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NU President sees opportunites ahead for college

Mike Desmond/wbfo news

Niagara University President Father James Maher admits these are challenging times for those in higher education.Father Maher spoke Wednesday evening to a group of alums and friends in the Niagara Falls Conference & Event Center. He has spent enough time on campus since taking over last summer to decide where the school is going.

Father Maher said his school is financially sound and is drawing students but believes a more expansive view is need moving forward.
            
"We owe it to our students to prepare them for a global marketplace and a workplace," Father Maher said as he explained his rationale for recruiting more students from outside the U.S. and Canada.

"So what better way to do that than to create a laboratory of life on a college campus where people from different cultures, ethnicities, races can really interact and really work on common projects and at the base of that is education."

Father Maher said students want to come to the U.S.  because our higher education system is the envy of the world. He maintains Niagara offers that experience along with small classes and a nurturing environment in Lewiston.
 

Mike Desmond is one of Western New York’s most experienced reporters, having spent nearly a half-century covering the region for newspapers, television stations and public radio. He has been with WBFO and its predecessor, WNED-AM, since 1988. As a reporter for WBFO, he has covered literally thousands of stories involving education, science, business, the environment and many other issues. Mike has been a long-time theater reviewer for a variety of publications and was formerly a part-time reporter for The New York Times.