The story
20th century
The University of Dallas' charter dates from 1910 when the Western Province of the Congregation of the Mission (Vincentians) renamed Holy Trinity College in Dallas, which they had founded in 1905. The provincial of the Western Province closed the university in 1928, and the charter reverted to the Diocese of Dallas. In 1955, the Western Province of the Sisters of St. Mary of Namur obtained it to create a new higher education institution in Dallas that would subsume their junior college, Our Lady of Victory College, located in Fort Worth. The sisters, together with Eugene Constantin Jr. and Edward R. Maher Sr., petitioned the Diocese of Dallas to sponsor the university, though ownership was entrusted to a self-perpetuating independent board of trustees. The university opened with an initial class of ninety-six students in 1956.
The university's character was intended to be unlike other Catholic universities in Texas. Bishop Thomas Gorman had plans to shape it in the manner of Louvain, the Catholic university in Belgium where he himself had studied and which was considered an elite institution in his day.
The Sisters of St. Mary of Namur, Cistercian monks, Franciscan friars, and several lay professors formed the university's 1956 faculty. The Franciscans departed three years later; professors from the Order of Preachers (Dominicans) joined the faculty in 1958 and built St. Albert the Great Priory on campus. The Cistercians established Our Lady of Dallas Abbey in 1958 and Cistercian Preparatory School in 1962, which are both adjacent to campus. The School Sisters of Notre Dame arrived in 1962 and opened a school for children with learning difficulties in 1963 and a motherhouse for the Dallas Province in 1964, both on campus. The sisters moved the school to Dallas in 1985 and closed the motherhouse in 1987. The faculty is now primarily lay, but there are Cistercians, Dominican Sisters, and clerics on faculty.
Braniff Graduate School, the Graduate School of Management, and programs in art and English all began in 1966. In 1973, the Institute of Philosophic Studies, the doctoral program of the Braniff Graduate School and an outgrowth of the Kendall Politics and Literature Program, was initiated. The School of Ministry began in 1987. The College of Business, incorporating the Gupta Graduate School of Management and undergraduate business, opened in 2003.
Since the first class entered in 1960, university graduates have won 39 Fulbright awards.
Accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools came in 1963 and has been reaffirmed regularly. In 1989, it was the youngest institution of higher education ever to be awarded a Phi Beta Kappa chapter.
21st century
In 2021, the University named Johnathan J. Sanford as the 10th president of the University. He was hired in 2015 as dean of UD’s Constantin College after 13 years of teaching at Franciscan University of Steubenville. In 2018 he became provost, during which time he oversaw the development of the university’s strategic plan to shore up academic excellence, the school’s reputation, and community and Church involvement.
In 2013, the Princeton Review ranked the university as the 15th-most LGBT-unfriendly school in the United States. Two years later, the university applied for an exception to Title IX allowing it to discriminate based on gender identity for religious reasons. The university "cannot encourage individuals to live in conflict with Catholic principles," according to president Thomas Keefe.
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President Thomas W. Keefe was hired from Benedictine University to serve as president. Like his predecessors, he quickly ran into controversy. In 2017, Keefe's leadership was strongly and publicly challenged by over half the faculty and thousands of alumni members of an independent alumni group called UD Alumni for Liberal Education. Their complaint was over a proposal to add a new college within the university that it was believed would have low standards. After intense controversy and multiple efforts by trustees, on Good Friday of 2018, after Keefe's extended and unexplained absence from work, the university's trustees voted to fire him, effective at the end of the academic year.
Seal
The outer circle of the university's seal is an alteration of verse 8:19 of the Book of Zechariah, "Veritatem tantum et pacem diligite", which means "Love truth and peace." The university's motto replaces pacem with justitiam, and so may be translated as "Love truth [and] justice." In the center of the seal is a Triquetra interwoven with a triangle as a double symbol of the Holy Trinity and a Fleur-de-lis which symbolizes the Cistercians. It also includes two crusader shields which depict the (left) Lone Star of Texas and (right) the torch of liberty and learning. The wavy lines near the bottom represent the Trinity River.
The role of the Cistercians
Bishop Thomas Gorman wrote as early as 1954 to Abbot Anselm Nagy to ask the displaced Hungarian Cistercian fathers from the Monastery of Zirc to assist in founding the university. On the first day of classes in September 1956, nine Cistercian fathers, at that point half of the entire faculty, were employed at the new university. The history of UD is connected to both those founding Cistercian priests and many more Hungarians who taught there in the first decades.
Guadalupe art print scandal
On February 14, 2008, an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe was removed without permission from the Upper Gallery of the Haggerty Art Village. The image, Saint or Sinner, was on loan from Murray State University in Murray, Kentucky as part of a larger exhibit of works by Murray State students. The piece reportedly portrayed the Virgin Mary as a stripper.
After students voiced criticism, signs were put up to warn visitors that "some items [on display] might be considered offensive." The university's president, Frank Lazarus, publicly criticized the theft. Reaction to Lazarus' statement prompted heated campus discussion, and was discussed online on Catholic blogs and in conservative tabloids.
Student Leaders for Racial Solidarity
In 2020, an undergraduate submitted a proposal to establish a club called Student Leaders for Racial Justice. After heated debate on campus, the university administration eventually approved a revised version of the submission, leading to the establishment of the Student Leaders for Racial Solidarity Club.
From Wikipedia’s article on University of Dallas, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.5