Since the 2019 Examen, SCU has navigated leadership transitions—including appointing its first lay president—and the COVID-19 pandemic. Significant structural milestones include:
Establishing the Division of Mission and Ministry and the Division of Inclusive Excellence at the VP level.
Appointing dedicated Mission Officers within the schools of Arts and Sciences, Engineering, and Law.
Strong community alignment with values of cura personalis, environmental justice (Laudato Si’), and social reconciliation.
Process
The Mission Priority Examen (MPE) was a broad and inclusive process:
Diverse Stakeholder Representation The outreach was not limited to internal staff. It explicitly included faculty, staff, students, administration, trustees, alumni, the Jesuit community, and even parents and "friends of the University." This ensures the mission is evaluated from both an internal operational perspective and an external community perspective.
Massive Quantitative Reach To ensure the findings weren't just based on a small vocal minority, the university integrated data from 7,269 individual responses through a combination of the campus climate survey (3,450), the graduating senior exit survey (3,286), and a dedicated mission survey (133), plus an open email address for unsolicited feedback.
Qualitative Depth via Live Sessions Beyond surveys, the university conducted 27 distinct listening sessions during Spring 2025. This allowed 416 participants to provide nuanced, "communal and individual" feedback on sensitive topics like where the mission feels "absent or unseen."
Iterative "Talkback" Validation The process included a built-in feedback loop. In Fall 2025, the university held nine "talkback" sessions with 200 participants to present initial findings. This step allowed the community to refine and "own" the proposed priorities before they were finalized, ensuring the end result was not a top-down mandate but a shared vision.
Mission Priority 1
Promote Greater Depth in Living our Mission
Our first mission priority aims to promote opportunities for greater depth of engagement with our Ignatian mission and guiding values, and with their roots in our Jesuit, Catholic traditions and identity.
Consistently name and celebrate SCU’s key Jesuit values.
Seek to offer the possibility for deeper exploration of spirituality and faith, across traditions and backgrounds, with a special focus on Ignatian, Jesuit, and Catholic approaches.
In doing so, we will seek to engage our members of our community where they are. This will involve giving special attention to the large number (a majority) of members of our community who come with diverse faith backgrounds, or increasingly, with no organized faith background.
Commit time and resources to accompanying students who come to us with significant faith commitments to deepen their living of those faiths.
Formation programs, already well developed for newly arriving students, faculty, and staff, will be expanded to accompany each community member’s progression across their time at Santa Clara.
Explore ways to recognize and celebrate the living of mission by faculty and staff, and we will draw on these leaders ever more fully to support mission animation across the university.
Create a standing cross-university committee on Mission, led by the vice president for mission and ministry and with members from each of the schools and other units, to regularly share ideas and to function as an ongoing “mini-examen” body for our living of our mission.
A reimagination of Campus Ministry into what might be called a Center for Spirituality and Faith.
Execute on opportunities for synergies and collaborative ministry and formation through the relocation and integration of the Jesuit School of Theology, currently located in Berkeley, to the Mission Campus.
Advance Institutional Commitments that Reflect our Mission
Our second mission priority seeks to build on our strategic plan’s institutional commitments to advance the ways our community feels included in the living of our mission in the concrete circumstances of their lives.
A concerted effort to address the financial realities of Silicon Valley through attention to wages, salaries, and the housing market, and an aspiration toward full-need scholarships for our undergraduate students and meaningful support for our graduate students.
Break down siloes and significantly increase the means by which members of our community directly come into contact with our worldwide Jesuit family and its distinct educational mission. This includes expanding our global connections to the Jesuit network of colleges and universities; a university-wide working group led by the Provost and Vice President for Mission and Ministry has already begun work and is in the process of presenting concrete proposals to the university. This project aims to move the share of our undergraduate students with international experiences from 30% to 40%, and assure that all have global competency before graduation, and offers a series of other recommendations to internationalize our institution in a self-conscious way that is consistent with Jesuit values.
It also includes increasing our intentionally Ignatian pedagogical impact through our new Center for Teaching Excellence and through the way we pursue our core curriculum revision. And it will be fortified by the relocation and integration of the Jesuit School of Theology to the Mission Campus. Finally, it will involve special attention to graduate students, both centrally through Mission and Ministry and through specific programming in the College and schools which builds on the newly established mission officers located in each school.
As can be seen in the descriptions of our two mission priorities, we see great resonance between them and the University’s strategic plan, Impact 2030. That plan, adopted in 2023, emphasizes Ignatian and Jesuit values in its articulation of four key priorities:
Reach on a Global Scale
Solutions for the Universal Good
Opportunity for All Talented Students
Belonging for All Broncos
In addition, Impact 2030 advances a set of Foundational Commitments that align financial commitments in support of the strategic plan, emphasizing human capital and business planning investments that can sustain improvement over the long term.
As we show throughout the full report, the president, senior administration, and board of trustees are fully invested in that plan, and they have developed a means of continuously monitoring the progress toward its goals. We envision a similar monitoring process for our mission priorities, with regular oversight from the standing committee on mission integration proposed above.
