St. Gregory’s adopts vision for next 100 years
SHAWNEE — As St. Gregory’s University celebrated its centennial last fall, work already had begun to chart a course for the next 100 years.
That plan includes growing enrollment, replacing the residential halls and exploring the creation of a College of Health Care.
President Greg Main said the university will kick off a $140 million capital campaign this summer to fund the new strategic plan.
“It’s going to be a challenge, there’s no question about that. But nothing great is ever created suddenly,” Main said.
Vision for Our Next Century was developed with input from about 80 business, civic and Catholic leaders across the state, some who didn’t know much about the university. Involving a broader population was important to ensuring support going forward, Main said.
“We wanted some new, fresh ideas about where we are going as a university,” he said. “Just doing things like in the past wasn’t going to help us.”
The document is designed to guide priorities and institutional decision-making in the coming years. It has been adopted by both the university’s board of directors and the monks of St. Gregory’s Abbey.
Plans for growth
The plan is built around four goals: establishing St. Gregory’s as a regional center of Catholic culture and education; improving the learning and living experience for students; growing enrollment significantly in both the traditional and adult programs; and studying the feasibility of creating a College of Health Care.
“This is a most exciting chapter for Oklahoma’s only Catholic university,” said the Rev. Don Wolf, chairman of the board of directors. “Vision for Our Next Century will provide our students numerous spiritual, academic and professional benefits.”
The Catholic University of Oklahoma, as it was called in the beginning, offered its first classes in 1915 in the newly constructed Benedictine Hall, which remains the heart of the campus.
Current enrollment is 654. A number of initiatives in the strategic plan are aimed at increasing the number of students.
Those range from focusing on academic excellence to replacing the half-century-old dormitories that are beyond repair, Main said.
The campus has three residence halls that can hold up to 450 students in two-person rooms. They don’t provide the living environment and Internet service students expect, Main said.
The university also will reach out to Indian tribes across the state in an effort to duplicate the relationship already established with the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Main said.
Last summer, the two entities announced an agreement that provided $5 million to the university and full scholarships for up to 60 members of the tribe.
“Currently, 37 students are in that program and we expect it to continue to grow,” Main said.
Many tribes need educational services for their members, especially children who drop out of high school to work, he said. St. Gregory’s wants to help them obtain a high school diploma or its equivalent so they can qualify for college.
Bold ideas
Establishing a College of Health Care is the biggest idea in the strategic plan, Main said. How that might look has yet to be determined.
Main said a team will study the possibility of operating the college in Tulsa, Oklahoma City or both. The team will consider schools of osteopathic medicine, pharmacy, optometry, physical therapy and mental health, as well as expanding the existing nursing program.
“There is a huge demand here for people who are trained in these areas,” Main said.
The Rev. Lawrence Stasyszen, abbot and chancellor, said some of the most bold and exciting ideas in the strategic plan came from people outside the St. Gregory’s community.
Their input was creative and energizing, Stasyszen said.
The start of the university’s second century is a natural point to begin implementing a plan to address “the needs of our students and the culture as a whole in the 21st century,” he said.