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
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*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).