Interviewing Marist College President Kevin Weinman: Conversations on education and the importance of studying abroad

By Alice Adams

This October, Marist College president Kevin Weinman paid a visit to the Marist Italy campus in Florence. He looks in on the programs every semester when he gets the chance, this time flying into Florence after a visit to the first-year Dublin program.

The festivities lasted two days, beginning with a group lunch for the Freshman Florence Experience (FFE) students, followed by a sizable reception in the evening for everyone in the FFE, four-year, and semester programs, and a breakfast for the four-year students the following morning. Between these, he popped his head into some of the courses taught by Marist faculty. The visit was short but sweet, with President Weinman catching up with as many students as possible. Marist Italy is looking forward to celebrating his next visit in the spring.

I nabbed a few moments of the president’s time at the Bachelor’s Degree Program breakfast to discuss his mission and future vision for the school. As mentioned in the interview, Marist 100 refers to his strategy to bolster Marist’s academic excellence by way of a student-led, globalized, community-focused approach to higher learning. The plan emphasizes the importance of many facets of teaching, one of them being the importance of studying abroad.

What is your mission as a leader in higher education?

In our strategic plan, Marist 100, we have a vision Marist will improve the world through education. It’s an ambitious mission that we have. It’s not just providing an excellent educational experience for students in and outside of the classroom, but it’s really to send them off into the world so that they can do great things in whatever it is that they choose to do. Providing students with essential skills around writing and critical thinking, the ability to construct an argument, to debate, and to make connections across disciplines so that ultimately they end up doing tricky things in the world, is really what our goal is and what my goal is as president.

Regarding the Marist 100 outline: why do you think it’s so important to foster an international education?

The world is increasingly connected, and if our students can make connections across cultures, if they’re able to understand the history of different peoples, nations, and cultures, they’re going to be able to succeed wherever they are. They’re going to be surrounded throughout their careers and lives by people who think differently. The students who are going to be the most successful in their careers and personal lives are the ones who are inquisitive, and who understand where the other person comes from and what makes them tick, what makes them think. The more our students are exposed to the world, the more they’re going to connect with others. That is one of the keys to life, knowing how to connect with others.

What excites you the most about how the Marist Italy programs fit into that vision of growth?

There is nothing like this in the world. We have about 8% of our student body right now in Florence, so a large portion of our students are here at any point in time. Having many of them here is tremendously unique, and it provides incredible learning opportunities for our students as they engage with each other, with the Marist faculty lead that we send over here every year, and the faculty at Lorenzo de’Medici, our partner institute. So it’s a rich learning environment. It’s a rich social environment. Students have a great time hanging out together in Florence and traveling across Europe on the weekends; there’s nothing like it in higher education. I’m proud to be a part of it and to help try to make it even better over time.

What do you think sets Marist apart from other schools?

It’s not only our commitment to study abroad, where we’re ranked number one amongst our peers across various programs but that we occupy this interesting space between a university and a college. In many ways, we’re a small university; we have six schools and 15 graduate programs, an accredited campus here in Florence, Division One athletics, and pre-professional programs. So we look like a university, however, we act like a small college; we give our students small class sizes, they know their faculty and their faculty know them, and there’s a hands-on feeling.

We were noted by Princeton Review as the eighth happiest college in the country, and that speaks to student happiness with that hands-on, personal touch that we provide, even within this larger setting that feels like a major university. So study abroad and the Florence program really fit into that, because it’s quite unusual for a school this size to have this kind of offering.

This interview has been edited for length and/or clarity.

Photos by Alice Adams and Conor Glesner.