University of Portland Museum

Search Results for: raphael wilson

March 11, 1979 – Brother Raphael Wilson Inauguration

By

This was the date of the inauguration of Brother Raphael Wilson, C.S.C., as the sixteenth president of the University of Portland.  He had served as professor of biology prior to becoming president.  In 1982 he left the University and in 1996 was ordained a priest for the diocese of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

Brother Raphael Wilson, C.S.C., Inauguration as President of University of Portland, 1979 (University Archives)
Chain of Office 1979 (University Archives)

The presidential inauguration of Brother Raphael Wilson, C.S.C., marks several “firsts” in University of Portland’s history.  It is the first time (a) that a president has been selected by a Board of Regents and (b) that a Holy Cross brother has been named president of University of Portland.

It also marks the first time the University, founded in 1901, will be able to present to its president (and succeeding presidents) with an official chain of office.
(by Ann M. Rischiotto, The Beacon, March 8, 1979, p. 9)

 

In Memory: Dr. Arthur Schulte, Jr., March 15, 1928 – September 24, 2018

By

100 Years of Service to UP: Dr. Manuel Macias, 34 years; Dr. Arthur Schulte, 34 years; Dr. James Covert, 32 years in 1992

Dr. Arthur A. Schulte, Jr., died September 24, 2018 at age ninety in his sixtieth year as a Pilot. Which is not to say that his priorities were strange, though there is a hint of madness topping the list when asked in 1998 how he would choose to be remembered and Dr. Schulte confessed:

“Well, I’d like to be remembered as a man who loved the University and the people he worked with, as a man who worked and prayed each day for the University’s success. As a man who worked hard to keep the University’s progress as a whole in mind, and bent all his efforts to making it secure so it could grow safely and responsibly.  As a good steward of the Church I loved.  As a father who loved his daughters deeply.  And as a husband – a good one, I hope, but there you’ll have to ask Ruth. God blessed me with Ruthie.  Or that I used the tools God gave me to make the University better than it was when I started.  I helped the place change for the better, I hope.” (Portland Magazine, Spring 1998)

In truth, that hope was full and realized.  Dr. Schulte’s work earned him the University’s highest faculty honors and national recognition for his scholarship.  And also the University’s trust, twice steering the University in crisis times, appointed Acting President following the resignation of Brother Raphael Wilson, C.S.C., and once more after the tragic death of Rev. Thomas C. Oddo, C.S.C. in 1989.  In fact, he served as Executive Vice President for 25 years in total, from 1971-1996.

Therefore, very much a good-steward as in the quotation above, but remember those words were delivered in the Alumni magazine, and large heart is able to answer more than one duty.   Dr. Schulte’s family also earned the full devotion of a full heart.  And after their children were grown two Schulte scholarship funds were established at the University assisting a new and expanding generation of the Pilot family learning, living, and growing at UP.  From 1996 to date, the Dr. Arthur A. Schulte, Jr. Endowed Scholarship and the Tessa Ruth Schulte Endowed Scholarship funds have provided a helping-hand for nearly eighty students attending UP.

Gallery of photos from the University Archives

Inauguration 2014

By

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

Fr. Paul Waldschmidt, C.S.C. and Students with campus map, 1962The 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:

Fr. Oddo with students in front of Science Hall, October 1983I 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

no images were found

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).