Ryan Maher, S.J.,(COL’ 82) Associate Dean of Georgetown College, will be leaving Georgetown University at the end of this academic year.

On Tuesday, Kevin Quinn, S.J., President of the University of Scranton, announced that Maher will be the founding executive director of the university’s newly created Jesuit Center. Maher has served on Scranton’s Board of Trustees.

The Center will “foster faculty and staff participation in the Jesuit higher educational mission, support faculty teaching and scholarship that advances the University’s Catholic and Jesuit character, and promote Ignatian spirituality within an interreligious context.”

During his tenure at Georgetown, Maher has become one of the most popular and well-known Jesuits on campus. In 2009, Maher received the Georgetown University College Democrats’ Alumnus of the Year Award. Fr. Maher is also known for his popular class “Jesuit Education.”

“I love teaching that course, and I told the president of Scranton that I would only make the move to Scranton if I could continue teaching it up there,” Maher wrote to Vox in an email.

Maher becomes the executive director of The Jesuit Center at the University of Scranton in July 2012. He assured Vox in an email that he plans to teach at Georgetown for the remainder of the academic year.

Read the full text of Fr. Quinn’s email to University of Scranton students after the jump.

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The Cardinal Newman Society, a group that aims to “renew and strengthen Catholic identity in Catholic higher education,” is attacking Georgetown College’s recent video “Jesuits at Georgetown” over the opening line of the video.

At the beginning of the video, Fr. Ryan Maher, S.J., associate dean of the College, says, “Our job as educators, and as priests really, is not to bring God to people, or even to bring people to God. God’s already there and the people are already there. Our job, our way, of living out our educational vocation is to ask the right questions, and to help young people ask those questions.”

CNS jumped on this quote, writing that the video never makes it clear that the Jesuits at Georgetown are trying to “bring students to the fullness of truth in the Catholic faith.”

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