Eduardo Peñalver was named president of Seattle University, a Jesuit college, in 2021; he previously served as dean of Cornell University’s Law School from 2014 until 2021. Peñalver, who is 49 years old, earned his undergraduate degree from Cornell and his law degree from Yale Law School, so he possesses all the strengths that attorneys can bring to a college presidency.

Peñalver acknowledged that if you tracked the background of college presidents, the single most represented discipline would be law. “Legal education trains you for leadership, both in its focus on communicating complex ideas to a general audience, and breaking down complex problems and understanding and exploring alternatives to resolve them,” he said. In short, it boils down to “problem-solving,” he added.

He’s also an expert on property rights and co-wrote a book, Property Outlaws, published by Yale University Press.

Peñalver was the first lay person named president of Seattle University in its long, 130-year history, having replaced Father Steve. He is also the first Latino president in its history.

Being a lay person as president presents “challenges and opportunities. The challenge is to continue to help Seattle University reaffirm and express its Jesuit character and tradition,” he explains. “How we live that out and express that with leadership that isn’t Jesuit” is another question to be tackled.

He also noted that over the last 50 years, the college has been in transition. For example, its faculty, which was once predominantly Jesuit, has become much more diverse, and what remains is only a handful of Jesuit professors. What it means to be a Jesuit college when the faculty is predominantly secular, is another question to explore.

Being involved in a Jesuit college also carries numerous benefits. “If you look at our vision statement it calls on us to be innovative and progressive, both in terms of the subject matter we offer and the way we go about teaching,” he explains. “We’re in a place where innovation meets humanity; it’s the secret sauce of Jesuit education.” Students who study finance, business and technology are engaged in discussions about their values and integrity, an increasingly necessary exercise in a complex universe.

Seattle University’s graduate school in law is one of only three in Washington state (Gonzaga University and The University of Washington are the other two), and its three most popular majors include business/marketing, nursing and computer science, which lead to satisfying and well-paying careers.

Its three most popular graduate programs are in Law, Business and Nursing. But its fastest-growing graduate programs are in Business Analytics, Computer Science, and School Counseling.

Seattle University sometimes gets overlooked amidst its much larger neighbor, the University of Washington. U.S. News and World Report noted that the University of Washington enrolls 54,000 students annually compared to Seattle University’s 7,268 students, including 4,300 undergraduates, 2,210 graduate students and 750 law students. Hence Seattle University has about 15% of the University of Washington’s student body.

Proving that it attracts a diverse student body, 89% of Seattle University’s students receive some form of financial aid. In the fall of 2021, 25% of its undergraduate were from under-represented minorities - Black, Hispanic, and Native American - and 61% of its undergraduates were women.

Peñalver knows and understands the Seattle area since he’s a native of Puyallup, Washington, a city of about 42,000 residents, located 35 miles south of Seattle. His father is Cuban and was in medical residency at the University of Washington in Seattle.

When Peñalver was named president in early 2020, the pandemic was heating up and vaccinations hadn’t yet been issued. In his words, “Many people weren’t comfortable meeting face-to-face.” So how could he familiarize himself with the campus, faculty and student body, he wondered. His answer was having face-to-face meetings when people were willing and having Zoom meetings when necessary.

Now that Peñalver is engaged in his presidency, he has two clear goals in mind that he’d like to achieve. One entails building and enhancing Seattle University’s national reputation beyond the tech city’s limits. Most of its students are drawn from out west, but “we’re not as well known, east of the Mississippi, despite our 130-year history,” he notes. “We need to introduce ourselves to the country, through excellent hiring and a deliberate effort to get our people out in front of a national audience, through media engagement and innovative research,” he declares.

Secondly, his goal is to “continue to build a richly diverse and inclusive campus environment. We’ve made strong steps in diversity in senior leadership at the university and we need to build on that with our faculty by recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty and senior leadership team,” he states.

Asked if he felt Seattle University was overshadowed by its larger collegiate neighbor, the University of Washington, he replied that “there’s room for more than one great university in Seattle. They’re public, and we’re private and religious. They’re a large-research-focused campus, and we’re more student-focused, even though we have research, it’s more applied. Their class size is larger, and students at our campus get more personalized attention. We complement them and add to the richness of higher education in the great Seattle area.”

Asked what he brings to the presidency as a Latino, he noted that when he was an undergraduate at Cornell University, its population was only 5% or 6% Hispanic, and he worked hard to create a more diverse campus. That number has increased by three or four times since then. At Seattle University, his goals are similar, to hire a more diverse and inclusive faculty and administrative leadership .Establishing a close relationship with faculty is another one of his goals. “It was easier as a dean,” he admits, since often faculty may be intimidated by dealing with a college president. Once a week on campus, he meets faculty at a coffee spot, where they can ask him questions, has faculty over for dinner, and meets with department heads. His goal is to be accessible as possible.

He also noted that he thought the city of Seattle has generated negative press in certain media outlets that was unwarranted. “The city continues to generate innovation and is one of the top destinations of recent college graduates,” he notes.

In the next two years, one of his primary goals is to expand the scale of graduate education at Seattle University. “We can grow that by 50%,” he declares. And doing so will help it grow its national reputation, another of his key initiatives..