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Presidential Inauguration Address

October 1, 2004

It is a privilege to be here today as President of the University of Detroit Mercy. I want to thank so many people who have been a part of putting this event together—the planning committee, faculty, staff, students, alumni and friends of the University. I also want to welcome the many civic and church leaders who are here, as well as delegates from other schools, family and friends, many Jesuits, many Sisters of Mercy, and as have already been introduced, three former presidents.

I am humbled to be in your presence in this way, but I am proud of this University. There is no position I would rather have than to be President of the University of

Detroit Mercy. This is a great school, a great place in the heart of a great city, and it is my goal to make ours an even stronger presence, a stronger commitment to city, to education, to community.

We had a wonderful week of events that express our mission to integrate the intellectual, spiritual, ethical and social development of our students. In the course of this week of inauguration events, we have had an academic symposium and a blessing and dedication of academic facilities. We have taken a day to do service. We had the annual Red Mass at the law school with the renewal of the lawyer’s oath of office. And we had fun; we had a concert on Monday, and I was standing in the same place I am today only I had a guitar in hand. All of those different pieces of life come together in the educational experience at this University.

This morning’s installation ceremony involved three symbols of office. I was handed a scroll containing the foundation, mission, and vision of this University, and charged with making sure that our mission is lived out and our vision is achieved as we build on our foundation. In addition to the scroll, there is also the mace that leads processions, not so much as a club, but as a symbol of authority—authority that I hope comes by accepting this role as a role of service to the University. And finally, this medallion and chain were placed on my shoulders. It is a humbling challenge to have the hopes, the trust, and the lives of so many people on my shoulders. But I have two things going for me: one is that I do not do it alone, we do it together; and the other is that I am strengthened by having the hopes, the trusts, and the lives of so many supporting me.

A while back I was meeting with our University Advancement team members as they were having that anachronistic thing called an Advancement Retreat, and they were telling me all of the wonderful things that would happen as part of inauguration. We would bring alumni and friends of the University of Detroit Mercy and representatives of other universities to campus. We would bring people from across the country, and get to show off our facilities and our students. We would generate excitement and momentum through all the events of this week. So I said, "Well, then it sounds like you would want to inaugurate a new president every couple years." And they said, "No, no, we didn't mean it that way." Nevertheless, this week has been a great opportunity to celebrate not so much me, but the University and its identity and mission. I have been saying that all week, and I really mean it.

Our Religious Heritage

I think we at the University of Detroit Mercy often are motivated to live the mission of the University because things like leadership and service capture our imaginations. Our commitment to the city is something that people grasp and make a part of their lives because it is so much a part of this University. I think it is important, however, for us to pause and reflect on
the fact that those commitments really flow directly from the fact that this is a Catholic university sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy and the Society of Jesus.

I would like you to reflect with me this morning on how the mission flows directly from our religious heritage. To celebrate our heritage, let us begin with a little bit of history. What did our founders have in mind—that original group of Jesuits who came in 1877 to start a liberal arts college in Detroit, and the Sisters of Mercy who came in 1941 to provide liberal arts education for a nursing college and for their own sisters (although we know that Mother Manning had larger ideas in mind than simply some liberal arts support to other programs)?

Bishop Casper Borgess brought the Jesuits to Detroit in 1877 to found his Detroit Catholic College. He said, "We look forward to the young men who have received a religious education to give a healthy tone to society, to defend and practice the noble principles of honor, justice and truth. …We cannot lay too much stress on the necessity of giving the young men [it was young men at that point] a solid and thorough religious education."

The Detroit Evening News on June 8, 1877 ran an article that stated:

“Those who look on the Jesuit as the embodiment of pride, arrogance, ambition, craft and cruelty would no doubt be astonished to meet the four quiet unostentatious, courteous, learned, and gentlemanly persons who with so little display or advertisement installed themselves at the cathedral last week as the representatives of the Society of Jesus in Detroit.”

There is another piece of this history that I think we can be very proud of—the very first catalog of Detroit College contained this statement:

“No one, who may apply for admission to the college, will be refused on account of the religious opinions he may entertain, and no undue influence will be used to make a student change his religious belief.”

That welcoming of all faiths goes right back to the very first catalog of the University of Detroit, and when we begin the Celebrate Spirit Mass this morning, you will see a procession of the religious symbols
of many faith traditions, and we welcome them all here at the University.

The first catalog of Mercy College stated the purpose of the College as “the moral, intellectual and physical development of students according to the principles of a Catholic philosophy of education”—that sounds familiar. Mercy College aimed “to provide a broad general education and also the requisite technical training for Sisters…to provide a liberal education for young women with sufficient specialization in particular fields to qualify those who wish to continue to graduate school…to provide for young women an education embracing such a combination of cultural, scientific and professional courses as will enable them to assume positions of responsibility in a variety of fields.”

Leadership and service go right back to the beginning.

“Mercy College provides, in addition to its cultural and professional courses, theoretical instruction in moral and dogmatic truths. Through its extracurricular activities it aims to assist the student in translating these instructions into the practice of integrated, moral, religious and intellectual life. Thus the program of Mercy College aims to effect the harmonious development of soul, mind, and body.”

What a great heritage we have, a great heritage to embrace and enhance, and make even more relevant to today.

Our Mission as a Catholic University

Our mission statement says we are a Catholic, Mercy, Jesuit institution that exists to provide excellent student-centered undergraduate and graduate education in an urban context. Our Catholic legacy is a rich storehouse that is the Catholic intellectual tradition. It is a treasure house with much to offer the educational enterprise. Within that treasure house there are special rooms that are marked "Jesuit" and "Mercy" with the particular gifts and traditions of those orders, but they are part of the larger sense of what it is to be Catholic. I want to look at the Catholic worldview that stands behind our education, the Catholic worldview at its best—and I say “at its best” because we know that the Catholic tradition has not always been used in the best of ways and has sometimes been used to enslave and coerce rather than set people free.

At its best, the Catholic worldview starts with a radical openness to truth, a desire for truth, a search for truth, and it is at the heart of being Catholic because we seek the One who is truth. So we study everything. Everything is fair game for Catholic education. We study rigorously with critical examination of hypotheses and assumptions. Nothing is taken for granted, and that is part of the excellent education that we are about. We study and seek for truth and pass it on to others.

Where do we look for truth? The Catholic view sees the world as sacramental, as a place where God is present, and so in seeking for truth we are uncovering the One who is truth. We are always finding God in all things. “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,” as the Jesuit poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Where better to search for truth than at a comprehensive university? What a great thing to have such a wide range of studies all seeking for truth, truth about the human person and all of reality, always uncovering the essence of the One who is truth.

The Search for Truth

How do we look for truth? When we look for truth outside ourselves, we begin with reverence because the created world we are looking at comes from the hands of God. When we look for truth in human structures and human artifacts, we look with reverence because the starting point is always the equality in dignity of all human beings created in the image and likeness of God, even called to be co-creators. The Catholic worldview sees God present in all human beings, a God who in the incarnation chose to take our human flesh and be one of us, a God who enjoys participation in human life.

When we search for truth, we seek not just with our heads; we look at the world with our hearts, with our guts, with our spirit, with our whole selves. We do not just say, “What is the data?” We say, “How are the search and the data affecting me? How do they change me? How does this grab me in a way that God might actually be speaking to me through this experience of seeking the truth? How might God be leading me into my future through this experience?” That is part of our Catholic student-centered education. It requires compassion—part of our heritage from the Sisters of Mercy—that chooses to enter into the lives and experience of others as we look on everything and everybody. It requires discernment—part of our heritage from the Jesuits—that asks, “What is going on inside of me as I do this study? And how am I being affected by it and changed by it and drawn by it?” Compassion and discernment are at the heart of our being student-centered.

Where do we look for truth? We are embodied spirits and so location matters (as we discussed at our academic symposium). The urban context matters. During the 1960s and 1970s the University of Detroit had a campus in Clarkston, and there was a period of time when the Sisters of Mercy seriously considered moving Mercy College to their new land out in Farmington. If either of those paths had been followed, this would be a very different university. We would not be able to say that a third of our students are African-American if we were forty miles north of here. We would not have the same emphasis on the urban context in our mission if we were living twenty miles northwest of here. Being where we are matters. We choose to be committed to this city, to our neighboring community, to the Greater Detroit area, but we could not do the mission forty miles north of here the way we do it right here on McNichols and Livernois. It is the University’s place to be inserted, to be present, and to learn from our actions and our service in the city.

Educating the Whole Person

In sum, the academic enterprise is a reverent reflection on our world, on human beings, human experience, human action, and ourselves. We seek to integrate all of this, integrate the intellectual, spiritual, ethical and social development of our students. In my past four years as Vice President for Academic Affairs, I have interviewed a good number of faculty coming to this institution, and I would say to them, "How do you see yourself doing this integration?" And very often they would do what we often do, which is to say, "Well, I can take care of the intellectual part—that would be teaching and research," (and then skip over the spiritual part) and then move on to the ethical part, and say, "Yes, I can do ethics,” and “We will get students involved in the world out there, the social part." But we can't know the ethical—what to do—unless we know who we are as human beings with body, mind, and spirit, so these parts have to come together. We often tend to treat the mission as a checklist of elements rather than saying, "How do we really bring it together and make it one education?" I think that is the biggest challenge we face in living out our mission—to really integrate all those parts of our education and have it become a habitual way of learning for our students.

This integrated development of our students has to include a sense that they are not here just for themselves. Human life is about receiving gifts with open hands, and returning those gifts with open hands, and trusting that in the receiving and in the giving we will be nourished and receive even more. We receive from God's hands our gifts, our abilities, the knowledge that we struggle for, the truth that we seek, and we pass it on to others. And we find that in that passing on, we are enriched. It is what education is all about, and it is why we are in the academy. Education is not just for ourselves. It is for this city, for the world, for the common good, which is why we aspire to develop graduates who lead and serve in their community.

Sharing our Gifts

I said earlier that we welcome all faith traditions. That means that we have to walk a balance. We have a multicultural university. We have an ecumenical university. We have a diverse university. That is wonderful. That is who we are and who we want to be, but it takes balance to do this. On the one hand, we want to have times when we say explicitly, "We are Catholic, and we are going to do things in a Catholic way right now." For example, when this installation ceremony is over, we will have a Catholic Mass and we will use the language of the Catholic liturgy. On the other hand, there are many times when we want to gather all people of good will together, when we need to use a language of deeply shared values, a much more inclusive kind of language. The challenge is to learn the balance of when to use one and when to use the other, so that we are true to our Catholic roots, but we are also true to the way those Catholic roots impel us to work with all people in this educational enterprise.

The thing we want to avoid as we strive for this balance is hiding our Catholic gifts, not making them explicit or reflecting openly on them, lest we seem to impose them on others. We do not want to impose them. We invite others to share our gifts and to share their gifts with us, and we understand that people are free to receive or not receive. We are clearly not proselytizing, but if we really believe that our Catholic gifts, our Mercy and Jesuit gifts, are life-giving for our students and colleagues, we dare not hide them.

While books have been written about the legacies of our founders, I offer this brief summary: The Sisters of Mercy, and all who follow Catherine McAuley, embrace education for life and emphasize professional service as a way to promote systemic change. They aim to liberate the whole person from economic constraints and for service. The Jesuits, and all followers of Ignatius Loyola, embrace a service-oriented spirituality rooted in the Spiritual Exercises and emphasize education of leaders as a way to promote systemic change. They aim to liberate the whole person from cultural constraints and for service. Both of these traditions aim at the formation of women and men who will stand with others and live for others. What a rich heritage we have been given! No wonder we do not want to hide it!

Today, in this inauguration, we celebrate the University of Detroit Mercy, its mission and identity, and its heritage. I want to see the University grow not only in size and reputation, but in fulfillment of our mission. I want it to grow continually for a healthy, vibrant, and sustainable future. Wouldn't it be a shame if having access to this rich storehouse of the Catholic intellectual tradition, we did not use it ourselves or not offer it to our students? Wouldn't it be a shame if we said education is just about theory and facts and data, but we did not go back to the starting point that all human beings have an equality in dignity rooted in their being created in the image and likeness of God? Wouldn't it be a shame if we took that starting point, but did not call everyone in the academy to use his or her gifts, to share in the work of the Creator? Wouldn't it be a shame if we said education is about knowledge and skills, but we did not engage the heart and the spirit, we did not talk about values and ethics, we did not impel people towards leadership and service? Well thank goodness we do embrace our heritage. Thank goodness this University does strive to be true to its rich tradition, its identity and its mission. And thank goodness that you are all here today, committed to helping me to make the future strong and vibrant. That is why I am excited to be here. That is why I am proud to be the President of the University of Detroit Mercy. Thank you.