(CLICK HERE, if you are unable to view this photo gallery on your mobile device.)
He was a lawyer before he was a Jesuit priest, a vice president at Georgetown University and a dean of theology. He’s helped immigrants along the Mexican border, cared for lepers in India and served the homeless at People’s Park in Berkeley.
He’s written a book that’s been translated in three languages and happens to have an interesting connection to legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus.
And on Tuesday, Santa Clara University announced that in July the Rev. Kevin O’Brien, 52, will become the the private Catholic school’s 29th president.
O’Brien replaces the Rev. Michael Engh, who is retiring after leading the university in the heart of Silicon Valley for a decade. He will take over amid a billion-dollar capital campaign that, if successful, would make SCU only the fourth Catholic university, and the first in the West, to raise that much money.
“He’s very charismatic, articulate and engaging,” said John M. Sobrato, philanthropist and chairman of SCU’s board of trustees. “He also by his nature has a very collaborative and transparent leadership style. He’s a good listener, but also very decisive when he needs to be.”
O’Brien, who currently is the dean of SCU’s Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, brings a wide-ranging background — and brushes with fame — to the new position. His father worked as personal manager to Nicklaus, the golf great, for 35 years and O’Brien had a role in a viral video in 2017 debunking the so-called “war on Christmas,” saying that Jesus “wouldn’t care much whether we say Merry Christmas.”
He has been a frequent television commentator on church issues on MSNBC and has written extensively about church reforms in the wake of the priest sex abuse scandal.
But it is his lifetime of straddling the worlds of the privileged and the poor that gives what O’Brien says is the perspective he needs to lead the 167-year-old Catholic University built around the historic Mission founded in 1777.
“I feel comfortable whether it’s in a boardroom in San Francisco or Wall Street or an immigrant detention center on the border in Arizona,” O’Brien said in an interview with this news organization. “I want to bring those two settings together — I want to make sure that those who have so much will remember those who don’t.”
O’Brien has set a goal of raising $180 million to go toward financial aid to broaden the diversity of the student body and ease the pressure on parents who want their children to receive a Jesuit education, which at Santa Clara costs $50,000 a year in tuition alone.
O’Brien’s new role also comes in the midst of what he calls a “tragic” college admissions bribery scandal that has hit Stanford, USC, Yale and other universities and is “utterly demoralizing and alienating.”
“We need to create an equal playing field,” he said.
Born in Montreal, Canada, his family of five moved to south Florida when O’Brien was 4. He and his brother and sister often tagged along with their parents and Nicklaus on the golf tournament circuit.
“From a very young age we were thrown into this very adult world,” O’Brien said. “I remember being 7 or 8 at receptions, crashing a cocktail party to find my parents, talking to these adults — I learned not to be intimidated by their title or wealth.”
He earned an undergraduate degree in government in 1988 from Georgetown University, a law degree from the University of Florida, where he was editor of the Florida law review, and two other advanced degrees.
O’Brien became a naturalized American citizen at age 22 and had intended to pursue a career in law and politics, but after two years working as a corporate litigation lawyer, he said, he felt “empty.”
“It wasn’t fulfilling me deep down,” he said. “I felt restless to give back in a different way.”
He accepted a job as a teacher at Cardinal Newman Catholic high school in West Palm Beach, Florida, which led him to reconsider becoming a Jesuit — the order of priests that had educated him at Georgetown. He describes his “mini-epiphany” in “The Ignatian Adventure,” which has sold 40,000 copies and been translated into three languages.
He entered the Jesuit order in 1996, when he was 29, and was ordained in 2006. He worked at Georgetown for eight years, including as vice president for mission and ministry and was a member of the president’s cabinet. In 2016, he became dean at the Berkeley campus of SCU’s School of Theology, where he was responsible for most of the school’s functions, including academics and fundraising.
Along the way, he earned degrees in philosophy and theology. Throughout his career, he said, he was always “ministering” in some capacity.
“Whether working at an underfunded Catholic parish in the Bronx, working at hospice for cancer patients in New York, a leprosy hospital in India, a barrio outside of Guatemala or immigration detention centers in Los Angeles,” he said, “I was always deeply rooted in making sure my vocation was always attentive, that I was always attentive to the needs of those who were most poor and on the margins.”
Despite the divisive political environment across the country, he said, he welcomes diversity of opinion on campus and lively debate.
“I think we get lost and forget the people we’re trying to help,” he said “That’s why at a Jesuit university, we have to make sure we’re not just dealing in concepts, but in contacts with people.”
While working in Berkeley, he often says Mass at St. Agnes in San Francisco’s diverse Haight neighborhood and frequently serves the homeless at People’s Park in Berkeley.
“The challenge of an administrator is to remain rooted in what’s really happening on the ground,” he said.”It reminds me why we’re doing what we’re doing — we’re educating our students and engaging in research with our faculty who intend to make this world a more just and gentle place.”
O’Brien says he wants to continue to improve its connections with Silicon Valley’s tech leaders and expand the national and global standing of the university, which is already ranked the No. 1 regional university in the West by U.S. News & World Report. The capital campaign is intended to increase scholarships and endowed professorships and bolster its athletic program.
So far, $600 million has been raised, including $100 million from Sobrato’s father, John A. Sobrato, to build a “discovery and innovation” complex in the middle of campus to inspire collaboration in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.
O’Brien says that keeping up his social justice work while leading the university will be challenging, but “if I’m asking our students and faculty to do it, I better be doing it, too.”
