Campus, Community, Arches

Coming Home

Remembering Ron Thomas, the university’s 13th president, who passed away April 17 at age 74.

Ronald R. Thomas is home. For 13 years, from the summers of 2003 through 2016, that beloved home was here, as president of University of Puget Sound. His irrepressible enthusiasm for all things Puget Sound so animates the campus today that it’s impossible to speak of it in the past tense. He loved it all: every student, every possibility, every building, every blade of grass. The campus looks the way it does because he was a master of master planning. He envisioned a campus that was a true “tapestry of learning,” welcoming people and connecting them not only to ideas and the life of the mind but to each other. Before Ron, there was no Commencement Walk. No Event Lawn. No center for the health sciences, now known as Weyerhaeuser Hall. No Athletics & Aquatics Center. And perhaps his greatest point of pride: Commencement Hall—now Thomas Hall—a living and learning center meant to be both a home for ideas and a home for students.

Home. If you knew Ron Thomas at all, or heard him speak even two or three times, you know how important the concept of home was to him. Home is more than a place. Home is the people who inhabit it, the people who are welcomed there. He would quote one of his favorite novelists, Charles Dickens: “Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than any magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to.”

President Emeritus Ronald R. Thomas speaks with students. — President Thomas—known affectionately as “RonThom”—was a fixture on campus. “I love this university,” he wrote to the campus community when he retired in 2016. ”I can honestly say the last 12 years have been the most meaningful and fulfilling of my life.”

President Ronald R. Thomas — During his tenure as president of University of Puget Sound, Thomas transformed the college into a leading liberal arts institution, executing a clear vision with an unmatched enthusiasm, keen intellect, and abiding affection.

His first home: Ocean Grove, N.J., in Neptune Township, where he walked the same streets and boardwalks referenced in the lyrics of another local son, Bruce Springsteen, whose entire catalog Ron knew by heart. Home was The University of Chicago, where he began his academic career as an English professor; and Harvard University, where he was a fellow; and Hartford, Conn., where he served as professor, department chair, vice president, and interim president at Trinity College. Home was the City of Destiny and the University of Puget Sound. And always, first and foremost, home was Mary Thomas, the great love of his life and partner in adventures large and small.

There were many adventures. And he wrote about them. A lot. His Arches columns are must-read story-poems that give us all a peek into how that magnificent mind worked—conversationally drawing together disparate ideas, pondering big questions with insatiable curiosity, and offering an invitation to be part of the story. Here he is in Beijing, visiting with alumni, and in Hanoi, spending Christmas Eve with PacRim participants. Here he is in Istanbul, exploring the Byzantine architecture of the Hagia Sophia, which in his deft imagination becomes a metaphor for the nobility of the World War II-era barracks that once occupied the center of campus. Here he is, wearing a hardhat, perched a hundred feet off the ground on the steel girders that will frame Thomas Hall, picturing the view that will inspire future occupants for generations to come. Here he is, surrounded by bridesmaids and groomsmen at numerous alumni weddings—even officiating at one. Here he is, baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, pacing behind the bench at a Loggers basketball game, completely immersed in what he calls “the sweatiest of the liberal arts.” Always with a story to tell. Always asking you for yours. And most of those stories were about the idea, the quest, the importance of home.

Home is not a place you arrive at, but an action you take: It is the act of progress, home is moving on, home is making the world a better place.

He was a student of the promise of home—as defined by the crooning of Springsteen and Bob Dylan, and the prose of Homer and Tennyson, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Toni Morrison. He quoted most of them and more in the hallmark “Welcome Home” speech that he gave in Baker Stadium every fall to each incoming class—remembered by alumni as much for its dazzling and diverse references as the sheer number of times he spoke the word “home.” (In his last convocation address, to the incoming Class of 2019, he invoked it no fewer than 62 times.)

“For the wise person, the educated person, the person at an outstanding liberal arts college in Western Washington, beneath the great mountain and beside the silver sea,” he said, “home is the place you already are and the place you are going to, the road to your future: You make the place where you are your home.… It is not one place, but a place that moves with us, the raft on which we navigate the river of life.”

“Home,” Ron told each incoming class, “is not a place you arrive at, but an action you take: It is the act of progress, home is moving on, home is making the world a better place.”

Without question, Ron made Puget Sound a better place. The university, the campus, and all the people—students, alumni, faculty, staff, trustees, and more—who have found a home here.

Wherever Ron calls home now, he’s happy there. Fully immersed in the wisdom and whimsy of the universe and pursuing all of his soul’s passions at once: Here he is, dishing with Dashiell Hammett about detective fiction and debating the finer points of the hero's journey with Tennyson. Here he is, inhabiting Thomas Hall and ever so subtly but firmly influencing the selection of art on the walls, dropping in on lectures and board meetings in the Tahoma Room, and awakening new possibilities in infinite generations of students who roam its halls. Here he is, still strolling New Jersey boardwalks at midnight, whispering lyrics into the ear of Springsteen and quoting Bob Dylan and kissing Mary goodnight. Someone so made to love this life can’t help but love what’s next.

Perhaps the most fitting benediction for a truly one-of-a-kind president is from novelist Ursula K. Le Guin, among the luminaries he quoted in every Welcome Home speech:

May your soul be at home where there are no houses
Walk carefully, well loved one
Walk mindfully, well loved one
Walk fearlessly, well loved one.
Return with us, return to us
Be always coming home.

A memorial service is scheduled for Saturday, June 24, at 2 pm in Thomas Hall. The public is welcome.

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