College Honors Founder Dr. John W. Neumayr

At a reception and formal dinner on Thursday night, the faculty and students of Thomas Aquinas College celebrated one of the College’s founders, its first dean, and a senior tutor, Dr. John W. Neumayr. “The Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas,” explained Dean Brian T. Kelly, “seemed like an eminently appropriate day to honor a man who dedicated so much of his life to promoting the method and doctrine of St. Thomas Aquinas.” After more than 40 years of service to the College, Dr. Neumayr retired at the start of this academic year.

In a lighthearted festivity, complete with much joking and celebration, senior members of the faculty thanked Dr. Neumayr for more than four decades of service to the College. Fellow founder Peter L. DeLuca, the College’s vice president for finance and administration, described the central role that Dr. Neumayr played in founding the College and forging its academic program. Dr. Neumayr “spent almost 50 years of laboring to bring Thomas Aquinas College into being,” he said, “and to make it the kind of institution it aspired to be from the beginning.”

Audio: Mr. DeLuca’s remarks

Dr. Thomas Kaiser (’75), a senior tutor at the College and a member of its first graduating class, reflected on Dr. Neumayr as both his onetime tutor and his longtime colleague. “One of the things that his students and colleagues appreciate most about Dr. Neumayr is his knowledge and love of the perennial wisdom, especially as it is epitomized in the writings of Aristotle and St Thomas,” said Dr. Kaiser. “Dr. Neumayr has drunk deeply of this wisdom and made it his own.”

Audio: Dr. Kaiser’s remarks

In gratitude for Dr. Neumayr’s service, Dr. Kelly presented him with an icon of St. Thomas. Yet when he took to the lectern, it was Dr. Neumayr who expressed gratitude, thanking God, the College’s faculty and staff, its chaplains, its benefactors, its governors, and the students and their families. He then discussed, all too briefly, the circumstances and thinking that led to the College’s creation and its flourishing over the last 45 years.

Audio: Dr. Neumayr’s remarks

“When I talk to people, and they I know that I come from Thomas Aquinas College, they say, ‘Well, that’s a great books school, isn’t it, a classical education?’ And I say, ‘Yes, it is.’ But what they don’t see is that underlying the great books is a curriculum that is ordered to faith seeking understanding,” said Dr. Neumayr. If there is “one telling text,” he continued, that offers “an insight, an understanding of what Thomas Aquinas College is fundamentally,” it is a letter that St. Thomas Aquinas once wrote to a young confrere, a Br. John, advising him in his studies. “St. Thomas said, basically, ‘Go to the little rivers, follow the little rivers before you enter into the great sea of knowledge. The little rivers are the human arts and sciences, the handmaidens. The great sea of knowledge, of course, is sacred doctrine.”

Guiding students along the little rivers all the way to the great sea of knowledge has been the life work of Dr. Neumayr, for which the College is profoundly grateful.