Monsignor Tim Murphy, in many and amazing and entertaining ways the face and voice and cheerful symbol of Central Catholic High School in Portland for nearly forty years, was himself a fine student at the school in southeast Portland—president of his class, star baseball player, and excellent basketball player. But it was the priesthood that was Tim Murphy’s dream, and after seminary training he was ordained a priest of the Archdiocese of Portland in 1967.

For all his herculean labors at Central Catholic High, he has also been a tireless servant to the Church in Oregon, serving in 17 parishes, so far. Born in 1940, baptized and schooled at All Saints, Tim attended Santa Clara University for a year, the University of Portland for a year (1959-1960), and then Saint Thomas Seminary in Washington, where he earned his bachelor’s (in philosophy) and master’s (in divinity) degrees; after ordination, he then returned to The Bluff, while serving in St. Charles and Holy Cross parishes, to earn his master’s degree in education. A man of quiet but startling energy then as now, Tim also started a fifteen year teaching career at Central Catholic in 1968. In 1983 he went to Regis High in Stayton to be principal for seven years, but eventually returned again to Central, this time as principal (1990-1995), president (1995-2008), and now president emeritus.

For all that Tim is famous in Portland, in Oregon, and in the Pacific Northwest, as the very embodiment of the mission of his school, he has been a gracious servant to the Church he loves, helping out as pastor, assistant, or guest in nearly every parish in metro Portland: Saints Anthony, Charles, Therese, Catherine of Siena, John the Baptist, Francis, Agatha, Patrick, Mary of the Valley, and John Fischer, as well as Holy Family, Immaculate Conception, Blessed Sacrament, Our Lady of the Lake, and Sacred Heart. He also served a year as chaplain at Mount Saint Joseph’s Nursing Home in Portland. It is also probably an inarguable fact that Tim

Murphy has, in his nearly fifty years as a cheerful, witty, generous priest, baptized more children, celebrated the marriage of more couples, and celebrated the lives of more Catholics who have gone home to the Light than any other priest in Portland—a remarkable thing to say, but indicative of Tim’s conviction that a priest is a servant of the faithful, and available for any and all holy moments.

Suitably enough it is Central Catholic High that has most pithily summed up its beloved Monsignor Murphy; when Tim was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 2010, his plaque was both epic and terse: Beloved Priest, Friend to All, and Spiritual Leader. The University of Portland today agrees wholeheartedly with those compliments, and awards Tim its highest honor, the Christus Magister Medal (“Christ the Teacher”) for the grace and generosity and prayer of his life and work.

The internationally renowned oncologist and cancer researcher Dr. Brian Druker, winner of the 2009 Lasker-DeBakey Award for Clinical Medical Research (an honor often called the American Nobel Prize), was born in 1955 in Minnesota and earned his bachelor’s (in chemistry) and medical degrees from the University of California at San Diego. He then did his internship and residency at Barnes Hospital in Saint Louis (part of Washington University’s School of Medicine) and was a fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Dana-Farber Cancer Institute before making the momentous decision to come to Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, where he now directs the Knight Cancer Institute, is a professor of medicine, and holds the university’s Jeld-Wen Chair in Leukemia Research.

“At Harvard,” he has said, “I was researching what drives the growth of cancer cells. For probably 30 years the view in cancer work was that if we understood what drives the growth of cancer we could target it with specific therapies and shut it down. But after all those years of people saying that, we stopped believing it because it had never been done. So as I tried to set up my own laboratory at Harvard, the view was what you are doing isn’t going to work, we just don’t believe it, nobody’s been able to prove it, we don’t want to put more resources into this. So at that point in my career I had to make a decision: do I believe that this is the path forward, or do I accept what some really smart people are telling me? And I decided that I believed this was the way forward…”

Toward Portland, toward OHSU’s cancer center, and soon to a drug called imatinib (better known as Gleevec), the first targeted cancer therapy. While doctors and scientists have battled cancer in many ways—interferon, bone marrow transplants, chemotherapy—Druker’s dream is to target cancers without harming normal cells. Gleevec is aimed at leukemia, and there are “probably thousands of ways that growth is regulated in cells, so ultimately our work and the work of many other researchers now is to create drugs to target all the abnormalities in cell growth,” he says. “The future of cancer therapy is going to be to define cancer by the broken parts.”

Today Gleevec treats ten different cancers, and Druker notes that there are targeted drugs being developed for skin cancers, breast cancers, and colon cancers. “For me the future of cancer research is far more targeted therapy. The analogy I use is infectious diseases. A century ago, if you got an infection, that was fatal. But antibiotics and vaccinations and public health prevention programs were discovered—all targeted therapies. We can make cancer treatable and curable, or even eradicate it, over this next century.”

Famed distance swimmer and Down syndrome activist Karen Gaffney has spent her life showing the world that commitment, determination, and vision are the hallmarks of a well-lived life, not believing false limits imposed by other people’s expectations.

Renowned for her extraordinary exploits as a swimmer (she has swum the English Channel with teammates, swam nine miles across Lake Tahoe, and swam across Lake Champlain and San Francisco Bay, among many other feats), she is also a remarkably eloquent speaker and activist for people with developmental disabilities, and president of the Karen Gaffney Foundation in Portland.

Born in San Jose, Karen earned her high school degree at Portland’s Saint Mary’s Academy in 1997, where she was a member of the Science Club and (naturally) lettered in swimming. She then earned her teacher’s aide certificate at Portland Community College in 2001, and set off on her remarkable career as one of the best-known and revered voices in the world for people with Down syndrome. First as a swimmer, and then as an increasingly eloquent and sought-after speaker (she has given talks in France, Indonesia, and all around America), she has personally changed the way in which our culture sees men and women born with Down syndrome, a chromosomal anomaly that causes developmental disabilities of many kinds and degrees. Roughly one of every 550 babies born in America today have Down syndrome, and screening now allows parents to discover the condition at or before birth; many of the children thus identified are “terminated” before birth, as the euphemism has it, and one of Karen Gaffney’s insistent messages is that this is not merciful at all, but the killing of a being just as capable as anyone else of remarkable deeds, a rich and joyous life, and indeed a unique influence on the world—as she should know.

While she still swims two to three miles a day, and is the president of the Karen Gaffney Foundation, an umbrella for dozens of projects assisting and inspiring people with disabilities, Karen is also an advisor to Exceptional Parent magazine and a much-in-demand speaker nationally and internationally to children and families of people with disabilities.

“My major focus is to advocate for inclusion of people with disabilities in the home, schools, workplace, and community,” she says. “I want to deliver hope and inspiration to kids and their families. I want to change kids’ lives. I want to influence people who do not have Down syndrome to realize we are more like everyone else than we are different. We don’t want to be different. Treat us like you treat your own children. We are your children. Let us do what we can do. Let us lead the lives only we can lead, do the things only we can do. I have done the best I could with what gifts I have. I worked as hard as I could. I wanted to show people that the experts are wrong, and we can do anything.

Noted ethicist and scholar Kirk Hanson, who delivered the Commencement Address to the Class of 2013 at University president Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C.’s invitation, is one of the founders of the field of modern business ethics. Today he is executive director of the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University, and is that Catholic university’s John Courtney Murray S.J. University Professor of Social Ethics. He remains a professor emeritus of business and ethics at Stanford University, where he taught for many years, and is a prolific writer, perhaps best known for his popular weekly column on workplace ethics in the San Jose Mercury News.

Hanson earned his undergraduate and MBA degrees at Stanford (where he was editor of the student newspaper), and also did graduate work at Yale Divinity School and Harvard’s Graduate School of Business, but his expertise in business ethics was not earned in the classroom as much as it was in enterprise. Fresh out of college, he worked for the National Alliance of Business (working directly with Levi Strauss chairman Walter Haas), the Southern New England Telephone Company, Chicago United (a business/minority organization coalition), and the National Affiliation of Concerned Business Students (an organization he founded in 1971), before starting three more national business ethics organizations—the Hanson Group, the Business Enterprise Trust, and Ementoring.com, an online course company founded in 1999 and sold a year later.

All this while returning to academia, first as a professor of management at Claremont Graduate School, and at Stanford University, where he directed the master’s degree program, taught in the university’s noted Executive Program, and chaired the university’s Commission on Investment Responsibility. In 2001 he accepted Santa Clara’s offer to both teach and direct the Markkula Center, which has more than fifty affiliated scholars and programs in the ethics of biology, health care, technology, government, law, education, and character development. Here on The Bluff, executive vice president Fr. Mark Poorman, C.S.C., developer of the University’s booming Character Project, has worked with Hanson and the Markkula Center. Together, they labor to shape their respective universities’ creative efforts to foment, hone, elevate, and stimulate character discernment and development.

In addition to his work as a popular journalist, Hanson is the author, co-author, or editor of many books, among them Putting Christian Values to Work in Business and The Accountable Corporation, and an articulate and blunt commentator on poor corporate performance from the Catholic Church to Enron, Exxon, and British Petroleum. “Over the many years I have been teaching business responsibility and ethics,” he says, “there’s been a new case about once every five years that defines again for us why business ethics and corporate responsibility need to be a constant concern: Lockheed, Love Canal, General Dynamic, errant savings and loan companies, Exxon, WorldCom, Countrywide, Toyota, BP. [All these] stories demonstrate how quickly corporate good will can evaporate through misbehavior…reputations are swept away by the manipulation of the truth. Only consistently thoughtful and responsible decisions about safety and the welfare of all stakeholders of the firm, and complete transparency in times of crisis, will sustain a company’s reputation…”

One of the most influential, respected, creative, and tireless tribal leaders in Oregon history, Kathryn Harrison was born in 1924 in Corvallis; her mother, Ella, was of the Eyak people of Alaska and her father, Henry, was of the Mollala people of Oregon—a tribe legendarily established near Mount Hood by Coyote the Trickster in ancient time. Orphaned by a flu epidemic at age ten, she survived a brutal foster home for four years before escaping to Salem’s Chemewa Indian School, where her father had once been valedictorian. She graduated in 1942 and “impulsively married a classmate,” as she says; over the next thirty years she had ten children and endured terrible poverty, constant moving as migrant laborers following crops throughout the West, and an alcoholic husband.

But Kathryn Harrison was and is irrepressible. By the time she was fifty, she had graduated from Lane Community College’s nursing program, and found work at Lincoln City Hospital, on the coast. There she reconnected with friends and relations among the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz, and was elected to the tribal council. It was here that Kathryn found her life’s work. The 1954 Western Oregon Indian Termination Act had ended the tribal status of the 61 recognized tribes in the state; while most First Peoples here received some small token payment in exchange for title to their ancestral lands, the loss of federal status also meant the loss of health care, educational services, and employment opportunities. In Kathryn’s family, for example, each member received $35 for the loss of land their ancestors had lived and worked on for many centuries; land never legally sold, the First Peoples considering ostensible ownership of holy creation a patently silly idea. Many among the First People in Oregon understood that a secure and bright future for their heirs and tribes lay in restoration of federal recognition, and in Oregon no leader fought as hard, as deftly, and as tirelessly as Kathryn Harrison. In 1976 she and two of her children testified before Congress, and in 1977 the Siletz were restored to federally recognized status. Kathryn then returned to her father’s tribal home at Grand Ronde and worked to restore tribal land, legal status, and health care there; working closely with Mark O. Hatfield and Les AuCoin, she saw the Reservation Restoration Act passed in 1988. In 1995 she helped establish both the Spirit Mountain Casino and the Spirit Mountain Community Fund, a charitable foundation that has distributed nearly $50 million to nonprofit agencies in Oregon since 1997—among them the University of Portland, where tribal contributions help fuel scholarships for students of the First Peoples and programs educating students and neighbors about the ancient history and proud people who have lived in the University’s home for many thousands of years.

Harrison, elected to the Grande Ronde tribal council continuously from 1984 through 2001 (she never lost an election), also served as chairman of the council and trusted and revered counselor for many years; today she still serves as ambassador-at-large for her people, and has been much lauded for her creativity, eloquence, and open spirituality. Among her many honors are awards from American Indian Business Leaders, the Oregon Commission for Women, and the League of Women Voters. She is featured in the book Standing Tall: The Lifeway of Kathryn Jones Harrison (Oregon Historical Society Press), and in the Great Tribal Leaders of  Modern Times film series from Portland State University.

Born in Cuba, the American running and coaching legend Alberto Salazar first rose to prominence as a high school runner, winning the 1975 Massachusetts state cross country title and training with the famous Boston Track Club, whose members included world-class runners like Bill Rodgers. He then enrolled at the University of Oregon, beginning a life-long love affair with the Beaver State. As a Duck, running for Bill Dellinger, he was an All-American, helped win the 1977 national cross country title, was national cross country champion himself in 1978, and made the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team in the 10,000 meters, although that team never got to race in Moscow due to the American boycott. In 1981, just before he graduated, he broke the American indoor record in the 5,000 meter race by nearly 20 seconds, a stunning performance.

Salazar then moved up to the 26.1-mile marathon, winning three consecutive New York City Marathons from 1980 through 1982; he also won his hometown Boston Marathon in 1982, and finished that year ranked first in the world in the marathon and first in America in the 5,000 and 10,000 races. Over the next few years he continued to be among the finest runners on the planet, making the U.S. Olympic Team again in 1984 and winning the 56-mile Comrades Marathon in South Africa in 1994, but finally he shifted his creativity and ferocious work ethic to coaching, where he has become worldrenowned all over again.

As coach of the Nike Oregon Project, Salazar has applied all sorts of training, conditioning, diet, tactical, and psychological ideas to the task of producing world-class runners who live and train in Oregon. While the culmination of Salazar’s coaching may have come in the 2012 Olympics, when Mo Farah of England won both the 10,000 and the 5,000 and Central Catholic alumnus Galen Rupp of the USA earned a silver medal in the 10,000, he has also coached Alan Webb, Adam Goucher, Kara Goucher, and many other runners to top-caliber feats on the track.

Yet even his own running and coaching feats were not enough for Salazar; in 2012 he published his autobiography, 14 Minutes: A Running Legend’s Life and Death and Life, which explores his life from Havana to Oregon, and details the day in 2007 on which he suffered a heart attack and was clinically dead for 14 minutes. For all the glitter and gleam of his athletic and coaching accomplishments, Salazar here discusses, with remarkable eloquence and honesty, his deep Catholic faith, his conviction that grace has played a crucial and astonishing part in his life, and his belief, as he says, that there is far more for us to learn about life and death than mere biology. “Like so many young adults, I drifted away from Mass and the sacraments but finally returned with a vengeance,” he says.

“My faith is no longer just window dressing but something that pervades every part of my life. Even my regular workouts now include praying the Rosary. In my view I can do nothing without God. I put myself in God's hands. In the end, I believe, this is the only success that matters.”

Br. Donald Stabrowski, C.S.C., for sixteen years the University’s academic vice president and then the University’s first provost, also served as a dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and as a professor of political science during his 34-year tenure on The Bluff. But for all his administrative accomplishments—his tenure as chief academic officer is the longest in University history, and he oversaw remarkable growth in faculty numbers, grants, regional and national awards, and national scholarly renown—he will perhaps be missed most by his students, who found him a cheerful, avuncular, and brilliant teacher, and by the University’s alumni, who were regularly treated to his humorous and erudite commentary on American politics. When he left the University in 2012, upon being appointed assistant provincial for the Congregation of Holy Cross in America, the University lost a wonderful teacher as well as a pillar of the University’s stunning progress over the last two decades.

Born in Mishawaka, Indiana, Brother Donald earned his undergraduate degree in history from St. Edward’s University in Texas, and then not one but three master’s degrees (history and education at Indiana University, and government at the University of Notre Dame), before earning his doctoral degree, also in government, from Notre Dame. By the time he was deemed a doctor of philosophy, in 1985, he was already a veteran teacher and administrator: teacher at Cathedral High in Indianapolis (1963-1969), assistant principal at Archbishop Hoban High in Akron (1970), principal at Holy Trinity High in Chicago, and then a teacher at Holy Cross College, Purdue University, and St. Francis College.

In 1988 he came to the University of Portland as an assistant professor in history and politics, and three years later was named dean of arts and sciences; in 1996 he was named academic vice president, and in 2002 he was named the University’s first provost. He also served one semester as the University’s acting president, in 2003, only the second man ever to hold that position, between the presidencies of Father David Tyson, C.S.C., who had been elected Holy Cross provincial, and Father Bill Beauchamp, C.S.C., who took office as president in 2004.

But these facts and numbers, admirable as they prove his academic career to be, do not catch the wonderful width of his interests and scope of his curiosity. A particular scholar of ethnicity and urban politics, he is the author of South Bend Polonia, a book about the political machine that long held sway on the west side of South Bend, Indiana. He is also the author of many essays, articles, and scholarly papers, on subjects as  various as the history of his beloved Holy Cross Brothers, Oregon’s state budgeting process, American trade policy, the history of brick manufacture at the University of Notre Dame in its earliest years, Catholicism in Oregon, and the history of the nuns of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Perhaps the one subject on which he has published neither article nor monograph is that which he loves best of all: gardening. It is a sure bet that no Holy Cross man in the history of the University ever spent more hard hours in his garden, which is blooming gloriously in the campus’s Holy Cross Court even as you read these words, and which Brother Donald will certainly be tending while here to receive his well-deserved doctorate.