The Quest for Wisdom, Truth, and Virtue at the University of Dallas

A university is more than a set of departments, and an education is more than a set of facts. Wisdom is inextricable from the knowledge and exercise of moral virtues, and a true education must help shape both.

The University of Dallas is a Catholic liberal-arts university widely recognized for its demanding liberal-arts curriculum, its mission to revivify the best traditions of the West, its profound influence on the classical-education movement in the U.S., its high rates of sending graduates into top medical, law, and PhD programs, its integrated humanities approach to PhD programs in literature, philosophy, and politics, its human-dignity-centered approach to technical programs in the graduate college of business, and its fidelity to the spirit and letter of those norms by which Catholic universities are recognizably Catholic. To the mind of a typical progressive, that last distinctive should make us unwelcoming to those who do not share our faith. Such a conclusion is false, and dangerously so.

Since our founding, students of various faiths have flourished here. A welcoming spirit is a hallmark of genuine and confident Catholic faith. One relevant example is the relationship we maintain with Tikvah, through which Jewish students have been completing a Master of Arts in Humanities with a Jewish Classical Education Concentration as they prepare to teach in the growing number of Jewish classical K-12 schools. Such a relationship is not surprising since we at the University of Dallas see our Jewish friends as our elder brothers in the faith.

In current reflections on what is wrong with higher education, indoctrination and stifled discourse are rightly identified as serious problems. Free inquiry and speech are posed as antidotes. In fact, a new university named after another Texas city has vaunted these as principal goods. I cheer these efforts, but fear they may be fleeting. Free inquiry and speech are genuine goods, but intermediate ones which are means to still higher goods. We must be free in our pursuit of wisdom, but real wisdom has roots. Universities are not merely the sites for the free exchange of ideas, they are also the transmitters of tradition that secure and advance knowledge and shape character.

Let me expand on that through the particular lens of my own institution. What is the University of Dallas? It is not the collection of our degree programs. Rather, the University of Dallas is a community, a network of friendships, united in the shared pursuit of wisdom, truth, and virtue. That is why we exist, for these are the fundamental goods of education.

Wisdom is a combination of understanding things as they are and being able to demonstrate them. Wisdom grows as our possession of truths grow, as we come to be shaped by those truths, and put ourselves to the test through dialectical exchanges. Ultimately, wisdom rises to reflection on the greatest of all things. We know from both reason and faith that this is ultimately God himself. It is God who is the source of all truth and the object of all wisdom. All that is has its source in God, and each of our worthy endeavors reach their fulfilment insofar as they make manifest the greater glory of God.

Truth is a matter of communion between soul and object of inquiry. This communion is not achieved through a downloading of information, as though we are some sort of repositories of facts like encyclopedias or computers. We are thinkers who have learned to think for ourselves by asking questions, testing, experimenting, imagining, creating, performing, arguing, wrestling with case studies, pulling things apart and putting them back together, reflecting, and ultimately listening to things as they reveal themselves to us. It is through these processes that we eventually come to hold onto, to grasp, to possess, truths about things in such a way that they become parts of our very selves.

A virtue is a honed disposition that makes us better human beings and enables our proper work to be done well. There are virtues both of the mind and of character. The highest virtue of the mind is wisdom, and one facet of wisdom is its application in discerning how we should act. It is in action that the virtues of character are most required. We ought not merely wish to be good, to be courageous, to be honest, to be just; rather, we are ordered and fulfilled in our humanity through acting courageously, honestly, and justly. We become more the selves we are called to be through exercising the virtues for the benefit of others in business, medicine, ministry, research, teaching, policymaking, raising a family, or any of the many other walks of life our students are called to traverse.

Our campus life is enriched daily with many opportunities to deepen one’s Catholic faith through sacred liturgy, prayer, and devotional practices. But no student is compelled to participate, for we know that grace must be freely accepted. Our non-Catholic students often cite the strong Catholic ethos of the university as its most attractive cultural feature. Students are offered tremendous opportunities to participate in premier internships, but none is forced to make use of them, for we know that aspiring to excel in one’s career requires freely honed desire. But there is no avoiding our efforts to cultivate both intellectual and moral virtue.

The tradition in which our free exchange of ideas is pursued is one in which a strong interrelationship between the virtues is acknowledged. You cannot achieve philosophical wisdom without practical wisdom, and you cannot achieve practical wisdom without moral virtues. You cannot nurture in others those things you lack, and so professors have a high calling to embody those virtues in which they seek to shape our students. Professors, too, need their guides, and find those guides in the very tradition in which the university is rooted.

The three descriptors of the University of Dallas in the first line of this essay are each relevant: Catholic, liberal arts, university. Each can be separately defined, but their interwoven nature is what roots—that is, anchors and nurtures—the distinctive university we are. Earnest students of good will, whatever their particular faith, are shaped by the vibrant and rooted tradition at the heart of our liberating education to quest successfully after wisdom, truth, and virtue.

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About the Author
Jonathan J. Sanford is the tenth president of the University of Dallas, where he is also a professor of philosophy.
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