Kevin Wildes

Reverend Kevin William Wildes, S.J., Ph.D., (born September 27, 1954) is the current president of Loyola University New Orleans. He was formally installed as the school's 16th president on 2004-07-01. During his second year in the position, he was charged with seeing the school through hurricane Katrina. On 2006-04-10, President Wildes, unveiled Pathways - Toward Our Second Century, Loyola's strategic plan. The proposal is controversial because it includes program and personnel cuts and consequently encountered opposition from students and a no-confidence vote in members of the current administration by faculty. The Board of Trustees however unanimously approved and passed the plan in a meeting on Friday, 2006-05-19.

Wildes entered the Society of Jesus in 1976, and was ordained a priest in 1986, completing his vows in March 2004. He holds advanced degrees in theology from the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and in philosophy from Fordham University and Rice University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1993. Before taking his current position, he worked at Georgetown University where he was a chaplain in residence, beginning his tradition of living in the student residences, and an important advocate for fund raising for the school. His weekly informal masses in his residence attracted a loyal following among students. Prior to joining the Jesuits, Wildes was a professional boxer.

As an author, he has published numerous works on ethics and morality, especially in the field of bioethics which he has lectured widely on. He has been called upon to give analysis on bioethics issues on nightly talk shows in Washington, and on 1997-07-22 to testify before the House Committee on Sciences on the topic of human cloning. He is Associate Director and a Senior Research Scholar at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and frequent contributor to their journal. He served as an editor of four compendiums of bioethics essays, such as Choosing Life: A Dialogue on Evangelium Vitae. In 2000, he published Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics, his most successful work to date.

List of Works

 * Moral Acquaintances: Methodology in Bioethics. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press; 2000.  ISBN 0-2680-3452-4.