A Call to Magnanimity

Todd Ream: Welcome to Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. My name is Todd Ream. I have the privilege of serving as the publisher for Christian Scholar’s Review and as the host for Saturdays at Seven. I also have the privilege of serving on the faculty and the administration at Indiana Wesleyan University.

Our guest is Jonathan J. Sanford, Professor of Philosophy and President of the University of Dallas. Thank you for joining us.

Jonathan J. Sanford: My pleasure. Thanks for having me on, Todd.

Todd C. Ream: The charter for the University of Dallas dates to 1910, and what we know and recognize today as the University of Dallas, however, perhaps dates to 1956. Unlike like most Catholic colleges and universities that can point to sacrifices made by members of religious orders in a few cases of diocese for their existence, the history of the University of Dallas includes sacrifices made by Vincentians, Cistercians, Franciscans, Dominicans, Sisters of St. Mary d’Amour, and the Diocese of Dallas. As a result, how do you tell the story that gives shape and meaning to what we recognize as the University of Dallas today?

Jonathan J. Sanford: Yeah, it’s a great question. So we had an interrupted history, you might say. We ran from about 1910 until 19, I think it’s 27. And the Vincentians played a major part in that earlier iteration. Uh, the University of Dallas, it was a very different university, still Catholic, obviously, and downtown Dallas or, or a little bit on the, on the northeast side, but close to downtown where the Jesuit high school now is to be found.

And one of our claims to fame is we beat the Notre Dame football team in, I don’t know, 1915 or something like that. But we were more like a typical regional Catholic university at a time that had a paucity of Catholics in the region. I think that might’ve been one of the challenges. Also it was a period of time, of course, in which the economy in the United States was extremely challenging, particularly as the university reached the decision to fold. But the diocese held onto the charter.

And in the 1950s, there was a remarkable bishop in the Diocese of Dallas by the name of Bishop Gorman. Bishop Gorman had his PhD in history from Louvain and had this idea of founding a Catholic university that would be truly great in the image and likeness of those great European universities. And that was a, a, a really outstanding and remarkable ideal that he set before the early now resurrected University of Dallas because there was still a paucity of Catholics in the region.

Most Catholic universities that sprung up between the 1940s and tail end of the 1950s really were supported by the GI Bill with the aim of being of service to the local Catholic population. Here, there were just a couple hundred thousand Catholics in the region.

And one of the things that Bishop Gorman wanted from the very beginning was to have a graduate school with PhD programs. And we had that very early. He did not want the university to be run by a particular religious community, but of course, he had the school Sisters of d’Amour who were involved in that resurrected moment. They had a junior college, more or less in Fort Worth, and they wanted to have a major Catholic university.

We’re still the only Catholic University in this part of Texas. Actually, we’ve got the only presence as a Catholic university within the tri-state area, but the sisters couldn’t quite pull this off, and Bishop Gorman identified some Catholic philanthropists whose names are all over campus. They put together an enormous sum of money, and almost a thousand acres were given to Bishop Gorman, eventually to the University of Dallas in order to bring about the university.

So, you know, I have a background, of course, I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, where uh, the Congregation of Holy Cross has a major presence running the University of Notre Dame, more or less. And then I went to a Jesuit university. I had a postdoc at another Jesuit university, taught for many years at a Franciscan university, and have some familiarity with the diocesan university. But the University of Dallas is not diocesan, and it’s not run by a religious community. And yet, I was impressed when I first stepped on campus by just how many religions there are on campus.

We have Cistercian monastery that abuts our campus. In fact, they sit on land that we used to own, and we gave to them this, this particular branch of the Cistercians had their monastery in Hungary seized by the communists, and they reassembled after several years of having made their way through different parts of Europe and eventually to America. At the invitation of Bishop Gorman, they came down to Texas, and they helped in the initial running of the university. In fact, they supplied almost half of our initial faculty.

We currently have Nashville Dominican sisters who are teaching for us on campus. We’re working on building a convent for them on our campus. We have a Dominican priory on our campus, and that is the house of formation for the southern province of the Dominicans. We have Holy Trinity Seminary on campus. That is the seminary, the minor seminary for the diocese, and we’ve got several neighboring dioceses who send their men there.

There is another seminary in Dallas called Redemptorist Mater, and that’s a Neocatechumenal Way seminary. We do both minor and major seminary, intellectual formation for those men. And then we’ve got several lay apostolates in the area. Opus Dei, Regnum Christi. There’s a Legionnaire High School that’s across the way. There’s a traditional Latin Mass parish that’s up the street. And we even have charismatics on campus.

So I was surprised when I arrived and was trying to get my bearings like, okay, what, what, what is the unifying charism of the University of Dallas when we have so many different, all authentic, all rich, all faithful to the Magisterium, but so many different charisms and spiritualities that have an influence on the campus.

And what I came to appreciate is it’s, it’s truly the, the intellectual vision of the place that unifies these different groups and that have attracted them and others. That was an incomplete list, who have assembled here in Irving, Texas. We’re right on the cusp of the city of Dallas. And have, have plowed their, their, their lives into building up this remarkable university. So I had not found another university that has such a variety of spirituality influencing its culture.

And it’s not as all of our students are Catholic either. From the very beginning, we were open to students of any faith whatsoever. And in fact, we’ve got a significant relationship with a Jewish organization called the Tikvah Fund, where we’re educating some of their future teachers within the classical education model that they’re dedicated to supporting. So it’s a unique university in that and other respects.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you. Fascinating history. Fascinating. Yeah, I didn’t realize there were that many groups, even having gone through the history of the university enough that I could identify the ones that I did, that there were that many and in many ways still active in around the university, so thank you.

In what ways does that charism that unifies those groups, that intellectual sort of commitment then influence the formative practices in which educators who serve at the University of Dallas are asked to participate, called to participate?

Jonathan J. Sanford: Yeah, so we’re, we, we take our mission very seriously. Our mission is, is fundamentally dedicated to the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and virtue. That’s a, that’s a triad you can find in Plato’s Apology, where Socrates makes his compelling case for a life dedicated to those three ends. And we think that those are the proper ends of an education.

The charisms as I was suggesting are unified under this particular vision of wisdom, truth, and virtue. It’s a vision that is enabling our graduates to make the fine distinctions that are necessary in positions of leadership. So we have a long track record for our relatively short history of promoting people into positions of leadership.

For instance, 12 bishops have graduated from the University of Dallas, which is a large number for a school of our size and our short history. We have, as far as I can tell, the highest med school placement rate in the state of Texas and the highest out of any Catholic university. And, and many of our graduates are running hospitals and, and are top surgeons in, in their communities. We’ve educated a lot of attorneys and corporate leaders.

But that kind of orientation towards a life of magnanimity is fostered within a culture that takes seriously the principle formation of the mind, right? So we want our students to cultivate intellectual virtues. I’m prepared to argue if, if you disagree, that entails also a cultivation of moral virtues. That’s a matter of some controversy but might be too arcane for this conversation. But, but I think, I think one does encourage the formation of moral virtues through a particular approach to intellectual formation.

And, and then, you know, you asked about the way in which the charism ignites the place. I mean, there’s a rich culture here. We have two daily masses on campus and Eucharistic adoration for our students. Those students who go to daily mass, don’t always go to mass on campus because there’s that Cistercian monastery with its own church. They’ve got an early morning mass that a number of students go to. The Dominicans have their Mass.

And not all of our students go to daily Mass. It’s certainly not a requirement. We don’t have a chapel requirement, but the degree to which our students deepen their faith commitment or those who are not Catholic, consider the invitation to be more open to the possibility of entering the Catholic faith. Those are part of the culture on campus.

But one of the things that I take particular pride in is we recently surveyed our students and made sure that in our focus group sessions, we spent time with our students who are not Catholic. And those students who are not Catholic, mentioned the Catholic culture of the University of Dallas as the most attractive feature of the university.

But the approach that we take is not, okay, well let’s be welcoming, let’s water things down. Let’s pretend we’re not as serious about our commitment. That, I think, is exactly the wrong approach. Rather, we’re going to fully embrace as much as makes sense within a university setting our Catholic life. And that in and of itself is welcoming, right? It’s the, the catholicism with the, the small c in a sense of, of universal that, that I think is, is entailed by Catholicism with a big C, properly understood.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. That kind of formative orientation of the campus then makes me wonder, in what ways is the University of Dallas’s commitment to the liberal arts and liberal learning then unique amongst American higher education and perhaps unique even amongst Church-related higher education?

Jonathan J. Sanford: We have become unique because so many universities have for a variety of internal and external reasons, jettisoned major parts, if not the whole, of what sometimes is called general education. We refer to this as the core.

The core itself, so it’s basically two years of integrated courses that are trying to provide what Newman describes as, as the circle of knowledge, right? A full exposure to every major discipline. We think it’s absolutely essential that our students know how to think historically, philosophically, scientifically, mathematically, according to the fine arts. They need to be able to think economically. They need to be able to understand American founding principles and the principles of government behind them theologically.

So you, you think of each of the major disciplines as providing a kind of comprehensive whole, and that, that, that provides a couple of things, right? It certainly shapes the mind to appreciate the fullness of modes of appreciating that which God has created. It encourages reflection then on what Newman calls in his Idea of a University, the science of sciences, right? How does it all fit together? So that’s the first two years.

And then the second two years you adopt a discipline or what other universities call a major and, and we’ve got a wide variety of majors, but that the major, the discipline is predicated upon having a foundational set of understandings. And now you try to understand the whole through a particular lens.

One of the things that’s unique is the extent to which there’s representation of literature in our approach. We’ve got four required courses in literature going from the epic up through the contemporary novel. All of our students have to take two years of foreign language with the goal of achieving mastery, such that you can read the literature in that language. So there’s a heavy literary component.

And that was brought on by a remarkable president who came in maybe 10 years into the existence of the university. Dr. Donald Cowen and his wife, Dr. Louise Cowen, who was the founding dean of our graduate school of liberal arts, cultivated this approach because they thought that in order to understand anything, you need to understand narrative structure. You need to cultivate a poetic imagination. At the time a typical core would have a stronger representation from philosophy and theology, but not so much literature. We also have four history courses for a similar reason because of the narrative structure of understanding.

The last thing that makes this unusual is many universities have retained in some way a core, but within an honors track, and what we provide is this same integrated set of courses for every single student who comes to the University of Dallas. And of course, you know, any liberal arts core is ultimately aiming to liberate our students from ignorance from the sort of baser desires in our own age. That’s a matter of endless distraction through social media and so forth but liberated to think about what God is calling them to do with their lives.

Liberated as well for, for genuine friendship. C.S. Lewis in the Four Loves, you know, he describes friendship as, as a matter of, of sharing a passion for an object, right? And he gives some funny examples. You know, it could be stamp collecting or anything. But what if you put the most important objects within the Western intellectual tradition before students? And tell them, okay, this is what you need to care about, right.

And I think a part of that fundamental virtue of education is recognizing the way in which the tradition itself is a teacher. And so you know, the faculty reflecting upon our tradition have put these objects of study before our students and they’re all engaged in it.

And if you walk up and down our mall on campus on a day that’s not 108 degrees or raining, you’ll find students outside engaged in discussion. They’ve cultivated the habit of learning how to argue without quarreling because we keep our classes small and we put a heavy emphasis on writing and the art of oratory. They love it and deep friendships are formed through that common pathway that all of our students participate in.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. I want to transition now to asking you about your own sense of vocation and how it developed.

You earned an undergraduate degree in classical languages and philosophy from Xavier University in Cincinnati, and then a PhD in philosophy from the University of Buffalo. At what point did you determine that philosophy was fundamental to how you’d understand and express your vocation?

Jonathan J. Sanford: It’s hard to determine sort of an exact moment. So I went to a classical education high school, one of the first in the, in the, the new movement of classical education. I’d read some philosophy. Loved Plato, hated Aristotle because he just seemed obtuse to me. I’m an Aristotelian now.

Went through this program at Xavier, which was basically the old Ratio Studiorum, the old Jesuit college education. So four years of reading literature in Greek and Latin. And it translates to a classics degree, but it was more than that because of the way in which it was an integrated core. It was very small. By the time I graduated, there were only six in the class coming through this particular program within Xavier. But that’s what attracted me to Xavier. And I thought, maybe I’ll teach high school language or literature or history and coach baseball and basketball? I thought about being an attorney.

My second major for three years was literature and I stepped out of that major, in large part because of my attraction to the philosophy professors who welcomed argumentation. And I seemed to rise in their estimation the more I would disagree with them. And I found that to be encouraging. And that was not the case with my English professors for whom disagreement was problematic. And, you know, that’s idiosyncratic to the people I would’ve had.

But I kept coming back to what is it about philosophy that I find so compelling? It was hard for me to define it. I could, I could think about anything. It asked big questions or I could get nitty gritty in my analysis. It was almost last minute when I decided to pursue a PhD in philosophy. Last minute in the sense that time was running out. I had a couple of high school teaching offers on the table and had taken the LSAT and, and had some law schools reach out to me to say, we’d really like you to come.

But I didn’t pull the trigger on those because I felt like there was this love for this way of thinking that I would forever regret not having pursued as far as I could. And that was a big part of it. And then thinking about getting a PhD really came down to being able to communicate that love with students. So I went to graduate school purely to pursue a love and to someday be able to, to teach students in the discipline that was focused on that love.

And Buffalo proved to be a good place. I went there as opposed to other places, in part because of the man who eventually would become my PhD advisor, who had this remarkable pedigree. He had been at the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies at Toronto. Etienne Gilson was one of his teachers. And Joseph Owens, who was a great Aristotelean scholar.

It also is the birthplace of phenomenology in the United States. And at that time I was very interested in Edmund Hussel and Martin Heidegger and I thought, well, I would have exposure to a wide variety of, of different disciplines within philosophy. And they had a dual PhD program in classical languages and philosophy that I was considering.

But my wife eventually said, you know, um I think one PhD’s enough, it’s time to get a real job. And thanks be to God I did. But it was a good, it was a good place to pursue that love that I had.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah. Thank you.

After you did a postdoc at Fordham University in New York City, you joined the faculty and the administration at Franciscan University of Steubenville. In terms of the administrative positions that you held at Franciscan, you chaired the philosophy department as well as served as an Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs.

In what ways, if any, was your sense of vocation influenced by the Jesuit charisms that you encountered at Xavier, and then possibly also at Fordham, but in what ways were they influenced by the charisms of the Third Order Regular Franciscans, who you encountered while you were at Franciscan University?

Jonathan J. Sanford: I felt this call to teach. I didn’t know where I would have the opportunity to teach. I loved being at Fordham and, and they did offer me a full-time job. It was a three year postdoc that was cut down to one year. It wasn’t a tenure track position, but I would’ve had a gig that they thought would convert to tenure track once the higher ups said that that would be okay. That was in 2001, 2002.

New York was a place for my wife and I, both of whom are Midwesterners, that felt a little scary back in that period of time. And, economically, we were trying to figure out how we could ever support our family on, on the salary in that part of the world. She’s a nurse. She’s worked part-time off and on, but it was hard to make all the economics work.

So Franciscan was interesting because they had a master’s program that they had recently started. And they were trying to bridge the Thomistic tradition and the phenomenological tradition, and I’ve got roots in both and interests in both. And it was a very lively department. I had a job offer in Pennsylvania and California at that time, at two other Catholic universities, and then a couple of secular universities. I chose Franciscan because it seemed the most lively in the department, and I appreciated the university’s commitment to its Catholic identity. I thought that was important.

I thought that that was important in part because when I was at Xavier I was inspired by the Ignatian motto of “Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam,” right for the greater glory of God. And, and in fact that that’s, that’s a model that remains near and dear to my heart as a way to orient my own efforts.

I use the term magnanimity before I see that as a call to magnanimity. One that’s properly mixed with humility as, as two-sister virtues. But the witness to the Ignatian ideals was mixed as Xavier, I’ll say. And, and I think it had, at least during the time I was there, had lost its sense of Catholic identity and I was just surprised by what seemed to me a kind of embarrassment about the Catholic identity of the institution by those who were leading it. And I, it didn’t make sense to me at the time, but it seemed to me a real miss in terms of encouraging the students there to at least take seriously the tradition that undergirded the university.

And so I packed that away when I went off to graduate school and, and thought about it and started doing on the side some, some studies in, in the history of, of the university. And was trying to make sense of this apostolic constitution that John Paul II had recently promulgated called Ex Cordia Sier from the heart of the church, which is a way to recall Catholic universities to their initial reason for being. And John Paul II, I knew, was himself a man of the university, a longtime professor in both philosophy and theology. And there was a lot of attention given to the norms in that apostolic constitution.

But as I read it and, and started reading other works of John Paul II, I came to appreciate the emphasis on research, on the transmission of knowledge, the growth of knowledge, and the service to humanity. And those were themes that I found within Newman’s Idea of a University and others of his writings that I began to read again on, on the side at this time.

And so going to Franciscan University, with an exposure to a rich tradition within the Jesuit approach, was very helpful. But I also had this idea that we can do better. We can do more. We seemed to be a little anxious about something that I came to uncover when I was studying about the Land O’Lakes statement. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that, but I think it was 1967, Father Theodore Hesburgh and presidents of Seton Hall and Saint Louis University and a few other Catholic universities, they issued a statement that basically said Catholic universities in order to be truly great and excellent, need to divorce themselves from some of the magisterial or hierarchical influences that have been part of their, their history.

What struck me the most about that moment and was what led up to it, which was this, this idea that you could not really be excellent. You cannot be really outstanding as a university and, and, and faithful in your, your understanding of your identity, you know in this case Catholic University.

But I know Protestant universities have, you know, a similar struggle. And then I had experience in a way, a university that was trying to affect at least some degree of a divorce between its institutional Catholic identity and its commitment to excellence. And what I experienced at Franciscan was a university that said, we’re all in on, on fidelity to Catholicism, but I saw my mission there as well. Let’s get really excellent, in terms of the intellectual formation.

And I did not intend to step into administration. That was never an aspiration. I wanted to teach, and I’ve taught continuously since I first left graduate school and still teach now as a president. I have to co-teach because I travel so much. Although this summer, I’ll be teaching on our Rome campus for a month.

When I was asked to be chair, I was only, I think, done with my third year there, which is not typical. I hadn’t been tenured, but the department needed somebody who could bridge some challenges in the department. And I was already keen to revise the core curriculum there. I thought it needed to be much more robust. Then while chair held the sort of the principal faculty representative role, so there was a committee called the Faculty Governance Committee. So I was the young guy who was occasionally standing up to the vice president for academics and the president saying, you guys need to do better in X, Y, and Z and, and you need to pay us more and here’s why.

And so there was a new vice president for academics who came in and he knew that about me. But also knew that I was not a screed. I made reasoned arguments that were well grounded. And he said, look, I tend to agree with the things that you’ve been arguing. Why don’t you help me to actually pull them off?

And, and I thought, okay, well if I say no to that, then, then somehow, I would have betrayed the very things that I’ve been dedicated to. So I did that work for a couple of years and, and we worked to revise our, our rank and tenure standards, which for, you know, your listeners who were involved in the university, you know, that’s where a lot of the sausage making happens. We elevated the standards which I thought were key to advancing towards greater academic excellence.

And then I was part of the process here from the administrative side to improve the core curriculum there. And I started studying the core curriculum at the University of Dallas as really the paradigm and, and successfully got about half of the way towards the University of Dallas core curriculum, which was, I would say significant progress. And then I thought my work was done.

And so I was going to go back to teaching and writing full-time. I had missed a couple of opportunities to apply for sabbatical. I told that VPAA this is my last year. My wife’s going she’s had enough. Her part-time nursing job was really taking off. We have a large family. I wanted to write the sequel to a book that was going to come out soon on virtue theory and then the University of Dallas came knocking and, and right at that time, and I said no.

I have a friend on the faculty who was attached in some way to the search for the dean and we’d known each other for a long time and, and he reached out to me privately and said, look, I know you’re happy where you are. I know you’ve got another book to write. And yet we could really use you right now. Just trust me on this. I know the lay of the land. It’s an important moment for the University of Dallas and, and would you at least give us a look?

And, and so I prayed about that for a while and, and I felt like there were two, two paths before me and I, of course, was in constant conversation with my wife. And at the heart of my prayer was, well, Lord, where do you want me to serve you faithfully. Is it through the classroom and writing or is it through leadership? I suppose from a natural perspective, I was also assessing where, where are my greatest strengths and weaknesses and where can I apply the talents that I have most effectively.

I didn’t arrive at a decision that said, okay, well you’re a lousy teacher and researcher, so just leave that aside and go the leadership route. And I’ve kind of kept that, that part of me as I’ve moved on in leadership. But I felt a call to do something I did not anticipate, which initially was to be the dean at a different university and uproot our family. And my wife went through her own discernment process and we kept checking notes and everything checked out. It really seemed like this is what we’re supposed to do. So that really is the heart of the matter.

I mean, there were a lot of analyses and thoughts that went into it, but we finally made the decision after I visited what felt like I was gonna be entering a foreign territory. I’d been to Texas maybe once or twice for conferences in the past, but really Texas just seemed so far away from our Midwestern souls but I called my wife at the end of my first day on campus after I had given an address to the faculty and spent time with students and just rich conversations. And I said as strange as it sounds, honey, I feel like I just came home.

And from an intellectual and cultural perspective that’s very much what I feel about the University of Dallas and did from the very beginning. This is, this is, this is my home and, and my call is to serve it as well as well as I possibly can.

Todd C. Ream: In terms of that sense of home that you feel at the University of Dallas, you know, beginning first as dean, then as provost, now as president, how critical is it to have that sense of home as president and be able to communicate it and articulate it to others?

Jonathan J. Sanford: I find it absolutely, critically important. And starting early in my tenure at Franciscan even I would engage with trustees on occasion because of the, the faculty leadership position I held and then through administrative roles and, and I’ve heard from past trustees, even current trustees at the University of Dallas, right, this idea that a university is a business, right, and they typically mean well, you’ve gotta think about revenue and expenses. You’ve gotta do the careful work that any business does. You need to think about taking advantage of market opportunities and avoiding threats. And all of that is true.

One of the things that struck me early on is that, well, if that’s true and it’s not true in every way that it’s meant, right, because a, a university is a different kind of entity at the most basic level where not-for-profit, but it’s different in, in other ways as well. But if it’s really true, then the most successful business leaders I know know that business inside and out. And they have been a part of it for many years, and oftentimes worked up within this the very corporation that they now lead. Those are the ones who are the most successful leaders.

When I see the growing tendency to have university presidents who may have, let’s just say relatively little exposure to how the academy actually works and sometimes only a kind of a surface understanding of the academic mission. I’m sure they’re innovative and able to identify opportunities that somebody coming up from within may not, but boy, it would be hard to really have that kind of inside the belly of the beast perspective that I find absolutely essential to the way that I lead.

So I, you know, I’ve run the gamut of different positions and even when, when I was a student and I’ve worked in facilities. I’ve driven shuttles on campuses. I’ve seen the thing over many years and the governance considerations are really significant. So I really love and appreciate however vociferously they may disagree with me, the ability of faculty members to articulate their positions.

I used to sit on the faculty senate here at the University of Dallas when I was provost. I didn’t have a vote, but I could sit there and I miss it. I’m oftentimes people will complain about all the time wasted in these governance conversations. And sure there are ways in which you can ridicule what goes on. But you know, most faculty members they don’t have a full view of the financial picture. They’re trying to figure things out.

And here at the University of Dallas, they really love this institution and they’re the ones who are providing the bread and butter work that our students love. And you ask any graduate of the university about their favorite features of it and they will tell you it’s the faculty members who devoted so much of their life to them and built a deep personal friendship with them, however, unequal that friendship may have been during the time that the student was under their care. But that’s what really matters. And it matters for vision casting and it matters for the kind of strategic and tactical decisions that need to make in collaboration with others. So I don’t know how I would do it if I didn’t come up from within.

And I don’t wanna cast any dispersions on, on other approaches, but what I would say to a business a man or woman who, who really insists on, well, we need somebody coming out of, whether it’s politics or the corporate world or what have you, or marketing or fundraising, yeah, that’s important. But you may not get the thing that holds the hole together. And unless, unless you’re willing to give that person time to really study the institution and get to know it, which is hard to do when you’re the top dog, so to speak, and you’re sitting down to have conversations with people, right. Because everyone’s gonna be guarded.

And people are guarded with me now. I’m the president, but I oftentimes can tell what they really think. And I’ve got faculty relations and, and friendships where, where I’ve got a kind of an inner core of friends who will give me the lay of the land. And all of that is, I think, essential to leading this institution well.

Todd C. Ream: Yeah, thank you. As unfortunately, our time begins to become short, I wanna shift now to asking you about the academic vocation and over the course of your career, what qualities and our and or characteristics prove definitive of how we come to understand that calling to service, scholarship, and teaching?

Jonathan J. Sanford: Yeah. You know, I think it begins with having a hungry soul. We live in an age that oftentimes tells us that we’ve got more or less figured out, right? Anything you wanna know, you can just download from the internet, right? And I think of that now, it’s an older movie, the Matrix where the protagonist is hooked up to some feeds into the back of his head to download information. I think that’s the way a lot of people think about learning.

And it’s something actually that Plato himself references in, in the Republic when, when he compares what people say about education to, to what it actually is. What it actually is a matter of turning of the soul. Not just the eyes, but the whole towards the good. And that turning requires a good teacher, but it also requires a hungry soul.

So another way to think about a hungry soul is with the twin virtues of intellectual humility and a sense of wonder. I say twin because you, you, you only wonder when you realize there’s, there’s more to know or that you’re ignorant. But it takes, I think a genuine moral virtue, a virtue of liberal education to acknowledge when you don’t know. And so those are both essential.

And then it’s hard work. So you need the virtue of perseverance in order to persist in the pursuit of those objects of your wonder. And we don’t always get, if we line up that hungry soul and we persist, it’s not like we get the whole and in a downloadable chunk. What we get are glimpses and we need to savor those, those glimpses, right? And, and that kind of savoring is, you know, if you think of the Latin term sapient, right? It’s tasting but it’s also the word for wisdom, right? And we need to plow that into the sort of the, the, the recycling mechanism of recognizing what else you don’t know when you, and what you’re wondering about and persisting.

We need to be docile as I said before, not in the contemporary understanding of docility, where like, you know, a docile workforce is ready to be subjected to exploitation, right? What docility pertains to having a, you know, the ability to learn, the desire to learn and one needs hope in learning in order to persist.

So I think in our day and age, as I referenced, this is as old as the history of humanity. This idea go back to the Tower of Babel, right? We are going to use our art and industry to reach up into heaven and become Gods ourselves. And this is, this is the idea, of, of knowledge as a kind of conquering spirit that, that we can utilize for ultimately world mastery and it has effects in little ways.

We think about what it is to know. And that’s problematical and sort of a temptation of academic life because we do come to know things and it is empowering. But there’s so much more to know. And we can have hope of learning more. But we need to allow ourselves to be attentive to the possibility of the marvelous in what we observe and take counsel with others who, who’ve got bits and pieces and work together to have a more unified understanding in whatever discipline you find yourself. So those are some of the virtues that I think are really important.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you. As we close our conversation, then I wanna ask, you know, the final question in that, in what ways, if any, is the health of the Christian academic vocation then related to the health of the relationship that the university shares with the Church?

Jonathan J. Sanford: So, you know, I mentioned early in our conversation some of those unique features of the University of Dallas. We’ve got a great relationship with the diocese. You know, but we’re, we’re independent and and one way or another, every Christian university is, is independent, but I think needs to see itself as a maker of culture. Culture is a human artifact. Our culture is deeply wounded. We’re not primarily dedicated to the work of frontline missionary activities, right? Some of our students go off on alternative spring breaks or on Saturdays, and I’m sure you do at Indiana Wesleyan, have students who are engaged in Forks of Mercy.

But our primary work is the formation of the mind and the cultivation of the character of the students who are in our care so that they can become salt and light to a world that deeply needs them. Some Christian universities, some Christians have reached a point of dear despair about our culture, that they think that the task is to build enclaves to protect against the influences.

I think our Christian call again, is to be salt and light. We need people who are really well formed, who can think clearly, who can write well, who could speak eloquently, who are going to find themselves in positions of leadership and have a fundamental influence on building up a new generation of an enriched culture.

Todd C. Ream: Thank you.

Jonathan J. Sanford: You’re welcome.

Todd C. Ream: Our guest has been Jonathan J. Sanford, Professor of Philosophy and President of the University of Dallas. Thank you for sharing your insights and wisdom with us.

Jonathan J. Sanford: My pleasure. Thanks so much. I really enjoyed the conversation, Todd.

Todd Ream: Thank you for joining us for Saturdays at Seven, Christian Scholar’s Review’s conversation series with thought leaders about the academic vocation and the relationship that vocation shares with the Church. We invite you to join us again next week for Saturdays at Seven.