The Busiest Season of Them All

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My last Momentum post ended with 18,770 chairs, 16,000 cookies, and a cloud of commencement confetti.

Then the graduates crossed the stage, families headed home, and LMU entered the part of the year when it becomes exceptionally good at looking as though not much is happening.

Parking spaces appeared. Palm Walk briefly became a walk. Even the coffee lines lost some of their dramatic tension.

It was not, however, a summer vacation for our teams. Almost as soon as we were waving at the taillights after Commencement, the work changed gears. Summer is when many of the projects that would be nearly impossible with a full campus actually happen. We had just over 100 days to make the most of it.

A lot changed while you were away. And, as usual, a few things happened that no one put on the schedule.

This week, classes are underway and the life of our campuses has returned. Now the boxes are mostly unpacked. Residence halls are full, Palm Walk is crowded, and the coffee lines have returned to their natural state.

LMU feels like LMU again. Welcome back, we’ve missed you.

A Brief Reintroduction

If this is your first Momentum post, or if the summer was long enough to erase a few names, I’m John Kiralla. I am an LMU alum, married to an alum, the parent of two current Lions, and someone who has spent more than 30 years here.

At this point, LMU is less a line on my résumé than part of my family tree.

I serve as LMU’s executive vice president and chief operating officer. I also serve as LMU’s chief marketing officer and chief communications officer.

Those titles are a mouthful. The work is easier to explain.

Students do not experience LMU in divisions or reporting lines. They experience a Wednesday.

My teams work across facilities, technology, safety, people, dining, events, communications, marketing, and partnerships. The goal is to make the seams between those areas less visible, remove unnecessary friction, and help LMU feel like one university.

This summer gave us plenty of chances to do that.

Start With 30 Students

The most visible summer visitor was an NFL team. And I enjoyed seeing us on nightly newscasts (some national) generated by football fans predicting how the Rams will perform this season with LMU as the backdrop. I also appreciated hosting thousands of visitors daily, many of them new to our campus and considering where to attend college.

But by far, the most important number was 30.

Thirty LMU students completed internships during Rams Training Camp, working inside the operation while thousands of fans came through campus. A new internship cohort will continue that connection this fall, and more than 50 students will participate in mentorship opportunities during the academic year.

Since our partnership began, more than 1,500 students from all seven LMU schools and colleges have participated in Rams programming.

That’s not a footnote, that’s the point.

External engagement should do more than place two logos next to each other. It should create access. It should connect classroom learning to consequential opportunities, put students in rooms (or on fields) they could not enter on their own, and make Los Angeles feel less like the city outside our gates and more like an extension of the LMU classroom.

The Rams packed up their helmets and left. The opportunities stayed. If you’re interested in learning more about the Annual Training Camp, the Rams’ photo galleries say it all.

The Work That Disappears

One of the odd truths of university operations is that success often looks like nothing happened.

A roof holds. A door opens. A screen turns on. Water goes where it is supposed to go.

And when it doesn’t, people show up.

This summer, a major water intrusion beneath Sunken Garden and Ignatian Circle flooded portions of the basement of St. Robert’s Hall. Nothing important down there, of course, except electrical transformers and sensitive technology infrastructure.

“Heroic” can sound like an oversized word for facilities work. Less so in the middle of the night, when crews are stopping an underground leak, pumping out a basement, rebuilding temperamental circuit breakers, and racing the calendar so one of LMU’s original buildings can open for fall.

Our teams and campus partners worked around the clock. St. Robert’s opened on time. Some restoration work continues downstairs, but the building did what it has done since 1929: welcomed students back.

Elsewhere, students returned to renovated off-campus graduate apartments. Hannon Apartments and Gersten Pavilion received new roofs, and Gersten got a newly waterproofed, sharper-looking exterior. Teams also worked on walkways, heating systems, and the less glamorous pieces of building infrastructure that become glamorous the moment they fail.

Palm South and Doheny received upgraded OneCard entry hardware, including smart tap-lock capability, as part of our continuing work to improve safety and convenience across residential spaces. The pilot was remarkably successful, virtually eliminating lockout issues for summer guests. Over the next several years, we plan to expand this solution to thousands of locks across campus.

At the LMU Children’s Center, summer work included drainage, sidewalks, plumbing, flooring, landscaping, and fencing. It is not a glamorous list. It adds up to something much more important: a safer, more welcoming place for children, families, teachers, and staff.

We also installed new storm-drain piping, catch basins, and access structures that redirect roughly 35 percent of the Westchester Campus’s stormwater lines toward the south side of campus. We had to tear up Loyola Boulevard to install them, but with El Niño strengthening in the Pacific, that may prove to be one of the summer’s more timely investments. Southern California weather retains final approval.

Downtown, LMU Loyola Law School received new exterior branding, a visible reminder that when we say “our campuses,” the word is plural. Our responsibilities extend across Westchester, downtown, Playa Vista, our residential spaces, and LMU’s other properties.

Inside classrooms, computer labs, and event spaces, teams installed new audiovisual technology and refreshed all things digital. Students also gained access to Microsoft Copilot and LinkedIn Learning.

The best classroom technology is usually the technology no one has to think about. The screen works. The sound works. The professor begins. Students can focus on why they came.

A Little Less Circling

This month, LMU will launch JAPA, short for Just Another Parking App. The name may be the most refreshingly uninflated technology brand of the year.

JAPA will provide real-time information about parking availability. It cannot create a space where none exists, but it should reduce the slow, spiritually testing laps around a garage while everyone silently negotiates with fate.

Because LMU has a habit of turning practical problems into learning opportunities, the project has also created internships for students in business and entrepreneurship, marketing communications, and technology and innovation.

One parking app, three academic pathways, and fewer aimless circles.

That is the kind of dot-connecting I like.

Building a Better LMU, in Plain Sight

Some summer work disappears behind walls. Some arrive with fencing, detours, and signs large enough to make its presence known.

You may have noticed the new Building a Better LMU signs around campus. They represent a small change in how I want us to work.

Construction is disruptive enough without mystery attached to it. If we are taking a walkway offline, renovating a dining hall, replacing an escalator, or opening something new, you should know what we are doing, why we are doing it, and when we expect to finish.

The signs and website are part of a larger commitment to making the work of the university more visible and understandable. You should not need insider knowledge to know what is happening on your own campus.

The Lair is on track to reopen in October with new food stations, a redesigned entrance, refreshed interiors, an expanded patio, and considerably more natural light.

Until then, Roski Dining Hall is serving as the temporary home of LMU’s new All-You-Care-to-Eat model, supported by ADA-accessible shuttles, food trucks, and the rest of our campus dining network.

A temporary dining arrangement is no one’s dream semester-opening experience. Our Hospitality team is closely watching traffic, wait times, shuttle use, and student feedback, and will adjust where we can. The middle chapter of a renovation is rarely the glamorous one. The payoff is coming.

The LMU letters are also expected to return to the bluff later this fall, years earlier than we once estimated the hillside stabilization project would allow. These three letters carry the emotional weight of the bluff. They are part of how generations of Lions picture LMU, long after their final walk across Palm Walk.

You will hear much more when we are ready to unveil them. I suspect I will not be the only person watching when they go back up.

And yes, the University Hall escalators.

I have now written about them often enough in The Escalators and Up, Down, and Stuck in Between to qualify for a minor in vertical transportation.

The first new set is expected to return to service in September, with additional escalators coming online throughout the fall.

And if you walk through University Hall during the day and do not see crews working, please do not mistake quiet for inactivity.

Work on all three escalator installations is moving forward in parallel, and at a pretty frenzied pace. You just don’t see much of it during the day.

Because the installation is extraordinarily noisy and disruptive, crews work from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m.

The project is not idle. It has simply gone nocturnal.

The Burns Recreation Center pool reopens Sept. 11 after receiving new plaster, deck, tile, lighting, and handrails. We are finishing the exterior and installing accessibility improvements to Sacred Heart Chapel. Across campus, smaller repairs and upgrades continue, many of which are only small until they affect your day.

You can follow the latest timelines, openings, and project details through Building a Better LMU. And this update is only scratching the surface because there were dozens of other projects I won’t take the time here to detail.

No One Asked for an Org Chart

No one has ever stopped me on Palm Walk and said, “John, what this academic year really needs is a cleaner reporting structure.” Fair.

But structure determines whether a problem moves or bounces. It influences whether work has a clear owner, whether teams see the same information, and whether a good idea has to survive six handoffs before anything happens.

So we made some changes this summer.

Facilities Management became Facilities Management and Planning, and Vini Bhargava joined LMU as our new vice president to lead it. Vini comes to us after senior roles at Northeastern, Google, UC Berkeley, and the University of California. Her arrival coincides with a much larger effort to think about our campuses not project by project, but as an interconnected, long-term plan for teaching, learning, living, sustainability, infrastructure, and growth.

Operations became Operations and Strategy, bringing planning, analytics, events, institutional coordination, LMU Radio, and Executive Affairs into closer alignment, while giving additional muscle to our operational excellence work.

We made several other moves for the same reason. Parking and Transportation joined Campus Safety Services. The Children’s Center joined Auxiliary and Business Services. External Relations sharpened its focus on partnerships, civic engagement, government relations, and our coming master-plan renewal. Enrollment marketing is becoming more integrated.

That is plenty of organizational prose for one blog post.

The underlying idea is much simpler: put work that belongs together closer together.

The org chart is merely the wiring. What matters is whether the lights come on.

The Useful Part of the Future

That same principle is shaping how we think about operational excellence, AI, data, technology, and the future of work. “Operational excellence” can sound like a phrase invented in a windowless conference room.

I mean something much more concrete: fewer unnecessary handoffs, clearer ownership, reliable systems, better decisions, and more time for work that actually requires a person. AI, meanwhile, is being marketed as the answer to nearly everything, including several questions no one remembers asking.

We are interested in the useful part.

Where can AI eliminate repetitive work, make information easier to find, improve decisions, or give people more time for work requiring judgment and human connection? Where should we move carefully because the stakes are higher?

We will be working through those questions this year. Operational excellence is not about asking people to run faster on the same course. Sometimes the course itself needs to change.

I want LMU to be ambitious about the future without confusing speed with wisdom.

Welcome Home

So yes, there are new spaces to see.

But there are also new systems, new partnerships, new opportunities for students, and some bigger questions ahead.

This year, I will invite you into conversations about the next 20 years of our campuses as we begin renewing LMU’s master plan. We will start sharing more about what the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games can mean for our students and families as LMU prepares to serve as Team USA’s high-performance training and recovery center. And we will keep building partnerships across Los Angeles that create opportunities our students could not get from LMU alone.

I will also keep writing here about AI, operational excellence, the future of work, our campuses, and occasionally, apparently, escalators.

They are all connected.

The job is to look inward at how LMU works, outward at the extraordinary city around us, and then connect the two in ways that make this university better for the people who experience it every day.

Summer gives us a rare window to do a lot of that work.

And then, almost overnight, Palm Walk fills up. Residence hall doors start opening and closing. Classrooms come alive. Parking becomes competitive again. The place gets louder.

In other words, LMU comes home.

For those joining us for the first time, welcome.

For everyone returning, welcome back.

Summer may be our busiest season.
You are the reason for it.

—John

PS: A little summer homework: My COO leadership team and I at UC San Diego, learning from colleagues about the latest thinking in campus planning, construction, technology, and AI, and bringing some ideas home to LMU.