Bad news from University of Dallas

As an alumnus of the University of Dallas, long active in the national alumni association, I am saddened but not surprised by the latest fiasco. During the 1970s, under the leadership of Louise Cowan and the late Donald Cowan, the University earned a national reputation for excellence in the humanities, i.e., complete education of the human person, based on a rigorous classical core curriculum. The mandatory classical core curriculum has produced distinguished alumni who include a U.S. Navy Admiral, a special counsel and a speechwriter to Presidents of the United States, other lawyers, political leaders, physicians, physicists, philologists, philosophers, artists, Broadway and Hollywood actors, best-selling political commentators, nuclear engineers, aerospace engineers including a leader in the Apollo Space Program, imaginative entrepreneurs in commerce ranging from toys to nanotechnology, the Dean of the Honors Program at Baylor -- and more. Every one of us had to study the same classical core. Obviously this did not make us narrow, limited, cookie-cutter products of arts-and-letters "specialization." To the contrary, our classical education broadened us and equipped us to be leaders, giving us gifts of critical thinking, eloquence and culture. Our school had a disappointingly small financial endowment but a priceless endowment of intellectual inquiry firm in the 2,000 tradition of Catholic Christianity.

For three decades, U.D.'s superb tradition of teaching and learning has survived, sustained somehow by the priceless spiritual and intellectual endowment. Family members followed family members to enroll, and word of mouth kept enrollment going. Freshman enrollment today is the highest ever, with average SAT scores nearly as high as they've ever been -- this a testament to the perseverance of the faculty and the families who sustain U.D. through "legacy" enrollments. Faculty members have made financial sacrifices to keep teaching students and wisdom that they love in spite of the Trustees' cluelessness and failure to provide for them financially. George Weigel, the best-selling author of Witness to Hope, Pope John Paul II's authorized biography, sent both of his daughters to U.D. Weigel praised U.D. as the "best Catholic university in the United States."

Still, for many years, since the Cowans retired and Charles Grahmann became the Catholic Bishop of Dallas, there has been a deep rift between the Board of Trustees and its hired Administration on one side and, on the other side, the main part of the students, alumni and faculty. Grahmann packed the board of trustees with philistines, Babbitts and the dregs of a local clergy whose notoriety is a national scandal. The Grahmann gang dominating the U.D. trustees has failed miserably in its principal mission: to sustain with solid fundraising a school that was excellent when they took over the board. Instead of raising funds to pay the faculty a living wage, they have tried to heir utmost to "dumb down" U.D. and to micromanage the long-suffering scholars of the faculty. The trustees have scant appreciation for the treasures of the classical core curriculum and the Catholic intellectual and spiritual tradition. They have been shoving U.D. in the direction of becoming a temple of mediocrity or worse.

Is there any hope for U.D.'s future? Maybe if the Grahmann Gang would abdicate.

Egads.

I'm not even a conservative Catholic and the idea of UD hiring their own Jack DeGioia-type depresses me.

Appianus, like you I’m a UD graduate who has been active in the alumni association and was active in the effort to resist some of the “innovations” sought by Fr. Joseph, the late and unlamented president of UD. I share your concern with the board’s apparent ignorance of what makes UD an important place. But I’m not going to be involved in this particular fight, because after many years I’ve concluded that the alumni of UD are all hat and no cattle.

You speak of UD’s “priceless spiritual and intellectual endowment.” All that granted, UD alums never seems to want to talk about the financial endowment. UD alums give at an abysmal rate, and always have—especially for a body that claims to be as passionate about the school as we do. You say that the board has failed to sustain the school and its faculty with solid fundraising. Where do you think that money is supposed to come from if not from the alumni? And if you were a foundation giving officer or wealthy philanthropist, would you support a school whose own alumni won’t?

Were I the school’s president or a board member, it would be very difficult for me to credit the moaning and complaining that UD alumni constantly indulge. Should we be surprised that the board makes its own independent if misguided judgment about the school’s future? Should we be surprised that they ignore what we have to say? Why should we have a seat at the table when decisions are made if we refuse to support the school financially?

It also won’t do to say that as soon as we get what we want, we’ll give. Fr. Joseph is gone, many excellent faculty have been hired, and President Lazarus, while perhaps not everything we might have hoped for in a president, seems to be willing to do the right thing. As you note, enrollment is high and scores are up, but alumni still won’t give. And historically never have, not at rates that can sustain and grow the school.

It seems to me like the alumni at UD always move the goalposts, always demand more, while refusing to show their support. After a while, it reminds one of Charlie Brown and the football, and any self-respecting board member would be justified in saying, I'm sick of being played for a fool by these people.

sorry that should be "And maybe if the Berry's of the world realize that all they'll be inheriting is scorched earth, then they'll take themselves out of the running."

IrritatedUD Grad:

You are right in that there is a noisy, incurably malcontent element among the UD alumni, but there those kinds of elements in every such group. Some of these who complain the loudest are very young and need to grow up a lot more and get a life. A few even are long in the tooth but still need to grow up and get a life. The youngest ones also tend not to have the funds to give big gifts to UD even if they were motivated to give. The older cranks who never grew up probably don't have funds either.

But if you discount or filter out the segment of congenital complainers, I think you would need to recognize a large number of UD alumni who are very balanced and reasonable people who are offended by the trustees' -- and on too many occasions, administration's -- contempt for UD's traditional educational philosophy.

I do not have the data or statistics to refute your strong and general assertion that UD alumni are stingy, but I sincerely question your assertion. I invite others who have good data to join the discussion and offer a truer understanding of UD alumni support for the school. There are different indicators of support -- not only dollars in the aggregate, but percentages of alumni who give anything at all instead of nothing, etc.

I am absolutely, painfully certain that some alumni give more than they can afford in spite of insults from the trustees and mistrust with the development office, in a kind of wistful "triumph of hope over experience." If you know UD alumni well, you know such persons too.

The alumni in any case are who they are and cannot be changed except when the grim reaper takes some and some new ones are added through graduating from the university.

The trustees are, to put it charitably, a totally bad fit with the students and alumni. They are a self-perpetuating body whose greatest common denominator is that most of them were cronies of the unlamented former Bishop Grahmann. They don't want to change nor even to play by their own rules -- for example they established term limits ostensibly to cull some deadwood and then waived term limits in order to elevate a very deadwood Grahmann pet to be chairman of the board. But in theory at least, it is easier to change the trustees than the alumni. And the two groups are definitely incompatible.

More than half of UD undergraduates are from outside of Texas, but almost 100 percent of UD trustees are from Dallas, and they have little connection to the school other than their coziness with former Bishop Grahmann. Imagine if Cornell University insisted that all of its trustees had to be nothing more or less than worthies of the local Chamber of Commerce or Shriners Lodge of Ithaca, New York.

The UD trustees have spurned proposal after proposal to put Catholic leaders of national intellectual and financial substance, from all around the nation, on the board. For lack of better evidence this too was the handiwork of the creepy hand of Grahmann.

And it is their responsibility -- not the demoralized alumni's -- to inspire confidence in the current and future direction of the school and to raise the big capital funds for the university. Some of them are nice, well meaning people, and some of them most definitely are not. Some of them disparage the alumni and the students and the curriculum openly, like the trustee who said he could not imagine sending one of his own children to UD. Is he still on the board?
Probably. As a body they clearly do not fit the institution on whose board they mistakenly were selected to serve.

They appoint administrations that hire development people who are, shall we say, less than optimal in connecting with the alumni and constituencies that could and should support the university's traditional and praised curriculum. To be more specific, Monsignor Joseph's development chief was a charlatan who did a great deal of damage. The jury is still out on the new advancement chief, but this person has not yet demonstrated that he too will not prove have been a charlatan.

This is a radical thought and most unlikely to happen, but if the current trustees would resign en masse and let Bishop Farrell pick up the pieces to put together a new board, that would be a cleansing management change that just might give UD a fresh and promising start.

To conclude, UD alumni are a large, scattered, somewhat factionalized group. They are what they are and like the poor (which some of them are) they'll always be with us.

But the if the trustees, bless their hearts, would notice that Grahmann is in the -- pardon the expression -- rearview mirror, and if these sometimes harmless North Dallas folks could look at their relationship with the university they misunderstand so badly (and to some extent dislike) and say: goodbye. This didn't work out. It's not our fault nor your fault. We'll pass this trustees responsibility on to some people who actually appreciate what UD stands for.

According to USN&WR, the UD alumni giving rate is just slightly south of 20 percent. In the run of alumni giving in the U.S., this is middle of the road. Given the passion that UD excites, it is a strangely low number. I know many alumni who give 'till it hurts. I also know many who have an opinion about the school, but never a check for it.

WE MUST GET OVER OUR OBSSESSION WITH THE TRUSTEES. We must take responsibility for the school. Grahmann is gone. Joseph is gone. The board has changed fairly substantially (one of the most recent additions holds a BA from UD). Enrollment is up. Scores are up. The physical plant looks better than ever. The school managed to avert the financial crisis of 2003-04. We won!

And yet, a rump group of UD alums has once again found a way to create apocalyptic scenarios out of the hiring of a provost. I have no love for the board, but can certainly understand why they would be perplexed and miffed at the constant carping. And who precisely are these people of substance who were hoping to get on the board? I don't believe in leprechauns or unicorns, and I don't believe in the mythical group of super-wealthy Catholics whose money wasn't good enough for UD, either.

Why is the board's responsibility "to inspire confidence in the current and future direction of the school"? Why is it not the responsibility of the people who went there?

Irritated:

I plan on writing a substantially longer post later today, but in the meantime, I'd like to respond to some misunderstandings about alumni giving. Like you, I was under the impression that alumni giving for years has been awful. After participating in the phoneathon for several years and getting frustrated about the lack of good data on alumni, I started to look into the practices of University Advancement, particularly the alumni data they were working with. What I found was extremly surprising. UD alumni actually give at a fairly high rate---when they are contacted. Up until very very recently when some improvements were made, there was correct contact information on less than half of the UD alumni.

Now better contact data should yield much better results, but only when married with good messaging and the ubnderstanding among alumni that what they say about UD is the same thing the admnistration is saying. BTW, this misunderstanding about alumni giving has for a very long time been used as reason to ignore the very reasonable concerns of alumni who truly care for the place.

Many alumni and others interested in the University of Dallas are very concerned about the question of whether the future provost will be Catholic or not. That is an important issue, no doubt, as a Catholic university needs an administration that has a thorough understanding of the Catholic tradition. It is equally important, however, that the new provost will have an outstanding academic record. A provost is something like a "first faculty member," a role model who sets standards and implements policies concerning the academic rigor of an institution of higher learning. This is why Tom Hibbs was such an exciting candidate: he is a Catholic intellectual of significant repute--and promise.
By the way, the University of Dallas is not in crisis. There are some tensions and debates over the future vision for the university--but such discussions are normal at any institution or even business. There are also some financial challenges, concerning salary levels and the state of the library, for example. But these are not problems of apocalyptic dimensions. I am confident that they can be addressed and resolved.

Although I am an outsider, please allow me to make a suggestion: Your first order of business with the new bishop should be to restore U.D.'s Catholic appearance in it's most conspicuous place.

It's been nearly two years since I last attended a Mass there, but I assume that the chapel still looks like the product the breakaway spirit of Vatican II American Catholic church rather than the Roman Catholic Church in America. As I mentioned to Rod in a post some months ago, U.D. appears to be ashamed of belief in the Real Presence because He is shunted off to a tiny niche by the door; not allowed inside the Unitarian Universalist-like meeting hall ("chapel") itself. But of course what is allowed in is an elevated wading pool that sounds like a toilette flushing every few minutes-- the spirit of V II types have to show that U.D. is up to date, you know. This outsider sees it as all hat and no cattle, as Texicans like to say.

It broke my heart to see reverent, clear-eyed Catholic students (our future) having to attend Mass with fold-down kneelers in a "worship space" ashamed of the Real Presence.

Want to spark contributions by Catholics? First give them something authentically Catholic to be proud of again.