By Paul Gray
The University of Notre Dame’s Celia Hammond becomes successor to outgoing Catholic education giant Peter Tannock
A LAWYER who is also a 39-year-old mother of three has been appointed to replace Peter Tannock as Vice Chancellor of University of Notre Dame.
Professor Celia Hammond has worked in private legal practice in Perth as well as in senior administrative and teaching positions at Notre Dame, including as Deputy Vice Chancellor.
She is the daughter of the former Chief Judge of the District Court of Western Australia, Judge Kevin Hammond.
Her appointment as Vice Chancellor of the Notre Dame was announced this week.
In an exclusive interview with The Record before the announcement was made, Prof. Hammond told of her passion for Catholic education and the unique mission she sees for a Catholic university.
She said Catholic universities provide higher education and learning as other universities do, but a Catholic university delivers this “within the context of Catholic faith and values.”
The new vice chancellor said a Catholic university provides a strong focus on knowing each individual student in its care, and on respecting each one as an individual.
A Catholic university like Notre Dame has a strong pastoral care program which caters to the whole person, not just to their academic needs, Prof. Hammond said. Prof. Hammond says the idea of a Catholic university may still seem new in Australia, but there is a long history and tradition of Catholic universities.
Many secular universities started off as religious institutions, she said. Another distinctive way in which Notre Dame projects Catholic values into the world is by insisting on philosophy, theology and ethics as core subjects in the curriculum undertaken by all students in every faculty. Prof. Hammond is interested in all three of these areas, though she modestly professes no special expertise in any one of them. She has served on two hospital ethics committees, at St John of God and Mercy Hospitals.
Bringing the examination of ethics into the lectures on law which she has delivered to Notre Dame students has been one of the most rewarding features of her time at the university, she says.
Because of the university’s Catholic environment, it was possible to teach the law to students and then hold sessions with them asking questions about what is ethical. “It was liberating.”
While she continues to pursue an active interest in ethics, her reading on the topic is “for breadth” rather than in any specific area.
Prof Hammond says she was attracted to law and teaching as a young woman because of parental example: her father, a lawyer and judge, and her mother a teacher.
“At first I wanted to be a teacher, but I also loved logic and reasoning.” In law, she thinks, the arts of logical argument and reasoning are not used simply for argument’s sake, but to help solve problems and help people.
She says there has been a distinct Catholic contribution to the development of law, citing Saints Thomas Aquinas and Thomas More as examples of significant contributors.
She says she is looking forward to an international ethics conference hosted by Notre Dame at its Sydney campus next month at which Catholic legal thinkers such as John Finnis will speak.
Married with three young boys, Prof Hammond says she is able to manage a full-time job with the demands of being a mother because of a lot of support.
“I fit in everything in the way everyone does,” she says. “People have been doing it for years.” She says she has enjoyed great encouragement from her family – her husband Simon King is “proud and supportive” of her appointment as Vice Chancellor – and the environment at Notre Dame has been helpful too. Now in her 11th year of employment at Notre Dame, she says she feels like she has “grown up” in her professional life at the university – and the university also supported her in having her children, all three of whom were born since she started there.
Coming to Notre Dame in 1998 felt like “coming home” after working in private practice and lecturing at secular universities, she says.
The Catholic university is mission-focused, with a feeling among its people that everyone is headed towards the same goal.
She says the university is “not utopia” – no working environment is – but when you work at a Catholic university you “sense you were doing something higher than just doing something for yourself.”
Prof Hammond succeeds Dr Peter Tannock who will retire as Notre Dame’s Vice Chancellor on July 31.
Dr Tannock said this week that in Prof Hammond, the University had found a person of outstanding ability with a deep understanding of, and commitment to, Notre Dame and its objects.
He said she is a young woman of exceptional ability and experience who will be supported by the entire Notre Dame community in leading and managing the university, and taking it to the next stage in its development.
Meanwhile Dr Tannock’s contribution to Catholic education was praised by Notre Dame’s Chancellor Dr Michael Quinlan.
Dr Tannock has made an unparalleled contribution to Catholic education in Australia.