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A Message From the President

On Becoming a Radically Student-Centered Jesuit Research University

This strategic plan for 2026–2030 calls on Saint Louis University to pursue a single, defining ambition: to become a radically student-centered Jesuit research university.

Decorative 2 × 2 grid of SLU campus images, including the interior of College Church with its flying buttress ceiling supports, a group of students cheering in SLU shirts, two students conducting research near a pond, and an exterior view of the Doisy Research Center. The arrangement matches the cover of the Strategic Plan PDF.
 

For a university committed to cura personalis and the courageous pursuit of truth, this is not a departure from who we are. It is a call to become more fully who we are meant to be; it is a design principle, and in an important sense, a homecoming.

Being student-centered does not mean treating students as customers. We are educators. Our responsibility is to help students discover who and what they can become and to hold them to the standards of excellence, discipline, integrity, and responsibility that such growth requires. Genuine care both cherishes and challenges. At times, caring well for a student means asking more of them, not less: encouraging persistence when something is difficult, insisting on intellectual rigor, expecting responsible choices, and helping them learn from failure rather than protecting them from every disappointment.

That understanding of formation lies at the heart of our Jesuit tradition. Our students should leave SLU intellectually serious, ethically grounded, capable of wise judgment, and prepared for lives of meaning, accomplishment, generous service, and joy. And because we are a research university, students should encounter the creation of knowledge as part of that formation. Our greatest distinction will come from the mutually reinforcing excellence of our teaching and scholarship.

We must act with urgency. The years ahead will require us to make choices, simplify what has become unnecessarily complex, concentrate resources where they can have the greatest impact, and hold ourselves accountable for results rather than intentions.

But my call for urgency should not be confused with anxiety. We have a compelling mission, talented people, remarkable students, and the institutional capacity to act. We are fully capable of bringing those strengths together with greater focus and purpose.

This plan will ask something of every part of SLU and, ultimately, of each of us. Becoming radically student-centered will require changes in systems and structures, and it will also depend on countless individual acts of teaching, mentoring, service, judgment, and care. If we approach that work with courage and creativity, centered on what is distinctive about Saint Louis University, I believe we can become the university envisioned in these pages — and thrive. Thank you for your commitment to SLU’s future.

Edward Feser, Ph.D. 
President