class - Regis College

dear
neighbor
2
REGIS TODAY
Seeing higher education today from a global and personal
perspective brings both joy and challenge, and once a university
president sees, he or she must respond.
My work in international nursing education, for example,
led to the recognition that the era of nursing on the global stage
had arrived, and I was invited to give the keynote address
at a Global Nursing Caucus in Boston last October. Then, in
November, I visited with alumni and prospective students in
Thailand and Japan. The warm welcome and memories of Regis
showed great love of the College, saying a great deal about a
Regis global network that already exists and has for decades.
Who can forget the story of Sister Jeanne d’Arc O’Hare, CSJ,
on Fulbright in Africa in the 1960s and a car pulling up beside
her and asking, “Are you a Sister of St. Joseph?” The speaker
was a Regis alumna, a diplomat’s wife. Nor shall I forget the
Thai alumna whose family I met, and the Japanese alumni
who wanted to know all the Regis news.
Meanwhile, at home, contemporary Regis undergraduate
and graduate students are revealing the world within us and
alive, and electronically connected. “Unity,” a wonderful
vitality through the lens of our Sisters of St. Joseph heritage.
The Sisters are dedicated to “unity and reconciliation.”
In December, Vice President Paul Vaccaro visited high schools in Brazil to tell students
about Regis. During spring break in March, Regis students traveled on community service
and learning trips to Peru and Grenada and on a glee club performance tour to Barcelona.
In May, the Erat Scholars traveled to Le Puy, France, to visit the origin of the CSJs; to
Geneva, Switzerland, to explore UN programs in human rights; and to Rome, to ponder
the teachings of Vatican II during this 50th anniversary year. Last year they visited Kenya.
Our Haitian nursing faculty came here in March from all over Haiti for their spring
semester and, having been here two or three times, they, too, now claim Regis as alma mater.
Our admission director Wanda Suriel ’98 just returned from visiting Guatemala, Honduras,
Nicaragua, Ecuador, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. I am just back from Puerto Rico,
where I met with many of our wonderful alumni there.
Both here and abroad, a variety of faces, races, and faiths make up the Regis College
“new” community. We love it, and we love them, these citizens of the world. The responsibility
that comes to me with this global perspective is to build the infrastructure to sustain and
develop the connections, to fund the communication and correspondence, and to strengthen
our relationships. For these reasons I am working toward establishing a Regis College “institute
for global connections.” At a recent Partners in Health board meeting, Dr. Paul Farmer
and Ophelia Dahl singled out the contributions of two universities—Regis and Harvard. I
beamed with pride and knew that we were on the right track. So, stay tuned, friends of
Regis College all over the world. You will be hearing from me about our global connections.
Antoinette M. Hays, PhD, RN
PRESIDENT