On November 21st 2025, The Record’s Managing Editor, Dominic Wilkinson, sat down with Mount St. Mary’s University President Gerard J. Joyce to discuss his first year at the Mount.
Our magazine’s namesake, Orestes Brownson, a voluminous 19th century writer who commented on politics, religion, and culture, visited this university in the 19th century and fell in love with this hallowed ground. What will a visitor of today fall in love with when they see this university?
I’ve been here almost sixteen months now and when you come from an environment that you’ve been part of for 33 years, my biggest fear was “how am I going to feel remotely close to the way I feel about my alma mater (Mount DeSales) that I’ve worked at for so long?” I use this in the purest sense, you could enjoy a view, you could stand at the top of the Grotto and look down, but that doesn’t do it for you. It has to have human interaction in order to infuse meaning to that. It is everyone here who has made me fall in love with this place.
When I say this is a sacred mountain, you have to be a part of it in order to truly appreciate it. I think when people come here it’s the combination of its location and the interaction with people and how that fills their heart. It is one thing to know something; it is another thing to love something. When you can feel it in your heart, it then becomes extremely personal and it becomes easier to be a part of and really difficult to move away from.
There is something larger going on here because it is coming through the people that are a part of this. It’s not just coming, I don’t stand here and all of a sudden it feels this way, it was those reactions and the reflection through this beautiful setting that actually brings it to life. When I say to you “I’ve fallen in love with this place,” it’s something I never expected, it’s a feeling I could have never thought I’d want to get to, but what I have is so delicate and special to me that I keep it very close to me because I want it to last forever.
With the humanities and the liberal arts, we speak so much about human connection. Could you tell the Record how we foster this human connection at the Mount?
For me, the human connection starts with the unfiltered acceptance and noticing of the dignity of the human person. We have to believe that every person who is made in the image and likeness of God and has the intrinsic God-given right to have recognition of their human dignity. The human interaction piece is what, in my opinion, fuses the mind and the soul, and the body, to a certain extent. The humanities and this core curriculum we have play a huge role in developing students.
When you come in at 18 years old, your mind is still developing. You are not an adult; you are a young adult. If you are joining your life with the life of Mount St. Mary’s University or Seminary, we are going to walk with you on that developmental journey, and the heart of that is exposing you to the humanities, making you a person that can go out into society and be able to write, speak, present, and have a good core knowledge base in a variety of topics of history and art. It’s a requirement for a degree, but in my opinion, it’s a requirement for life.
I’m striving to see how the core and humanities lift up every discipline here, and how the discipline lifts up the core, how they work together and not independently. I think your major is what gets you through the door when you go into the work world and your vocation, but the core and humanities are what makes you distinct.
In the Mount’s core curriculum, students learn of the phrase, “City on a Hill”, to be a beacon of virtue. How can the Mount be a “City on a Hill” for other universities to model themselves after?
I want to make sure others understand we are humble. We should be proud of who we are, but we don’t think we’re the best. I do believe, when you say “beacon of virtue,” I would replace that with “one of one.” I’m trying to explain and to share with people, understanding they’re never going to find another school like this. We’re the only university that has the largest Catholic seminary in the country and the National Shrine Grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes.
When I arrived, I thought they were operating a little independent of each other. My vision is to see what the synergies are between the two without any of the entities losing their core purpose. I think that you could replace that “beacon of virtue” with “one of one” because we do things differently.
We have some street credit; we’ve been around for 217 years. We’re not new, but we also know that we’re not perfect. I still think that at the end of the day the fact that I’ve been asked to help in this evolution and this next phase of leadership humbling me and I’m fortunate to do that.
In your time as president, this university has undergone great attempts to improve its Catholic standing. However, many have noted the disconnect between the athletic and academic departments with the university’s revitalized Catholic mission. How can we marry these departments and promote a greater Catholic Mount?
In our strategic plan, there were two non-negotiables when I put the committee together, the first being that it can’t be longer then a three-year plan. Higher ed changes too rapidly and we have to be able to pivot. The second, you’re going to see four goals in there. You’re not going to see a goal under mission because mission has to be the foundation of every goal. Visually, the base of the mountain is mission, the slope is the goals, and the peak is how we communicate this out. Every decision that we make has to be looked at through a Catholic lens.
I’m exploring the possibility of starting a nursing program in the next few years. My first thought on that is any medical program here will have a medical ethicist as part of developing the program and delivering the medical ethics piece. I’m taking the Catholic identity and things that are important to us like medical ethics and business ethics. As we develop these programs, I’m taking pieces of the humanities and making it part of it from its inception, rather than trying to fit it in over top. I think that’s going to make us pretty unique as an institution with deliberate health care programs, but it’s from a Catholic perspective.
What is your vision of a Mount St. Mary’s University graduate?
In my presentation to prospective students, I say “there is no ideal Mount student.” I talk about the fact that every student in the room brings their own talents, gifts, backgrounds; all the good things that contribute to who they are as a person. On the back end of graduation, I do believe there is an ideal Mount graduate. That is someone who leaves here thinking, “of all the schools I could have gone to, I made the best choice possible.” They go out into the world and bring the Mount with them. Because of who they are, and we as a village help them in their development, that’s putting into society the notion that this place puts something special in their graduates. It’s easy to say “what we do and how we do it.” The hardest piece is “what does it mean?” The meaning is when they go out into society and how they represent themselves and Mount St. Mary’s University.
