Hurley set to be a game-changer at Canisius
John J. Hurley was at an alumni reception when asked what he would want if granted three wishes for Canisius College.
"Instant name recognition, a $400 million endowment and a 6-foot-10 center who can shoot," Hurley quipped. "I'll take it from there."
Hurley, who will take over as Canisius president next year, was sort of joking, but it's clear that his agenda is to move Canisius up the ranks of the higher-education hierarchy.
The Rev. Vincent M. Cooke, who retires as president in July, charted a course for making the Jesuit institution one of the top colleges of its stature in the Northeast.
Now, Hurley will try to pick up where his mentor left off.
It will take more money, more students, more academic prowess and certainly more name recognition outside the Buffalo region — all at the top of Hurley's to-do list.
"I look at Villanova in Philadelphia, a Loyola University in Maryland, a Dayton or Xavier in Ohio, a Creighton in Nebraska," Hurley said. "Those are schools I would like to see Canisius be like. We're not there. We still have a long way to go."
It was no surprise last week when the board of trustees named Hurley the 24th president and the first lay leader in the college's 140-year history.
Cooke took the largest private school in Western New York to new heights during his 17-year career, raising a record amount of donations and building up the Main Street campus with $140 million in capital projects.
Facing up to critics
But Hurley — a lawyer who returned to his alma mater in 1997 as a top administrator — was usually somewhere in the background. He served as general counsel, chief fundraiser and head of college and alumni relations. His fingerprints are all over the campus.
"He was an integral part of the great success of Canisius College over the past decade," said former Buffalo Mayor Anthony M. Masiello, a Canisius alumnus. "He and Father Cooke were a great one-two punch."
In fact, Hurley long has been rumored as Cooke's successor, fueling some of the bitterness on campus and feelings that the board's presidential search was rigged.
But facing up to his critics may have helped Hurley. It forced him to crystallize and articulate his vision for Canisius during his interviews and meetings with members of the campus, many of whom knew him as only the guy who raises the money.
"John got a workout," said the Rev. Michael F. Tunney, a professor of fine arts who headed the search committee. "It was a challenge for him as the internal candidate, with all these stories going on, but I think he became a better candidate through the process."
For many, the process confirmed that Hurley was the right candidate for the job.
"We thought — and the board was unanimous on this — that John had the best vision for the future of the college, a vision that was reasonable and could be executed," said Catherine M. Burzik, a 1972 graduate from San Antonio, who serves as chairwoman of the board of trustees.
"They need someone who can hit the ground running," said Masiello, a former Canisius basketball star, who serves on the Canisius board. "He knows the community, he knows the alumni, and he knows where the college has to go."
Hurley, 53, is a Buffalo guy.
He's from a family of nine children, including six boys who all went to Canisius. As a freshman, Hurley was pretty sure he wanted to be a lawyer and, after graduating in 1978, won a fellowship to the University of Notre Dame, where he earned his law degree in 1981.
For 16 years, Hurley practiced law — secured lending, bankruptcy, acquisitions of troubled companies — most of that time while at the firm Phillips Lytle in Buffalo, before he accepted Cooke's offer to join Canisius.
He and his wife, Maureen, have two children in college and one in eighth grade. He tries to bike at least 20 miles before work, skis during the winter, likes to cook, has Bills season tickets and bleeds Canisius blue and gold.
"He loves that school," said his oldest brother, Paul, who is president of Trocaire College in South Buffalo. "Before he even worked there, he was president of the alumni. I remember taking him to their basketball games when he was a kid."
Brings a different style
In some respects, Hurley will be similar to Cooke as president, because of what he learned under his tutelage.
Cooke lets the people he puts in charge do their job, Hurley said. And if problems arise, he said, Cooke doesn't overreact, takes a deep breath and realizes things aren't as bad as they may seem.
But in other ways, Hurley will have quite a different style.
"I'm probably more informal," Hurley said. "I will probably see more direct interaction with the people on the campus and in the community."
He also intends to offer more help to Buffalo as a whole.
"I think Canisius has a great reputation, but I often thought that we could be doing more for the community," Hurley said.
While Canisius wanted some continuity, a smooth transition after Cooke's departure, Burzik doesn't expect Hurley to be more of the same — he can't be.
"I think the challenges John faces are going to be different from challenges faced by Father Cooke," Burzik said.
For one, Hurley is acutely aware of concerns about a lay presidency, a distinction understood by his brother Paul, the first lay president at Trocaire.
The two brothers often discuss the tension over what Catholic colleges should and shouldn't be doing, and how schools can maintain their Catholic identity as the presence of religious men and women on campus fades.
"He's deeply involved in the Catholic tradition," Paul Hurley said. "He's done a lot of reading on the Jesuit and Catholic tradition of the college and can articulate it very well."
Maybe Hurley's biggest challenge will be the drop in the number of traditional college-age students projected over the next several years nationwide, a demographic trend that is expected be more severe locally.
Canisius will need to become more recognizable outside Western New York, so it can compete for students elsewhere and gradually grow by 1,000 undergraduates, as Hurley envisions.
Setting priorities
The college has 3,200 undergraduates and 1,500 graduate students. It is ranked 21st in the Northeast by U.S. News & World Report magazine among colleges that have a range of undergraduate degrees and some master's programs, a list that includes the likes of Villanova University, Providence College, and Rochester Institute of Technology.
"Not enough people have heard of us," Hurley said, "and that's one thing I'm going to work on."
Raising the bar for Canisius won't come cheaply. Hurley wants to beef up the college's endowment, money that could be used for scholarships and boosting academic programs.
Campus critics have complained that the college has spent too much time on building projects and not enough on building up the size and quality of its faculty.
To which Hurley responds: "That's got to be a priority."
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