To the faculty, students, alumni, parents, trustees, benefactors, and friends of the University of Dallas:
Alumni and Family Weekend has once again come and gone, and though our classrooms remain full, the Mall feels strangely empty now that our graduates and their families have said their goodbyes. Such moments bring home to me the friendships that sustain the university and her mission. I want to dwell for a moment on the importance of those friendships, before drawing your attention to two ways we might renew and deepen them.
Aristotle observed that friendship holds cities together. That, we may surmise, is why the Greeks kept a common hearth at the center of their civic life. Just as a household had its hearth, so too the city had a hearth of its own, where citizens gathered, honored guests were received, and sojourners were welcomed home. It was a visible sign that its citizens belonged to one another, wherever their journeys took them.
The University of Dallas is not a city, but it is not unlike one, and just as citizens must seek each other’s good in working together for the good of the city, so must we care for one another as we work to fulfill the university’s mission.
Last weekend, children of alumni jumped in a bounce house beside students streaming to class while the Dumb Ox bustled with graduates returning to campus. It was a beautiful thing to see these generations mingling. If we are to lay the foundations for the university’s next seven decades, we must make time for conversation across generations: to hear each other’s stories, to see what each other sees, and to imagine what we might build together as we look to the future. Let me suggest two ways we might begin that work together even now.
The first continues a longstanding university tradition going back to Lyle Novinski’s “Eternal Cities” tours of Italy and Greece. From June 1–10, 2027, Dr. Susan Hanssen and Fr. Thomas Esposito will accompany me on a pilgrimage to Greece.
I warmly invite you to join us for days of exploration, shared meals, conversation, and prayer in the company of old friends and those we have yet to meet. Whether you return to familiar places or encounter them for the first time, I hope you will find companions in the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and virtue that animates this university.
A second opportunity to bring our generations together awaits at 1101 Owenwood, long a common hearth and home for the university—one that is familiar to many alumni and friends of UD and still to be discovered by others.
Home to our third president, Donald Cowan, and his wife, Louise, and later to Professor Lyle Novinski and his wife, Sybil, it was a place where many students first entered the university’s great conversation. They returned to its table after journeys through Greece and Italy, bringing what they had seen and learned back into that conversation. There, the university’s great conversation became something lived: a common search carried on around a table among friends.
I heartily thank the recently established Cowan-Novinski Foundation, which is raising funds to acquire and preserve this home so that its tradition of hospitality and intellectual friendship may continue for generations to come. The Foundation hopes to welcome students, faculty, alumni, visiting McDermott Professors, and friends for conversation, learning, and fellowship.
These are small steps toward renewing the friendships on which the university’s work in the years ahead will depend. Whatever we build for those who come after us will begin with the life we share now.
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