On Holy Thursday, my wife and I drove down from our home in San
Jose, CA, about 300 miles to the coastal city of Ventura, where
we had rented a house to be with our grown children over the
Easter weekend. Our two oldest, David and Ben, live with their
families in the small town of Santa Paula, about 10 miles inland
from Ventura. On the outskirts of Santa Paula, nestled deep among
steep hills at the edge of the Los Padres National Forest, our
two youngest, Nathan and Anna, are freshmen at Thomas Aquinas
College.
It occurred to me on the way down that my wife and I were making
the trip for the thirty-eighth time since early 1995, when we
first visited the Thomas Aquinas campus. I had spent some months
working from a distance on an article about the school and its
trouble with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges
(WASC), a regional accrediting agency which had recently taken up
a certain posture of insistent political correctness regarding
the campuses under its jurisdiction.
The original purpose of college accrediting agencies had been to
serve the modest function of examining and attesting to the
public claims of their member institutions. Thomas Aquinas
College, for example, advertises itself as a Catholic liberal
arts college “in the Great Books tradition.” There are no
textbooks or lectures or academic majors or electives. The
curriculum recapitulates the Western intellectual tradition, with
a rather imposing four-year reading load stretching from the
Bible and Homer through the Greek tragedians to Plato and
Aristotle and Euclid to Lucretius and Virgil and Augustine and
Aquinas and Dante through the moderns right up to Newton and
Darwin and Freud and Einstein and the Tractatus of Wittgenstein.
The readings are monitored in seminars guided by “tutors”
(professors with the usual graduate credentials but without the
busybody careerist distractions of rank and tenure hustling). In
conventional terms, the liberal arts degree of a TAC graduate
translates into a double major in philosophy and math, with a
minor in literature. And the proper function of WASC is to
certify that Thomas Aquinas College does indeed do what it claims
publicly to be doing.
In the early nineties, however, the accrediting agencies started
getting frisky with their mandates, gradually insinuating
requirements having more to do with educationist ideology than
with education: race and gender “diversity” in the student body
and faculty, required courses in victimology and selective
indignation, “multiculturalist perspectives” ignoring or
denigrating Western culture, and so forth. The folks at Thomas
Aquinas College, perhaps because they were unaffected by a
generation of creeping decline in higher education, saw through
the political scam instantly and, by a fascinating twist of
fortune, spearheaded a movement against the WASC assault on the
institutional integrity of the member colleges. The obscure
little Thomas Aquinas College (founded in 1970) pulled together a
coalition of sure-enough diversity: Stanford, Berkeley,
Pepperdine, several small Protestant colleges, St. Mary’s in
Moraga…even the lefty Reed College in Portland.
It was an irresistible David-and-Goliath tale, and I got to know
Thomas Aquinas College during the several months I worked on the
story, especially its dynamic and tirelessly cheerful president,
Thomas E. Dillon. Dillon had assumed the presidency a few years
before the WASC contretemps broke out. In his undergraduate years
at St. Mary’s, he had been taught by the eventual founders of
TAC, and he went to work as a tutor at the new college after
taking his Ph.D. at Notre Dame. Twenty years later, in 1991, he
took on the duties of president, just when the college was
starting to have serious financial trouble. For the next eighteen
years, under Dillon’s leadership, thousands of new donors were
attracted to the school with gifts totaling over $100 million so
far; a permanent campus (replacing the trailers that had served
as dorms and administration buildings) was gradually built, and
the student body tripled (to an annual average of 350).
My wife and I watched all this happening, intermittently from a
distance and close up as we’ve sent our own kids, one by one, to
the college since 1998. The two oldest, David and Ben, now live
with their growing families (our grandkids) in that area. Nathan
and Anna, the two youngest, took a break from the rather intense
campus life of TAC and stayed with us in the rented house in
Ventura when we went down to visit over the Easter weekend. On
the Tuesday after Easter, we left the kids and drove back home,
and on Wednesday Anna called us from the campus.
The school had just learned by phone from the Irish police that
President Tom Dillon, 62, had been killed when the rented car he
was driving on highway N7 from Dublin to a college conference in
Limerick had suddenly swerved off the road. Also in the car was
Tom’s wife, Terri, who was hospitalized with a fractured collar
bone. Terri will be coming home to four grown children and
fifteen grandchildren.
Early in March, about five weeks before Tom’s death, TAC’s new
chapel, Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity, was finally dedicated
after several years of planning and three years of construction.
It is a magnificent structure of renaissance and mission design,
with a domed bell tower rising high above the campus: Tom
Dillon’s dream and crowning public achievement.
Just now, though, I’m inclined to think more of Tom’s countless
personal achievements — such as, for example, his inadvertent
inspiration to me and my family. God be with you, Tom. And God
bless your beautiful school.
