II. Institutional Appropriateness

As the oldest diocesan university in the country, Seton Hall has already formed and educated thousands of students, including parish priests and vowed religious and lay leaders over our long history. For nearly a century and a half, we have trained church leaders for the State of New Jersey, and beyond. We wholeheartedly respond to the Lilly implementation proposal because of our hope-filled vision for the future. Preparing, even now, for our sesquicentennial in 2006, we believe that exploring the nexus of faith and formation, of calling and career, of mission and ministry will help us move from being a 'regional treasure' to a 'national resource' (Choosing the Right College, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2001).

As a Catholic university, we recognize that not only persons but institutions also have a vocation. The patroness of our University, Elizabeth Ann Seton, stands as a model of resolute attentiveness to the Lord's call to love and service. She responded to the Lord's invitation to become, first, a wife and mother and, then, as a young widow, to become an educator who founded a Religious order of women - the Sisters of Charity - and established the largest parochial school system in the world. When her nephew, Bishop James Roosevelt Bayley, founded Seton Hall University in 1856, he envisioned this new university as 'a home for the mind, heart and spirit.'

Six years ago, the University's Board of Regents gave its approval to our President's vision for the future of Seton Hall: All the University's academic efforts will flow from its faith and justice commitments. Students, prepared ethically and professionally, sustained by a rich Catholic intellectual heritage, will be formed to be servant leaders in a global society. Carefully but resolutely, the mission to form servant leaders began to be expressed in the manifold activities of the University as these touched the lives of our students, faculty, staff, administration, regents and alumni. Our mission is informed by the One who proclaimed: 'I have come not to be served, but to serve.'

This focus on the formation of servant leaders provided significant impetus for our University to look beyond its walls to help heal the conditions of poverty and injustice that fester just outside our gates. In pursuing its own vocation of servant leadership to the communities of Newark, Orange, East Orange and Irvington, Seton Hall University tries to model the kind of leadership it hopes to form in its own students and offers its students the very opportunities they need to grow in servant leadership. The Institute for Service Learning, American Humanics, DOVE (Division of Volunteer Efforts), and other initiatives at the University already offer students opportunities to put into practice the servant leadership skills they are learning in the classroom. The Center for Public Service, the Institute on Work, and the EPICS program in the College of Education already train civic and educational leaders in selfless service and in the inherent value and dignity of whatever particular work our students pursue as their 'career.'

We did not believe that it was enough merely to proclaim our vision for forming servant leaders. We have also undertaken what we called the Bayley Project, an extensive ethics survey of our University. Over the course of four years, we examined every process, policy and practice at the University and, with an exhaustive self-evaluation which an external consultant and auditor directed, we laid a foundation for the kind of work that Lilly Endowment's generosity will make possible. One of the first fruits of the Bayley Project was the creation of a new Cabinet-level position, the Vice President for Mission and Ministry, whose responsibility it is to ensure that our mission to form servant leaders in the Catholic tradition inspires everything we do.

We are a community that values our diversity. Recently ranked Number One in the nation for its diversity by the 2003 Princeton Review, the Seton Hall University community believes strongly that the pursuit of truth that marks any great university is best undertaken when each of us sits shoulder to shoulder with women and men who are trying to understand that truth from a multiplicity of cultural and spiritual perspectives. Grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition, we also treasure the opportunities to explore the truth that exists not only outside and beyond us, but the truth that God has placed in us and between us, as well.

After almost 150 years of educating for ecclesial ministry and professional service in society, there already exists at Seton Hall University a culture that is ripe for the transformative processes that the grant from Lilly Endowment will make possible. The Lay Leadership Program in the major seminary, as well as the many graduate programs of the School of Theology, have offered education and training to hundreds of lay women and men who now minister in parochial, education, social service and archdiocesan ministry.

Seton Hall University views Lilly Endowment's invitation to engage in a faith-based exploration of vocation as a blessed and sacred opportunity - a critical kairos - to connect even more deeply with our institutional mission to form servant leaders. It is also time to reform ourselves with insights and sensitivities drawn from the Catholic tradition, most notably those that link vocation with service to the common good. And it is time to release new and bold visions and energies into our University and the world.

So convinced are we of the value of this opportunity provided by Lilly Endowment to re-ground and energize our vocations, that our University stands ready to extend this exploration of vocation and its fruits not just to our faculty and our students but to all our constituencies: our Regents, our administration, our staff, our alumni and the public community that we serve. We want a sense of vocation as service to the common good to permeate all that our University is and does.