Inauguration remarks – October 12, 2007
Assumption President Francesco Cesareo

Your Eminence, Cardinal Dulles, Your Excellency Bishop McManus and Bishop Caggiano, Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray,  Mayor Lukes, Fr. Poirier, members of the Board of Trustees, distinguished representatives from colleges and universities across the country, faculty, students, and staff, family and friends, I thank you for your presence here this afternoon.  This Inauguration ceremony is a celebration of Assumption College and not a single individual who leads that community.  It is for this reason that we are honored by your presence, which honors this excellent institution.  Cardinal Dulles your presence with us these last two days has honored the College.  We appreciate the insightful lecture you delivered last evening. Bishop Mc Manus, I look forward to our collaboration and pledge to you that Assumption College will be a resource for you in the carrying out of your ministry in this Diocese.  My friend and classmate Bishop Frank, your words at this morning’s liturgy will sustain me in this ministry.  Lieutenant Governor Murray, your presence among us is recognition of the important role that Assumption College plays in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.   Mayor Lukes, I look forward to partnering with you, to promote the development and growth of our city.  Fr. Poirier and members of the Augustinians of the Assumption, I am grateful for your welcoming me into the Assumptionist family.  We are collaborators in this ministry of higher education and I promise you that I will do my best to carry forward the vision of Fr. D’Alzon and the charism of the order with your guidance and assistance.  To the members of the Board of Trustees, thank you for the trust you have placed in me.  It is a great privilege to assume this responsibility fully aware of the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead, yet confident that with your support Assumption College will become a stronger academic institution.  To the faculty present here today, thank you for welcoming me and my family into your community.   Whatever this institution has accomplished in the past or will accomplish in the future is due to the dedication and efforts of the outstanding faculty here at Assumption College.  I look forward to collaborating with you as we begin to implement an academic vision that builds on our strength as a liberal arts and professional studies college.  To the students who are here today, your presence means so much to me.  You are the reason that Assumption College exists, we are here to serve you and to facilitate a transformation of your very being.  To the entire Assumption College community present here, I pledge to you my dedication, hard work and diligence in carrying out this responsibility for the benefit of all who make up this community.  It is an honor to serve you as your new President.

Allow me for a moment to thank my friends and family who are here today.  To my friends and colleagues from John Carroll University in Cleveland where I spent 15 wonderful years, I am so grateful for your presence here today.  John Carroll provided me with the opportunities to work with many special individuals, to grow and develop as a faculty member and administrator. It will always hold a special place in my heart.  To those who have come from Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, thank you for sharing this day with me.  My years on the bluff were among the happiest in my career because of the people with whom I had the privilege of serving and collaborating and from whom I learned a great deal about leadership.  Knowing that there are people at John Carroll and Duquesne supporting me in this position will be a source of strength as I carry out the duties of this office.  Let me thank here Jim Swindal for his words this afternoon.  His friendship has been one of the treasures of my academic career. 

Let me thank my family for their presence here – my cousins, my nephews and nieces, my sister-in-laws, my mother-in-law and father-in-law.  Having the support of family is truly a blessing.  To my brother for his support over the years, I am most grateful.   Let me say a word about my mother and father.  Both of them immigrated to this country from Italy after World War II, my father having survived as prisoner of war in a German labor camp.   While they did not have the benefit of an education beyond grammar school, education was important to my parents because they believed it would open up possibilities that they never had.  Consequently they pushed us to excel, to work hard and to take advantage of the education they were providing us.  I recall to this day spending every afternoon as a child with my mother reading on her lap or her quizzing me in Latin in high school (she probably can still recite the first declension of puella).   Every so often my mother would say to me “due mani,” and I knew exactly what she meant.  She was referring to my father and reminding me that it was through his hard work each day in an iron works factory that we were able to have a Catholic school education.  My father was always there to lend a helping hand particularly when it came to building something for a school project.  It is because of the values my mother and father instilled in me that I stand here today and for this I express my thanks and love to them.   Finally, to my wife, Filomena, and children Marianna, Gianfranco, and Massimo, I have been able to assume this office because of the support of my wife. Her willingness to assume so much more of the household responsibilities has allowed me to pursue opportunities that would not have been possible.  But more than that, she provides me with the confidence and strength to lead with courage and conviction, the sympathetic ear to listen after a difficult day, the words to encourage me or to rethink a direction, and the embrace that picks me up.  I cannot express in words the love and gratitude that I have for her and I know that this community will also come to love her.  To my children, thank you for keeping everything in perspective and for reminding me by your laughter, playfulness, hugs and kisses that there is life outside the Office of the President.  I may be the President, but I will always be daddy first. 

In 1904, the hopes and dreams of Fr. Emmanuel D’Alzon, founder of the Augustinians of the Assumption, to establish a university were fulfilled with the founding of Assumption College.  Living in the aftermath of the French Revolution, Fr. D’Alzon came to see that education was the means by which the society of his day could hope to be transformed.  Writing to the Assumptionists of Nimes, Fr. d’Alzon reminded his brothers, “It is crucial that you be convinced of the truth that the world, even in a decadent state, is governed by ideas. [Those] who are sowers of ideas, provided they be true and fruitful ideas, will be the true reformers of society.” (68) For 103 years, Assumption College has lived out the vision of Fr. D’Alzon, who understood that education should be concerned with the formation of one’s whole being that rests on “the truth one acquires through learning.”  This understanding of education was not unique to d’Alzon as he received his inspiration from the writings of St. Augustine, who saw education as the building of character (De Trinitate, X, 17), which would in turn impact the way we live our lives and ultimately impact the society in which we live out our lives (Sermo, 267, 4).  However, for many today, higher education has become simply a means to an end, the avenue by which one attains a set of skills that will lead to a particular job and a desired socio- economic level.  Higher education has become more vocational and less interested in the engagement of ideas and the cultivation of moral and spiritual values that will truly form and transform the essence of the human heart.  As a result, the primacy of relativism has taken root in many of our institutions.  The classics and revelation are considered to be inadmissible as norms or canons for the education of all, which has led to the abandonment of the idea that education, should involve the search for objective Truth.  Consequently, such a view leads to the conclusion that the place for liberal learning may not always, or even usually, be found in ordinary academic institutions.

Assumption College and the vision of Fr. d’Alzon stand in contrast to the career oriented, value free approach that has penetrated the landscape of higher education.  Fr. d’Alzon, writing in his Revue de L’Enseignement Chretien gives us pause as we reflect on contemporary higher education, “...education is not only a way to acquire certain skills necessary for someone preparing for a career; we need to give teaching a higher goal, moral formation based on firm principles, helped by those great truths that rest on religious truth, by which the great truths can ennoble us by teaching us about our relationship with God and everyone like us under the watchful eye of God.  In the name of tolerance, we have tragically downgraded the sublime mission of teaching.  With the pretext of making allowances for a variety of beliefs, all beliefs have been set aside.  Such a singular system, which in the name of respect for individual convictions, produces indifference and scorn for all convictions!” (p. 92) A similar concern was echoed in Fides et Ratio by Pope John Paul II who believed that the intellectual culture of the late 20th century had set aside “the search for ultimate truth” giving rise to a culture of relativism that reduces everything to mere opinion.  The result for institutions of higher education has been the emergence of an approach to learning that makes one institution indistinguishable from the other.  Herein lies the importance of Assumption College and what it can contribute to maintaining the plurality of higher education and providing an alternative to the morally fragmented, relativistic, and careerist approach that seems to dominate today.

Allow me for a moment to draw upon my own discipline of history. In 1393, the Renaissance humanist Pier Paolo Vergerio wrote a treatise entitled On Liberal Studies, in which he defines a liberal education in this way:

We call those studies liberal which are worthy of a free person; those studies by which we attain and practice virtue and wisdom; that education that calls forth, trains, and develops those highest gifts of body and mind which ennoble individuals and which are rightly judged to rank next in dignity to virtue alone; for to a vulgar temper, gain and pleasure are the one aim of existence, to a lofty nature, moral worth and fame.

Assumption College for over a century has preserved a philosophy of education that reflects this Renaissance notion, which is needed in our world today more than ever.  The diversity of contemporary academic life should not obscure the ways the liberal arts can provide students with the abilities, flexibilities, and nobilities of mind with which to lead meaningful lives.  As a strong liberal arts college, Assumption provides a distinctive academic experience that fosters a climate where intellectually curious students recognize that the right question is sometimes more valuable than an easy answer, where one is not afraid of challenge, and where true learning means stretching the heart as well as the mind.  We challenge students to strive for greater personal excellence in all aspects of life, reflective of the words of Fr. d’Alzon who described Christian education as “striving to shape one’s whole being.”  As Fr. d’Alzon made clear, we must tap the full potential of students’ minds and hearts while encouraging them to leading a life beyond the self by contributing their time and talent in service to the community, particularly on behalf of those who have no one else to be their advocates.  On all levels, the education students receive at Assumption must embrace rigorous scholarship and adherence to ethical values.  Of primary importance at an institution grounded in the Catholic/Assumptionist tradition, our education takes faith and religious experience seriously as constitutive elements of being human and proper objects of academic study as well as of personal appropriation.  A liberal arts education looks to form men and women who are effective and articulate advocates of what they know and what they believe.  This is accomplished through an education that invites individuals to trust their experience as a source of revelation and direction.   This is what Augustine himself experienced when he heard the voice of a child say, “Tolle et lege” which led him to pick up the writings of St. Paul that transformed his life forever.  It is this formative and transformative aspect of education that Fr. d’Alzon’s friend and collaborator, St. Marie Eugenie, foundress of the Religious of the Assumption, reminded him when she wrote, “We both well understand that formation is not the quantity of things one has learned; it is rather, if I may say so, the expansion of the intelligence and of the character thanks to the truth one acquires through learning.” How is this to be accomplished at Assumption College?  Through a curriculum that prepares the student for life beyond a profession, for life in a global community.  Our curriculum must help our students develop the habits of heart and mind that are the hallmarks of liberally educated women and men.  A curriculum in the liberal arts should blend a reverence for tradition with new ways of looking at the world by introducing students to the history of ideas upon which concepts of justice, equality,  and virtue rest.  Students need to read the great classical works of the past, such as The Iliad, The Aenied, The Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, which touch upon timeless questions of what it means to be human.  They need to read Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas, so as to grapple with the meaning of existence.   Through rigorous engagement with the past, along with an openness to new ways of knowing, our students will be better prepared to engage the world in which they will live out their personal and professional lives.  Such a curriculum must nurture curiosity, inspire love of learning and provide students with the foundations they will need to engage in life-long learning.  This means that as a college we must insist that our students have a firm understanding of their own Western tradition, so as to be better able to enter into dialogue with those of other traditions as a means of fostering a mutual understanding and respect for one another in the hopes of creating a more peaceful world. 

Being grounded in the liberal arts allows students to see the bigger picture, to recognize the integral nature of knowledge.  In an increasingly specialized academic climate, where disciplinary boundaries have not only fragmented knowledge and the act of learning, there is a need to move beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries.  It is here that a broad liberal arts background can come into play, relating disciplines with one another, showing the relationship between different modes of cognition, showing how different methodologies can be brought to bear on the same problem.  At Assumption the curriculum must reflect an understanding of the liberal arts that carries with it a sense both of largeness, of breadth, of freedom and a reminder that there might be common arts and understandings that anticipate and transcend disciplines.  This is consonant with the tradition of Catholic education which was developed with a view toward the integration of all faculties, enabling each to make its proper contribution to the formation of a Christian outlook on life, which was central to Fr. d’Alzon’s vision of “penetrating the world with a Christian idea” and is echoed in the College’s motto “...until Christ be formed in you.”  This integration of knowledge is also seen as one of the characteristics of a Catholic college by Pope John Paul II in Ex corde ecclesiae, where he writes:

“It is necessary to work towards a higher synthesis of knowledge, in which alone lies the possibility of satisfying that thirst for truth which is profoundly inscribed on the heart of the human person.”

A consequence of this integration of knowledge will be to see the falsity between the “ivory tower” and the “real world” - to examine critically the inextricable link between the college and the world beyond the campus; to relate learning inside the classroom to living outside the classroom; to become effective participants in the world by promoting social justice and becoming active, thoughtful, and productive citizens of the world.  In accomplishing these goals, Assumption College can truly transform the lives of its students.  Herein lies the importance of education, as Pope Benedict XVI recently made clear, “Progress becomes true progress only if it serves the human person and if the human person grows: not only in terms of his or her knowledge, but also in his or her moral awareness....And this education has two dimensions.  Of course we have to learn, to acquire knowledge, ability, know-how,...But...simultaneously we need the formation of the heart,...with which the human person acquires points of reference and learns how to use knowledge correctly.”  (Castel Gandolfo, 5 August 2006)

Many of the characteristics of an education grounded in the liberal arts that I have highlighted receive their distinctive quality at Assumption College in the Catholic intellectual tradition.  The feature that distinguishes Assumption’s education is the fact that the mission of education here is nourished by our Catholic identity reflected in the spirituality of the Assumptionists.  In Ex corde ecclesiae, Pope John Paul II reminded us that Catholic colleges must be places where “Catholicism is vitally present and operative.” (ECE, #14) This is accomplished first and foremost in the curriculum of the institution.  Catholic colleges like Assumption have an obligation to engage the Catholic intellectual tradition.  This tradition represents a 2000 year old dialogue between the community of believers and the culture in which they have found themselves.  Throughout its history, this community of believers has been involved in virtually every kind of human endeavor which has led to a particular worldview through which one understands the world and its problems.  Therefore, there is a need for a curriculum that casts a wider net over what the Catholic tradition and heritage are and how they interface with human endeavor.  The study of the Catholic intellectual tradition in an academically rigorous way allows students to understand the various ways in which this tradition has had a significant impact on the formation of culture, how Catholics have fashioned a critique of the world in which they find themselves, and how Catholicism itself has been effected by the world and culture in which it finds itself.  Given the richness and vitality of the Catholic intellectual tradition we will develop a curriculum at Assumption that will provide students with the opportunity to engage the Catholic intellectual tradition through the works of the great thinkers and writers of this tradition.  Such study does not represent a parochial mindset, but rather an enriching and a broadening of the educational experience of our students, since the Catholic intellectual tradition encompasses ideas and texts that emerge from a conversation about the world and our relationship to God.  By adding this dimension to our curriculum we will be committed to seeking and synthesizing all knowledge, including the wisdom of Christian revelation.  In so doing, Assumption College will play an important role in ensuring the future of the Catholic intellectual life.

Similarly, the Catholic intellectual tradition highlights the compatibility of faith and reason, a hallmark of Catholic institutions of higher education.  It is imperative that Catholic institutions of higher education counter the notion that faith is necessarily the enemy of reason and vice versa.  In a world that is increasingly marked by fundamentalism on many levels, Catholic colleges and universities provide society with a great service in combating this trend through their emphasis on faith and reason.  By emphasizing the role of faith and reason in the pursuit of knowledge, our students will, in the words of Pope John Paul II, “acquire an organic vision of reality” and “develop a continuing desire for intellectual progress.  In the communication of knowledge emphasis is then placed on how human reason in its reflection opens to increasingly broader questions, and how the complete answer to them can only come from above through faith.”  (ECE).

In our world today, Catholic colleges and universities have a prophetic role to play which will require us to have, in the words of John Paul II, “the courage to speak uncomfortable truths which do not please public opinion, but which are necessary to safeguard the authentic good of society.” (ECE#) At Assumption College we will embrace this prophetic role by preparing our students to become responsible citizens and agents of change and renewal who will defend the sacredness and dignity of life at all stages, who will work to defend the rights of the poor, the marginalized, and the dispossessed, and who will bring their faith to bear on the great social, political, and moral debates that will determine our future as a civilization.  This will require that we not be apologetic about our Catholic identity so that Assumption College can assure, as John Paul II wrote in Ex corde ecclesiae, “in an institutional manner a Christian presence in the university world confronting the great problems of society and culture...” (ECE, #13)

The vision that I have articulated today for Assumption College - a rigorous classical liberal arts education firmly grounded in the Catholic intellectual tradition - in many ways counters contemporary trends in higher education.  Consequently, bringing this vision to life will carry with it many challenges.  But despite these challenges, implementing this vision will be essential if Assumption College is to be transformed into a leader among Catholic institutions of higher education.  If we want to become a premier academic institution in the Northeast with a clear and distinctive Catholic identity - which I believe is essential for our future - we cannot shy away from the task that lies before us in implementing this vision.  This is the work to which all of us - faculty, staff, and administrators - must commit as we advance the educational mission of Assumption College.

As a Catholic liberal arts and professional studies college Assumption will strive to prepare its students for a lifetime of learning, not simply for a job.  In fostering the study of the liberal arts the College seeks to produce in its students a desire to continue growing and learning.  As Fr. d’Alzon once wrote, “We will find ourselves urging our young people towards God, delivering them from what is false, raising them to the level of truth, transforming them into vessels of truth, convincing them that nothing but truth is real or good....We will present the truth to them in all its forms and discover hidden in characters that are disordered, flammable matter that lacks only a spark to be set afire.” (Address to faculty at Assumption, 1846, p. 85)   In fostering a love of learning we will enkindle a desire for God, who is the source of all truth.  But, even our learning is insipid if we fail to use our knowledge wisely.  In the end we seek to be wise, and to know what is worth pursuing in life, and to discover to what it is that we should give our lives.  This is our goal for our students.  We can know much and yet fail to discover the truth; we can have critical skills of analysis and yet fail to live with integrity; we can understand the world and yet fail to understand ourselves.  The goal of the education we provide at Assumption College is not simply to know, but to live wisely the truths about God, humanity, and the world around us; truths both discovered by us and also given to us as a gift of grace.  It is that gift, nourished within a community of learning, faith and service, which will transform us into the persons God has called us to be.