To the faculty, students, alumni, parents, trustees, benefactors, and friends of the University of Dallas:
In 1956, Bishop Thomas Gorman held before the University’s founders the vision of a “great university” that would one day “guide the intellectual life of the country.” As the University enters her eighth decade, I offer this inaugural issue of Principes, my new presidential newsletter, as an invitation to the whole University community to join me in confident pursuit of that vision.
The University of Dallas has not been spared the storms besetting American institutions of higher learning; she has had to navigate them and navigates them still. If speaking of greatness at such an hour seems unusually bold, perhaps I can only say: it is. I must insist, however, that the boldness of the present letter rests upon the simple fact that the University of Dallas is indeed a great university. This will be plain to anyone who recalls that the greatness of any university is to be measured not by its size, wealth, or rankings, but by the competence and character of its graduates.
Consider the evidence. No American institution founded in the twentieth century has received a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at a younger age than the University of Dallas. The curriculum that secured this distinction is the same curriculum that has produced thirty-eight Fulbright scholars, ten Goldwater scholars, five National Science Foundation fellows, and two clerks to justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. For the good of the Church, the University has educated one archbishop, twelve Catholic bishops, one abbot, more than three hundred priests, and more than one hundred religious sisters in the short span of seventy years. At least four hundred seventy-five of her alumni teach in colleges and universities, while more than eleven hundred have carried the University’s approach to liberal education into hundreds of classical schools across the country. More than seven hundred licensed attorneys, more than five hundred physicians, and over one thousand founders and entrepreneurs have gone forth to serve in the courtrooms, hospitals, and marketplaces upon which our common life depends. We could continue, but the point is clear. Look to the men and women entrusted with the institutions essential to human flourishing, and there you will find graduates of the University of Dallas.
This is not a matter of chance. It is the fruit of a deliberate form of education that, for seventy years, has formed persons of wisdom, character, and eloquence in service to the common good.
The tradition of Catholic universities that the University of Dallas was founded to uphold has a name for such men and women: principes — the “leading citizens” without whom no commonwealth can flourish.
Principes are what the University’s faculty have long formed, what her alumni are, and what her current students will one day become. And so, by its title, I offer this newsletter both as a tribute to the leading citizens of the University of Dallas and as a summons to the whole University community — each of us — to embrace Bishop Gorman’s founding vision as our common vocation.
I intend to trace this vocation more fully in the letters to come.
I pray that they may help us to see more clearly the great gift entrusted to us, to love it more fervently, and to join in building the great university Bishop Gorman envisioned. This work belongs to all of us. And so, I will close each letter with the words of Nehemiah 2:17 — Venite, aedificemus, “come, let us build.”
May Our Lady intercede for us, may the Lord bless us, and may He establish the work of our hands.
Venite, aedificemus,
Jonathan J. Sanford, PhD
President and Professor of Philosophy