On Monday, August 24th, the Wyoming Catholic College community opened the new academic year by officially welcoming the forty-nine members of the Freshman Class into the exciting adventure that is Wyoming Catholic. Hailing from twenty states (and several countries), this year’s class marks the second consecutive year with a significant increase in class size—a trend that is increasingly common and encouraging in faithfully-Catholic institutions of higher education, and one that the College’s administration expects to continue in the coming years.

The morning began with the annual Convocation Mass at 8:00AM at Holy Rosary Church, followed by the traditional All School Photo on the church steps. Then the students processed back into the church for the formal Matriculation ceremony itself. There, each member of the Class of 2030 signed their names into the leather-bound student register known as the Matricula, which holds the signatures of everyone who has attended the college since it first opened its doors in 2007.

At the ceremony, the College’s Academic Dean, Dr. Scott Olsson, a woodworker of considerable skill, drew upon the analogy of working with wood by hand, as opposed to using power tools. “At first, hand tools seem to be wholly inferior to their powered counterparts, but they have a surprising advantage. When you start to use hand tools, you become newly attentive to the wood. You learn that the wood wants to be cut in a certain way…It’s true that I can cut a board uphill or downhill with my electric compound miter saw, but I will get a much finer cut if I observe and obey the grain. The paradox is that if you really want to be proficient with power tools, you need to spend some time NOT using them.” 

In an academic environment increasingly obsessed with off-loading the traditional work of education (particularly when incorporating AI into the classroom or into the day-to-day lives of students), Dr. Olsson’s analogy was an illuminating one. “For the next four years,” he told this year’s incoming class, “you’ll be focusing on the hand tools of learning. Reading, speaking, writing. You will learn to have a conversation. With these tools, you must choose your own words and examine your own assertions. Although a textbook or Sparknotes or ChatGPT would strip away these difficulties, you’ll read the authors themselves and their own words.”

Summing up the extraordinary opportunity before them, he emphasized that “to be a Great Books college is to shout out, ‘The grain matters. It matters, although this work will at times be painfully inefficient.’ This is the natural and proportionate inefficiency of attentive labor and a worthy object. Master these tools and the rest will come easily to you.”

After listening to Dean Olsson’s remarks, signing their names in the leather-bound registry, and shaking hands with the College’s president, Fr. Dcn. Kyle Washut, the Class of 2030 was welcomed into the Wyoming Catholic College community by their fellow students, along with the College’s professors, staff, and their families. The ceremony concluded with a singing of the College’s official anthem, Verus Conditor Montium.