By Amy White
The Texas Catholic
At the beginning of each academic year, the University of Dallas’ dean and director of libraries and research Ron Scrogham sees a familiar sight: Incoming students — often accompanied by their parents — make their way into the Cowan-Blakley Memorial Library entrance, through the William A. Blakley Building, and up to the university’s Core Text Collection: a selection of 2,456 books, representing 76 unique titles across a slew of disciplines, which are ready to be checked out of the library for use in the semester ahead. Within about two weeks of the beginning of each term, most of the books in the collection have already been plucked from the library, stuffed into backpacks, and carried to classrooms.
The Core Text Collection provides many UD students each year with free, semester-long access to several of the core curriculum books — those texts that will come to define the first two years of their collegiate education. In recognition of the impact of the collection, the University of Dallas’ Back to School campaign, “Love Ye Core,” is set to expand, through donations, the number of core curriculum books the library offers — putting more copies into the hands of UD students.
“That’s part of what the mission of the library is: to support student success,” Scrogham shared, “and this is a way to do it: provide books.”
Love Ye Core
Named in reference to the school’s motto, “Veritatem, Justitiam Diligite” or “Love Ye Truth and Justice,” the Love Ye Core campaign is set to run from early August to Sept. 26. It follows last year’s “Love Ye Prof” initiative, which celebrated the impact of the University of Dallas’ professors.
“People who participated in the campaign sent personalized messages and gifts to welcome back professors,” recalled Kevin Grillot, associate vice president of advancement and marketing at the school. “The overall response was nearly overwhelming as parents, current students, and alumni, including one from UD’s first class of graduates in 1960, wrote about how professors’ sage mentoring transformed their lives and how UD’s education continues to shape their lives to this day.”
The Love Ye Prof campaign raised around $150,000, doubling the prior year’s results and funding three Faculty Excellence Awards in Research supporting summer research. This year, the university again aims to raise $150,000, this time in support of the library’s collection of core texts.
“This year, people who participate in the Back to School campaign with a gift of $170 or more can include a personalized message in a newly added core text in the library collection, expanding the access to the Great Books for generations to come,” Grillot said, “including the generation whose first semester begins this fall.”
Those personalized messages from donors will be immortalized on bookplates within the donated texts.
“We anticipate them to be everything from something cute and funny to maybe some sort of reference to something in the book that was important to the donor,” said Ashton Ellis, senior vice president for admissions, advancement, and athletics at UD, “but it offers (donors) an opportunity to showcase their personality to a lot of people who will read this book.”
Materials for the mission
The focus of this year’s Back to School campaign, the texts of the core curriculum, points to a truth about the University of Dallas, Scrogham suggested.
“We,” he said, “are a text-driven university.”
Spanning philosophy, history, and economics; reaching across politics, science, and art; and diving into theology, languages, and literature, the core curriculum is arguably one of the most distinctive features of the university, setting the very foundation of each student’s collegiate formation at the Irving school.
“We’ve actually been ranked as one of the top schools in the country with the core curriculum by the association of ACTA,” or the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, Ellis shared. “For the last almost 20 years, this group has consistently ranked us as one of the top universities in America because of it.”
While many educational institutions have largely abandoned the core curriculum, providing instead a “choose your own path type of education,” the University of Dallas prides itself on a curriculum that for more than 70 years has nurtured critical thought, informed discussion, and deeply held values, Grillot said.
“This is one of the wonderful things about the University of Dallas,” he added. “Because the education has been consistent with the core curriculum, the experience ties together people throughout generations.”
According to Scrogham, the books of the University of Dallas’ core curriculum are in some ways the very embodiment of the mission of the school: The pursuit of wisdom, truth, justice, and virtue — all of this is wrapped into those formative texts that students bring into classrooms, into conversations, and into moments of contemplation.
Love Ye Core, by celebrating the curriculum through its support of the Core Text Collection, contributes to that mission.
“The library,” Scrogham said, “provides the material for the realization, for the satisfaction of the mission itself.”
To learn more about the University of Dallas’ Love Ye Core campaign, visit udallas.edu/bts.
Cutline for featured image: The University of Dallas’ Back to School campaign, “Love Ye Core,” is set to support the Core Text Collection housed on the Irving campus. Pictured is Ron Scrogham, dean and director of libraries and research at the University of Dallas. (University of Dallas photo)
