Inside Parmer Hall: The Academic Impact - Dominican University

On August 30, 2007, Dominican
University dedicated John C.
and Carolyn J. Parmer Hall.
Among the dignitaries attending were
His Eminence Francis Cardinal George,
OMI (who led the blessing ritual),
US Representative Danny K. Davis,
18 www.dom.edu
DEDICATION CEREMONIES
PARMER HALL
Village of River Forest Board of
Trustees President Frank M. Paris and
Dominican University Trustee Emerita
Carolyn Noonan Parmer ’52, for whom
(along with her late husband) the
new building is named.
On Rosary Sunday, October 7, 2007, the Dominican University
community gathered to dedicate Founders’ Court—Parmer Hall’s
tribute to the Dominican sisters who shaped the school. The
court, supplemented by a wall of remembrance in Shaffer Silveri
Atrium, demonstrates how the founders’ ideals and efforts remain
central to today’s institution. During the ceremony, Sr. Clemente
Davlin, OP ’50, delivered a memorial to the university’s “founding
mothers” and those who followed. Her speech is adapted here.
Today we celebrate the members of the Congregation of the Most
Holy Rosary, our sisters who loved this place into being. But
especially, as we dedicate Founders’ Court, we remember those
sisters who have worked and taught for Rosary and Dominican.
I think of Sr. Mary Aquinas Devlin, who became an internationally
respected scholar, a Guggenheim Fellow whose edition of the Latin
sermons of a fourteenth-century bishop, friend of Chaucer, was
published by the Royal Historical Society and is still the standard
edition. I think of Sr. Reparata Murray, founder of our library school,
called to Rome to help reorganize the cataloging of the Vatican
Library; of Sr. Alberic coming home from Yale to teach generations
of chemists (including women who succeeded in the then-rare
feat of entering medical school); of Sr. Greg, whose love of theater
still burns in her alums; of artist-faculty like Sr. Catherine Wall, Sr.
Guala, Sr. Felix, adorning the college with paintings, mosaics and
vestments. I remember Sr. Maristella convincing colleagues of the
need for a psychology department. When I was an undergraduate,
everyone, no matter what her major, took Sr. Thomasine’s first
economics class. She was a scholar, a consultant to the White
House, but what a teacher!
We know that in 1934 the faculty offered almost
1,000 people free courses in the depths of the
Depression, and that in the same decade, determined
to begin to create racial diversity, they invited black
sisters as students. We remember hearing about
Sr. Vincent Ferrer walking the picket line at the
stock yards for workers’ rights, and Sr. Mary Ellen
O’Hanlon, passionately attacking racial myths with
her biological expertise long before the civil rights
movement, and those of us who were here saw Sr.
Albertus Magnus become the target of vilification in
her last years because of her work for women. Most
of you remember Sr. Paul; I remember her in her
old age insisting on coming with me to the murder
trial of a student’s brother who in self-defense had
inadvertently killed his attacker. I pleaded with her
not to come, because she was frail and in pain, but
she said, “I’m coming, dear. You see, if you go alone, they will only
think he happens to have one friend who is a sister. If I go with you,
they will think a whole community stands behind him.”
They did all this—and much more—out of love: love for this place,
certainly; love for their students and their world; and most of all,
as Mary did, out of love for God. These founders have not gone
away from here, even the ones who have died. They are, as the
Eucharistic liturgy tells us, part of a great “cloud of witnesses” in the
communion of saints, of which you and I are part. They are present
in this place, watching us, praying for us, urging us on, helping us.