President's Heritage Week 2022 Message

Dear students, faculty and staff,

Every October, UIW celebrates Heritage Week, a tradition that invites us to reflect on our foundation and the legacy of our founders, the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. Throughout these several days, our community has prayed, celebrated and contemplated the responsibility and the gift that is our Mission.

We are reminded this time each year that our Mission is rooted in our origin story. In the 1860s, a devastating cholera epidemic left the people of the region in dire need of care and ministering. Bishop Claude Dubuis issued an urgent plea to the Sisters for help, writing: “Our Lord Jesus Christ, suffering in the persons of a multitude of sick and infirm of every kind, seeks relief at your hands.” The Sisters responded to the call, traveling from their native France to Texas. In the years that followed, the Sisters would establish the area’s first hospital, orphanages and schools, including that which would become the University of the Incarnate Word.

The Sisters enacted transformational, positive change in the world and gifted us our Mission to help educate students who are motivated to contribute in their own unique ways to its betterment. Today, our university community is made up of people who not only commit the story to memory, but its message to heart and its spirit to action.

As part of our Heritage celebrations this week, we honored those in our employee community who have done just this by demonstrating deep commitment to our institution and reaching a milestone year in their service. Please join me in congratulating the faculty, staff and administrators who marked five, ten, fifteen, and as many as forty years with us.

I am grateful for their contributions over these years and to all of you who further our Mission and support our students to carry it forward into the future.

Thank you for being a part of our UIW family, for all that you bring to our university, and for helping us build on the foundations laid by our founders long ago.

Praised be the Incarnate Word!

Sincerely,

Thomas M. Evans, PhD
President