President's Blog: From the Heart
A 175-Year Legacy
By Eric F. Spina
From my office in St. Mary’s Hall, I often find myself gazing out the window at the towering yet graceful Immaculate Conception statue on the Roesch Library lawn. With arms outstretched, Mary welcomes all who enter our campus.
As we celebrate the 175th anniversary of the University of Dayton’s founding this year, I’d like to welcome all Flyers to reflect on the University’s remarkable journey and embrace our future with faith and courage.
Our University’s roots began with a simple, yet profound, act of faith in a quintessential Marianist story that I love retelling. In 1850, Father Leo Meyer, S.M., didn’t have $12,000 needed to purchase Dewberry Farm and start a school. Instead, he offered landowner John Stuart a St. Joseph’s medal as his promise of repayment.
From a small, private boarding school for boys carved out of that fertile farmland all those many years ago, UD has grown into a pre-eminent Catholic university — one that holds steadfast to the Marianist values of faith, community, and service to others.
In those early days, Dayton was a modest city of just 10,000 people, and the boarding school’s first class consisted of just 14 boys, including one who would eventually become Dayton’s mayor. Today, UD is a thriving community of thousands of students, faculty, and staff and an anchor institution for a resilient, innovative city whose fate is intertwined with our own.
Over nearly 20 decades now, UD has adapted and changed for the times, but our mission has remained constant. We educate the “whole person” — mind, body and spirit — in a supportive environment that nurtures and respects the gifts of all and strives to support the common good.
Our Marianist founders and a long line of leaders, religious and lay, have made a number of bold yet thoughtful decisions that have shaped our destiny — from becoming the first co-educational Catholic university in the nation to strategically buying turn-of-the-century homes that once housed NCR factory workers and transforming that neighborhood into an unparalleled living-learning student community.
We are stewards of that legacy and take our responsibility seriously. Today, administrators work hand in hand with faculty and staff to imagine the future and build it — from partnering with The Entrepreneurs Center to develop an innovation hub in the iconic Dayton Arcade to teaming with Premier Health to start to bring the former Montgomery County Fairgrounds back to life through the onMain Imagination District. In the classroom, we’re ensuring that every undergraduate receives a holistic, relationship-rich education that includes meaningful hands-on learning experiences.
A history of UD, beautifully captured in the colorful timeline that stretches down both walls outside my office, is brimming with can-do moments and milestones.
It’s never been about the bricks and mortar. It’s always been about the people and the Marianist values on which we are all centered.
As a newly produced video frames it, “Bricks may form the foundation, but our legacy is the lives that have been touched and transformed.”
This is the heart and soul of UD — for 175 years and counting.
(The Forever Marianist Initiative ensures that we will always be guided by our Catholic, Marianist mission. Learn more.)