Find your compass.
The phrase has been visible on campus this spring, featured on websites and printed in thousands of programs for the inauguration of Dr. Kimo Ah Yun as the 25th president of Marquette.
Before it became part of the theme for the event — Open Your Heart. Find Your Compass. Change the World — the phrase was on Ah Yun’s own lips, inspired, in part, by the words of Pope Francis.
It reflects his conviction that transforming students’ lives is Marquette’s most urgent calling. True to Marquette’s Catholic, Jesuit traditions, this process starts with students opening their hearts to the needs of others and culminates in purposeful action to improve life for others. “That’s a key piece; it’s what the Jesuits teach us,” President Ah Yun says. “Be The Difference. Set the world on fire.” In the middle is the essential bridge: finding your compass to guide you as a moral, ethical person as you seek your purpose and potential.
“When students are here, they likely do not realize their lives are being transformed,” he says. “Then they get to their late 30s — they may be married, have a house, a family and a career. They reflect on how they got there, and say, ‘My Marquette education gave me this foundation that allows me to be who I am today.’”
Find your compass.
The words resonate with Ah Yun not only as a dedicated teacher-scholar and leader known for connecting students with vital growth experiences; educational transformation for him is also deeply personal.
Born in Compton, California, he moved as a young child with his family to Sacramento, where he’d become first in the family to graduate from college. He was far from finding his life’s purpose in those early years, instead just trying to find his way.
There were setbacks — the deadlines for college applications that no one told him about — and turnarounds, including the competitive debate career that started woefully before leading to national success. He rose from a delayed start at his local state university alongside many other first-generation and commuter students to study with distinction in one of the nation’s top doctoral programs in communication studies. At Marquette, he has progressed from dean to provost to president.
He did more than just weather his most difficult transitions; he owned and overcame them, until he became a specialist in turning challenge into a springboard to something bigger.
Benefiting from strong mentors and his Catholic faith, Ah Yun did find his compass. And so often, it has pointed him in the same direction: toward a calling to make a difference in students’ lives.
This calling is what brought him to Marquette in 2016 to be dean of the Diederich College of Communication — what changed his mind after he’d spent much of his time as a candidate for the position unable to envision asking his wife and three children to leave California, where he was associate dean of his alma mater, California State University–Sacramento. Then, Ah Yun met with then-President Michael R. Lovell, at a round table in Lovell’s office offering soaring views of Church of the Gesu. The two leaders connected over the vision they shared for making students and their experiences exceptional. Ah Yun felt the presence of faith in the room, which felt like a door opening, a passion deepening. “At a state institution, you park your religion at the door; your goal is to train and graduate students so they can be employable. But at a Catholic, Jesuit institution, you think about the larger context of developing a person so when they leave here, they leave with a tool set that informs and shapes who they are for the rest of their lives.”
In an hour’s time, everything had changed. “When I left his office, I got to the door and I called my wife, and said, ‘This suddenly got very real. I can see myself working for this president.’”
Nine years later, he realizes the bittersweet honor it is to serve every day in that same Zilber Hall office, as Lovell’s successor following the former president’s passing last June after a three-year struggle with cancer. “Sometimes this still doesn’t feel like my office,” Ah Yun shares. “But the benefit of it is being in a place where the best way I can honor him is by carrying on and doing the work that I know he cared about.”
Ah Yun’s compass points stronger than ever toward opportunities at Marquette that have been a lifetime in the making. “Education changed the trajectory of my life. It changed the trajectory of my children’s lives,” he says. “I do believe education is the great equalizer and great advancer of all we do.”
“He came out of very humble beginnings,” says Dr. Gary Meyer, professor of strategic communication at Marquette, of Marquette’s president, his friend and professional sounding board dating back to their graduate school days together. “He was transformed through education in authentic and inspiring ways. If a kid like him can rise up to be a president of a top 100 university, then anything is possible. He knows that. He believes in that. And I think he wants to share that with every student on this campus.”
Ah Yun is back in his old neighborhood again.
He’s on Wilmington Avenue, two miles from downtown Sacramento, looking out on the big grass yard where he played baseball with Curtis Park Little League. Beyond the outfield wall and an adjacent alley, he sees what he’s looking for — the tiny, faded cottage-style house where his family lived for years.
Leaning in to get a closer look at the images Google Street View is bringing to his computer screen, he zooms in to reveal a simple stucco box with a front canopy supported by 4x4s, moss growing between roof shingles and a front fence heavy with vines. “That’s the house,” he says, turning from the screen momentarily with excitement, then turning back to zoom in further. “See, that’s a door. If you look at the width of the house, it’s not many doors wide. It’s just super narrow.”
The setting inspires warm memories and frank assessments. “I lived there with my four sisters and mom and dad,” he says. “It always seemed big enough for our whole family, but later on, I looked it up on Zillow and saw that it was an 880-square-foot house.”
Ah Yun’s parents, James and Leialoha, both hailed from Hawaii and shared with their children a heritage of Hawaiian, Chinese and Portuguese roots. Since he was James Jr., Ah Yun’s grandmother asked that he be called Kimo — Hawaiian for James — as he has ever since.
His parents’ time on their island, Oahu, took them through their early 20s. After finding their way to California, they worked various jobs. “My mom cooked, worked the tomato fields, cleaned houses,” he recalls. His father laid flooring for a living — until his knees gave out. “I spent a lot of my early years learning how to lay carpet, linoleum and tile,” Ah Yun shares.
With Google Maps still up on his screen, he explores the limits of his world in those days. His elementary school was a short bike ride from home; the church his family attended, St. Rose Catholic Church, was a mile south down Franklin Boulevard.
Using his cursor, he follows a path he took hundreds of times as a child, north up the alley to the area’s namesake, Curtis Park itself — then as now, a crossroads for children from all directions, including the Spanish-tile bungalows and Tudors to the north and the run-down duplexes and apartment buildings to the east.
“It wasn’t like it was the roughest neighborhood,” he says, “but gang activity existed.” It was there on the edge of Curtis Park that Ah Yun, then in middle school, ran into Billy, a good friend of his from grade school. “He was that kid who was shaving in the sixth grade, a guy with muscles who you didn’t mess with. He’d gone to that side; he was in the gang.”
“I remember him telling the other gang members: ‘Hands off this guy. He’s going someplace, OK?’” Ah Yun relates. “I wondered what he meant by that. But that was it. He had the ability to tell people: This guy is off limits. And suddenly, I was off limits to everyone.” His knack for friendship and the vague sense he carried of having a purpose in life had spared him.
In the years that followed, Ah Yun’s family moved from the little house next to the baseball field — and moved again. “We rented all our lives,” he explains. “At some point, that house was sold, so you move to another house. And then that house was sold, and you move again. My parents would do things to make the house nicer, and the landlords would think, ‘Oh, now I can sell it.’”
Ah Yun now feels fortunate for all that his parents were able to share with him. They introduced him to a faith in God that has grown through the years. They emphasized the importance of hard work. And they insisted on personal integrity. In a life lived worrying about the next paycheck, the value of your word can be counted on more than anything.
Education could play a beneficial role in their children’s lives, they saw. They just weren’t sure how. “They would say: Go get an education,” Ah Yun reflects. “But, on the other hand, they had not been there. They did not know much about it.”
Fortunately, school came easily for him. In high school, after falling in initially with the group that gathered outside to smoke cigarettes, he extended his network and found new friends who were other good students. Still, his pathway in education remained murky. He and his friends all seemed to be looking forward to high school graduation his senior year, when he was taken aback by the news from some of them of the acceptance letters they were receiving from University of California–Berkeley, Brown and other universities. He hadn’t known to apply.
“My reaction was, ‘What are you talking about?’” he recalls. “If you don’t know anyone who has gone to college, then you don’t even know the steps you’re supposed to ask about. In high school, you just kind of show up at the beginning of the year. I had no reason to think college was much different.”
To sort things out, he worked for a year. “I got a job at a Shell gas station making $3.35 an hour,” he says. His gap year was spent as a local distributor in the petroleum industry, he has joked.
Still, despite this undeniable setback, Ah Yun had already found a vehicle that would lead him to unmistakable success and distinction — the debate team. He can’t now recall what led him to try debate as a high school sophomore; he can only say that he wasn’t very good at it. Today, he’s known as a good storyteller and speaker with many qualities that would make him seem a natural for competitive persuasive public speaking. “He has a tremendous ability to synthesize and make sense of complex information,” Meyer says. “When he gets in front of a crowd, it seems like he’s just talking. But he’s prepared, and he’ll cover multiple points and sub-points without notes.”
But back in high school, the seeds of those abilities were nowhere in evidence. “I was scared and awful. It’s quite likely I didn’t win a single debate that first year,” Ah Yun acknowledges. “Yet, for some reason, I thought: I think I need to be good at this in life, this whole speaking thing. So, I stuck with it.”
For Ah Yun, early-round losses became opportunities to stick around and observe. “You are in hundreds and hundreds of debates,” he notes. “I would watch the winners and ask, ‘What is it about them that makes them so good? What can I emulate?’ And then, ‘What is it about me that will help me find my own voice?’”
By his senior year, he had turned himself into a successful debater. And when he finally enrolled at hometown California State University–Sacramento, debate eased the disorientation he felt navigating this new foreign environment — the sense of uncertainty about what to expect or where to turn for answers that still helps him relate to first-generation students he meets on campus and drives his passion for Marquette’s signature student success efforts.
As he found friends and mentors — his people, as he’s come to call them — through debate and his courses, there was no stopping him, competitively speaking.
Lacking the big reputations of universities such as Berkeley and Stanford, Sacramento State and its debate team existed in their shadows, until Ah Yun helped change all that. Described by his mentor and former debate coach Dr. Nick Burnett as “probably the most successful debater in Sac State history,” he and his partners excelled in California and beyond — earning their way to the quarterfinals of collegiate debating’s national tournament, the equivalent of basketball’s Elite 8, in back-to-back years in the late 1980s. “This was a small school from Sacramento, right? I think it caught everybody by surprise,” Ah Yun remembers.
His future wife, Catherine Puckering, joined Sacramento State’s debate team the year he left for graduate school, and witnessed the huge impression he’d made. “When I joined the team, all I heard the entire year was ‘Kimo this, Kimo that.’ He was very good at debate, and he had this really big personality,” she says with a smile. “I was curious to meet this guy I heard so much about.”
Their meeting came — predictably enough — at the next national debate tournament. It was her first trip and his fifth, this time as an assistant coach of Kansas State University, where he was a master’s student. Puckering was practicing with her debate partner, who happened to be his former partner, when Ah Yun barged into the room, said “Hello” with a flourish, pivoted and walked out.
The glare she sensed coming off the debate guru in his element could only have been compounded by the results of the next few days: Kansas State was crowned national champion, earning the young assistant coach and his debaters a subsequent trip to the White House. “I had to wonder: Is this the same guy I’d been hearing so much about? But he obviously charmed me later,” Puckering says, describing a quick turnaround from that first meeting to their first date a few months later when he was back visiting family in Sacramento, an afternoon at the California State Fair sweetly chaperoning his 5-year-old niece.
Debate had led Ah Yun to his partner in all the subsequent steps they’ve taken together, including raising their three children: Benjamin, a 2025 graduate of Marquette, Molly, a 2025 graduate of the University of Southern California, and Haven, a graduating high school senior. “Catherine is my best friend,” he says. “There’s nothing in life that I would want to go through without her. I do not have the ability to be successful without her.”
“It’s like anything,” Ah Yun often says in describing these episodes from his life.
It’s a surprising phrase from someone whose journey — from avoiding gangs on city streets to achieving debate glory and rising to lead a major research university — is altogether his alone. But for him, there came to be something similar connecting every unfamiliar transition or towering challenge. Each could be studied, taken apart, addressed with a plan, conquered and turned into a success, with benefits for him and others.
Debate? “Like anything,” he says, “it taught me that you could be awful at something, but if you put time into it, focus on it, you can get better.” And as Ah Yun got better, his vision changed. Rather than simply focusing on individual arguments that appealed to him, he started seeing a range of possible arguments and the likely rebuttals from his opponents to each. Seeing debates unfold before they started, he could steer them onto favorable terrain, like a chess master on a chessboard. “At some point, my mind just opened. I could see everything at once,” he says.
Call me President Kimo
Students congratulate President Ah Yun in the Alumni Memorial Union after he is announced as Marquette’s 25th president.
Make no mistake: Marquette’s 25th president takes his role seriously — President Kimo Ah Yun understands the great privilege of leading a top Catholic, Jesuit university. But the man behind the mantle has an obvious playful side; he quickly eschews formalities that don’t fit his affable personality.Bump into him on the sidewalk and “Hello, President Ah Yun” won’t do. “Call me President Kimo,” he’ll insist.
It’s something he says on his near-daily walks around campus, his time to interact with students and learn from them about Marquette. Indulge him for a few moments, and President Kimo, also at his insistence, will buy you a coffee — he’ll even place the order for you on the app.
“I want students to talk to me,” President Kimo says. “If I say, ‘I’ll buy you something to drink; all you have to do is tell me two things: What is going well for you at Marquette? What is something that I can do to make Marquette a better experience for you?’ It’s my way of doing a little bit
of data collection. “The good thing is students like Starbucks — especially when it’s free.”
This notion of the approachable president isn’t for show; there’s no veneer.
It’s a contrast that’s authentically President Kimo: the data wonk who’s as comfortable in a suit, walking the Board of Trustees through enrollment projections, as he is in Marquette gear and face paint, making playful Instagram videos with the school mascot.
“It’s just fun,” President Kimo says of the light-hearted social media collaborations that showcase his wicked comedic timing — and frequently catch fire with young audiences. “If you can bring a little sunshine into someone’s life, why not? When you’re the president, people see you as separated. This humanizes you. It gives students the freedom to be themselves and see we’re all similar at the core.”
— Christopher Stolarski
Another leap forward came at the start of his doctoral studies. By then, Ah Yun had flourished in the master’s program in communication studies at Kansas State and gained an appreciation for the methods of academic scholarship: conceiving an idea, grounding it in theory, designing a study to answer key questions, and collecting and analyzing data to produce replicable findings.
At a graduate studies fair, he ran straight into the table featuring the doctoral program in communication studies at Michigan State University, where professors had pioneered a rigorous, quantitative approach to communication research and made their doctoral program one of the highest-rated in the country. Thrilled at the prospect of building his skills alongside these research titans, he applied and was selected to become part of the program’s elite student cohort.
Arriving in East Lansing, Michigan, in the fall of 1993, Ah Yun felt excited and generally well prepared but soon also a little uneasy. “You get there, and it’s like anything. There were five or six people in our cohort. You look around and realize you are around really, really smart people,” he says with an open shrug. “If I had to think about it, I was probably the one who was farthest behind in getting this stuff. So, I sat and thought, ‘OK, I know the problem. I know the point I need to reach. What’s my plan to get there?’”
For the next few months, he answered that question early every weekend. “There was a bookstore in town, and every Saturday or Sunday, I would show up when they opened. I would get a cup of coffee in the coffee shop. I’d get a book off the shelf, and I’d just sit and read it from cover to cover,” he says, smiling at the memory and repeating motions from his routine — coffee cup, book, pages. “I started on one end and thought, I’m just going to work this shelf. And when I get to the end, I’m going to start on the next shelf.”
Like others before it, this tirelessly executed plan bore dividends. “Ah, I get it now,’” he’d say after reading the same concept from 10 different perspectives. Professor Frank Boster had done the most to establish the program’s research prowess and taught its No. 1 research course. “To become his teaching assistant was a big thing. And I ended up becoming his TA for the research course,” Ah Yun recalls. “When students did not understand something, I could draw upon those 10 books that I read on the concept. I could find the explanation that worked for each person. It helped me with my teaching.”
The episode is “so quintessentially Kimo,” Puckering says. “If he had just taken the class and done what everybody does, he would have been proficient at the end. But that wasn’t enough. He needed to be an expert at research methods. So, he knew he was going to invest the time and just grind it out.”
Remarkably, he did this grinding while remaining his genial, generous self. He was “bright … very goal-directed … and focused,” Boster recalls. “He was universally liked, popular with students (great teacher), his fellow grad students and the faculty.” And oh, the professor adds, “He was and maybe still is a world-class Scrabble player. Tournament player!”
Across three decades, Puckering has seen her husband use this playbook repeatedly. “He’s done this as he’s moved into various positions. He devotes himself to really trying to understand the role. He reads. He talks to people who have done the role, trying to learn from them things to do, things not to do.”
For his first faculty position after doctoral studies, Ah Yun was called back to his alma mater, Sacramento State. In addition to giving his relationship with Puckering the opportunity to go the distance, he wanted to be at a university where he’d serve as a true teacher-scholar with opportunities to grow as a teacher as well as a researcher (publishing on topics such as more effective strategies for encouraging organ donation). Back at Sac State those first few years, he taught exclusively evening courses to students of various ages and backgrounds. “They would work eight hours. Then they would take a three-hour class with you. So, you’d have to rethink how you teach, how you keep them engaged,” he recalls. Relatable yet strategic, he calibrated his teaching to the unique needs of his students. “I thought I’d be a professor my whole life, so I thought: I want to be the best assistant professor I could be. I just focused on that.” It’s the strategy he’s updated for every role he’s assumed since then, including those at Marquette.
Cue his new position. “The difference this time,” Ah Yun says, “is there’s not a single book that says, this is how to be a successful university president.” Not letting that slow him, he’s been having meals and meetings with top executives he respects, including Peggy Troy, Nurs ’74, Hon Deg ’24, who ran and grew the massive Children’s Wisconsin health care system, and Vincent Lyles, executive director of Milwaukee Succeeds. From his early days at Marquette, he has sought out individual Jesuits as mentors and guides, observes Rev. Patrick McGrath, S.J., pastor of Old St. Patrick’s Parish in Chicago and a Marquette trustee. “Through his friendship with them and his experiences at Marquette, he deepened his appreciation of the pragmatic mysticism of Ignatian spirituality and the sensibility of the Jesuit way of proceeding.”
And Ah Yun continues to draw on his participation in the leadership master class led by his predecessor, President Lovell. “He really helped me think about how to integrate my faith into my work,” Ah Yun says. He learned from Lovell to reflect more — to take a day or a weekend before making a big decision — and to listen more. “When I go into meetings, I’m successful when I talk the least and just listen to what others are saying,” Ah Yun says.
What kind of presidency lies ahead for “President Kimo,” as he prefers to be called, as he aims to build Marquette’s momentum amid challenges such as declining numbers of Midwest high school graduates in coming years?
Those who know him well have very high expectations.
Longtime colleague Meyer has seen Ah Yun’s singular life experiences load up his leadership quiver with valuable qualities: integrity, authenticity, courage, conviction, generosity, a drive for excellence and evidence-based results, a strong faith. “These are all gifts, truly,” he says.
“I think of resilience in leadership with respect to President Kimo,” says Dr. Manoj Babu, Grad ’02, assistant professor of practice in management and a member of Marquette’s Academic Senate. “No matter what transpires, nothing deters him from the guiding principles and organizational success of Marquette. His love for the Marquette community seems to have no limits.”
“As provost, acting president and throughout the search process, Kimo demonstrated confidence and a deep knowledge of Marquette, its people and the challenges we face,” says Father McGrath, who served on the search committee that recommended Ah Yun to the Board of Trustees. “He demonstrates a calming equanimity even in the most trying circumstances.”
“I think of resilience in leadership with respect to President Kimo. No matter what transpires, nothing deters him from the guiding principles and organizational success of Marquette. His love for the Marquette community seems to have no limits.”
Dr. Manoj Babu, assistant professor of practice in management and secretary of Marquette’s Academic Senate
Dr. Sarah Feldner, acting provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, appreciates his respectful, purposeful and reflective way of making decisions and working with disagreement, and adds: “He is a meticulous researcher. He has taught me how important it is to know the data, and he does not ask others to summarize it for him — he consistently digs in and does the work.”
Student-centered and data-driven since emerging from grad school and beginning his faculty journey, Ah Yun uses these lenses in his most impassioned descriptions of his work at Marquette, including the collaborative crafting of Guided by Mission, Inspired to Change: Marquette University’s Strategic Plan for 2031.
That process began with the essentials. “You start with a blank page and ask the question: What is not optional? I remember mission was one of the first things we put on the page,” he says. “The plan had to reflect the voices of our community and their understanding of our purpose, and we had to be able to execute on it.” That last concern inspired work on performance-based goals and metrics that he sees as particularly valuable — including specific plan targets that define progress in mission-focused areas such as student success and academic research: retention, graduation, high-impact educational experiences, engagement in meaningful vocations after graduation, research centered on the Universal Apostolic Preferences identified by the Society of Jesus. “What I would say, and Mike would say, is Marquette has evolved in its sophistication in how we move, think and function. That sophistication means getting better at using specific language that we all understand, so we know what we’re working toward and can achieve accountability.”
Focus and intentionality are driving his work with Marquette’s leadership team and broader community. And the results — evidence-based, he’s sure — will be advancements in Marquette’s most important work. “The most important thing we do is to serve God. And we serve God through transforming the lives of our students and then contributing to knowledge that makes the world better.”
Strengthening the transformations students experience at Marquette, that is where his compass now points him, as he sits in the office that will eventually feel like his own. When he’s not meeting with Marquette alumni, Milwaukee leaders or members of the Marquette community, he’s there making plans, determining what Marquette needs most from him, gladly doing the work as always, often with a favorite tune drifting out the doorway, maybe Garth Brooks, the Eagles or Matt Nathanson.
As his inauguration ceremony approached this spring, Ah Yun found himself considering the 24 presidents who have come before him. “We are here today because of the work of those presidents with the Marquette community — the students, faculty, staff, alumni and the Board of Trustees, all working to get us to where we are,” he says. “So, when I think about it, I ask, ‘How do you continue to honor everything that’s been done in the past and then figure out what is that next big step that you take?’”
In the lead-up to the event, his wife felt pride. “I know where he began. I’ve seen the elementary schools that he went to, the neighborhood he lived in, the stories of his family, and for him to have gone from where he started to where he is now, it’s a remarkable story,” she says. “I’m proud of him for who he is and how he has taken these opportunities that have been put in front of him and done something with them. It is truly remarkable.”
