Building a Community
When a commuter school grows up
Feature article from the Fall 2020 issue of Sacred Heart University Magazine
By Melissa Ezarik
When Jim Kraemer was considering his college options, the schools typically pushed forward by the guidance counselor in his elite, Catholic prep school on Long Island were the ones you’d expect. Jim was looking for something different. He didn’t want to get swallowed up by a large institution or be bound by everyone else’s expectations. He wanted to chart his own course. He wanted a small school where he would be “sort of a big fish in a small pond,” he says.
He got what he was after. The small pond Kraemer found was a school with a campus of just four buildings. The dining hall was still under construction, so he started freshman year eating meals inside a tent. The main building was quite obviously a repurposed 1950s high school and, with no on-campus residence halls, Jim’s first college address was an apartment building down the street. The year was 1991. The school was Sacred Heart University.
At the time, Michael Kinney was on the Board of Trustees. When Kinney himself graduated from SHU in 1972, the all-commuter student body sat at 1,000. Now, in 2020, Kinney is retiring as the vice president of finance and administration of SHU with an incoming freshman class of 1,700 and a campus that is home to 3,100 residents.
Building a Residence Life
When Kraemer settled in as a freshman in ’91, administrators were busy planning on-campus housing and a true residential community. “I literally saw the parking lot become the first on-campus dorm,” Kraemer says. Sophomore year, he moved on campus and became a resident assistant, living in a dorm built behind the Jewish Senior Services property.
“The mixture of residential students with commuter students was definitely odd,” Kraemer says. “There were people you saw during the day, and they did go home. But then you also had the people you were living with.” He remembers hosting comedy nights and game shows at Chubby’s Pub, attached to the dining hall. He became the first chairperson of the newly formed Council of Clubs and Organizations, then class treasurer and finally student government president.
Speaking at an open house, Kraemer told a packed auditorium of incoming students that the college experience is what you make of it. “It’s not just about classes,” he said. “You’ve got to get involved.” In Kraemer’s day, the student activities director walked the hallways, literally pulling students aside to pitch joining a club or other organization. Today that pitch is a more formal overview of options—everything from 60 student-run clubs and organizations to the 27 intercollegiate club sports—presented as part of an eight-week first-year experience course.
Not long after Kraemer graduated and moved back to Long Island to commute to a banking job in New York, Larry Wielk was interviewing for Sacred Heart’s dean of students role. “I grew up in the Bridgeport area,” Wielk says, “and when I went for my interview my perception was still of a small, somewhat commuter Catholic college.” That reality had passed.
Wielk joined the University soon after its football team had launched. Although the existing basketball team was, as he says, “a Division II powerhouse,” he notes that fall was “kind of sleepy on the weekends, and football energized the campus.”
In evolving to a Division I athletics school, SHU was suddenly “on the map outside of the Connecticut area. We expanded our reach for students. And along with that, we kept building residence halls,” Wielk says.
“Having students on campus is extremely important,” Kinney says. “It’s what gives you your community.”
Academic growth also helped. The physical therapy program, for example, earned a reputation nationally and aided in attracting more and better students. Professional degree offerings in the health sciences, business and computer sciences also caught the eye of prospects.
Expanding Outward
SHU’s reputation may have been growing, but its 56-acre landlocked campus presented a bigger challenge. “We had discussions with everyone who owned a building around here,” Kinney says.
In every direction, the footprint of the campus needed to expand. And at every step, community and purpose had to go hand in hand.
In 2015, the Martire Business & Communications Center opened, and its sunken center hall, dining and lounge spaces bustle on both weekdays and weekends. That same year, Sacred Heart purchased Great River Golf Course in Milford, with facilities engaged for everything from orientation leader appreciation dinners to fundraising events and Parents’ Weekend “Nine and Dines.”
Then in 2016, the nearly 16-acre Jewish Senior Services property became available, paving the way to develop a fully-fledged Upper Quad. “Never—ever—in our wildest dreams did we really think we’d be able to have that space,” Wielk says. “We had to have it.”
Also in 2016, the University made headlines with the purchase of General Electric’s three-building campus. Now called West Campus, the 66-acre property is a hotbed of innovation, home to the IDEA lab for product prototyping, an artificial intelligence lab, a finance lab, a student incubator space and iHub, a coworking space created through a Verizon partnership.
The following year, 2017, saw the opening of the Center for Healthcare Education, a state-of-the-art facility a little farther down the road at 4000 Park Avenue, blurring the line between classrooms and clinics and immersing students into their professions from the very start of their studies. In addition to cultivating a real sense of community among the health-care disciplines, the building is also home to Balanced Kitchen, another of the school’s dining facilities, purposefully dedicated to healthy and sustainable food options.
Expanding Inward
“In total, in the last 10 years we have committed to spend in excess of approximately $700 million,” says Kinney, noting the added feat that Sacred Heart has managed its own financing.
At no point, however, has that growth outpaced its growing sense of community. In Kinney’s 15 years at Sacred Heart, he says the overall goal was this: “to upgrade ourselves, both academically and with student life.”
For example, “Linda’s”—the Linda E. McMahon Commons—features dining and entertainment facilities, a career center and a new campus store. Its dining facilities, one of seven now across campus with an eighth set to come in 2021 on the Upper Quad, are a long way from what the initial residents had and just one more indication of how vibrant the on-campus community now is.
Another tour stopper is the Bobby Valentine Health & Recreation Center that opened just last year. Beyond the eye-catching climbing wall and the lower level’s bowling alley, all corners of the rec center are busy seven days a week. That’s especially the case in the evenings and early mornings when its gym gets used for pickup games and intramural sports.
The need for a stand-alone chapel at this Catholic institution was answered early on in the transition, more than a decade ago. Today, alumni weddings there are common. “I’m sure back in the commuter days, there were tons of folks getting married,” Wielk says, “but it’s kind of neat to see the kid from Massachusetts marrying the girl from New Hampshire on campus.”
Campus activity is evident at all times of day and night. Wielk looks to get at least 90% of freshmen involved in a sport or activity. Performing arts programs have close to 900 students involved today, and participation in fraternity and sorority life was more than 1,800 in 2019‒20.
All of it has contributed to a campus community that engenders a sense of collegiality, says Pamela Pillo, executive director of undergraduate admissions and a 2007 graduate of the University. Furthermore, out of that strong sense of community grows a strong sense of responsibility. Volunteerism plays a huge part in the SHU experience, with students giving their time and talents to local schools, senior centers, soup kitchens and other nonprofits, Pillo says. There’s even a whole department focused on community service and volunteering.
My, Oh My, How We’ve Grown
Still, there is perhaps no better physical expression of how the University has grown than the Upper Quad. The two residences already open—Frassati (named for the Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, the Italian social activist who died in service of the poor at a young age and remains an inspiration to students worldwide) and Wiesel (after Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Prize-winning Holocaust survivor and activist, in appreciation of the Jewish community that was so long the University’s neighbor on the property)—are nothing short of breathtaking. With vaulted ceilings and high stone arches more reminiscent of Hogwarts than Park Avenue, the dormitories were the first pick of every rising sophomore, as well as a surprisingly high number of juniors and seniors, when the residence lottery opened in the spring. Two more as-yet-unnamed halls are scheduled to receive students in January 2021, and a third, housing the campus’s eighth dining facility, is slated to open the following August. “During move-in [to Frassati and Wiesel],” Wielk recalls, “I can’t tell you how many parents asked me if they could live there.”
The growth of the recruitment reach is evident in Wielk’s own travels. “My wife is from the Jersey Shore, and we go visit family and friends,” he says. In the years just after joining the University, Wielk remembers that people seemed confused and couldn’t place the school. Over time, he started to hear, “You’re the guy who works at Sacred Heart? My nephew is applying there.”
Now? “We go down there and see alums.”
And when alumni visit campus, “they’re just in awe,” Pillo says. “We have a picture in one of the offices that has a view of the way it looked when I was a student here. There were no buildings, just a walkway down the hill,” she says. “That is completely different now.”
Even during this year’s coronavirus closures, the campus remained alive with hundreds of construction workers keeping project schedules on track, Kinney says. Now—even after retiring, and more than 50 years since first coming to SHU as an undergraduate—Kinney is still on campus in a consulting role. Sacred Heart, it would seem, can be a hard place to leave.
As for Kraemer, he last visited a few years ago for Homecoming. “It was a complete transformation from when I was there,” he recalls. “And when I was there it was great. I walked around and wished I could do it all over again.”
Perhaps that’s because, even with all the changes, the campus experience is in many ways the same as it ever was. “We’ve evolved in size, but we still maintain that personalized experience that attracted so many of us in my days and before,” Pillo says. “That’s where we are grounded.”