Everything Matters
Dear Saint Mary’s Friends,
Yesterday morning I woke early, and my first thought was about my good friend Chet Raymo, a physicist, naturalist, and novelist who was my colleague for many years at Stonehill College. Chet graduated from Notre Dame—and his wife Maureen (Sterett) from Saint Mary’s—in 1958, the same year I was born. Maybe it’s simply random that our paths ever crossed, but in our longstanding inter-generational friendship, it’s wonderful to know we share a love, spanning many decades, for these three Holy Cross institutions!
For some reason, as I opened my eyes yesterday, I remembered the title of an article Chet penned long ago—“A Little Loop of Chaos”—back when he wrote a weekly science column for the Boston Globe. A quick internet search led me to it, and I laughed all over again (34 years later) at how Chet had managed to create a witty and truly informative introduction to chaos theory—a branch of science and mathematics that demonstrates how small changes can sometimes have large consequences. (His focus, improbably, is on the so-called “locker loop” on the back panel of many button-down shirts.) If you know only one thing about chaos theory, it is probably the “butterfly effect,” which describes how a small change in one state of a system (such as a weather system) can sometimes explain a large change in a later state of that system. A butterfly flaps its wings in one part of the world and causes a tornado in another.
Call it coincidence, but 30 minutes after re-reading that article, I set off on a walk, listening to a podcast called Hidden Brain. Nothing about the title of the episode—“The Art of the Unknown”—suggested that this conversation would also explore questions about randomness and chance or that it would engage with chaos theory! The interviewee, Brian Klaas, is a political scientist, and his research involves a wide range of historical incidents where small influences had large social effects.
At least part of the reason I felt so intrigued by these reminders of chaos theory is that August starts tomorrow, which means we are preparing for students to return to campus in large numbers. And I don’t mean that we are preparing for chaos, though there may be a little of that as over 1,600 students descend on the campus! We are not only getting ready to welcome back our returning undergraduate students—we are also embracing the largest class of first-year students to enroll at Saint Mary’s since the early 1990s and a small group of transfer students: over 500 new students. About 100 graduate students will also be enrolled in the year ahead.
While new undergraduate student enrollment has been over 400 the last few years, 500 is quite a jump—and it’s a wonderful outcome! Given my preamble here, you might be wondering: what is the cause? Well, we certainly planned for enrollment growth, and we made significant investments in our programs—curricular, co-curricular, spiritual, and social—through the Avenue Experience, which links academic study to career development, personal growth, and robust experiential learning options. Combined with other core requirements and a student’s chosen major, the Avenue Experience is designed to attract students committed to developing the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that prepare Saint Mary's graduates to lead with distinction and to flourish in their communities and careers. I’m grateful to the many faculty and staff members who have worked hard to create this new signature experience. We’re confident that this visionary change has produced a big effect.
Thinking about the “butterfly effect” also has me wondering whether there are some less directly traceable and even somewhat random causes that have also contributed to our enrollment surge. Last year’s exciting Notre Dame football season, for example, probably gave us a bump! I like to claim that we’re the only women’s college in the country with a Division 1 football program, and I have to imagine that social media posts by Saint Mary’s students playing in the Fighting Irish marching band or simply enjoying themselves at regular season games and then during the post-season playoff run serve as a reminder of the many benefits of our proximity to a big university environment. And then there are the hundreds—maybe thousands—of interactions prospective students have with our incredible alumnae, women who model lives of meaning and purpose. Every alumna creates some ripple effect that produces consequences the College has no official measures for. But we know they are real.
So thanks to all of you whose small and large acts of solidarity with Saint Mary’s contribute to our ongoing strength. You matter! As Brian Klaas says at the end of his Hidden Brain podcast, when some people encounter ideas of chance and randomness, they start to think nothing matters. But his argument is, “no, everything matters, even the tiniest stuff. And if you fixate on that idea, your life will always have meaning and always feel important.”
July 31, 2025