Remembering Rev. David Tyson CSC
“RIP Rev David Theodore Tyson CSC”
These are the words that will soon inscribe a headstone in a small cemetery in Indiana. Its installation concludes a tradition both unique and morbid for a college campus, the internment of a corpse on university grounds. This time, it will add a name beside that of Father Tom Oddo CSC, the man who preceded its new name in death, and in presidency, at another idyllic campus a thousand miles away.
The Eighteenth President of the University of Portland
On Saturday morning, I read that Father David Tyson CSC passed away in South Bend. The 18th President of the University of Portland, whose tenure ran from 1990-2003, was 78.
To some degree, I’ve become familiar with his story before reading any obituaries: David was Tom Oddo’s successor on the Bluff, and they were both once seen as possible successors to Fr. Ted Hesburgh CSC at Notre Dame—to whom David once served as Executive Assistant. I’m not aware if they knew each other, but I’d like to think they would’ve been friends.
When he was selected for the presidency by UP’s Board of Directors in Spring 1990, the campus mood was far different from the last presidential search: since Tom Oddo was hired eight years prior, the tumultuous and controversial presidency of Br. Raphael Wilson CSC had remained fresh in peoples’ minds. Questions of long-term sustainability and need for new direction centered that hiring committee’s decision on a boyish 37-year-old priest with meager administrative experience and a questionable activist past, someone they believed could course-correct a drifting university. By his untimely death in October 1989, the university had pulled back from the precipice of declining enrollment and possible closure, adopting a renewed spirit of Catholicism mixed with a global ecumenicalism that reflected Tom’s spirit of service and approach to the liturgy. Just as UP grew ever-more Catholic, it simultaneously welcomed everyone to come as they are, a dualism worthy of the fast-paced, internet-driven 1990s. What UP needed now was a leader to build upon the foundation laid by its late president. Enter Fr. David Tyson.
Hired in his early forties, David struck a tone similar in youth and energy to Tom’s style, leading a massively successful capital campaign and exploding student recruitment through the new decade. His balance of business and human affairs made a good fit for the presidency, as he courted internally recordbreaking gifts to UP’s endowment and received accolades for his service to students, including from the White House. A now-mythical entry in the university’s history records a donor gifting David a purple motorcycle, to have the president/priest ride the bike around campus once, then demand it be sold and the proceeds given to UP. It was also under his watch that UP first appeared on that popular gold standard of American higher education: the US News and World Report 10 Best lists, for Regional Universities in the Pacific Northwest—a coveted bunch UP remains in. Asking any of the priests I interviewed for Against the Current, and they’d say that whatever Tom built or made, David worked from. Fr. Dick Berg CSC, Dean of the UP College of Arts & Sciences under three presidents (1978-1991), told me the university wouldn’t be where it is today without the work of both men.
His life of service did not end in Portland. He later became Provincial Superior of the Indiana Province of Holy Cross—a role once held by the legendary Fr. Richard Warner CSC—and once again served in his later years as a college president, leading Holy Cross College at Notre Dame from 2017-2022. There, too, he brought renewed leadership to an institution in need of restructuring, and steadiness through the COVID-19 pandemic. Though he was not an activist like Tom Oddo, nor an academic like Raphael Wilson, he was a student affairs practitioner and higher education administrator in training and experience. He believed in a pedagogy of presence, the cultivation of a campus community that both supports and challenges the student on their learning and spiritual journey, a notion that—as a UP alum myself—I still see reflected in life on the Bluff. In that way, beyond the concrete and landscaped additions he fostered and the thousands of students he graduated, David Tyson’s impact continues to be felt beyond his presidency, a legacy far greater than the austere epitaph marking his end.
