President McLean: “Countercultural for 50 Years”

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“Countercultural for 50 Years” 
By Michael F. McLean, Ph.D.
President, Thomas Aquinas College
Alumni Dinner
July 3, 2021

Let me begin by adding my welcome to all of you and expressing my gratitude for your friendship and support. One of the joys of my presidency has been renewing friendships with alumni across the country and seeing how dedicated you are to the College and to the welfare of our faculty and students.

A sign of this dedication was this year’s Alumni Day of Giving on March 7. Roughly 500 of our alumni responded generously and sacrificially with an average gift of nearly $200, contributing a total of $57,233 — more than double last year’s contributions. Combined with the two matching gifts, that amounts to $93,243 in all — a 38 percent increase from 2018, and enough to cover the financial aid need of some seven current students for a year.

I also want to give a shout-out to the classes of 1981, 1996, 2001, 2010, and 2011, who are celebrating reunions this year.

I want now to recognize several individuals who have made enormous contributions to the success of Thomas Aquinas College, some over many years, others in the recent past:

    • Founder and now retired tutor Peter DeLuca and his wife, Kay — 52 years as a founder, tutor, administrative officer, interim president, and governor of the College. He once said “I feel as if I have been able to strike a blow in favor of Western Civilization.” And strike a blow he has, indeed.

    • Tom Susanka (’76) — Tom gave 41 years of extraordinary service to the College both as director of admissions and director of gift planning. Tom oversaw significant increases in our enrollment while working in admissions, recruited many of you here tonight, and helped shepherd many substantial gifts to the College while working in gift planning. 

    • Rev. Cornelius Buckley, S.J. — A university teacher, a college preparatory school president, a university dean, a university and seminary board member, a navy veteran, an author of at least 10 books and countless articles, and most of all a Catholic priest for nearly 60 years. Fr. Buckley has been a chaplain here since 2004. In that time, he has been a wonderful friend, confessor, and an inspiration to faculty, staff, and students alike. He is being recalled this fall to the Jesuit House in Los Gatos, California, so this is an opportune moment to salute him and express our thanks for his years of service.

As you know, the pandemic caused an evacuation of our students in March of 2020 and a rather abrupt pivot to online instruction. Thanks in large part to our students’ and to the faculty’s patience, cooperation, and flexibility, Zoom instruction went pretty well but was no substitute for the community life which is so essential to our ability to foster the moral, intellectual, and theological virtues and to our ability to conduct successfully our program of Catholic liberal education.

Together with the faculty, our students managed to return in the fall to in-person instruction and community life — with all its plans, protocols, and procedures — pretty darn well. Our seniors succeeded in completing their education here. Our students enjoyed the extracurricular activities which make for a rewarding and fulfilling respite from the rigors of our academic work. And all were also nourished with the graces provided by our chaplains. Also very happily, in addition to our nearly normal 2021 Commencement, we were able to conduct an in-person commencement for most of the members of the Class of 2020, who had been deprived of the celebrations which normally accompany graduation.

Alumnus and Dean John Goyette (’90) deserves a hearty well-done for getting us through the year in remarkable fashion and for coordinating so effectively with County health officials and with our medical advisory team. Alumnus Sam Caughron (’96) was extremely generous in serving on the team and in facilitating all of the testing we needed to do. 

Last but not least, let us offer our congratulations to alums Peggy (Steichen ’84) and Paul O’Reilly (’84). Paul, as you know, will assume the presidency of the College on July 1, 2022, and will be the first alumnus to do so. I have had the privilege of working closely with Paul over many years and I know he and Peggy will do an excellent job.

When the College’s founders wrote the Blue Book their principal concern was to outline a positive and robust vision of Catholic liberal education — a vision which takes our faith and the best of the Catholic philosophical and theological tradition seriously and fashions a curriculum accordingly.

The authors of the Blue Book were equally insightful, however, about describing the state of undergraduate education, including undergraduate Catholic education, in the late sixties and in identifying the underlying causes for its decline.

Chief among these causes was the wholesale and uncritical acceptance of the doctrine of academic freedom, understood, in the words of the Blue Book, “as the mentality of free inquiry, the mentality which sees itself as not enslaved to a fixed conception but free to subject every doctrine to critical examination and possible rejection” (p. 19).

With this as a principle, it is not hard to see that a Catholic college that considers the articles of faith as non-negotiable and beyond doubt, and that takes the magisterium of the Church as an infallible guide in directing us to the best and most reliable of teachers — in short, a college that proposes Catholic education as essentially faith seeking understanding — is almost inconceivable. But conceiving such a college — conceiving Thomas Aquinas College — is precisely what the founders did.

The authors of the Blue Book identify a number of important and extremely harmful educational consequences of this understanding of academic freedom. These include the secularization of American Catholic higher education, incoherence in the curriculum, the isolation of religion courses — which in no way performed a sapiential function with respect to the rest of the curriculum — and the substitution of vocational education for what was once an education judged to be intrinsically good for the human person.

Some 50 years after the Blue Book was written, it’s not at all clear that things in higher education generally have gotten any better; in fact, they’ve probably gotten worse. 

Christine Rosen, writing in a recent issue of Commentary magazine, says “we have moved beyond miseducation into an era of re-education.” She cites Critical Race Theory and gender studies as examples.

Rosen points to Duke University, which issued a statement last summer committing to “incorporate anti-racism into our curricula and programs across the university, requiring that every Duke student — in undergraduate, graduate, and professional programs — learns of the nature of structural racism and inequity.”

Rosen also mentions the University of Florida, the Rochester Institute of Technology, UCLA, and Princeton University, among others. More colleges and universities will no doubt follow in their footsteps.

I call your attention to these things as a way to highlight our College’s commitment to genuine education and its opposition to education which is little more than political indoctrination. This commitment and this opposition render the College uniquely fit to help nurture the Church and preserve the greatness of America. 

Thomas Aquinas College has an unapologetic commitment to the Catholic faith: to pursuing the truth about God, nature, human goodness, and the political order, and the confidence, contrary to the many skeptics who populate higher education today, that such truth can be found. 

The College proudly declares that, for undergraduates, certain things are more worth knowing than others and that such knowledge has to be pursued in the proper order and according to the proper method. 

Finally, the College declares that some are more worthy than others to be called teachers — chief among those most worthy being, after Our Lord Himself, St. Thomas Aquinas, but also including Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Newton, and Newman, among others — and that some books are more worthy than others of our time, interest, and careful study.

You have been the beneficiaries of these commitments. Generations of alumni such as yourselves are helping to renew the face of the earth — alumni who are serving well, and will continue to serve well, your families, your communities, your country, and your church. 

These commitments, and others I could mention, have made Thomas Aquinas College truly countercultural for all of its 50 years and will continue to do so for the next 50 years. 

As countercultural as the College is, it has been very successful. It owes its success, first, to the grace of God and to the vision of its founders. And then to all of the parents who have entrusted their children to us; to the Board members, benefactors, and alumni who have contributed time, talent, and treasure to ensure the College’s strength and well-being; and to the faculty and students who have dedicated themselves, as you once dedicated yourselves, to the College’s mission and educational vision, a mission and vision worth preserving, worth fighting for, and worth sacrificing for when necessary.

As we embark on the celebration of our 50^th anniversary, and look forward to the next 50 years in the College’s history, let us rededicate ourselves to that mission and vision, a mission and vision of vital importance in a world filled with an abundance of educational chaos and confusion. Let us thank God for our success — as we thank all of you for our success —  and pray fervently that He will continue to bless Thomas Aquinas College.

 

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