President Vischer commits to cultivating truth, beauty and goodness for St. Thomas
By SHEREE R. CURRY
W hen a 10-year-old Robert K. Vischer moved with his mother and siblings from Muscatine, Iowa, to greater Chicago in 1980, his world expanded. At the same time, as he tells it, he still lived a rather sheltered life. “I grew up in an overwhelmingly white suburb of Chicago and attended overwhelmingly white public schools,” he said. “I heard quite a bit about the Civil Rights Movement in Selma, Birmingham and Montgomery (but) I knew nothing about the history that gave rise to racial injustice in my own environment. I was an adult before I learned about the marches Martin Luther King Jr. led in Chicago, where he encountered what he described as the most hostile crowds of his life.”
Fast forward to 2017, four years into Vischer’s tenure as dean of the University of St. Thomas School of Law. That July, he was an inaugural recipient of the Minnesota Lawyer Diversity and Inclusion Award. The honor recognized his contributions to the advancement of diversity and inclusion in the practice of law. “Our Catholic identity compels us to be anti-racist, which means that we’re not just passively avoiding racism, but are working proactively to tear down systemic inequities shaped by racism,” said Vischer, who grew up in a religious home and converted to Catholicism as an adult.
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