Fr. Michael Engh, S.J.

Michael E. Engh, S.J. 

Mike Engh, S.J. returned to LMU to serve as Chancellor, effective 1 October 2020, and as such reports to the President, Timothy Law Snyder. A third-generation native Angeleno, he is delighted to return to his hometown and safely root for the Dodgers again.

From January 2009, to July 2019, he led Santa Clara University as its 28th president. He set the course with a strategic plan, Santa Clara 2020, diversified the student body, and led the school through the recession while avoiding furloughs or losing students. Fundraising raised the endowment from $515 million to $965 million. He served on the Board of Trustees of Boston College; the Board of Directors of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group; the Board of Directors of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities (AJCU); the Board of Trustees of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkely; the Board of Trustees of Bellarmine College Preparatory, San Jose; the President’s Council of the West Coast Conference; and the Executive Board of the Association of Independent California Colleges and Universities. In the fall of 2019, he joined the Board of Directors of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies, located at the University of Southern California.

Prior to his appointment as SCU president, Mike served as Dean of the Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts and professor of history here at Loyola Marymount University. A teacher and American historian, he published on the history of Los Angeles and the role of religion in the history of the American West. He was ordained a priest for the Society of Jesus in 1981. He holds a B.A. from Loyola University of Los Angeles, now LMU (1972); an M.A. from Gonzaga University (1978); a Master of Divinity from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley (1982); and a Doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (1987). On the LMU campus, he was a co-founder of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles, helped establish the Center for Ignatian Spirituality, and led the Jesuit Community in building a new residence. He also co-founded the Los Angeles History Seminar at the Huntington Library, now known as the Los Angeles History and Metro Studies Seminar.