Ferguson

Thanks, Fr. Gene. Thanks, Dr. Dan. Thanks Sue Zielinski, Kathleen Norman, Kate Henry and Joan McGuinness Wagner. Thanks all of you for your generous greetings and many messages of goodwill. Special thanks to Deborah McCarty-Smith for making me sound like an OK person in today’s Campus Report.

My friend Myron Achbach, the 1989 recipient of the Lackner Award, told me tonight would be one of the best nights of my life, and it truly is that.

My congratulations to Professor Una Cadegan, whose leadership on this campus I have long admired and whose tireless work with the Forum on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition Today I deeply respect. But what I have most enjoyed lately in Una’s work was her organization of a post-election party for our students voting in their first national elections last fall. That was very special and classic Una in its timeliness and thoughtfulness. Congratulations, Una.

Finally, my thanks to the Rector’s Council, to the Marianist communities, and to President Curran for nominating, selecting and approving us for this special honor.

In the tradition of the Lackner Award Dinner, I welcome my family and will introduce them to you.

My spouse and best friend, Susan. (the best Marianist I have ever met and one of the finest teachers and advisors at the University of Dayton)

Our sons: Mark, Dave “The Intern,” and AJ (all of Fergie Christmas Card fame). Amy Queenan and Katie Peterson (very important new women in our lives!) Mark and Amy are engaged to be married.

Charlotte Dobkowski (Susan’s mother and our house mother.) Martha and Will Ferguson of Cincinnati (Nothing about this night is more special to me than sharing it with my parents who celebrated their 65^th wedding anniversary yesterday.) Patti and Pete Weron (my big sister from Arizona and Illinois, depending on the time of year.) Mary Beth and Jim Hater (my little sister of Charlevoix, Michigan, can’t be here tonight. She’s our designated extrovert.) Arlene and Bill Ferguson (my big brother from Villa Hills, Kentucky, who first set a high bar for me as the Reds’ bat boy and expert storyteller.) Melanie and Jim Bohrer (my cousins who are both nurses and farmers from Guilford, Indiana.)

Susan and I are also very happy to have here tonight Sarah Hunt, Joei and Bill Hunt’s daughter and our God Child.

I have invited a few of the very many wonderful people I have been privileged to mentor as students or staff over the past few years. Please stand. I salute them and others who have worked with us as some of my very best teachers. Thank you.

My remarks and remembrances tonight are organized (in the Fr. Jim Heft tradition) around three ideas which I regard as characteristically Marianist: humility, hospitality, and stability. I am no expert on such things. These are my impressions.

As partial as I am to Learn. Lead. Serve., I could argue that humility, hospitality, and stability are even more essentially Marianist. When we at UD remember who we are as a Marianist university, we honor everything the Lackner Award stands for, as well as claim a potentially significant position in the marketplace where institutions are becoming increasingly homogenous. So, I ask you to listen as I remember aloud what I think these three words (humility, hospitality, and stability) mean as Marianist.

Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, this Marianist characteristic became controversial. It is essential. I have been part of multiple generations of UD and Marianist leadership over the past 35 years on campus. What I first knew about humility in the Marianist tradition I learned from Bro. Elmer Lackner himself. Elmer was a good friend and my colleague from 1969 when I met him in my first year of college until his death in 1984. Known as “Mr. UD” even before Joe Belle, Elmer was arguably one of the most influential leaders of Dayton throughout much of his 45-year career. Many of the UD upperclass scholarship funds in place today were personally solicited and negotiated by Bro. Elmer well before we had a development team and planned giving officers like my friends Regis Lekan and Nancy Stork. Along with Fr. Ray Roesch, Elmer and his understudy, Tom Frericks, were in on all major initiatives in Dayton during the 1960’s and 1970’s.

Yet Elmer Lackner understood his influence and his leadership as service to the shared future of the Dayton and UD communities and support of the teaching mission of individual and community development. Elmer was a slender and eventually a gaunt man who smoked as incessantly as he smiled through his large teeth and wide, dimpled mouth. I loved Elmer. He was thoroughly “Pittsburgh,” and his office sported memorabilia of the Pirates and Steelers.

In 1979, as a very young Director of University Communications, I visited with Elmer, Fr. Roesch, and our new President, Bro. Ray Fitz, to Elmer’s family home on the very top of a snowy hill in urban Pittsburgh. We spent an evening hearing Elmer and his five siblings (William, Loretta, Dorothy, Gilbert, and Louis) tell stories of their childhood. As I recall, they all smoked – just like Pittsburgh had throughout their youth!

So what is Marianist humility? It’s not what a lot of people think. As shown by Elmer and many others who have worked here in his tradition, humility is not about keeping our light under the bushel basket. It is not about denying our personal gifts or our institutional strengths. It is not about accepting something less than our very best.

It is about filtering our shining lights through the lenses of honest shortcomings. It is about using our personal gifts and our institutional strengths to do something important in an excellent way – rather than simply to be seen as important or to claim excellence that makes no difference to the common good. It is about accepting our imperfect humanity and demanding of our admittedly flawed institution the very best that we can honestly and modestly achieve. It is not Marianist to tolerate mediocre performance when individually and collectively we can do better for others. We may be more patient and more respectful of each other’s faithful service than other institutions in our society. But we are not, by tradition, easy to please.

I think the lessons for a contemporary Marianist university are profound. Thank you, Bro. Elmer.

Hospitality in this tradition called “Marianist” is more than just being friendly. An individual or an organization committed to building community (committed to the common good) takes hospitality very seriously. But it must be genuine. Imagine the personal discipline of thinking and feeling “I care about you even before I know if I like you or agree with you!” That’s Marianist hospitality.

In this regard, I would like to identify Susan Ferguson as my Marianist model of hospitality. You will seldom ever be unwelcome with Susan, even those of us with whom she occasionally disagrees. I know this well. On a majority of important matters, including child rearing, devotion to community, and making the bed in the morning, we agree. On other important issues, especially politics, we don’t. (Our lawn sported two different presidential candidate signs all fall – hers and his.) But Susan chooses to care about me – and you – not because she necessarily agrees with us or even always like us but because genuine (Marianist) hospitality requires a predisposition to respect everyone.

Susan is not alone in holding to such an attitude. Before I met Susan, I had my own father and mother as models of genuine hospitality. But not all hospitable folks are as nice as Susan and my parents. I also knew dozens of Marianist brothers and priests in my earlier days at UD who were not all likeable fellows. Today’s idea that UD hospitality requires niceness, extroversion, and hugs would surprise these guys. (But I love hugs anyway.) Bro. Joe Mervar, Fr. Urban Rupp, Bro. Vinney Wottle, Fr. Gabe Rus, Bro. Jim Cline, and Fr. Charlie Lees, to name a few, were not always nice guys!

But they were always predisposed to respect anyone and listen to anything before passing judgement. Nothing in our developing diverse community is more important than genuine hospitality that suspends judgement until after there is a relationship as context. Community requires that our world be understood by most of us as a “we” world, not an “I” world. Genuine hospitality simply acknowledges that I understand that it is not all about me!

One day last spring or summer, my good friend Professor Chris Duncan and I were seated on his favorite bench in the St. Joe’s courtyard when I mentioned to him the Marianist vow of stability. This began a journey for both of us and even for some of the vowed Marianists to understand better this unusual vow. (This is the only one, by the way, that Chris and I initially agreed we could honor!) As it turns out, however, the Marianist vow of stability is the culmination of the other three – not an add-on. As Sr. Leanne Jablonski first explained to me, for a vowed Marianist it simply confirms the other three vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. According to another friend, Carol Ramey of the North American Center for Marianist Studies, “In Chaminade’s thinking, the traditional vows were taken with the meaning and commitment of the vow of stability.” The Marianist vow of stability distinguishes this religious tradition from others by binding the individual to the community and affirming that promises matter, that “staying at the family table” is a good unto itself.

In this respect, it is relevant to all of us who dare to call ourselves and our institution Marianist. As you might expect, I have seen no better example in my career here than my own mentor, Bro. Ray Fitz. It is not enough for Ray to sometimes learn, to sometimes lead, to sometimes serve, to sometimes honor his commitments – whatever those may be. Ray is stability.

We are in continuous relationship with our families, our communities, our God. There is no such thing as time off for good behavior. Stability may be the greatest challenge of them all if we understand it to mean that, in general, we must live with the choices we make. (Of course, I am well aware of important exceptions to this rule. But they are few.) The Marianists, and Bro Ray in particular in my lifetime, have tried hard to teach us to live with who we are, with what we dream for ourselves, our families and our communities, with what we have committed to be for others.

It is on this point that I hope we can pause as we revisit our University mission in 2005 to understand who we have been, what we dream to become, and to what principles and ideals we have committed this institution since its origins. This is the only way to honor what we have inherited. A mission statement, someone once told me, is “a covenant with the generation that preceded us.” If it rings true, we must live it. If it does not ring true, we must change it. I believe, with the leadership of Dan Curran, Fred Pestello, Mary Morton and many others, UD will continue to reinforce in words and in actions its acceptance of a fundamental mission of serving the common good.

Before I end, I ask that my Fitz Center colleagues who are here tonight please stand. We are 24 students, staff, and faculty who are committed to building community in Dayton and the region as relationship brokers. We do so on behalf of the very best Marianist, Catholic university. Every day we learn more about what others want from the Fitz Center and the University. I believe we are a Marianist center above all else, but few of our community partners would ever know that. What they do know about these servant leaders, in addition to their proven competence, is their humility, hospitality, and stability. They know them by their consistent attitudes and behaviors.

I know I wasn’t very funny. But actually, I have learned to take this whole higher education enterprise less seriously than most. What we do here is, in many ways, overstated. What most of us would simply call “pretty good” in our family and neighborhood lives, the academic community insists on calling “excellent.” So we are all excellent in higher education – just read our stuff. By contrast, I’m increasingly fascinated by a rapidly growing, nondenominational Vineyard Church thriving on Indian Riffle Road which calls itself “A pretty good church.” It even has dubbed its latest building project “A pretty good parking lot.” We, in academia, take ourselves and our issues far more seriously than is warranted. The world certainly can thrive without us or this institution. But I, for one, am very proud and honored to have spent these past 35 years at a “Pretty good university.”

I am grateful for the privilege of playing UD’s and my own small part in trying to make Dayton and the world a little bit better. I thank God and Marianists like the priest, teacher, cook, gardener and Bro. Elmer Lackner who opened these doors through which we all have walked into “A pretty good university.”

The $5000 graciously provided to me by the Marianists will be distributed as follows:

$1000 to the Patterson-Kennedy Project Fund started by Mike Kelly’s 2002 Lackner Award (in honor of Susan Ferguson and Principal Nolan Graham)

$1000 to the Semester of Service (in honor of Joanne Troha, Bro. Ed Zamierowski, Jana Strom, Nick Cardilino, Bro. Victor Forlani, and all involved in community service learning at UD)

$1000 to the National Issues Forum on campus (in honor of extraordinary Political Science Professors Chris Duncan and Jason Pierce)

$1000 to the Women’s Center Mentoring Project (in honor of Lisa Rismiller, my mentees Jessica Gonzalez and Stacy Mollman, and the women and men I have had the privilege to mentor and be mentored by)