As a man man rooted in faith, having studied Jewish, religious, biblical, and theological studies, it’s no surprise that Christian M. M. Brady said he felt “called” to become the next president of Wittenberg University.
During a recent interview with Wittenberg journalism students, Brady noted that the university faces serious financial challenges, including an $11 million shortfall just for this year. "There is good, hard work to be done here,” he acknowledged.
Although he’s only been on the job for a few months, Brady said he already has a strong vision for the future and isn’t afraid to voice his ideas, even if they might not work.
“You have to try 100 things to find one thing that will work,” he said.
His resilience seems to have started 14 years ago; just two weeks before his son Mack’s ninth birthday, Mack passed away.
The tragedy struck Brady like a train, but he knew he couldn’t just wallow forever and have Mack’s legacy be reduced to that of a dad who went crazy with grief. Mack had been a goalie for his soccer team, and Brady wanted people to remember him for the joyous boy he was. That loss strengthened his resolve to continue celebrating life, despite its attendant heartaches.
“It’ll be alright,” said Brady, currently 57 years old. “Things won’t be the same, there will be real, real, difficult times that you will encounter in life. They will be hard, they will discourage you, they will make you cry, but it will be okay.”
Coming from a successful job as the dean of the honors college at the University of Kentucky, he knew he was up for more challenges. The biggest difference between being a president and being a dean is that there’s nowhere to hide, he explained with a wry smile.
He’s focusing on future enrollment, which he says will help ease the current strain. “Next year we’ll have a nice strong class,” Brady predicted.
With a strong background in finances, having raised over $100 million across three different institutions, Brady is hopeful that Wittenberg can regain its financial equilibrium through alumni support. One of the main ways he plans to focus on recruitment is by getting more people involved in Wittenberg’s sports facilities and by ramping up philanthropy efforts.
As a president who seems to thrive on constant contact with students, Brady is enthusiastic about seeing not only the incoming class of 2029, also the returning students that have come back to campus.
Being at a D3 school allows students to have the best of both worlds, athletics and academics, he noted. Despite his background in sports (Brady played water polo in college) and pushing athletes among the incoming classes, he reiterated that Wittenberg is first and foremost an academic institution.
Once the university gets on a more solid footing financially, Brady is hopeful he can bring back some of programs that had been cut. Having a rich background in music and languages (he speaks both Hebrew and Aramaic), Brady hopes to reimplement these programs in the best way that he can.
Music is very important to Brady. He expressed his love of the contemporary band "U2". During his interview with students, he sang snatches of songs from the group.
His love for music, however, extends far beyond the Irish rock band. In fact, he’s working to establish a new music club on campus, the Wittenberg Chorale. He’s so eager to see the club get started that he and his wife, Elizabeth, who teaches communication at Penn State, have agreed to personally pay the club director’s stipend. Eventually, he hopes the Wittenberg Chorale can be used as a way to connect with donors.
Brady is also hoping to build stronger bonds between the Wittenberg and Springfield communities. Having pitched ideas of getting Witt students internships and the ability to use their student ID as a discount for shops downtown, he is hopeful that these relationships will build a stronger sense of kinship and identity between the disparate groups. He also wants to build up a dual-credit program for high schoolers to start their college career here and potentially stay following their high school graduation.
With a strong vision for Wittenberg, and the resilience to fail and keep trying, President Brady believes he is the right man to lead Wittenberg into a greater era. In a recent campus email, Brady outlined six major takeaways from his first Wittenberg Board of Directors meeting, including fundraising efforts, the introduction of the Wittenberg Chorale, and improvements in residential life.
“While we enter autumn with more hope and optimism, I know that there is much more work to be done,” said Brady. “Just as Ezra Keller walked these weedy, muddy hills praying for God’s vision with ‘faith to believe, that in after years it will be an academic grove,’ we, too, must continue to progress forward with confidence and faith.”
