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 pursue that vision with a renewed sense of confidence.
I do not extend this invitation lightly. These are trying years for American higher education: as enrollments contract, costs mount, public confidence wavers, and families increasingly doubt what education is for. The University of Dallas has not been spared these storms; she has had to navigate them, and navigates them still. If speaking of greatness in such an hour seems bold, I can only say: it is. But it is the boldness not of presumption but of clarity and resolve. For the University of Dallas is already a great university, provided we judge greatness by its proper measure: not size, wealth, or rankings, but the competence and character of her graduates.
Consider the evidence. No American institution founded in the twentieth century has received a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at a younger age. Her alumni include thirty-eight Fulbright scholars, ten Goldwater scholars, five National Science Foundation fellows, and clerks to two justices of the Supreme Court of the United States. In service to the Church, they include one archbishop, twelve Catholic bishops, one abbot, more than three hundred priests, and more than one hundred religious sisters. In the academy, they include more than four hundred seventy-five college and university faculty and more than eleven hundred classical-school faculty and educators. In the professions and public life, they include more than seven hundred licensed attorneys, more than five hundred physicians, and more than one thousand founders and entrepreneurs. They serve in chanceries, courtrooms, classrooms, boardrooms, laboratories, studios, schools, and homes — wherever the future of our institutions is being formed.
These are not merely individual achievements. Nor are they the product of chance. They are 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 from which the University of Dallas takes her conception of liberal education has a name for such men and women: principes. Drawn from the classical and Christian ideal of the principes civitatis, the term names the “leading citizens” on whom the health of every commonwealth ultimately depends.
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, this newsletter is not only named in honor of the leading citizens the University has formed; it is a summons to the whole University community — all of us — to embrace Bishop Gorman’s vision as our common vocation.
I intend to trace this vocation more fully in the letters to come. In them I will consider the Catholic and intellectual lineage the University inherits; the founding aim that distinguishes her from other institutions; the Core Curriculum in which that aim takes form; the faculty who teach and steward it; and the transatlantic culture — stretching from Irving to Rome — in which our students form the friendships by which their education is carried into the world. Taken together, I hope these letters will show that the University of Dallas was founded to form leading citizens, that she has done so for seventy years, and that the very thing our Church and our republic most need now is the very thing that the University of Dallas provides.
I pray that these letters help us to see more clearly the gift entrusted to us, to love it more fervently, and to build, with renewed confidence, the University of Dallas in full. The University we have inherited is ours not merely to preserve, but to bring about more fully into being. This work belongs to all of us. And so I will close these letters with a summons to the whole University community, drawn from 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