Joe DeMedeiros

What we talked about

He did not believe the pitch

When he applied, everyone he spoke to told him the same thing: St. Edward’s is a community, it is a family, people really support each other. His reaction at the time, by his own account, was yeah, okay, sure. He describes the version of himself who showed up as a little jaded northeast guy.

What changed his mind was that the sentiment held after he arrived. It is a place, he says, where people look out for each other and try to find the best in each other. Twenty-two years is a long time to keep testing a claim like that.

A campus alumni no longer recognize

He puts the physical transformation at something in the neighborhood of twenty-six facilities either built or renovated across recent decades. Graduates from the earliest classes come back for reunions and find the place unrecognizable.

What has not moved, in his telling, is the mission and the Holy Cross charisms underneath it. The delivery has had to evolve as the world and the city changed. The reason has not.

The city and the university grew up together

His framing is that every great city has a great university associated with it, and that St. Edward’s is the private institution filling that role for a modern, global Austin. He is careful with it, saying he would like to think so rather than asserting it, but the pairing is the argument, and it is the cleanest articulation of institutional value anyone has given on this series.

Access first, everything else second

This is the spine of the interview. He does not soften the problem: university is expensive, students carry debt, and the job is to make it as affordable as possible. The accomplishment he reaches for first is that one in four students now holds a donor-funded scholarship of some kind, more than seven hundred and fifty students.

Then he sequences it deliberately. It starts with access, because absent access it does not matter what kind of talent a person has. Talent with no way in does nobody any good. Everything else in the advancement job is downstream of that one idea.

Why he calls it one of the coolest jobs in the world

He says he wakes up thinking it, and then immediately qualifies it, because he is not only talking about money and scholarships. The part that moves him is people getting the chance to develop the gifts they were given, and what opens up once they do.

His version of the outcome is not a job placement statistic. It is that students leave the campus having become a version of themselves they never thought was quite possible.

Where the questions come from

He is an immigrant from the Azores, the Portuguese archipelago in the middle of the Atlantic, and he traces his habit of asking why, what and how straight back to that, and to learning across two languages. He also offers restaurant recommendations if you ever go.

His parents did not have the opportunity to pursue advanced education and made other difficult choices, as millions of people have. From that he takes the belief that education is the one equalizer, and he holds it without illusions. Nothing is guaranteed. You can earn a doctorate and still struggle. What you get is access to different opportunities, the ability to put yourself in position, and eventually somebody willing to take a chance on you.

Connecting as a discipline, not a personality trait

Asked whether he has always been a connector, he says yes, and then describes a mechanism rather than a charm. He remembers small, random things about people. He notices when somebody else has a skill or an asset that would be useful to them. He puts the two together. Not always successfully, he adds, but often enough.

He also describes a career spent essentially interviewing people, asking them to tell him their story and listening for the obstacle they overcame or the decision that changed their direction. He is direct about why the work lands for him: it is deeply personal.

The Thanksgiving game

Aidan opens with a piece of research and Joe lights up. A muddy, low-scoring defensive win over the rival, on Thanksgiving, in one of the oldest high school football rivalries in the country, in a senior year that was otherwise rough after the team lost its starting quarterback.

He was flagged for holding on a scoring play, was convinced he had not held anybody, and later saw a photograph that suggested otherwise. He says it is a memory he replays when he is down. It is the warmest two minutes on the tape.