People/Legends 3

Pope Francis has dedicated 2015 as The Year of Consecrated Life.

Many meanings and associations flow from the term ‘Consecrated Life’, one of the first would be the thought of those men and women who pursue the vocation of religious life as nuns, brothers, monks, priests.  Another association is the way in which a person might consecrate or bless life by using the gift of our days as a blessing in life.

Consider this University of Portland legend.  Rev. Maurice S. Rigley, C.S.C.

Professionally, an English teacher.  By vocation, priest and religious.  Moderator of the Beacon, the Preface, the Log, Monogram Club, the Biolog.  Volunteer campus park ranger and grounds keeper, providing a piece of clean lawn to relax and lounge.   Friend of student boarders; friend of the city as one of the Blanchet House mid-wives, taking charity and care to the homeless exile in Portland.  He filled his hours, blessed his days, and impressed the same values on other people and lives involved within his own consecrated friendship while at UP from 1938-1961.

File sources: Alumni Bulletin, September 1961; The LOG, 1962; The BEACON 28 February 1964, (photo with caption to the current sign board); Alumni Bulletin, April 1972; Alumni Bulletin, April 1976; The BEACON, 6 April 1978 (tree photo with caption); Portland Magazine, Spring 1992; The Catholic Sentinel, 2 July 2009.

Photo credits:
1946 Log, with Beacon Staff
July 1953 Indiana Province Review
Alumni Bulletin, September 1952, p. 3
Alumni Bulletin, April 1972, p. 7
Alumni Bulletin, April 1976, p. 14
University Museum

 

Fr. Tom Oddo, CSC served as the 17th president of the University of Portland until his death in a traffic accident, twenty-five years ago on October 29, 1989.  He was forty-five at the time of his death; a dynamic leader and in love with the University.  Four years previous, at the end of the fall semester sending the students home for Christmas vacation, he wrote of himself and the University.

A Person in the Heart of a Community: “Students will keep a president alive and honest.” *

The Fifteenth president of the University of Portland was the first to be Inaugurated at a faculty convocation.  Following the experiment, Fr. Paul Waldschmidt offered these words of thanks to the University community:

…heartfelt thanks and appreciation to all of you for the heroic efforts you made to assure the success of the inauguration. . . .
…by an accident of fate, I happened to be the one upon and around whom the attention was centered, a recognition given based on the years of contribution to the work of higher education made by this University . . . [a communal legacy] in which all of you have shared significantly by your dedicated service.   In these days of frills and pressures, I hope that all of us may keep in mind the essential activity and responsibility of a University – the development of the minds of its scholars, both junior and senior; and the added dimension of a Catholic University – the spiritual and apostolic formation of the students.†

The Seventeenth president mentioned this legacy directly in his Inaugural Address, Fr. Tom Oddo saying:

I am most excited . . . about the invitation and honor which you are holding before me today.   I can accept them only because I have found here a community that will never let me do the task alone.

Naming them as the three pillars, the Holy Cross community and the community of faculty and staff – “who have always been committed to the excellence of this place” – and also “a student body of young, vibrant people, eager to be touched by the wisdom of the ages, most ready to learn and live out the values, the service, the social concern that this university espouses.”

All of whom are “people who have chosen this place because of its heritage of academic excellence and professional preparation, because it is a family in which they can feel at home and be nurtured.”‡

Inauguration dates:

Rev. Paul E. Waldschmidt, C.S.C., January 13, 1963
Br. Raphael Wilson, C.S.C., March 11, 1979
Rev. Thomas Oddo, C.S.C., October 10, 1982
Rev. David T. Tyson, C.S.C., March 3, 1991
Rev. E. William Beauchamp, C.S.C., September 19, 2004
Rev. Mark L. Poorman, C.S.C., September 26, 2014
_______________
*Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., Keynote Address, Inauguration of Fr. Oddo, Portland Magazine, Fall 1982.
†Rev.  Paul E. Waldschmidt, C.S.C., UP News (faculty newsletter), January 15, 1963, vol. 1, no. 12
‡Rev. Thomas Oddo, C.S.C., Inaugural Address, Portland Magazine, Fall, 1982; full text in the University Archives

For more pictures and history of University presidents visit the Clark Library’s Digital University Presidents Collection displaying images of photographs and objects held by the University Archives and Museum (with descriptions from the Archives and Museum).

Dr. Kathleen “Kate” Regan, professor of Spanish at the University of Portland, died unexpectedly on July 23, 2014.  The University community mourns Dr. Regan, remembering her as an innovative, engaged, and popular professor who joined the faculty in 1995.  In 2000 Dr. Regan was honored as the Carnegie Foundation’s Outstanding Teacher of the Year.  She led study abroad programs to Spain and Costa Rica and focused her research projects in Spain.  Dr. Regan completed her first film Sephardic Legacy of Segovia: Pentimento of the Past in 2005.  This was followed by a film about Sephardic singer Judy Frankel in 2008, and an unfinished film project on Don Quijote de la Mancha.  Dr. Regan incorporated filmmaking into her classes at UP as a fresh medium to engage her students in a way that writing cannot.  Leading the department of Foreign Languages from 2007-2010, since 2010 Dr. Regan served as chair of the Collaborative in International Studies and Global Outreach (CISGO).

The following are Dr. Regan’s words about the purpose of her work from a November 30, 2000 Beacon interview following the announcement of Dr. Regan’s Carnegie Outstanding Teaching Award.

[On becoming a Spanish professor] When I was a freshman in college, I knew that I would be teaching.  I just felt that calling and that’s what it was.  It was really bizarre.  You’re not the greatest student on earth and then you say, “I’m going to teach college-level students” and you’re thinking “This is bizarre because that means I have to get a masters and then a doctorate.” [. . .]  Also, in my senior year, metaphorically speaking, a professor tapped me on the shoulder and he said, “Are you going on to do a masters?”  And that was such a key because I had been flirting with the idea but I didn’t think I had it in me to go on to graduate school.  And so his asking me that and thinking I could made all the difference in the world.

[On the task of teaching] I come from a family of sales-people and teachers.  You know, what are you trying to do when you teach?  You’re trying to get students excited.  I really believe that when you’re learning foreign language it’s life transforming.  It opens up a whole new world.  I just like to share that.  It’s really exciting when a student signs up for study abroad and then comes back and says, “Oh man! This was the greatest thing because . . . . ”  I’ve been there and I know this but I still want to hear the story because it continues, it goes on.

The University Archives and Museum offer this slide show as a remembrance of Dr. Kate Regan.

This date in 1991 marked the inauguration of Rev. David T. Tyson, C.S.C. as the eighteenth president of the University of Portland.  Prior to his election by the Board of Regents, Father Tyson served as the vice president for student services at the University of Notre Dame, where he also held an appointment to the faculty of the School of Business Administration.

(University Archives Photos, Click on photo to enlarge)

After 24 years at University of Portland as history and political science professor, dean, academic vice president, and provost, Br. Donald Stabrowski, C.S.C., leaves University of Portland to service as assistant provincial for the Congregation of Holy Cross, United States Province of Priests and Brothers. A look back on his years with the Congregation of Holy Cross and University of Portland.

 

 

 

 

 

Slideshow produced by Marketing & Communications with photographs from the University Archives.