“When Dad Comes to Give a Lecture” - Dr. Daniel Toma: Scholar, Lecturer & TAC Parent

When geneticist Dr. Daniel Toma delivered his March lecture — “From Fruit Flies to Aristotle [to Dionysius]” — at Thomas Aquinas College, New England, at least one listener had likely heard those thoughts before: Dr. Toma’s daughter, sophomore Anastasia (’25).

“I had visited Anastasia a year ago in October,” Dr. Toma recalls. “I met several of the tutors then, and they wound up inviting me back for a lecture.” The faculty was grateful for his willingness — and grateful, too, for the intellectual substance he brought with him upon his return to campus.

In his lecture, Dr. Toma led listeners on a brief tour of his professional province of genetics, viewing it through both experimental and philosophical lenses and concluding with a glimpse of the field’s theological implications. The talk was well received by students and faculty alike.

As a professor of biology at Minnesota State University, Mankato — the largest school in the Minnesota State University system — Dr. Toma could easily have sent his daughter to a school much, much closer to home. How then, did Anastasia find her way to Thomas Aquinas College?

Dr. Toma’s answer is simple: “We’re practicing Byzantine Catholics.” He and his wife would settle for nothing less than an authentic Catholic education for their children. For high school, the Tomas are fortunate to live near Minneapolis, the birthplace of the Chesterton Schools Network, which, he explains, consists of “high schools built on classical liberal arts, with a Catholic perspective.” But what to do about college?

“There’s been a lot of research on what keeps kids Catholic, and the biggest thing is sending them to a good Catholic high school, as well as keeping them under at least a Catholic ‘umbrella’ through their undergraduate years, which is when, from a modern perspective, the ‘neurons start hardening,’” says Dr. Toma. “While nothing’s certain, it tends to be the best way of making sure that they preserve the Faith — and that’s the most important thing to my wife and me. They can do what they want when they go into the world, but our job as parents is to put our children in a setting where they will keep the Faith.”

“My job as a parent is to put my children in a setting where they will keep the Faith.”

Knowing the stakes, Dr. Toma kept his eyes open for schools to which he could entrust the intellectual and spiritual care of his children in their final years of formation. Fortunately, circumstance was on his side. “I did research in California for seven years,” he recalls. “So I had been up to the College’s California campus a number of times, where I got to know Tom Kaiser, who has an advanced degree in biology, like I do.”

Those visits convinced Dr. Toma not only of the College’s Catholic credentials, but of its intellectual seriousness and institutional longevity. “TAC has proven itself to be successful at turning out a ‘good product,’” he reflects. He particularly admires the College’s commitment to curricular breadth. “There are a few other institutions like it, but TAC stands out by having a lot of science and math. It’s important, for addressing the problems of the modern world, to really go into the sciences and learn how to deal with them.”

But unlike most institutions of higher education, Thomas Aquinas College balances this commitment to breadth with a fundamental commitment to showing how each discipline sheds light on the others. “I appreciate the fact that all the classes are highly integrated,” he says. “It’s not just the theology and the philosophy which are Catholic; the College knows how to integrate all the other secular disciplines into the tradition of the Church, pulling them together from a Catholic perspective.”

When the College’s New England campus opened in Northfield, Massachusetts — about 1,000 miles closer to Minnesota than California — the option seemed sealed by Providence.

Anastasia now plumbs the depths of the mysteries of both Creation and Redemption as a TAC student, and Dr. Toma could not be happier. “The College gives students the tools to approach and analyze the truth,” he says. “That’s the most important aspect of education. The primary purpose is to give students those tools, and only secondarily to get a job. It’s hard to find that attitude in schools nowadays.”