When Marylouise Fennell joined the Sisters of Mercy, she was taught that educating others was an integral part of the order’s work. In recent years she has taken that mission to Central America, where she has been involved in projects to help develop private higher education.
A Roman Catholic nun for more than 30 years, Sister Fennell has held many jobs in education, from teacher in a parochial school to university professor to president of Carlow College, a small Catholic institution for women. Now she is working with the presidents of 17 universities in Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to develop a regional accreditation system.
Most of the institutions were established within the past 15 years, mainly to help meet the growing demand for postsecondary training.
In countries beset by political strife and poverty, the founders of the universities also were committed to the belief that educating more citizens would help reverse some of the region’s problems. Enrollment at the universities ranges from a few hundred students to 10,000.
The universities now want to be recognized as legitimate by the rest of the academic world. Helping them achieve this, Sister Fennell says, is a natural extension of her career.
“I enjoy helping people,” she says. “In a way, this project is a continuation of that. It’s an opportunity to set a foundation.”
Sister Fennell’s work with the Central American universities started in 1991, when she was asked by the Council of Independent Colleges, for which she is a consultant, to go to Honduras and help a group of college presidents form an association similar to the council. The United States Information Agency supported the project.
“Her knowledge, her personality, her understanding -- she was obviously the right choice,” says Allen P. Splete, the council’s president.
In the four years since the Association of Private Universities of Central America was established, its membership has grown from 8 institutions to 17. The group is now commonly known as AUPRICA, the initials of its name in Spanish.
Forming an association, however, was not all that the presidents of the universities had in mind. They wanted to find ways to demonstrate how their institutions were meeting standards and, in the process, to win respect and legitimacy. In the past, private colleges in the region were often little more than proprietary schools. The presidents asked Sister Fennell if she could help them obtain accreditation from an American agency.
She said No. Instead, she offered to help them establish their own accreditation system.
“You have the power and the ability to draw from your resources,” Sister Fennell told them.
“Weezie,” as she is called by her friends and colleagues, “has always empowered people,” says S. Edward Weinswig, a professor of education at the University of Hartford who worked with Sister Fennell there. “She wants them to have power.”
Sister Fennell’s belief in self-help goes back to her childhood. Neither her mother, an English Protestant, nor her father, an Irish Catholic, graduated from high school, but she says they taught her “to believe you could do whatever you wanted to.”
Sister Fennell started out like most nuns in the late 1950s. Members of her order went into either nursing or teaching. But despite what might appear to some people to be limited options, she pushed herself to reach higher goals by combining a career as an educator with a commitment to her faith.
Now she is pushing academics in Central America to make their universities better and stronger. Says Mr. Splete: “She is putting these schools on the map with standards.”
It has not been easy. “The universities face terrible conditions,” Sister Fennell says, ranging from lack of books and basic teaching supplies to, in some cases, dirt floor classrooms and no running water. Despite the conditions, Sister Fennell says she saw in those classrooms “some of the best teaching in my life.”
It reminds her of her experiences while studying early childhood development on a kibbutz in Israel in the 1970s. “I saw limited resources then, but a strong community of people,” she says. “I see the same kind of thing in Central America.”
Much of Sister Fennell’s time in Central America has been spent helping university officials assess their institutions’ weaknesses. “Libraries had to be expanded,” Sister Fennell says. “Some of them had to upgrade the quality of their faculty. They needed to add different components to their curriculum.”
The university leaders detailed their problems and set goals to correct them in self-studies that Sister Fennell designed. “They produced tons,” she says, raising her hand several inches above a table to show the size of the documents. “When I saw what I had to read in Spanish, I thought, Give up, Fennell.
“But then I saw what they had done,” she says. “They had challenged themselves beyond what I thought they would.”
In one university’s self-study, officials listed the institution’s mission as “the advancement of our people and the economic development of our country.”
The countries in the region “know they are not going to get out of the problems they’ve had unless the regular folk get educated,” she says. “They are taking all their resources -- limited as they are -- and moving forward.”
Six months ago, Sister Fennell selected the first three universities to begin the formal accreditation process: Adventist University of Central America, a Costa Rican institution with 380 students; Catholic University of the West, a 940-student institution in El Salvador; and Pan-American Agriculture School, a Honduran university with 710 students.
The association of Central American universities recruited and selected candidates to serve on the first accrediting team, and in February, Sister Fennell returned to teach its members how to conduct site visits. “Everything came together,” she says. “It was great.”
It will be another five to eight years before the accreditation process is final for all of the universities in the association. In the meantime, Sister Fennell wants to develop more links between the private universities in Central America and institutions in the United States.
This effort has been slower to evolve, largely because of the lack of knowledge about Central America in the United States, says Sister Fennell.
She says she sometimes has been taken aback by the reactions even of fellow educators to her descriptions of her Central America projects. “These are bright people,” she says, “and they don’t know where Central America is.”
People in the United States -- academics as well as the general public -- need to know about these countries, Sister Fennell says. “Central America is moving ahead in education.”
Faculty members of U.S. institutions need to educate their students about the region’s geography, cultures, and politics, she says, and university leaders must develop more links with Central American institutions.
In today’s world, U.S. students need a knowledge of all countries, Sister Fennell says. In particular, they must learn about Central and South America because of the increasing importance of Western hemispheric affairs as well as the growing Hispanic population of the United States, she says.
In a recent survey by the Council of Independent Colleges, 62 per cent of the presidents who belong to the association expressed interest in establishing exchanges with the private Central American universities.
An increasing number of U.S. academics have asked Sister Fennell about establishing links with the institutions in the accreditation project. Sister Fennell is currently planning to take seven U.S. university presidents to visit private institutions in Central America.
“She is the national expert on these universities,” says Mr. Splete. “This really has been an achievement.”
In addition to leading Carlow College for six years, Sister Fennell taught at the University of Hartford and Saint Joseph College in West Hartford, where she also served as head of the education department and assistant dean of graduate studies. The Central America project, however, has been her most satisfying experience in higher education.
“I can’t tell you how rewarding it is for me,” she says. “I don’t think I have ever done anything in my whole life in education that I’ve been so proud of.”
Many years ago, Sister Fennell’s sister and brother-in-law died, leaving behind six young children. A brother adopted the children and Sister Fennell helped raise them. She describes the joy she has felt in seeing them grow up and how special it is to come home and find a message on her answering machine from one of them.
Her experiences in Central America “are analogous to that,” she says. “It’s very human, and very great.
“When I come into my office and there’s a message from one of the presidents, I get excited because I know I can help.”
