President Rob Manuel's 2025 Academic Convocation Remarks

Good morning!

I’ll join Provost Ghanem in extending a warm welcome to our new faculty and staff and wishing our many award recipients my heartfelt congratulations. You are what makes DePaul special.

I would like to recognize our provost, Salma Ghanem. As you know, this will be Salma’s last year serving as provost. I am extremely grateful for her leadership and friendship over these past few years and would like to say thank you, from the bottom of my heart. Let’s all take a moment to express our gratitude to her for everything she has done for DePaul. 

I want to start by acknowledging that in the 35 years I have worked at colleges and universities, I have never seen this number of issues being focused on higher education. I have never seen the external world try to change and rebuke honest intellectual discourse. I have never seen such a narrowing of access to higher education or such constraints put on the efforts to help our students afford an experience that offers the clearest path to a higher quality of life. 

The quick pace — and vast depth — of these challenges make it almost impossible to create a single plan with certainty. I know these challenges are creating anxiety and fear in our community.  

So today, I want to talk about what we can control – what we need to understand to make our path forward a fruitful one. Unlike any other time in the history of higher education, it is critical that we understand how to lead by balancing our mission, our educational practices, and our research with the financing necessary to carry these out. 

We need to create our path forward by balancing our heads, our hearts, and our wallets. 

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Let’s talk about the wallet first.

 

St. Vincent de Paul was a visionary, and his core was devoted to the service of the poor. He was also a financially savvy leader. He understood the need to have investments in his work and convinced the wealthy to support his work to aid the poor. He helped royalty and those with extreme wealth understand the importance of caring for the poor. That’s how he was able to make his work so powerful, so impactful. 

We are in the same situation. How do we manage to continue our work in a time when our financial reality is stable, but not sufficient? How do we continue to plan to live our mission in financially challenging times? 

There is some good news here. 

This year, our freshman enrollment will come in very close to 3,000 students — that’s a 10% increase compared to last year. New transfer enrollment is over 1,000 students, which is an 18% increase.

The university has maintained a strong financial profile, with affirmed credit ratings across major agencies. 

We also had a banner year in fundraising. We raised over $62 million last year, and we are very close to announcing new gifts that will be among the largest in our history. 

There is also some concerning news here. 

We are seeing a decline in our international student population, which is critical for our graduate programs, and our belief that our community should represent the world in which we live. We will know more about our enrollment outcomes in just a few weeks, after the fall census. I am grateful to the entire Enrollment Management team for their incredible efforts to lead us through this moment. You have done well. 

We are also being affected by the challenges to the financial aid programs that enable our students to attend DePaul — access to student loans, the slowdown of visa distributions, and the recalculation of eligibility for the PELL grant. These are critical deletions that more than challenge our core ability to operate.

Still, I believe we are capable of overcoming all these challenges. 

Our new strategic plan will require us to actively work to find alternative ways to fund certain programs that we offer. We need to explore the possibility of establishing different tuition standards for programs and think about how to better market our academic excellence. Rather than think in austere terms — what programs do we cut, we are going to think in creative terms. What needs to change to allow our programs to thrive?

Difficult for sure, but we will develop ways to maintain access for those who wish to attend DePaul. 

Now, let’s focus on our hearts. 

We must never refuse to see the personal impact of the upheaval in our world — or right here in our home of Chicago. Behind every headline about Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, Russia, Syria, Sudan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti — and so many other war-torn places around the world.

Behind every vicious account of murder and shooting in our own backyard, behind all those things, there is a DePaul student, a DePaul faculty member, a DePaul staff member, a DePaul parent, a DePaul child who is directly affected. We are a global university. 

Their suffering is not abstract; it is profoundly personal. Their dignity is not a political talking point; it is a fundamental, God-given reality. For each of you touched by this reality, my hope is that you feel seen, heard, and cared for in our faith-based community. 

With the looming surge in ICE and potential national guard deployment in Chicago, we must also now focus on how we help the members of our community stay safe. The letter we sent out yesterday to the community details the resources that are available, and I urge you all to read through them. Our administration is engaged with elected leadership in our state, and we are actively voicing our concerns to them.  I hope knowledge of the information we sent out will help support our community, and I ask you to make sure our students are aware of it. 

Pope Leo recently reminded us, "humanity cries out and pleads for peace," and it is a cry that "demands responsibility and reason." 

So, what can we do? We are not heads of state. We are not rulers of nations. We are not arbiters of war. 

Thankfully, the Pope offers us a path for that as well. He has said, "It is always possible to meet, even in a time of division, bombs, and war." He calls on each of us to "create opportunities to do so." Pope Leo has stated that if we "…disarm our words [,] we will help to disarm the world." 

St. Vincent is our model here, too. One of his greatest challenges was striving to balance action and the issues of his time against Christian charity and care for all — all while mediating the volatile intersection of religion, politics, and social turbulence. ​

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Sound familiar? 

We must ensure that our campus remains a place of respect and belonging — even if the world is not. 

This means we must care for the human suffering throughout the world. As an example, we must care deeply about the hunger, devastation, and tragedy in Gaza. At the same time, we must call for the return of Israeli hostages and understand the antisemitism and fear that many of our Israeli and Jewish community members experience, especially since October 7, 2023. 

If we are following St. Vincent’s example — we must engage with each other and find specific ways to assist those who are affected. I am proud of the Displaced Student Initiative program that we created, which is evidence of actual support that we can make a difference in the lives of those who are suffering. 

Our new reality must be met with a clarity in our approaches. While we will live with differences and with dissent, we must act with steadfast devotion to serving the poor and marginalized. And we must also respect the policy guidelines that exist to ensure that everyone at DePaul, including those whose identities are rooted in lands far from our campus, can find their path.

I am proud of the fact that our community is a diverse tapestry of backgrounds, faiths, and perspectives. Our responsibility is not to force conformity, but to ensure that in our pursuit of excellence, every member of our community can fulfill their God-given potential — so that they, in turn, can serve a world in desperate need of their gifts.

This moment also questions the intrinsic value of thought and intellectual discovery. In turn, the avenues for accessing opportunity through educational exploration are narrowing. For many of you, it seeks to erase your intellectual pursuits and personal history. I see and understand the anxiety and fear this causes. 

We do our work because of our mission, and we do our work for everyone: meeting them where they are and tailored to what they need. We are part of a faith tradition that is more than 400 years old. Our approach to education is steadfast.  

I say all of this, because I want you to know that these thoughts guide my actions as president here. My faith requires me to connect to these words — to have them present in the room when we think about how to balance the heart, the head, and the wallet. But these words have actions associated with them — ones that I hope will provide some comfort for you, as well as clarity for our path forward this year. 

Here are a few ways we are already balancing the heart, the head, and the wallet:

With these mechanisms in place for growth, we will:

In these challenging times, our commitment to academic freedom is vital. Our role is not to avoid difficult conversations, but to create the space where the academic expression in all our research informs the world conditions that we are experiencing. 

How do we do this? The good news, it’s already happening all around us at DePaul.

One year ago, we launched the Dialogue Collaborative to carry forward St. Vincent’s mission of building bridges and fostering mutual belonging. In only one academic year, the collaborative has made tremendous strides to create a culture where free expression is met with openness to understanding and shared meaning. 

To date, nearly 60 faculty and staff members have completed the Dialogue in Action certificate program. In addition, 40 student leaders have completed the Bridgebuilding Fellowship, developing skills to cultivate connection and relationship building across different faiths and ideologies.

I would like to take a moment to recognize the Dialogue Collaborative — current and past steering committee members, graduates of the Dialogue in Action Certificate, and anyone who has participated in a dialogue session or event. Let’s give them all a big round of applause. 

The Dialogue Collaborative represents one of eight university-wide initiatives in our new strategic plan, which I’m pleased to report has been officially approved by the Board of Trustees and will be ready to launch in the coming days.  

Already, you can see our strategic plan taking shape through the Dialogue Collaborative. You see it in our technology transformation — our new student/faculty/staff portal and public- ​​facing website that will launch in the coming months. And we will soon launch the most ambitious capital campaign in DePaul’s history. 

This plan arrives at a defining moment. While many universities are scaling back, DePaul is choosing a different path: one of growth, innovation, confidence in our abilities, and reliance on our faith-based mission. That is the Vincentian way — to meet challenge with courage and to respond to need with boldness. 

Here’s my ask of you: believe and participate. 

I want you to believe that we can live through these challenges. I want you to believe that we can be the first university in the country to address both the contemporary hardships and achieve real progress. I charge you to be present in the conversations, task forces, and working groups. Your voice matters, and it will shape the path we decide to travel in the future. 

We need to do this — because we matter. DePaul is an anchor institution for the city of Chicago. We are responsible for the education of some 22,000 people a year. We have produced more than 225,000 alumni. 

Each year, our university generates more than $1 billion in economic impact and supports nearly 12,000 jobs. For every federal dollar we receive, the return to society is more than fourfold.

These numbers tell a story: investing in DePaul is investing in the future of our students, our region, and our nation. 

Thank you for the work you do every day to live our mission. I look forward to the year ahead — as together, we design DePaul’s future, and in doing so, shape the future of higher education and our society.