Rev. Timothy Scully, C.S.C. serves as a fellow at the University of Notre Dame as well as a member of the Board of Trustees. Since 1967, the Board of Trustees has possessed the general power of governance of the university, with certain powers reserved only for the fellows. After a prominent career at the university, Notre Dame appointed Fr. Scully to this governing board in 2000 and then made him a university fellow in 2002.
Awarded numerous awards for his excellence in teaching, Fr. Scully is a political science professor and a fellow at the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies. He is also director of the Institute for Educational Initiatives, where he oversees the Alliance for Catholic Education (ACE) and the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. ACE, which Fr. Scully founded in 1993, provides hundreds of teachers to Catholic schools in many underserved communities across the United States, as well as in Ireland and Chile.
Fr. Scully has been at the University of Notre Dame for over 30 years. After receiving a BA in economics summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame in 1976,, he went on to receive his Master of Divinity from the University of Notre Dame in 1979. He was ordained a priest to the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1981 and served his first years of priesthood in Santiago, Chile. He later earned both his MA and PhD from the University of California at Berkeley’s Political Science Department in 1985 and in 1989 respectively.
Scully served as executive vice president at Notre Dame from 2000 until 2003. During these years he was responsible for oversight of the administrative functions and units of the university, including finances, some business operations, investments, human resource activities, and information technologies.
Prior to his years of service as executive vice president, Fr. Scully served as vice president and senior associate provost at Notre Dame from 1996-2000. During this time, Fr. Scully led the efforts to expand Notre Dame Study Abroad program, which more than doubled under his auspices. As a result, the university achieved the highest percentage of students in international programs of any American research institution.
Some of his notable contributions include the establishment of the university’s Office for Students with Disabilities, the Institute for Latino Studies, Notre Dame’s Washington D.C. academic programs, and new international programs in Santiago, Chile, and Monterrey and Puebla (Mexico) among many others. Fr. Scully also serves as a fellow and trustee of the University of Notre Dame in Australia and as a member of the Trinity Foundation Board in Dublin.
Fr. Scully has been serving impoverished communities for most of his adult life. In 1979, Fr. Scully founded the Holy Cross Associates Program. This post-graduate service program offers hundreds of young volunteers the opportunity to serve the poor throughout the United States and Chile “by integrating their Christian faith through service, community living, spirituality, and simple living.”
In 2006, Fr. Scully chaired a yearlong national task force to study the future of Catholic education in the United States. The final report, entitled “Making God Known Loved and Served: The Future of Catholic Primary and Secondary Schools in the United States,” was presented by Fr. Scully to the U.S. Council of Catholic Bishops in January of 2007.
According to the Institute for Educational Initiatives, Fr. Scully is now in the midst of launching 12 new initiatives outlined in the report, all of which are aimed at sustaining and strengthening Catholic schools nationwide.His writings reflect his focus on comparative political institutions, especially political parties, and include the following: Rethinking the Center: Party Politics in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Chile (Stanford, 1992); a coauthored volume on parties and party systems in 12 countries called Building Democratic Institutions: Party Systems in Latin America (Stanford, 1995); a coauthored volume on Christian democracy entitled Christian Democracy in Latin America: Electoral Competition and Regime Conflicts (Stanford, 2003); and a coauthored volume on the family in Chile entitled El Eslabon Perdido: familia y bienestar en Chile (Santiago: TAURUS Publishers, 2006).
Fr. Scully asked not to be quoted on his comments regarding his role as a trustee or the mission of the university and its role in the formation of students.
Senior Elliott Argue of Lyons Hall is taking a double major in philosophy and theology. She can be reached at eargue@nd.edu.
