As we celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the University of Dallas, it is worth noting its extraordinary fortunes. Situated on a notable elevation in Irving, Texas, the campus overlooks the city of Dallas and the Las Colinas neighborhood. When the university was founded, the campus stood in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by farmland. It was likely far from its founders’ minds that the institution would one day become an “academic Alamo” amid expanding residential and commercial development.
Yet it is not material growth that besieges the university, but rather the cultural, social, and political trends that have marked at least the last half century. The late Professor of English, Dr. John Alvis, drew an analogy between the Alamo and the University of Dallas as places of endurance and community in the struggle for freedom. As the university seeks to educate students in the pursuit of wisdom, truth, and virtue, Alvis suggested, it faces adverse forces that threaten to frustrate its mission. Where “careful reading and quiet conversation” are required, TV, loud music and emotional discourse undermine—indeed, sometimes prevent—the acquisition of necessary intellectual and moral habits.
To these concerns we must now add the Internet, social media and artificial intelligence. “The decay of the nation’s founding principle”—a socio-political shift from the ideal of equality to the notion of equity—undermines the very possibility of excellence in the pursuit of wisdom, truth and virtue. In its place, relativism supplants a proper understanding of human nature and its potential for excellence, not to mention its need for salvation, with an arbitrary tolerance of opinions driven by the whims of the day. If Alvis’s analysis was correct in 1989, how much more so today. And yet the academic Alamo is still standing—because we are here to win, not to lose.
What is the source of this strength that sustains the University of Dallas to the present day? It is the confidence and delight, shared by students and faculty alike, in the liberal arts as an age-old yet ever-fresh spring of knowledge, a powerful bond of genuinely human relationships, and a fertile ground for the cultivation of virtue in all its forms. But this is not all. If the liberal arts are the source of our strength, then Christ, who is the way, the truth and the life, is the ultimate orientation of all our efforts, whether we recognize it or not. Upon these two principles, this Alamo stands.