A new endowed position has been created at MSU to focus on the holistic well-being of students through spiritual development. The chair is one of 82 new endowed faculty positions established during MSU’s Empower Extraordinary campaign toward a goal of creating 100 new endowed faculty positions to provide critical resources for recruiting and retaining leading faculty members.
The Foglio Chair of Spirituality in the College of Arts and Letters honors Father Jake Foglio, an alumnus, former faculty member, longtime priest, and mentor to countless MSU student-athletes and coaches. Father Jake also has been a longtime stalwart of medical ethics training for the College of Human Medicine.
After graduating from MSU in 1951, Foglio worked for WKAR before serving in the United States Marine Corps. He graduated from Sacred Heart Seminary in Detroit in 1957 and was ordained a priest in 1961. He served St. John Student Parish (now St. John Church and Student Center) near MSU’s campus, since 1970. Father Jake joined the MSU Department of Family Medicine in 1986 to assist with medical behavioral science teaching and counseling and served as an assistant professor in the department until his retirement in 1997.
Listen to a recent podcast interview with Father Jake Foglio.
“As students move through the MSU curriculum, they have the opportunity to think about their values and explore how they might put them into practice to live a meaningful life,” says Christopher Long, dean of the College of Arts and Letters. “The spirituality chair will bring new research and scholarship to our commitment to help students understand more deeply what it means to be human and how to enact that humanity in whatever profession they undertake.”
For more than two years, the athletic department and the College of Arts and Letters worked with a committed group of donors to endow the Foglio chair position to make the practice of spirituality more available to all MSU students. MSU alumnus Kellie Dean helped secure more than $600,000 in gifts for the position, which created the endowment with an additional $1.5 million from revenues. There is an ongoing fundraising campaign to secure an additional $900,000 to support the spirituality chair position, which created the endowment with an additional $1.5 million from a reinvestment of media revenues from the Big Ten Network.