Maccarone Finds New Fit Comfortable and Rewarding

As a student, Ellen Maccarone sought the breadth of a large university, but as a professional, she sought a place whose values she shared, and found it at Gonzaga University.

In 2005 she began her career here as assistant professor of philosophy. She would become associate professor, adding faculty adviser to the president almost eight years ago.

“What I had been doing in public university classrooms that those folks thought was innovative was what was expected at a Jesuit institution,” Maccarone says.

Now she is acting vice president for mission integration, a position that has opened her eyes to the operational dynamics of this small city we call Gonzaga.

And she likes it.

“I haven’t had much of a chance to miss teaching in the classroom because a lot of my job as vice president involves teaching – from mission formation for our boards to helping areas of the University know more about Jesuit education. And it’s great because there’s no grading involved,” Maccarone says with a smile.

“One of the things that has made this transition to mission integration a good one for me was that for the last several years I’ve been thinking about vocation and what it meant to have one. I didn’t like vocation being a thing; a job title,” Maccarone says. “That felt constraining and Jesuit work is about freedom. For it not to be is antithetical to our work here.

“If I’m not thinking of myself as a teacher, what was it that I was doing. I concluded that my vocation was to understand things and share it with others. When that became how I talked about my vocation, the whole world opened up to me,” she says.

She enjoys the high-level strategic thinking that goes with her current job and has enjoyed contributing to Provost Sacha Kopp’s strategic planning process, which has given her a vision of what the University needs to look like in the future.

“The practical philosopher in me likes the action-oriented part of it,” she says.

“I love the fact that the people I am working with, other leaders, are all working toward the same end in the same way. As faculty, we are often working on our own. The shared part of the University, moving in the same direction at the same time, is good.”

With her current job she has gained appreciation for the complexity of work done in non-academic areas. If she had just one wish it would be this: “I wish we had more opportunity to understand what other people do. It is easy to make assumptions. I’d like to see faculty understand staff better, and staff understand faculty. I think it would make us more charitable with each other.

“There are pockets of people trying to do that work. Brian Steverson and the Institutional Work Values Project is a good example,” Maccarone says. “Those doing the flashier work are more visible. That’s important. But we must appreciate and acknowledge all the work that gets done, often behind the scenes, to make this place function as it does.”

In her own division, she is particularly excited about the work being done in Tribal Relations as it relates to our mission.

“There are reconciliatory efforts taking place between the University and Native people. I am often having to confess my ignorance when I have to stop a conversation and ask what something means. But it is really rewarding because I have been invited into something that many wouldn’t have the opportunity to think about. This work could change the way GU does things,” she says.

In Mission and Ministry, Maccarone applauds the efforts of Co-Directors Luke Lavin and Lauren Hackman-Brooks for trying new ways of engaging students, faculty and staff, particularly coming out of COVID and the restraints it put on programming.

“Gonzaga is a place of comfort and joy to me,” says Maccarone. She admits to spending a lot more time on campus than she did as a faculty member. And she couldn’t do her job nearly as effectively without her right hand, Assistant to the VP Cindy Perry, “who sometimes has to tell me ‘That’s not your job.’ Other times it’s ‘What can I do to help you? And I’m grateful for a lot of good friends who check in on me.”

It’s a lot of people living the mission.