Where’s the Bar?
Listening to Fr Michael Suarez’s keynote address at UVA’s Final Exercises a couple of weeks ago, a clarion call for academic freedom and a reflection on the university’s role in society, I was struck by his reference to one of his teachers, Dorothy Bednarowska. He refers (at about ’16) to a run-in he had with her while still a research student. Critical of his priorities, she told him squarely: ‘You are wasting your time! You think the bar is here right in front of you, but excellence lies much higher, and you should be chasing it!’ Where, these days, are the voices, in society, in the Church, that urge us to pursue excellence? Does anyone still believe in it? Bednarowska, a founding fellow (alongside Iris Murdoch) of St Anne’s College in Oxford, taught generations of young people to read responsibly and intelligently. Content to let her students be her legacy, she never published. What is more, as an obituarist pointed out, ‘she actively enjoyed teaching’. Clearly formidable, she was unconcerned to leave a monument to herself. Hers is, in the best sense, a provocative legacy. I am glad to be confronted with it.
