Sister Margaret Claydon: Our Muse, Our Inspiration, Our Guide

BY PRESIDENT PATRICIA MCGUIRE ’74

President McGuire offered these reflections at the Mass of the Resurrection for Sr. Margaret Claydon, SNDdeN, in Notre Dame Chapel on February 8, 2020.

Today’s beautiful liturgy is a magnificent celebration of the life of our beloved Sr. Margaret Claydon. Members of Sr. Margaret’s family, Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and members of the Trinity community, alumnae, faculty and staff and students: thank you for being part of this great celebration of a remarkable life, an intrepid spirit, a woman who inspired all of us to “proclaim ideals that never swerve” in the words of Trinity’s alma mater.

Beautiful tributes, so many memories, have poured into Trinity – hardly a person who traversed Trinity’s campus or knew a member of the vast Trinity family across the last 75 years escaped the powerful, penetrating influence of Sr. Margaret Claydon – college president, Hopkins scholar, Shakespeare teacher, faculty colleague, national educational leader, classmate, friend, mentor, religious sister, woman of great intellect and faith. As one alumna wrote, she was the embodiment of Trinity’s motto, Scientia Ancilla Fidei, Knowledge the Servant of Faith.

As I reflected on the tributes and shared stories with callers and heard the voices of our great Trinity family mourn and remember, I realized that I did not need to do much to prepare this reflection other than to let the voices of Trinity speak in the grand chorus of memory and gratitude for having the grace of Sr. Margaret in our lives. The words of Trinity alumnae across the decades speak to us in a remarkable litany of praise for our Trinity sister:

• An exemplar of the ideal Trinity Woman. A leader of penetrating intellect. A symbol of women’s strength and empowerment.
• A transformational leader. Intellectual and elegant. Courageous
• Majestic, magnificent. Gracious and classy.
• Great character, wisdom, intelligence and grace.
• Dignity. Indomitable. Formidable. Visionary.
• A friend, a classmate, a role model, a mentor.
• Erudite and charming. Best of the best. Compassionate soul.
• Our muse, our inspiration, our guide to higher realms (thanks to Cynthia Russell ’81 for this phrase, which I borrowed for the title of this reflection).

Each of us, in our own way, have insights and reflections on Sr. Margaret’s life, work and legacy depending on how we experienced our relationship with her as students, colleagues, sisters in community, family and friends; over time, for some of us, our relationship changed as we grew and took on new roles. Louise Hallahan Stakelin ’76 and other alumnae in Cincinnati extended particularly deep friendship to Sr. Margaret when she moved to Mount Notre Dame. Louise shared a reflection that speaks to something many of us experienced in our own relationships with Margaret: “It’s hard for me to describe how you can revere and admire someone for so many years and much later on have the enormous blessing of becoming a close friend.”

So it was that the Sister President I knew and admired, albeit often from afar in my student days, and, I confess, sometimes as her tormentor back then, became my confidante, mentor, trusted guide and friend as I learned how to be Trinity’s president.

In this role, at times, there are very few people in whom a president can confide honestly about the challenges we face. She instinctively knew what I was worrying about whenever she stopped by the office. When students would trouble me with various antics, I told her I felt like I was paying for the sins of my youth, and she would smile that small wry smile and chuckle appreciatively. She always wanted to know about visits I had with alumnae, and she conspired with me about how to solicit the large charitable gifts – “the biggies” as she called them – we needed to secure Trinity’s future. We went together several times to visit with the great Mary Goubeau ’27 whose legacy for Notre Dame Chapel is a testament to Sr. Margaret’s stewardship.

As I delved through the records of her presidency, I gained deep appreciation of her bold plans for Trinity – she loved building projects, first building the music and art wing of Main Hall, then building the library and Kerby Hall, then purchasing the Soldier’s Home property across the street! Planning to build a campus on both sides of Michigan Avenue! Suggesting to the city that Michigan Avenue should be closed because after North Capitol Street was cut through above Michigan there was hardly any traffic on Michigan! No small thinking for Sr. Margaret! It was 1966, a simpler time trafficwise in the city, and her campus master plan was magnificent!

And then, and then… in 1968, just weeks after the president of Georgetown assured her they would not go coed, she picked up the Washington Post to read the announcement of coeducation at Georgetown. Washington burned that year in the aftermath of Dr. King’s assassination, and then the student anti-war protests came to town, and then the great law for women’s rights Title IX enticed women to the big universities, and suddenly Trinity’s remarkable growth began to slow. But Sr. Margaret, ever the bold leader and champion of women’s education, pressed on in the belief that Trinity, the nation’s first and best Catholic women’s college could, indeed, must persist and thrive in service to our nation and world.

Trinity is still a Catholic women’s college today, first and foremost, because Margaret Claydon would not give up on this critically important mission that is increasingly rare in a world dominated by large, homogenized universities. There are only seven such institutions still operating, down from a high of about 170 in 1960. Like most of the remaining seven, we are a diversified university today with coed graduate and professional programs, but Trinity College, our women’s college, remains the foundation and true heart of Trinity Washington University. Our choice to sustain Trinity College to meet the educational needs of women who need this education so very much is deeply rooted in the vision, courage and philosophy of Sr. Margaret Claydon, who emulated Trinity’s founders Sr. Julia McGroarty and Sr. Mary Euphrasia Taylor in her devotion to this mission, to make a great higher education accessible to women who need it, and St. Julie Billiart’s call to her sisters to “teach them what they need to know” to thrive.

Sr. Margaret helped me immeasurably to think through our large plans for campus development, drawing upon the work she did in the 1960s. She was thrilled when we finally were able to open the athletic center she long desired, and she was a regular for a long time at the Fitness Center. The academic center was another fulfillment of plans she laid so long ago. As construction ensued on the Payden Academic Center, she often walked over to watch the work progressing on that site, and even put on a hardhat for the topping-off party.

Trinity in 2020 faces many of the same challenges that Sr. Margaret faced in the 1960s – not only in strategic business terms, which are constant, but more importantly in grounding the relevance of our mission in meeting the needs of our times. I read each day some new call to turn away from the liberal arts, even questioning the whole value of a college degree, and then I re-read her words from the speeches and reports she gave 50 years ago, words that are so powerful, so insightful and still urgent.

She was an invaluable advisor to me on issues in our relationship with the bishops, and several times she accompanied me to dialogues with local Catholic presidents and our cardinals on the topic of Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the 1990 Vatican document on Catholic higher education. I loved hearing her quiet but powerful her voice in those meetings – whenever she spoke, the clerics would actually stop talking and pay close attention to her, nodding in agreement, and I knew well enough to keep my own counsel and bask in her gloriously cogent explication of the ways in which our strength lies in being faithfully Catholic and academically independent.

Thanks to Sr. Margaret, generations of Trinity Women will never get T.S. Eliot out of our heads:

For I have known them all already, known them all:
Have known the evenings, mornings and afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
(The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock)

or this:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
(Four Quartets)

She was, indeed, haunted by time, a phrase she used in a farewell poem she wrote to the students, faculty and staff of Trinity when she stepped down as president in 1975. As I started these remarks saying that none of my own words could surpass the deep reverence expressed by our alumnae, now I also must say that there is nothing I will ever write that can compare to Sr. Margaret’s eloquent, elegant rhetoric. So today, let us hear her voice once more, in the farewell poem she wrote in 1975, reproduced in that year’s Trinilogue:

I am haunted by, harassed by
That relentless, sure-footed hunter, Time.
Tracking traces of my days
In scent of lilac and magnolia blooms,
Over waxen floors and chequered marble into innumerable meeting rooms.

Along a trail of torn-up, now discarded words,
With echoes of the melodies of songs still half-heard.
The chase is narrowed now, channeled into blue-gold, green-red fountain
As you catch sight of them along a furrowed mountain.
Sniff them down, pursue them, you will find their print
Engraved upon the target of my heart.
Snared there, shimmering in memory’s fragile trap.
There I hold them, heap them –
A mass of minutes made of yesterdays…
My Trinity days.

Wrinkled Time, of implacable face,
Armed with your tick-tock arrows,
I defy you to erase
This measured, treasured, garnered harvest –
Ah, tell-tale hunter, harvester,
Memories mould me, fold me…
While I, with haggard, homing heart, elude
You, Old trapper Time,
In our enduring feud…

Prize of lover’s recollection,
Tenuous collection…
My Trinity days.

As we leave with the memory of our Trinity days shaped and infused with the grace and spirit of Margaret Claydon, let us pray that the power, wisdom and love of the Most Holy Trinity remains with us and grows ever stronger thanks to her loving and constant devotion to our growth intellectually and spiritually in the great mission of Trinity.