Windsor, Ont.’s Assumption University, the founding institution behind the University of Windsor, has sold its historic building near the shore of the St. Clair River and a two-storey house close by to the 50-year-old secular university with which it has been allied since 1963. The $2.97 million deal will free up the University of Windsor to consolidate student services in the Assumption University building, move central administrative offices into its Chrysler Hall Tower and begin a process of tearing down some of the school’s more makeshift buildings, including an old bowling alley that currently houses the faculty of music.
Assumption has been granted permanent office space on the second floor of the old building from which a Catholic campus ministry team of seven will continue its work with more than 12,000 full-time undergraduates, 1,200 full-time graduate students and 3,300 part timers.
“It’s a strengthening of our mission,” Fr. Tom Rosica, Assumption University president and vice chancellor, told The Catholic Register. “We were in a retreat mode, not knowing what to do with all of this.”
Relieved of the burden of maintaining and fundraising for an historic building, Assumption will concentrate on chaplaincy, presenting its annual “Christian Culture” lecture series, developing new courses for Catholic teachers and future partnerships between Salt + Light Catholic Media Foundation and the University of Windsor’s department of communications, media and film.
Rosica, who is also CEO of Salt + Light TV, cites campus ministry as the most important role Assumption will play at the University of Windsor.
“In an age when it seems Catholic chaplaincy and care is put at the side, we’re being put at the centre,” he said.
Nobody should be surprised a secular university wants a strong chaplaincy on campus, said University of Windsor president and vice-chancellor Alan Wildeman.
“I don’t think you will find too many universities across Canada or North America who do not want the opportunity to make sure they serve the faith-based needs of their student body,” he said. “The University of Windsor is no different in that regard.”
The university also values Assumption’s free, public lecture series which brought Washington, D.C.’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl to Windsor Dec. 1 to speak about the new evangelization.
“They (Assumption lectures) contribute to the intellectual debate you want a university to be having,” said Wildeman. “We are a university and we need to be doing all we can to enable wide-ranging academic issues to be pursued.”
Rosica and Wildeman share a goal of seeing the university find ways to serve a city that’s been hit hard by the hollowing out of a once vibrant manufacturing sector.
“Assumption plays an extremely important part of the moral conscience in the midst of a big crisis,” said Rosica. “You have the crisis of unemployment, the crisis of poverty, the crisis of the Church in which this area was so hard-hit by the sex abuse. People have come to us and turned to us for all kinds of different assistance. That’s what really is important.”
The University of Windsor has made contributing to the economic and cultural well-being of the city one of five strategic goals.
“There are a lot of changes happening. Global forces are shifting employment patterns and there are significant winners and losers in that,” said Wildeman. “We have students on our campus whose families and maybe themselves as well have been impacted. For them, their faith is something that is important.”
The Jesuits founded Assumption as a college for boys, more or less the equivalent of high school, in 1857. The Basilian Fathers took it over and have been running it since 1862, transforming it into a university. When the provincial legislature created the University of Windsor in 1963, Assumption retained its charter and its ability to grant degrees.