Photograph of Dr. Smarrelli courtesy Christian Brothers University.
Throughout his 10 years at the helm, Dr. John Smarrelli has worked to give the students at Christian Brothers University the best possible platform for success. Set to step down at the end of this spring semester, Smarrelli can look back on his tenure, having boosted the university’s profile and extended a helping hand to the larger Memphis community.
MM: You’ve been at the helm of CBU for 10 years. Having made the decision to step down, how does it feel as you walk around the campus and interact with students?
Dr. Smarrelli: It’s a really mixed emotion, let’s put it that way. I’m very fortunate that through the course of my presidency two of my children got married and they’ve had children. So I’m now a grandfather of five individuals. One of my positives is I’m looking forward to being more of a grandfather than I had been, just because this job does not allow you to do that. One of the sadder emotions is the fact that I really love the students. For me, a day without the students is a day that I miss. So what I’m going to miss probably the most in terms of that emotion is just the regular sort of contact with students and just being there with them and part of this amazing journey that happens at CBU.
Are you going to dive straight into a vacation after your last day or do you have any immediate plans?
I’m not a great vacationer. I like to do things, so we’ll see. I’ll probably want to get away for a little bit of time, but right now we’re searching for my successor. I want to make sure I’m available for enough time to help that individual transition to Memphis.
What advice would you like to impart to your successor?
What attracted me most to CBU and to Memphis was that it was an opportunity to take a great university and ask how we can impact the community? So really, my advice to whoever comes in would be to make sure you continue to make CBU a significant player in this community and a catalyst for change, because we’ve got a situation where 85 percent of our graduate students stay in Memphis.
Another important concern is to just continue with the mission. At CBU, you meet the students where they are, and then you take them to levels that they never thought were possible. We’ve got an amazing faculty who really are there to walk with the students along this pathway.
Do you plan to be involved in the school after you leave?
It’s an option because I am a tenured professor in biology. The thing I’ve discovered about teaching versus administration is that as a teacher at a university like ours, you get to know the students in a real deep way. You get to know what their path is, what their stumbling blocks are, what their concerns are. As an administrator, you affect the lives of a lot more students but in a much more broader, horizontal way.
You’ve worked to get a few high school projects off the ground recently. What is your involvement with these programs?
The first is Crosstown High, and I was really excited that CBU was involved early on in that project. We said, ‘Let’s throw out the old high school desk-and-chair model and create a project-based learning opportunity for our students.’ The first year we brought in around 150 students. This year we’ll bring in another 150. A national organization called XQ saw us as a real player in innovative higher education, and they’ve been giving us significant dollars to make this all happen in a very amazing way. What we’re trying to do here is get the students integrated in the Crosstown building itself.
The second project we are involved in is with the Catholic Diocese. We’re in the process of beginning to take six of the closed Jubilee schools and create a pre-k-12 continuum of charter schools. I’m optimistic we’ll get that going this fall, but again, there’s still some hurdles to be done, so we can’t take credit until we open the doors and children come in, but it could affect the lives of 1,300 or 1,400 students.
When you were selected as president of CBU, you became the first person to hold that position who wasn’t a brother. Did that provide any extra challenges when stepping into the role?
The brothers themselves have been really great. They were welcoming from the beginning because there’s a little phrase from our founder, John Baptist de La Salle, about working “together and by association.” So our founder knew that by association, lay people have got to be involved in teaching.
What I had to do was convince the alumni that we hadn’t lost anything. But I was in fact more committed because I’ve got to every day prove that I believe in the mission of the organization. When you’ve got a collar you don’t have to work as hard to prove the mission because you’re living it, especially with the brothers, who are just really great people. I think we’ve done a great job of showing that a lay person can operate the mission as well as a brother at this point in time.
What do you want to take away from your time at CBU?
For me, it’s not about the buildings. It’s about the culture that you’ve changed. If you feel like you’ve sustainably changed the culture, then you feel good about that. The other piece is small schools like ours, there are also financial challenges that you need to overcome. We just finished a capital campaign where we raised $50 million; we were able to build the Rosa Deal School of Arts and our business school, and we had a few other projects. We really had to work hard to make those happen, but really what I want folks to recognize is that every day, it’s been for the students.
You even faced political backlash to do what you thought was best for your students. How did CBU’s scholarship program for DACA students come about?
There’s a growing population of Latino students in the community who are undocumented, and the issue was how they would afford a college education. They’re academically and intellectually qualified to get into CBU and do well, but the key is they can’t qualify for any state or federal support. We wanted to get them into school, but the question was: how do we make that happen?
An anonymous local foundation partnered with us, and we’re very fortunate to have received significant dollars from them. Our first year we brought in 25 undocumented students, and at the end of that first year 24 were still here.
I went back to the donor and said, “You got more money? I got more students for you.” Eventually, an organization called TheDream.US came down here to look at the program, and we also had the secretary of education visit. We were invited to the White House and I got to meet former President Obama, and it was amazing. I was like a kid in a candy store.
What wound up happening is TheDream.US said they would partner with the local foundation to bring more students here. It’s been a fun project, and one that a lot of people criticized us for, claiming we were giving away money. We really weren’t because I got all the money through fundraising; and even many of the students we bring in have to pay a small amount for their own tuition.
When I saw the first group of these kids, I literally had tears in my eyes seeing how successful they were, just how they integrated into our climate and just seeing the interactions with them and some of the more traditional students.
You’ve got to do what’s right and what’s mission-driven, and for me this was the mission-driven piece that I thought was important for me to do.
