
“Our natural contributions are made around religious education, preparation for parish directors of religious education, deacon formation, and perhaps ongoing clergy formation,” Brother Ploeger answered.
Among its courses and degrees in religious and pastoral studies are online classes offered by the University of Dayton, a sister Marianist institution in Ohio, through Chaminade, for diocesan catechists and Catholic school teachers.
“Obviously we are doing outreach trying to make Chaminade that place you would think of as your Catholic University,” he said.
This year, Chaminade invited all of Hawaii’s Catholic school principals to campus to create an “affiliation,” Ploeger said. If their students wanted to continue a Catholic education in Hawaii, the university’s president wanted them to know that “we’re the place.”
The visit ended up being an eye-opener for some of the principals, one of whom told Brother Ploeger, “I didn’t know Chaminade had this much to offer.”
The Marianist said that he was told that there is a Chaminade alum teaching at every Catholic school in the state.
“It’s highly probable,” he said. “I consider the diocese as one of our biggest constituencies.”
Chaminade’s outreach to the diocese and the broader Hawaii community is an integral part of the school’s mission and survival.
“This is all part of, I think, every institution, especially an institution like a university,” he said. “Your future is insured when people can’t imagine the world without you. It sounds narcissistic in one way, but you know you are fulfilling your mission if that’s how people view it.”
“When Sue came here in 1995, the question was, ‘Was there any good reason for Chaminade to exist?’” he said.
“That was an open question in everybody’s mind.”
Brother Ploeger paused before proceeding.
“I would like to think now that the Marianists and the diocese are clearly people that couldn’t imagine life without Chaminade. That everybody sees the vitality. That these alliances are so important that there’d be no doubt, that if someone asked you if there should be a Chaminade, you would answer, ‘Yes!’”