Detroit — Jesuit Fr. Gerard L. Stockhausen was a brilliant economist, a courageous leader and a kind priest. But the first word Fr. John M. Staudenmaier, SJ, used to describe his longtime friend and fellow Jesuit colleague was “smart.”

He had to be in order to undertake the kind of monumental rebuilding of an iconic Detroit institution such as the one he engineered over 10 years at the University of Detroit Mercy.

Fr. Stockhausen, who served as provost and academic vice president of UDM from 2000-04 and later as its president from 2004-10, died Jan. 12 after a battle with cancer. He was 66.

“When he came to the university here as provost and academic vice president in 2000, he spent the first two or three months he was here learning his way through all of the budgetary operations of the entire university,” said Fr. Staudenmaier, a professor for 25 years at UDM and current assistant to the president for mission and identity. “I watched him systematically learn his way through the intricate fiscal strengths and weaknesses of a pretty complicated organization until he and the president, Sr. Maureen Faye, were able to launch a top-to-bottom self-study of every single budgetary area in the university, from the mailroom to the physics department to an entire college.”

That massive undertaking, which involved nearly 400 people working at the university, proved to be the start of Fr. Stockhausen’s legacy in helping spearhead the “rebirth” of Detroit’s joint Mercy- and Jesuit-run university, Fr. Staudenmaier said.

The end result of the years of study, planning and execution was a transformed university, including almost $100 million in investments at the university’s main campus on McNichols Road and moving the dental school and clinics from their Outer Drive campus to a new location near Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to allow for expansion.

“That took a lot of work and a lot of investment, and now you have a dental school that’s twice the size it had been. Its dental clinics in a single year served 25,000 people and had about 120,000 procedures — a huge operation, and it would be hard to imagine the city without it,” Fr. Staudenmaier said.

Fr. Stockhausen was able to accomplish so much because of his mastery of intricate details and his ability to motivate those who worked with him, he added.

“He understood that what he and the president were asking of all the people who worked here was that on top of their jobs, that they dig into analyzing which things should be changed and which should be invested in more,” Fr. Staudenmaier said. “I think one of the reasons people worked so hard on that was because they trusted him.”

“It is a much healthier institution, and people who hadn’t been around since before 1995 were flabbergasted,” he said.

While Fr. Stockhausen will be remembered for his institutional successes, that’s not the only impression he left on UDM’s faculty and staff.

“He played a 12-string guitar very well and loved to sing,” Fr. Staudenmaier said, adding Fr. Stockhausen used to lead the music for worship services. “When he was inaugurated as president in 2004, he and two other Jesuits who were also musicians created a temporary ‘funky band’ and performed. He loved doing that.”

Fr. Stockhausen was also a formidable athlete who loved to water ski and play basketball, Fr. Staudenmaier said, passions he shared with UDM’s hoops-crazy students and faculty. He would eat lunch each day near the campus fountain “so kids could come up and find him,” Fr. Staudenmaier said. “He was very accessible to staff and faculty, and that’s why he’s left a lot of people heartbroken on this campus.”

In a statement, current UDM president Antoine Garibaldi, Ph.D., said the university had lost “an incredible leader and a wonderful friend.”

Fr. Stockhausen was born in Milwaukee and entered the Society of Jesus in 1967. He was ordained in 1979 and pronounced final vows in 1989. He spent 15 years teaching at Creighton University before his tenure at UDM. From 2010-15, Fr. Stockhausen served as socius and executive secretary to the president and director of planning for the U.S. Jesuit Conference.

A funeral Mass was celebrated Jan. 16 at Gesu Church in Milwaukee, and a memorial service was to be Jan. 20 in UDM’s St. Ignatius Chapel.

Fr. Staudenmaier said one of his favorite memories of Fr. Stockhausen was a homily he gave several years ago, “one of those homilies you never forget,” he said, about the parable of the man bought a field where treasure was buried.

“Jerry said of this parable of Jesus, you don’t just get the treasure. You have to take the field with it,” he said. “That’s what happens in a marriage: you don’t just get the parts you easily love; you have to take the whole field. And that was like him: he never ducked the tough stuff.”

—Mike Stechschulte