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EDITOR’S NOTE: Following is the address given March 30, 2000, by the Rev. Joseph L. Levesque, C.M., at his inauguration as the 25th president of Niagara University.
This is the day the Lord has made! Let us rejoice and be glad! Today we pray that God will continue to bless Niagara University and that the fullness of God's love will be poured out upon us. And we pray for this through the intercession of St. Vincent de Paul.
Bishop Mansell; Fr. McKenna, provincial superior; Mr. Glynn, chairman of the board; trustees; Mayor Elia and Mayor Soluri, clergy, religious, colleagues, honored guests, my friends and dearest family:
Niagara University is proud to continue its Catholic and Vincentian tradition in the new millennium: a university of excellence, preparing our students for their future lives, filled with hope!
As I have said elsewhere, I want people to know how good Niagara University is, how qualified and dedicated our faculty and staff are, and how well our professional and career-oriented programs prepare students for graduate studies and for the working world.
And today, we celebrate who we are. We share our halls and hearts with all who greet us and join us as we take another significant step forward on our journey of life in higher education.
Almost 150 years ago Niagara University started this special journey by educating and preparing priests, for we started as the Seminary of Our Lady of Angels. Today we have new students, and we use a new pedagogy for a very new and advanced world, but with the same dedication of faculty and skilled professional staff training our students in mind, heart and soul.
St. Vincent de Paul
St. Vincent de Paul, founder of the Congregation of the Mission, the Vincentian Community, is in one sense the founder of Niagara University. It is above all St. Vincent de Paul and what he did and taught in his life that gives the motivation to what I wish to say today at this inaugural time. Niagara University today commissions its 25th president. Because of custom, the president offers those here gathered an outline of his vision for the university, so allow me to do that.
Vision and History
I want to respect and build on the sacred past of this outstanding university. Fr. John Lynch, C.M., and Bishop John Timon, C.M., the first bishop of the Diocese of Buffalo, were co-founders of Niagara University. They started with six seminary students and two faculty, first in Bishop Timon’s house in Buffalo, then moving into a vacated home for boys on Best Street in Buffalo. In time, the founders moved the university to the Village of Suspension Bridge, now Niagara Falls, where the Vincentian founders purchased 100 acres of the Vedder Farm on Monteagle Ridge, as well as the 300-acre DeVeaux farm.
I have enjoyed reading stories of how, as a very young man, and then as a priest, John Lynch was in Ireland dreaming and longing to visit the United States and, especially, this land of the great Niagara Falls. I am happy that we, too, have all gathered today in this wonderful setting of lakes, rivers, gorges, international borders and our majestic thundering waters of Niagara Falls just down the road.
Our founders were people of strong faith and hope, planners, people full of adventure, answering the needs of the church and the people of their time.
Today, we who are gathered here continue that special journey of Niagara University started by Fr. John Lynch and Bishop John Timon.
The President’s Values
But today I want to spell out what I value most about Niagara University, and that is its Vincentian mission and values. In the last several months, I have invited all faculty, students and staff to come and talk to me, and they have told me that Niagara University’s greatest strengths are its people—faculty and students—and all the important staff who form the community of Niagara University. There is something special, dynamic in all our people. They connect, they are happy to be here with and for each other. They work at "learning" and "scholarship" together. They are happy to be working together, and they do it well.
In summary form, we can say that our students and faculty seek excellence in learning to be able to serve our world better and to respect and care for the poor and most disadvantaged.
Niagara University excels in service learning, and I believe that we do so because it is at the heart of what our university has done for many long years. Our "Learn and Serve Niagara" program has grown into the exemplary program it is under the charismatic leadership of our own Dr. Marilynn Fleckenstein.
The staff of the Academic Exploration Program recently visited with me and told me that "the people who work here, and the excellence of our academic programs" are Niagara University’s greatest strengths. The members of the biology department came together and spoke to me with enthusiasm of our young faculty who are being supported and mentored, who enjoy doing undergraduate research and being with our students, and who wish to carry on numerous learning projects with our students.
What is the summary of responses to my question of all those who visited me since Jan. 1, 2000? My question was: "What are our greatest strengths at Niagara University?" The answers were:
1. Our faculty and staff—dedicated, talented, active and involved;
2. Our students and alumni—enthusiastic, supportive, who love Niagara University and all for which it stands;
3. Our service of others—this is our great tradition that the people here at Niagara University know and love.
The faculty of the criminal justice department summarized it well for me: "We have great faculty and students; there is a religious dimension to our life here—we live as family, as community, we have a spirituality that the majority are touched by; this all comes into the classroom, where you find a sense of dignity and respect; we have excellent faculty and student interaction."
This is who we are, this is our tradition. As president, I want to build on these strengths.
In addition to those who have visited me in my office, I also want to thank those around the campus who have stopped me, welcomed me and extended their best wishes to me. I met many of you at a breakfast hosted by Dr. Mason; or I met you in lower level Gallagher Center, while having a sandwich; or upper level Gallagher Center, going to a basketball game; in the Dwyer Arena for a hockey game; or to the Leary Theatre for another excellent production. In many ways and places, you have welcomed me home, and I am happy to be here, back home, with you.
St. Vincent’s Life and Challenges
(Editor’s note: The following remarks were delivered by the Very Rev. Thomas F. McKenna, C.M., provincial of the Eastern Province of the Vincentian Community. They reflect his interpretation of how St. Vincent de Paul, founder of the Vincentian Community, would view the role of Vincentian education, if speaking today.)
From my vantage point of 17th century France, the language and methods of your education prospects feel very different, but at the heart of it, things are the same.
Education is an essential way that the Divine spark inside each of us can catch fire. It’s one of the deep channels along which God’s image inside of everybody can move and grow.
Now this might sound very ethereal. But it translates into a simple thing: Education helps you see and do what God sees and does.
It enables you to see because it feeds the inner self so it can notice better what is important in God’s sight. It catches sight of things which part of the culture tries to screen out--realities like the dignity of the poor and vulnerable people in society; things like compassion and healing as activities to which to devote your best energies.
Education lets you do, that is, gain the skills you need to put flesh on your vision. Education actually allows you to move on the values you see. It is needed to translate what you feel into practical action which helps others. It gives you the tools to move from affective intentions to effective activities.
That’s how I view education: an essential, fertile, effective medium for doing God’s work in the world, especially for serving God’s favored ones, the poor.
These are core values in the right kind of education, and Father Levesque will speak further of them.
(End of Fr. McKenna’s remarks. Fr. Levesque resumes speaking.)
In 1994, Sr. Louise Sullivan, D.C. published here at Niagara University a booklet that was researched and written as part of her summer research grant. Her booklet, "The Core Values of Vincentian Education," summarized St. Vincent and St. Louise’s life and work. She then determined and spelled out the core values that flowed from that. I would like to quote and to use the framework/outline of these core values of Vincentian education to develop my vision for Niagara University:
1. A Niagara University Vincentian education is holistic. "It seeks to respond to the intellectual, spiritual, moral and affective needs of the students. In other words, our education is for the heart as well as for the head."
This value, especially as it relates to the spiritual and moral aspects of our lives, gives me an opportunity to speak a few words about Niagara University as a Catholic university.
In the words of "Ex Corde Ecclesiae," Pope John Paul II’s apostolic statement on Roman Catholic higher education, the first thing that is clear about being a Catholic university is that it "maintain communion with the universal church, the Holy See, the local church and, in particular, with the diocesan bishops of the region or the nation in which it is located" (II, Article 5, Paragraph 1).
As we live out our life, the pope’s document says, a Catholic university has an ability to show how it looks at the world and the exalted place of the human person within it—always preserving dignity and respect for all persons. Our Catholic culture has an ability to transform how we can speak about human nature, the human person and God. It is clear that there are many special ways in which our distinctive Catholic culture can influence the greater society in which we live.
I am happy that Fr. Devine took time to speak of and to emphasize the Catholic side of our university in his term as acting president.
I will encourage all to emphasize the important contributions of our Catholic culture to our students’ lives, always respecting and promoting the place and dignity to be given to all other religious families and traditions and their inestimable contribution to our Niagara University education.
2. A Niagara University Vincentian education is integrated. "Our education blends the humanistic and the professional, the abstract and the practical."
I will strongly encourage new majors, minors, double majors, concentrations, and in a special way, study abroad—all that can enrich our students in professional and humanistic ways. No one profession, with the particularity of its course work, is enough to help us live in our world today. All parts of our curriculum are important. Our new core curriculum is well on its way, and I look for and encourage its completion and acceptance. It will be by way of that core curriculum that we will be able to give the special stamp of our Vincentian mission to all our students in all our majors.
3. A Niagara University Vincentian education is creative: "We must always seek new or renewed ways to meet the changing needs of students while maintaining a clear sense of the possible."
Dr. Wayne Northcutt of the International Studies Program recently told me "to think big." I liked that. Yes, I must think big. We should all think big. What new and better ways can we do this to better serve our students?
My dear colleagues of Niagara University, let us think big, pay attention to the signs of the times and the needs of our students, and let us plan to move forward, hopefully, in new and better ways.
I thank Fr. Golden and all who worked so hard with him in developing the university's strategic plan. We will move forward with this plan and continue to adapt it. I look forward to our projected new programs. I am very excited about our present plans for renovation of St. Vincent’s and our newest plans for student apartment-style residences. These are going to be attractive additions to our growing campus. This summer, some athletic fields will be moved to make room for the planned housing, which we expect to be available in fall 2002.
We will be more creative in finding out how we can better market to our future students all that we are and have. We will finance our great future plans, and I look forward to our next capital campaign. It will be the largest yet that our university will have seen, and it will start by 2001.
In my term as president, I am committed to the significant growth of our present endowment fund. I will link our next campaign and all major fund raising to our 150th anniversary to be celebrated in 2006.
4. A Niagara University Vincentian education is flexible: "We will adapt to the needs of the nontraditional student."
I will seek and encourage ways for us to reach out to all those nontraditional students of Western New York through the opening of new sites in and beyond Niagara County, and I will work with our faculty and staff to encourage them to offer more of our courses online, and in a particular way, to the disabled community.
5. A Niagara University education is excellent: "Vincentian education places quality at the center of its educational activities. This excellence is sought in teaching and methodology, that is, the method employed must be active, challenging, competency-based and enable the student not only to learn but to enjoy doing so."
I have looked forward to meeting our faculty and staff in face-to-face sessions. I hear about the outstanding teaching and research work that is being done with our students. The dedication and excellence of our faculty and staff is already there. I will only encourage that dedication to grow more.
The faculty of the departments of biology, psychology, criminal justice and the non-tenured commerce faculty, and the staffs of Academic Exploration, academic support, career development and Learn and Serve Niagara have come to visit me, as units. They spoke with great pride and enthusiasm about their work and what they are doing in their field and with our students. I have enjoyed hearing about our faculty who co-publish regularly with their students. I love such excellence of work and I will encourage even more of the same.
6. A Niagara University Vincentian education is person-oriented: "The Vincentian educational institution must be one in which all administration, faculty, staff and, most importantly, students are respected and valued."
Those who have been speaking to me have emphasized that that was one of the greatest strengths that they clearly saw at Niagara University.
We know that respect and self-esteem are basic and essential to human life. These values have to be lived in and out of the classroom--all over the university, all of the time. There are so many different ways in which people must respect and value each other, and we also know that at times this might not be done. We must correct our mistakes. Allow me to seize a moment here to do in a limited fashion what recently we saw the Holy Father, Pope John Paul II, do in the name of the Catholic Church:
In the name of Niagara University, I ask the forgiveness of those faculty, students, staff and administrators who have not been shown respect and value by Niagara University, by our members. For myself and my predecessors, I ask your forgiveness for being insensitive to you, for denying you what have been your rights, for disrespect, for nontrust, for poor morale, for causing divisions, alienation and your feeling disenfranchised.
I beg of God for Niagara University to have the strength and grace to be able to forgive, to forget, to heal, and to go forward in hope.
A Niagara University Vincentian education is collaborative: "Vincentian education seeks to collaborate rather than merely compete with other educational institutions."
To my colleagues from colleges and universities, especially those in Western New York; Ontario; Westchester, N.Y.; Queens, N.Y.; and Washington, D.C.: I pledge Niagara University to collaborate with you. It is my desire. It is the only way to go forward in higher education today.
I thank Fr. Golden and Sr. Denise Roche of D'Youville for taking the initiative to go forward with our increased collaboration here in Western New York. I thank Fr. Harrington for allowing us to work with administrators and staff at St. John's University so that we can find more ways to collaborate as Vincentian sister universities.
Ontario students have been among our graduates for many years and now serve in Canadian schools as teachers, guidance counselors and administrators, as well as in the Ministry of Education. In recent years, we have formed partnerships with Niagara College in Ontario. In the fall we will begin a partnership with Georgian College in preparing school administrators in the Georgian Bay area of Canada.
To all alumni and corporate world friends present here today, I ask you to study and propose ways in which Niagara University can collaborate with you in educational ventures. I ask you to step forward in the very near future and to make your commitment known. I assure you of my positive response and collaboration.
In the spirit of a collaborative university, I also want at this juncture to promise to you, Mayor Elia and Mayor Soluri, my desire to have very strong ties between Niagara University and our surrounding communities of Niagara Falls and Lewiston. I make a very special promise to you: I want to work with you starting today, Mayor Elia and Mayor Soluri, in new and wonderful ways to build and strengthen our local communities and Niagara University. This will continue what our earliest Vincentians, faculty, students and wonderful people of this area have always done, and today it must be done better than ever and with all our talent.
8. A Niagara University Vincentian education is focused: "Vincentian education is ever viewed as central to the Vincentian mission of service to the poor. As such, it strives to integrate this vision into the educational process and to keep the primacy of it alive among all those who share in this common mission."
This is a Jubilee Year of the church. It is a time of our consciously reaching out to others, especially as summarized in Luke 4:18, "to bring glad tidings to the poor … to proclaim liberty to captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free."
I encourage and join you, my colleagues of the university, to celebrate Jubilee time for the poor. Let us together celebrate the Jubilee Year in ways suggested by the National Conference of Catholic Bishops:
- pray regularly for greater justice and peace;
- learn more about Catholic social teaching and its call to protect human life, stand with the poor, and care for creation;
- reach across boundaries of religion, race, ethnicity, gender and disabling conditions;
- live justly in the university, in family, the marketplace and the political arena;
- serve those who are poor and vulnerable, sharing our time and talent;
- give more generously to those in need here in this country and abroad;
- advocate for public policies that protect human life, promote human dignity, preserve God's creation, and build peace;
- encourage others to work for greater charity, justice and peace.
These are goals that will extend far beyond this Jubilee Year.
Here in the Diocese of Buffalo, Bishop Mansell sent us a booklet describing the diocesan theme for the celebration of Jubilee 2000: "We are Catholic. Let It Show." Many of the ideas/suggestions I just described are also part of the booklet. We shall use it to assist us in celebrating and living Jubilee 2000, especially at Niagara University.
The Community That We Are
These core values of a Vincentian education must be seen as lived in the dynamic and varied community that we are. St. Paul used the image of Church as, "We are one body, but many parts." We are one university with many parts. In the end, what's most important is that we will achieve this vision together. Everyone. Niagara University is not the buildings. It is not the 144 years of history. It is not even the mission. Niagara University is all the people who come together for this academic enterprise: It is the faculty and the switchboard. It is accounts payable and the post office. Student clubs and business services. Athletics and public relations. It is food services and the library. Student life and information technology. Human resources and the copy center. Admissions/records and academic support. It is the novena office and health services. Learn and Serve and media services. Campus safety and the campus store. It is the museum and university advancement. Career development and financial aid. Counseling services and the mail room. It is ROTC and student government. Facility services and campus ministry. Niagara University is all of us: the students, the faculty, the staff, the administration, the board, the secretaries, the priests and brothers, and all the many collaborators who so generously give their time, talents and resources to build this great institution. We are Niagara University. The future of this university is dependent upon us all.
Conclusion:
My dear family, friends, colleagues and alumni, "I am Joseph your brother." It is a phrase I have come to use when giving retreats and in my term as provincial. I would like to be able to use it here at Niagara University as I try to serve you as president.
As your brother, I need to work with you as well as for you. It is collaboration that I pledge to you. And I ask you to help teach me to do it well.
I will do all that my role calls for officially. But I also ask you, please, to tell me how you want me to serve Niagara University as president. Continue to come and visit my office and let me know you and your department/sector better. Give me your best advice.
Some final words of dedication/consecration:
1. I dedicate my ministry of presidency to our God of compassion and mercy, under the patronage of Mary, Our Lady of Angels.
2. I dedicate myself personally to all members of the Niagara University community. I will work as hard as I can to create with you an environment of collaboration and compassion.
3. I dedicate this inaugural day to you--the Niagara University students, faculty, staff, administration, and confreres. I congratulate you, Niagara University! You are the best!
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