Who Is Your Alma Mater?

A look at how universities came to be known as “alma maters”—and what it would mean for them to deserve the name.

By Douglas V. Henry

A university is, according to the usual designation, an Alma Mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint, or a treadmill.

                   St. John Henry Newman, The Idea of a University

Alma Mater. Kind mother. In the literal sense, an alma mater nurtures with mother’s milk and tender caress. She provides a mother tongue, deeply rooted belonging, and safety from harm. Through knee-dandling explanation and elaborate family mythology, an alma mater prepares daughters and sons to shoulder the weight of adult life. Steady discipline and hard correction are also within an alma mater’s ken; they dismay her children but are borne of care against calamity. When we are fortunate enough to have had such an estimable mother, we rightly remember and revere her. We honor her sacrificial, life-giving love, and we celebrate her gifts as integral to our identity and success.

Is it not remarkable that a fundamental human relationship, adapted into an epithet of maternal Roman goddesses and later used by Christians to praise the Virgin Mary, should also be used to describe one’s college or university? We commonly call our universities alma maters and adopt of them fiercely loyal and familial views. Such a maternal metonym stirs the emotions in ways that “institution” or “school” do not. As Saint John Henry Newman understands, an intimate relationship can be had with an alma mater; not so for a corporation or factory. That we personify and maternalize our universities is both noteworthy and rife with meaning.

For instance, once we discover that a stranger is an alumna of our university, she becomes like a sibling, someone with whom we share a special bond. Across the U.S., hundreds of thousands of people annually come “home” to their alma maters for extravagant reunions replete with feasts, football, parades, reminiscing, and tale-telling. Alumni adorn their homes with college emblems and memorabilia, sometimes creating spaces resembling the household altars of ancient Rome, replete with latter-day Lares. We pay homage to alma maters through insignia affixed to cars, embroidered onto apparel, and occasionally tattooed onto bodies. But familial reverence reaches perhaps its greatest measure in magnificent endowments and bequests. To our alma maters we pay not only lip service, but give generously, even sacrificially.

We cherish our alma maters because we are told to do so—sometimes directly, but more frequently and formatively through founding myths sunk deep into our collective imagination.

The devotion accorded to colleges and universities is surprisingly pervasive and seemingly immoderate.  Allegiances typically run deeply among alumni of both small liberal arts schools and enormous state universities. Why do colleges and universities command such intense loyalty? What underlies the allure, real or imagined, of participation in this particular cultural institution? Furthermore, should the modern university even play such a large role within American life? Under what circumstances do universities deserve the exalted place we accord them as kind mothers?

We could explain the prestige and power of universities in a variety of ways. Modern universities have a significant economic impact on their local communities. They serve as hubs of research and innovation in business, medicine, and technology. Graduates anticipate better employment and greater lifetime wages. Higher education is also politically important. Universities commonly embrace education for citizenship as part of their mission, emphasize responsible civic engagement, underwrite research with public policy implications, and serve as a proving ground for nascent political leaders. Another obvious explanation for universities’ sway derives from their status as academic and cultural storehouses and seedbeds. Universities make available troves of hard-won knowledge and technical skills to degree-seeking students and the wider public. They preserve past and far-flung cultures, even as they critically engage and shape contemporary culture. Indeed, their intellectual resources and cultural authority go hand in hand with their economic and political power. None of these things, however, explain why anyone would adopt, in heartfelt fashion, the maternal image of Alma Mater for their university.

We cherish our alma maters for a more immediate and revealing reason. We are told to do so—sometimes directly, but more frequently and formatively through founding myths, long cultivated and rehearsed, and now sunk deep into our collective imagination. Plato had Socrates propose such a story, the so-called noble lie, to effect fraternal solidarity within his imagined city of Kallipolis. Let us tell everyone, Socrates suggests, that despite appearances to the contrary, everyone was formed and nurtured inside the earth, their mother. Every man, woman, and child therefore owes allegiance to their common mother and all their sibling-citizens. Admittedly, no one would believe this improbable story, at least at first, but perhaps it would have “a good effect, by making them care more for the city and for each other” (Republic 3.415d).

Universities are the beneficiaries of often fantastic stories, recounted in myriad adaptations and dramatically reenacted in annual rituals from the silly to the sublime. Like Socrates, whose founding myth fostered kinship within his ideal city, the dreamers, founders, benefactors, and presidents of universities encourage the telling and retelling of stories about Alma Mater, cultivating extravagant devotion at every turn. The collegiate stories we hear and rehearse alter how we think, feel, speak, and live. We tenderly revere our alma maters not because a university education facilitates economic advantage, political influence, or actual knowledge, but because our imaginations conform to curated narratives of the maternal protection and lifelong bonhomie universities offer.

For a telling example, consider the worshipful devotion at work in Brown University’s song “Old Brown,” composed in 1860 by James Andrews DeWolf and recounted by Martha Mitchell in her Encyclopedia Brunoniana. Within a decade it took root and became known simply as the school’s “Alma Mater”:

        Alma Mater! we hail thee with loyal devotion,
        And bring to thine altar our off’ring of praise;
        Our hearts swell within us, with joyful emotion,
        As the name of Old Brown in loud chorus we raise.
        The happiest moments of youth’s fleeting hours,
        We’ve passed, ’neath the shade of these time-honored              walls,
        And sorrows as transient as April’s brief showers
        Have clouded our life in Brunonia’s halls.

The opening lines do not merely maternally personify the university, but indeed deify it. To her sacrificial altar, alumni are beckoned to pay glad and generous obeisance. She deserves not only dutiful respect, according to the song, but unequivocal joy in her presence. After all, we can credit the “happiest moments” and preservation from all but the shortest of sorrows to this nurturing mother’s care. Two further stanzas tell of a life full of “grateful affection” for help in reaching “manhood’s high station,” conjoined with nostalgic “love and deep veneration” that outlast “the blightings of age” and the passing of friends. “Oh! Then, as in memory backward we wander, / And roam the long vista of past years adown, / On the scenes of our student life often we’ll ponder, / And smile, as we murmur the name of Old Brown.” The poem thus frames a life well-lived under the benevolent ministrations of Alma Mater, whose maternal gifts in youth propel one to worldly success and keep one company into old age. She is the source of youthful bliss and fondest memory, so much so that the final stanza all but ends with a deathbed scene of tender fidelity as one calls out to Alma Mater. Brown’s school song is not unique in its narrative arc and tone. In Providence, Rhode Island and college towns around the world, the mythic notion that universities are like mothers deserving our devotion has settled into a narrative that, for the most part, is widely embraced.

A true alma mater understands education as attuned to human persons in their complexity—aesthetic, affective, intellectual, imaginative, and moral.

I understand the reverence paid to alma maters. As dean of a large honors college in a national research university, I encourage devotion among alumni and donors whose friendship and solidarity help me lead effectively. Not only do I encourage it, but I share it. Having entered a third decade of service to my university, I love her as an alma mater even if my degrees come from elsewhere. The reasons are straightforward. Through thick and thin, I have become bound to a collegiate faculty and staff who know and care for each another. They command my respect as dedicated scholars and teachers who “love truth, kindle faith, and cultivate virtue in friendship, study, and service to Christ and neighbor.” With them, I continue to grow in understanding and wisdom, holding out hope that we might live up to our God-given potential and inspire our students to do likewise. We all learn from shared reading, conversation, and scholarship that spans antiquity to the present, runs an interdisciplinary gamut from anthropology to theology, and takes shape in the light of Christ. Together, we fondly watch our students’ promise unfold each year, taking pride as they achieve what Sharon Daloz Parks in Big Questions, Worthy Dreams says undergraduates desire: belonging, integrity, and a place of meaningful contribution. Under the leafy canopies of quads shaded by century-old Texas live oaks, in the resplendence of a library among the most beautiful anywhere to be found, and even before the pockmarked chalkboards of old-fashioned classrooms, I take inspiration at a human longing and purpose embodied in something as special as my university. She has earned my devotion. In all these details, my experience recapitulates elements of university life that for centuries have elevated and ennobled undergraduate life—meaningful friendship, thoughtful education, and self-transcendent purpose grounded in love of truth, beauty, and goodness.

Yet America’s higher education institutions, be they public or private, flagship or regional, secular or religious, liberal arts, professional, or technical, face serious difficulties. It takes little imagination—or only a few minutes on the internet—to identify wide-ranging problems conveyed by words like brink, broken, collapse, crisis, decline, destruction, and survival. As dire as the difficulties are, we might be forgiven for worrying that if in one breath we make Alma Mater a metonym of the modern university, we must in the next admit she has broken trust with her children. In many cases, she has taken rather than given. Where nurture and admonition might have made something of her charges, indifference and anomie have sometimes produced morally rudderless graduates. In place of the “mother tongue” she might have offered through a substantial curriculum, wherein shared culture, texts, and vocabulary forge common interests and mutual understanding, students routinely encounter a bewildering, multidisciplinary Babel, leaving them unable to name or know things wisely and well. In these and other ways, the myth of Alma Mater can outstrip the reality found by those whose impressionable minds and cherished hopes the modern university welcomes. Although we and Saint Newman would wish it otherwise, universities can become impersonal factories stamping out graduates like products, some of them profitable and passing muster, and others dispassionately cast off and cast out. Such universities deserve neither to be called alma mater nor to be cherished by alumni. Indeed, they become occasions for disappointment and regret, sometimes shading over into hard-bitten disillusionment or angry protest.

For all that, neither cynicism nor defeatism should win the day. Certain conditions help universities deserve the exalted place accorded them as alma maters. Devotion and duty converge in calling us who love our schools to see these conditions fulfilled. While here is no place to lay out a comprehensive case, I can briefly indicate a twofold vision of an alma mater worthy of the name.

First, such a university must take seriously the work of nurturing men and women who arrive with intellectual and moral possibility and vulnerability. Here is Newman’s lyrical description, in My Campaign in Ireland, of such determined, formative education:

It is our duty and our privilege to be allowed to hold back the weak and ignorant a while from an inevitable trial; to conduct them to the arms of a kind Mother, an Alma Mater, who inspires affection while she whispers truth; who enlists imagination, taste, and ambition on the side of duty; who seeks to impress hearts with noble and heavenly maxims at the age when they are most susceptible, and to win and subdue them when they are most impetuous and self-willed; who warns them while she indulges them, and sympathizes with them while she remonstrates with them; who superintends the use of the liberty which she gives them, and teaches them to turn to account the failures which she has not at all risks prevented; and who, in a word, would cease to be a mother, if her eye were stern and her voice peremptory.

To be sure, only a few scattered universities of our day harbor anything as substantial and directive an educational vision as Newman describes. Yet the rarity of the thing only makes it more priceless and all the more deserving of honor. Indeed, short of something like what Newman portrays, “Old Brown’s” hailing of Alma Mater with loyal devotion, joyful emotion, and pious praise is disproportionate. A university’s worthiness to be called an alma mater, simply put, demands its comportment as a kind mother.

Second, the best universities reflect a reality that Newman’s theological conviction betokens. Newman wrote and spoke often of the Virgin Mary, preached sermons such as “The Reverence Due to the Virgin Mary,” and penned a favored English translation of Alma Redemptoris Mater. He regarded Saint Mary as the greatest exemplum of maternal devotion: one who was full of grace, and both blessed and a blessing to the world because of her fidelity and humility before God. By envisioning a good university as an alma mater, Newman inevitably refers its aspirations and vocation to the pattern of the Alma Mater, the Virgin Mary, the Mother of the Redeemer. We justifiably commend some universities by extending to them this ancient epithet of the Virgin Mary. When we rightly hail our colleges and universities as Alma Mater, we honor an education ordered to the work of God in the world, an education that emulates the kind, gracious mother who loved and nurtured Jesus in humble service to the Lord.

Putting these two points differently, a true alma mater understands education as attuned to human persons in their complexity—aesthetic, affective, intellectual, imaginative, and moral. For this reason, Newman writes of inspiring the affections of the heart and making use of imagination, taste, and ambition. While universities exist in order to discover and impart knowledge, learning and teaching are more than merely intellective activities. Herein lies no novel revelation; the wise have always grasped the need of educating the whole person. A true alma mater also orders education to the highest things. Consider the difficulty of imagining a stenography school producing undyingly loyal alumni, or a cosmetology or truck driving school inspiring graduates to sing of deep devotion to alma mater. For good reason, when Newman writes of the university as Alma Mater, he orders education to such resplendent ends as “truth,” “duty,” and “noble and heavenly maxims.” When the stakes of education are grand, impassioned undergraduates and ardent alumni naturally follow. To the extent universities pursue grand ends, they are colloquially admirable alma maters. At their highest and noblest—when truth, duty, nobility, and knowledge converge in humble love of God—they become figures of the great Alma Mater that Newman ever holds in mind.

In Desiring the Kingdom, James K.A. Smith points to secular liturgies that shape our imaginations and desires as much as our minds. Through these liturgies, we come to conceive of the world and give over our hearts to particular goods in it. The spaces we inhabit, and the practices associated with those spaces, form our inchoate dreams and desires. If movie theaters, shopping malls, and sports arenas have their liturgies, so also do universities. Indeed, modern American universities provide one of the most influential secular liturgies of our culture. Through campus architecture, selective institutional narrative, and varied traditions and practices into which we are inducted during impressionable years, we come to embrace the myth of the university as alma mater. Its liturgies are well practiced and efficacious. Even without marketing specialists to curate institutional image, it would be unsurprising to regard our colleges fondly and to commit ourselves gratefully to them. But whether or not we should honor our colleges as alma maters is another matter. By understanding how universities orchestrate our celebration of them as alma maters, and by considering the conditions in which the honorific is genuinely warranted, we can exercise initiative to pay homage or withhold it, as circumstances recommend.

Who is your Alma Mater? Is she kind, nurturing, solicitous, and wise? Is she devoted to the truth, beauty, and goodness in which we find our highest possibilities? Is she responsive to divine grace whereby immeasurable blessing comes to her and to others through her? If not, then perhaps more modest gratitude is owed. If so, however, let us by all means proclaim, “Alma Mater! we hail thee with loyal devotion / And bring to thine altar our off’ring of praise.”

Douglas V. Henry, Ph.D., is Dean of the Honors College at Baylor University. His published work addresses such varied writers as Plato, Boethius, John Bunyan, Iris Murdoch, Walker Percy, John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Cormac McCarthy, and it ranges across diverse topics including allegory, divine hiddenness, doubt, ecumenism, freedom, hope, and love. He is currently at work on a constructive critique of the modern university entitled Three Rival Versions of Education.