Remarks at Opening Dinner for Faculty and Staff
by
Father Jonathan DeFelice, O.S.B.
President
Saint Anselm College
21 August 2007

Good evening and a very special welcome to all the new members of our faculty and staff and their spouses and guests.  We are happy to have all of you as part of our Anselmian community.  Would all those who have joined our community since last August please stand and be recognized!

First of all, greetings from Abbot Matthew who unfortunately is not with us tonight. He is at the moment in Hungary giving a short course in monastic spirituality to Benedictine monks there – in Hungarian!  He did want me to be sure to tell you – in English! – that you are all in his prayers as this new academic year begins.

Some other updates from the monastery:  this year Father John will be on sabbatical from the College and will be spending the year as a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame.  While there I think he will also be secretly honing his skills as the chaplain to our football team!  Father Mathias has returned to the College from his graduate school work in California and now will be part of the Dean of Students staff.

We were all saddened to lose two irreplaceable monastic members of the Saint Anselm community.  Fr. Daniel was called to the Lord on Commencement Day in May and Sr. Nivelle followed him in August.  These two Benedictines spent a combined total of nearly 80 years on this campus, living and modeling their faith for generations of faculty, staff and alumni. We will certainly miss them both and I ask your prayers for their eternal happiness.

On a more joyful note, this summer my confrere and the college’s Dean, Father Augustine, celebrated the 25th anniversary of his profession as a Benedictine monk, a significant milestone in anyone’s life.  Congratulations Father Augustine!  And finally on the monastic news side, we welcome our newest member, Brother John Paul, who is a native of New Hampshire, and who began his novitiate just last month.

This summer was a busy one, beginning with back to back Democratic and Republican presidential debates.  On two nights in early June our campus became a classroom for the entire nation.  I am so very grateful to every member of this community: from the men and women of our physical plant, information technology and dining services departments; to staff at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics and members of the college advancement, college communications and marketing, our executive vice president, faculty and so many others who  pulled together - once again - in the ultimate all-hands-on-deck commitment to doing our part to advance the dialogue and the debate that is so vital to our nation’s democracy.

I offer a special thanks to two people who kept us on time and on task in the months and weeks before the crush of cameras, media and candidates descended onto our campus. Thank you to Mica Stark and Bill Furlong who stayed calm before and during the storm.  I would like to ask every person who worked on the debates, in any capacity, to please stand.  You have my profound thanks.

As I mentioned to a group of network executives and community leaders at one of the pre-debate receptions, one of my frustrations with the TV coverage was that Wolf Blitzer has no problem reporting on the comings and goings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but he struggled to correctly pronounce Saint Anselm College. Despite his bungling I heard from college presidents and alumni around the country about how fortunate we were to have such an event here and how much they appreciated our efforts.

The staging and infrastructure of the debate was still being disassembled when about 1500 students form across the country descended on our campus for the national City Year convention.  For those of you not familiar with City Year, it is an organization in which students and recent college graduates make a one year commitment to service in cities throughout the country. We were honored by the presence of former President William Clinton who delivered the keynote address in Sullivan Arena just days after his wife had debated on the same stage. President Clinton remarked that he thought it was quite an accomplishment that both he and Hillary were on campus in the same week.  We thought so too! Again, I extend sincere thanks to the countless people who gave so many hours to ensuring the success of this program.    

In the coming weeks and throughout the fall semester - as we head into yet another New Hampshire primary - we can anticipate even more activity on our campus from the presidential candidates and the news organizations that cover them.  I thank you all in advance for extending the very best of our Benedictine hospitality to all.

I want to say a special word of thanks to our Executive Vice President, Dr. Marie George, who has now completed her fourth year with us and who has provided exemplary leadership for so many critically important initiatives here at the college; this year she has added the skill of news network negotiation to her portfolio.

As we turn our attention to another academic year, we will be immersed in the hard work of preparing for the spring 2009 visit of the New England Association of Schools and Colleges for the accreditation process that occurs every ten years.  I am grateful to Dr. Derk Wierda who has agreed to chair the self-study committee that has been established, and to those faculty and staff who have agreed to assume leadership roles in preparation for the NEASC visit.
 
I am always energized by the return of our students when the campus finally feels normal again; when we can all see with our own eyes and hear with our own ears the reason we are involved in the work we do.  This year we will have another robust and bright freshmen class.  As always, I am grateful to everyone on campus, and especially to members of the enrollment management unit whose good work has once again yielded such a bountiful harvest.

I find myself thinking often, but especially at this time of year, about the reality that as the world changes in so many ways around us, there are certain fundamental premises on which this college was founded that remain unchanged.  This college was founded with a vision that it would become an outstanding Catholic College that would prepare its students for life in the world in which they would live and work. 

The founding monks were, for the most part, German immigrants to the United States; they came here from Newark, New Jersey that was, even then, a far more urban environment than rural New Hampshire they found when they came to teach the sons of the mills and the maids whose families wanted better opportunity for their offspring; the sons of primarily Irish and French immigrants – an ethnic mix that was a huge challenge in its day!

The founders’ mission, as they saw, it was to improve the world in which they themselves worked, a world in many ways unfamiliar to themselves.  From the beginning Saint Anselm has had to face significant challenges and, with every one, a positive response promoted the growth and development of our college.  The challenge to leave Newark and come here at all was soon compounded by the fire that destroyed the first building; the response was to stay here and continue the work despite difficult economic times. 

The challenge of deciding to close the prep school and concentrate on the college alone in the 1930s was followed by further challenges in the financial world and with a world war.  The response to remain open and to struggle through some of the most difficult years in our history brought a postwar success that had seemed almost impossible to many, and unlikely to most.  The challenge of admitting women for the first time through the founding of our department of nursing was thought to be folly by some; but the positive response ushered in a new decade of success.  The challenge to double the size of the student body and expand the college’s facilities in the late 1950s was unprecedented and a source of enormous anxiety.  The positive response resulted in the modern era of the College and nearly a half-century of physical, financial, and qualitative growth.

I have mentioned just a few of the major challenges – there have been many more, some of the same magnitude; others less so; the response to all of which, however, brought us to where we are today.

As this College has grown and developed and changed in so many ways that fundamental task has not changed.  We are still about improving the lives of our students, still about educating them well for the world in which they will live – not the world of the 19th or even 20th centuries, but this new world of the 21st century that is so much characterized by global awareness and communication and by enormously complex political and ethical questions.

Our students will have to navigate their way through life in a world very different from the one that almost everyone in this room grew up in; a world that presents challenges that even a decade ago we might never have imagined.  To do that – and to do it well – means that Saint Anselm must look at itself again and ask if we are doing the work that we need to be doing.  Are we open to new challenge of being a truly Catholic college that is truly inclusive of all?

We have been asking ourselves this for some time now; and we have made some significant efforts and had some significant successes.  We are truly blessed on this campus to have a large number of pioneers who have already cleared a path for us in these efforts.  Let me cite just a few examples.

I offer my deepest thanks to the Dean and to the faculty who have embraced the challenge through developing new courses – to name but a few – courses like Chinese, Confucian Thought, Native American literature and history, Politics of Diversity, and the Life of Mohammed. We can all be proud of the fact that curricular responses to the need for inclusiveness resulted in the funding and hiring of specialists in African History and African-American Literature.
 
It was heartening last year to see so much excellent programming on this campus: at the NHIOP and other venues focusing on Islam, world poverty, Catholicism in India, the Middle East, Darfur, Brazil and the Catholic Church, religion and politics in Lebanon and book discussions on Asia.
          
Likewise, it is noteworthy that while so many colleges and universities have abandoned requirements in modern and classical languages, our commitment has never wavered. Simultaneously, we are making progress in expanding our study abroad options, including a more permanent opportunity for our students to study in the truly universal city of Rome.
 
Complementing advances on the curricular side, our path has also been illuminated by a vast and rich array of co-curricular programming from the Multicultural Center’s non-stop offering of food, music, and dance; to that office’s collaboration with residence life to set up new kinds of programming.  Students from Lithuania, the Philippines, Bulgaria, Italy, Mexico, Ecuador, and Native American reservations have all contributed their time and talent to bring this rich programming to our campus.  And our food service staff has researched and prepared meals that broadened our cultural understanding.

My thanks as well to Bob Shea for the Dana Humanities Center’s focus particularly in the last two years on new and different experiences in the performing arts of so many cultures.
All of these examples bode well for how our faculty, staff, and students have embraced the nature of our changing world. There is now the need for all of us to step forward into that world with confidence, and to also invite that world into the embrace of this campus in ways that further strengthen our resolve to be excellent in all regards.

A Benedictine monastic scholar* recently wrote that “a person who really feels at home can open the door wide.”  I think we can say the same about Saint Anselm College.  We “really feel at home” with who we are as a Catholic liberal arts college; and so we should feel quite confident in opening our door wide.

We need to become a college community that, because of our Catholic identity, intentionally and deliberately reaches out with open arms and open minds to all people and to the truth wherever it is found.  We could all just rest content with who are right now.  But the consequence of that would be to constrain this fine college to be less than it can be; it would make us unfaithful to the founding vision, to our mission, to our role in the Church and society.

Saint Anselm has never rested content in the 118 years since its founding.  I do not want it to do so now…and I know that you, too, want nothing but our college’s progress and success.  The process of being a truly inclusive college, of educating ourselves and our students to different ideas, different cultures, different backgrounds, and different people is the work of all of us.  We are the ones who must show the way for our students.  All of us.  And we need to act, not simply talk.  Not all of us are faculty members, but all of us – no matter what our role is in the college – all of us are teachers.  And we all need to insure by what we say and by what we do that we are teaching the lesson that a truly Catholic college is a truly inclusive college.

And so to assist us, I have formed, with the full support of the President’s Cabinet and the willing service of members of our college community, a President’s Advisory Council on Inclusiveness that is being chaired by a highly respected member of our faculty and a very skilled administrator, Dr. Denise Askin.  Under her leadership we shall consider what skills we ourselves need, what moves we need to make, what changes we may need to embrace, so that Saint Anselm College will continue to provide the very best possible education.

The formation of this council is not a symbolic gesture, nor a bow to the winds of political correctness.  I consider the formation of this council a clear sign for everyone to see that this college stands ready, willing and able to embrace the challenge of a changing world, to open its door wide.

Among the many goals of the college’s strategic plan, one is that we be deliberate and intentional in thinking about how our faculty, staff, students, as well as our curricular and co-curricular efforts support our goals for diversifying this campus. When we talk about diversity, we are talking not just about the who that studies or works at Saint Anselm College, but also about the what: that great mosaic of courses, programs, and experiences that come together to produce a Saint Anselm education.
 
There are big questions we must ask and answer. How do we enable our students to encounter this world in meaningful ways? What must we help them to learn?  How must we help them, and ourselves, to step out of the comfort zones of the familiar in order that they may be truly educated?  How do we succeed in making Saint Anselm College not just the alma mater for more minority students, but also the place where every member of our community embraces the challenge to expand the horizons of our minds and hearts.
 
My friends and colleagues, inclusiveness is a way of being in the world, a state of heart and mind that knows that when we step into the unfamiliar, when we open ourselves to that what is new or different, we become more than we might have been.

The pursuit of excellence requires each of us to take up this work.  It is not the responsibility of one or a few offices or even the President’s Advisory Council on Inclusiveness.  It is the responsibility of all of us here, and all who will come after us.  To those who have blazed such a wonderful path for us, I offer my thanks and encouragement that you continue in this great work.
    
On the eve of this new academic year, I ask everyone in our community to take up this challenge with all the vigor and enthusiasm that you bring to your other work on our campus.

If you do, we shall succeed as those before us succeeded in the challenges of their own time.  We truly feel at home – let us open the door wide, and let us remember always that the good work we are doing will help advance a civilization of love for the good of society and the glory of God. 

I look forward to seeing you at the opening Mass next Monday morning.

Thank you and God bless you all.

*Aquinata Bockman, O.S.B., Perspectives on the Rule of Saint Benedict, Introduction.