The McDevitt Center for Creativity and Innovation
The McDevitt Center for Creativity and Innovation at Le Moyne College represents a transformational new model for enhancing and integrating research, teaching, learning, and service within the context of a Catholic and Jesuit Comprehensive, Liberal Arts College.
Structurally, the McDevitt Center represents a quite unique combination of two elements. The McDevitt Center is a high-level research center anchored in four endowed McDevitt Chairs and featuring the kinds of faculty programs and initiatives found in top-tier research institutes and the McDevitt Center is a full-spectrum experiential learning center featuring the kinds of high-impact co-curricular programs that dramatically enhance student engagement and learning.
The transformational power of the McDevitt Center derives in part from this combination of elements. Together, they allow the McDevitt Center to play a central role in creating an energized and intellectually vibrant campus community by eroding boundaries between faculty and students, between research and teaching, between faculty and student-services administrators, and between academics and real-world engagement.
Ultimately, however, the transformational power of the McDevitt Center is rooted in the ways in which it embodies the fundamental principles animating Le Moyne’s Catholic and Jesuit vision of scholarship and education: our conviction that all knowledge forms a whole and that each individual disciplines requires enriching insights derived from others; our recognition of the necessity for attentiveness to the values informing inquiry and to the broader historical, cultural, social and political, etc. contexts and implications of inquiry; and our belief that all knowledge is ultimately an instrument of service to others and of thoughtful activity to promote peace and justice locally, nationally, and globally.
Endowed McDevitt Chairs
As a research center, the McDevitt Center is anchored in our endowed McDevitt Chairs in Computer Science, Management/Information Systems, Physics, and Religious Philosophy. These chairs represent the heart of all of the McDevitt Center’s faculty programming and initiatives.
All other programs and initiatives directly supported by the McDevitt Center are oriented and informed by the questions, projects, and challenges engaged by the occupants of these chairs and are intended to bring distinction to these chairs and enhance their value to Le Moyne College.
Given the central and shaping role they play, the McDevitt Chairs will be occupied in short-term appointments by eminent thinkers and researchers who are at the forefront of their disciplines and whose work exemplifies the central goals and values of the McDevitt Center: their work will cut across disciplinary boundaries and transforms disciplinary self-understandings; engage emerging developments, perennial questions, or grand-challenges; enrich the research and teaching of Le Moyne’s regular faculty and enhance the education of our students; and demonstrate a mindful regard for values and a commitment to using research to positively impact our world.
Responsibilities of the McDevitt Chairs will (in most cases) include:
- Working directly with both undergraduate and graduate students by, for example, addressing relevant courses, offering Core Lectures, working with students in the Integral Honors Program, mentoring individual students, etc.;
- Offering a “master-class” to Le Moyne faculty that will also be open to faculty from other area colleges and universities and to selected members of the wider community;
- Assisting relevant Le Moyne faculty to advance and develop their own research; Offering one (or more) public lectures related to their work;
- Organizing a significant national or international conference to be held at Le Moyne during their tenure as McDevitt Chair;
- Acting as ambassadors for Le Moyne College and the McDevitt Center.
Announcements
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New Science, Technology, and Information: 'Grand Challenges'
Call for Proposals
In Academic Year 2013-2014, the McDevitt Center for Creativity and Innovation, in partnership with the McDevitt Chair in Information Systems, will sponsor broad research and teaching initiatives focused on ‘grand challenges;’ areas of enduring challenge and critical importance that are worthy of serious scholarship and investigation as well as appropriate venues for long-term research, programming, investment, and exploration.
More information...
Latest News
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Dr. Jennifer Glancy, Professor of Religious Studies, and Dr. Karmen MacKendrick, Professor of Philosophy and Associate McDevitt Chair in Religious Philosophy, have been awarded an Enduring Questions grant by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). With the support of this grant, they will develop and teach a course organized around the question, “What Does Prayer Do?” In addition, Glancy and MacKendrick will organize and host public lectures addressing this question in collaboration with the McDevitt Center’s Science and Religion in Modern America initiative.
History of the Center
The McDevitt Center for Creativity and Innovation is supported by a $50 million gift to Le Moyne College by Robert and Catherine McDevitt of Binghamton, New York.
Catherine McDevitt passed away in April 2008 and Robert McDevitt died in September 2008.

The McDevitts were of deep Catholic faith and were long-time friends of Le Moyne College and its Jesuit heritage. Robert McDevitt's cousin, the late Rev. Edward L. McDevitt, SJ, was one of five Jesuit professors who established Le Moyne's physics department after the College was founded in 1946. Robert McDevitt himself had been Regent Emeritus since 1972 and served as a member of the College's Board of Trustees from 1977 to 1980. In 1978, he was awarded an honorary degree - Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa - from Le Moyne.
Robert McDevitt was owner of McDevitt Brothers Funeral Home, a business his grandfather founded in Binghamton in 1880. Though the mortuary business is well-respected and successful, their financial fortune was not derived from it. Robert McDevitt's mother was the secretary to A. Ward Ford, founder of a company that ultimately became part of IBM. He inherited the shares of company stock his mother had acquired, and then spent 70 years accumulating more shares.

Despite their quite considerable fortune, the McDevitts lived simple and unassuming lives grounded in the same Jesuit values taught at Le Moyne College and exemplified by its faculty, staff, students and graduates. The McDevitt Endowment and the McDevitt Center for Creativity and Innovation that it funds will help transform Le Moyne College. By establishing Le Moyne College as a dynamic center for creative research that addresses vital issues and is informed by enduring values, the McDevitt Center will accelerate the college’s move to a higher academic tier and dramatically enhance its standing among colleges and universities.