PROVIDENCE — Providence College continued its centennial year celebrations with a ceremony honoring the 100-year anniversary of the granting of a state charter at the State House on Tuesday, February 14.
College President Father Brian Shanley and Governor Gina Raimondo were among those who spoke at the event commemorating the signing of the official state charter into law by Governor R. Livingston Beeckman on February 14, 1917.
“As we celebrate our centennial today, we recognize and thank the state of Rhode Island for its role in the birth of our college, and I am optimistic the next hundred years will be equally as fruitful and rewarding as the first hundred for the students, the faculty and the staff of Providence College and the larger Rhode Island community,” said Father Shanley.
Providence College was founded through the joint efforts of the Dominican Friars of the Province of St. Joseph and Bishop Matthew Harkins, second bishop of Providence, who invited the friars to open an institute of higher learning in the state. The college opened its doors to its first graduating class in 1919, holding its first commencement ceremonies in 1923.
“We’ve come a long way since 1917. We have now conferred just under 54,000 undergrad degrees and we occupy a unique position in American higher education as a Catholic and Dominican liberal arts institution that is primarily undergraduate in nature and which happens to have both a strong athletics program and a burgeoning brand new business school,” said Father Shanley.
He went on to speak about the continued challenge of providing a liberal arts education in a culture that increasingly values a financial return on investment in higher education.
“We believe that a liberal arts education changes the heart and the souls of young people and gives them the skill set not just to be productive members of an economy, or even just civically active, but to lead good and virtuous lives,” he said. “That’s really the goal of a liberal arts education, and we still champion it at Providence College.”
Governor Raimondo commended the college on its liberal arts education in her congratulatory remarks, emphasizing the number of graduates who have gone on to serve in public office. A graduate of nearby La Salle Academy, she recalled studying at the college’s Phillips Memorial Library as a high school student and hearing stories of the famous Development of Western Civilization course from a sibling and friends.
“The thing that PC has taught is the value of civic engagement, the value of a well-rounded education, the value of humanity, and I’ll tell you right now we could use a lot more of those values in the state and in our country,” she said. “I for one feel lucky that we have PC here in Providence thriving and continuing to pump out great public servants, great lawyers, great teachers, great physicians who are the backbone of our community.”
Speaker of the House Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President M. Teresa Paiva Weed also offered remarks. Paiva Weed, a graduate of the class of 1981, was a student at Providence College during the 1977-1978 academic year that witnessed both the historic blizzard of ’78 and a dormitory fire that took the lives of 10 female students.
“It was a very sad chapter in the school’s life, but the friends and the people and the family that came together during that difficult time, to this day I still share those friendships,” she said.
Dr. Richard Grace, professor emeritus in the department of history, offered a historical perspective on the college’s founding. Emphasizing the anti-Catholic sentiment that was popular in the country during its early days, he referred to the clause in the state charter that specifically prohibits refusal of admission to any person on the basis of religion and how this policy has come to form the college as a haven for members of many religious and immigrant groups over the years.
“That openness helps to account for the significant number of Jewish students who enrolled at Providence College as classmates of the many immigrant children of immigrant Irish and Italian and Portuguese and French Canadian parents, among other ethnic groups, in the early years of the college,” said Grace.
The ceremony concluded with a performance by I Cantori, the college’s premiere student choral group. Andrew Konnerth, president of the Providence College Student Congress and master of ceremonies at the day’s event, spoke with Rhode Island Catholic following the ceremony about the student body’s involvement with the centennial celebration.
“The centennial has been something that students have been engaging in. It’s a part of the entire college, not just administrative,” he said.
