Reflection: St. Thomas Homecoming

There was extra energy on campus all week as students geared up for Homecoming weekend. A new expression of school spirit this year was “the Homecoming Taxi” – a festively decorated golf cart careening around campus, with two exuberant students at the wheel, offering rides even if the passenger only needed to walk 50 feet to the next building. There were food, drink, and sweatshirt giveaways; concerts on the quad; and games galore on Monahan Plaza.

But Homecoming touches on something much deeper than campus energy and school pride, as important as those are. The late sociologist Robert Bellah, in his classic Habits of the Heart, wrote that a real community is “a community of memory.” Because it’s important that a community remembers its history across generations, it’s vital that a community continually commits to “retelling its story.” Our communities are not just backward-gazing, though. Bellah explained that communities of memory “tie us to the past,” but they also “turn us toward the future as communities of hope.” They “connect our aspirations for ourselves” with “the aspirations of a larger whole” and help us “see our own efforts as being, in part, contributions to a common good.”

Yesterday morning, we celebrated the “Old Guard” reunion brunch – welcoming back to campus our alumni who graduated 50 or more years ago. This year the guests included graduates from as far back as the class of 1950 – i.e., Tommies who were born a mere decade after our founder, Archbishop John Ireland, died. Measured in lifetimes, a university born in 1885 is still quite young.

And what do our graduates from 50 or more years ago tend to share with me? The same thing that graduates from 5 years ago want to share: stories of the friends they made at St. Thomas, and gratitude for the faculty and staff who touched their lives. Tom Pacholl, for example, was an alum who passed away last year and played in the 1949 Cigar Bowl for St. Thomas. When I had the opportunity to talk with him, he didn’t share stories of gridiron exploits or career success. He talked about his St. Thomas buddies and how their friendships persisted over the decades.

As a community of memory, what are the stories we share with one another? What do these stories tell us about who we’ve been as a St. Thomas community, and who we aspire to be?

On Friday, I met with a current student who has been talking with friends about ideas for building a strong and vocal student presence in the new Lee & Penny Anderson Arena (or as she referred to it, “The Penny.”) I asked her how the semester is going, and she told me she is loving a class that she didn’t expect to love – Insurance & Risk Management. The material is more interesting than she anticipated, and the professor, she said, is fabulous.

That student will be invited to her first Old Guard brunch in the year 2076. I won’t be there, but I anticipate she’ll be sharing stories of the times she and her friends screamed themselves hoarse during the inaugural season of “The Penny,” and of how much she benefited from the teaching of that professor, Kyle Falconbury.

Founded on faith and fueled by friendships, St. Thomas is a community of memory, and of hope. We will remember the past, and we will look to the future.

This message is adapted from President Vischer's Sunday Reflection sent to the University of St. Thomas faculty and staff on Sunday, Oct. 5, 2025.