The Letter to the Hebrews invites us to persevere in this life by recalling the “great cloud of witnesses” who have gone before us. In the weeks since publishing the inaugural issue of my presidential newsletter, Principes, I have followed that counsel by reading through the speeches of my predecessor, Donald Cowan. It would be hard to overstate the encouragement I’ve taken from this exercise. Indeed, I have been astonished to learn how clearly, and how frequently, Cowan gave voice to the hopes for the University that animate my own work today.
Take, for instance, these words from Cowan’s 1965 convocation address, in which he states with startling simplicity:
“The purpose of the University of Dallas is to serve the culture by providing its leaders.”
To read Cowan’s writings is to encounter a remarkable confidence in the public impact of the men and women who would go forth from this great University. “You have a public function to perform,” he told his students. “Do not come here if you do not intend to be somebody important”—a mother or father; a priest or librarian; a craftsman or midwife; anyone, in short, whose work sustains the institutions on which our commonwealth depends.
This must be put just so. To instrumentalize the pursuit of truth, virtue, and wisdom for the sake of cultural influence would be to forfeit the University’s mission. The formation of leading citizens, however, is not a rival end set alongside the ends proper to a liberal education; it grows from the pursuit of truth, virtue, and wisdom as fruit grows from a living root. As Cicero observes in On Duties, the desire for truth itself gives rise to “a certain desire for leadership.” Those who seek the truth—and find it—cannot remain indifferent to the good of their fellow citizens.
Cowan understood this. And he saw, as we must learn to see now, why today’s leaders require something more than technical competence. Expertise is, of course, indispensable. Yet the knowledge of the expert, if it remains merely technical, can furnish us only with data. What it cannot do is tell us how to live. “Decisions are acts of the will,” Cowan wrote. “What we seek is wisdom to direct the will.”
Wisdom to direct the will. More than sixty years later, that is the intended fruit of a University of Dallas education: we seek to form men and women who, precisely by holding fast to “the old verities that are essentially unchanging,” excel in imagining “new forms, new modes, new applications, new dimensions” of human flourishing.
Cowan could not finish this work, and neither can we. For a university is not a finished possession but an inheritance that each generation must receive, cultivate, and hand on. What we inherit, we must also 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