CSB/SJU announce first-ever joint president

The search is over.

After nearly six decades of partnership under separate leadership, CSB/SJU has its first joint president: Brian Bruess, who was announced as the inaugural joint president on March 15.

Bruess, who currently serves as the president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wis., is set to start in his new role on July 1.

“This is a truly historic moment for our schools, and the future is so incredibly bright,” said LeAnne Stewart, chair of the CSB Board of Trustees and the SJU Board of Trustees.

The decision was met with mixed reactions from the student body, some of whom were hoping for more diverse representation in a president. Others called for their peers to give Bruess a chance to meet with students before forming their opinions.

“I feel like it’s important to have the president represent a diverse group of students because they represent us, they carry our affairs, and I just feel like they picked someone who fit the majority instead of trying to pick someone that in some ways kind of fits the minority,” SJU first-year Dee Statum said.

Bruess has been president at St. Norbert, his alma mater, since 2017. Before that, he spent 22 years at St. Catherine University, a college for women in St. Paul, where he worked in a variety of roles, including executive vice president and chief operating officer.

In his first interview with The Record on Wednesday, Bruess said he’s been admiring CSB/SJU from afar for nearly 30 years, especially the schools’ roots in Benedictine Tradition, liberal arts and existing as colleges for women and men.

“The single biggest reason that I applied [for the position] was because of my deep respect for women’s education and men’s education, and it cannot be overstated how significant that was in my decision to apply,” Bruess said. “St Ben’s and St. John’s represent one of the most compelling, unique contributions to American education, period.”

This appointment comes as a result of a monthslong process that began in August 2021 with the formation of a presidential search committee. The committee’s 21 members, with the help of a search firm, initiated a nationwide search for the new president.

Applications for the position closed in early January, and the committee whittled the candidates down to a group of finalists, who they interviewed in mid-February, before eventually unanimously selecting Bruess as the best choice for the role.

Members of the search committee signed a non-disclosure agreement prior to the search, preventing them from sharing information about the finalists and other components of the search process.

“The purpose of the closed search is to protect the privacy of the applicants and to ensure that we get the best applicants we can,” said Malik Stewart, director of the Multicultural Center. “For a sitting president to apply for jobs, it can affect their current job.”

The confidentiality of the search is a change from past presidential searches. In previous searches, such as the SJU presidential search in 2012 and CSB presidential search in 2014, the final three candidates’ names were released to the public and they visited campus to meet with the community.

When he starts as president in July, Bruess’s goal in the first few months is to listen to students and faculty, something multiple members of the search committee said he does exceptionally well.

“To have someone who can guide us in a united direction [while] still listening, still being considerate of everybody’s opinions is going to hopefully help us move into the future in a good way,” said Connor Kockler, SJU Senate President and SJU search committee student representative.

Outside of that initial stage of listening, Bruess hopes to further the schools’ work on Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Justice (DEIJ). St. Norbert’s hired its first senior diversity officer, John Miller Jr., during Bruess’s tenure in May 2021, something CSB/SJU are currently in the process of doing.

At St. Norbert’s, Miller Jr. also serves as the dean of curriculum, which was important to Bruess. For him, DEIJ work is inseparable from what is taught in the classroom, and the work falls to the whole community.

“I refuse to let that responsibility of that role be the responsibility of that person, because systemic change requires everybody helping with diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging,” Bruess said. “We’re going to hire an institutional diversity officer, and that person will be brilliant, but it’ll be part of the larger systemic approach.”

With this announcement, Bruess becomes the second male president in CSB’s history, the first being Stanly Idzerda who led the college from 1968 to 1974. This was an area of concern for many students.

“The fact that now our first combined president is a man, I feel like it’s kind of a slap in the face to the history of St. Ben’s as a women’s college,” CSB sophomore Sonja Hoversten said.

Hoversten, among others, pointed out that CSB has gone from having Mary Dana Hinton, a Black woman who led the college from 2014 to 2020, as a president to a white man. She indicated that Bruess’s appointment marks a step backward instead of forward for the institutions.

The Black Student Association shared a statement echoing this sentiment on Tuesday, acknowledging Bruess’s experience while asking the schools for an explanation of the decision.

“How did CSB go from a Black woman president to a white man? This not only amazes us, but it is frustrating,” the statement said.

Both Hoversten and Statum said that they took exception to the appointment of a white man, not to Bruess’s character or experience.

Despite these questions, members of the search committee believe they chose the right candidate for the job. They pointed to Bruess’s time at a women’s college in St. Catherine’s as well as dedication to his students as determining factors.

“I understand the concern, but at the same time I have never felt so confident in having President Bruess as the president of St. Ben’s and St. John’s,” said Crystal Diaz, CSB Senate president and CSB search committee student representative.

Faculty search committee representative Claire Haeg said she was hoping to find a diverse candidate but Bruess emerged as the top candidate.

“While all of us may have been looking for somebody who looked transformative, we do have a transformative leader,” Haeg said. “We believe we have chosen a transformative leader, somebody who will lead us forward and make the changes that need to be made.”

“He fixed a lot of problems at his prior institution. Students really loved him,” Haeg said. “He really understands a lot of the things that we’re going through, and I think [he] will be a really strong leader as we come through the next essential years.”

Interaction with students is something extremely important to Bruess. He often attends student events with his wife Carol, a professor emeritus at St. Thomas, at St. Norbert and plans to do the same at CSB/SJU.

That interaction played a significant role in his tenure at St. Norbert. After Bruess announced in fall 2019 that he would not renew his contract to stay at St. Norbert after the 2019-20 school year, students and faculty participated in protests supporting Bruess, eventually resulting in the Board of Trustees at St. Norbert offering him a multiyear contract extension.

When Bruess takes office in July, it will be a benchmark moment for the vision of stronger integration, which has been in the works since 2019, when the CSB and SJU Boards of Trustees formed a Joint Strategic Vision Committee and determined that a single president under a stronger integration model was the best way forward for both schools.

“By having one president who leads both schools, it’s going to enable us to pursue a strategic plan that is bold, that allows us to be more nimble and innovative, and will allow us to continue to differentiate ourselves in what is a competitive higher education environment,” LeAnne Stewart said. “The world is moving faster and faster every day, and we need to be able to do that at St. Ben’s and St. John’s, too.”

Malik Stewart hopes that people keep an open mind as the start of Bruess’s time as president approaches.

“I would go and encourage people to look at his track record and look at what he has done and meet him before they make a sort of a judgment about what type of leader he’s going to be for our community,” Malik Stewart said. “And then, you know, you’ve got high expectations. Hold him to those expectations.”