When Sister Vicki Bergkamp, ASC, stepped to the podium to begin her remarks at Newman University’s spring commencement ceremony, a memory popped into her mind.
“I have to chuckle as I stand here today,” she told the graduating class of 2026, “remembering when I sat in your chair in 1972 at my own graduation from this university.”
The moment was more than the connection of two points in time. It was a window into a relationship between a person and a place so deep and so durable that, more than five decades later, the two are difficult to separate.
Bergkamp has been a student at Newman. A professor. A board member. A board chair. An acting president. And now, in the spring of 2026, the recipient of the St. Newman Medal — the university’s highest honor — and its commencement speaker.
60 years. One institution. A life fully given.
A farm girl with a library problem
The story begins in Pretty Prairie, Kansas, population just a few hundred, where Bergkamp grew up on a dairy farm as the oldest of four children. She attended a two-room schoolhouse at St. Louis Parish, where the curriculum recycled often enough that she heard the same math lessons three years running.
She didn’t mind. She was too busy reading everything she could find.
“I was always a reader,” Bergkamp said. “My folks got us an encyclopedia set and most evenings I was looking up something. I was just always curious.”
The sisters who taught her recognized the hunger. On their days off, they rode public transportation to the library to keep young Bergkamp supplied with books.
“They took their day off to take public transportation and get me books to read,” Bergkamp said. “I was impressed with that.”
She would not forget it. That quiet, selfless act — women in religious life giving their own time for a student’s growth — planted a seed.
In August 1967, right out of Sacred Heart Academy in Wichita, Bergkamp joined the Adorers of the Blood of Christ (ASC). That September, she enrolled at Sacred Heart College and has been connected to her alma mater — today Newman University — ever since.
Teacher who taught more than she knew
Bergkamp graduated in 1972 with a degree in mathematics, went on to earn an MBA from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in education from the University of St. Thomas, and returned to what was then Kansas Newman College in 1978 to teach management science.
It was the beginning of a teaching career unlike most — not because of its length, but because of its shape. Bergkamp would teach at Newman, leave for an administrative role, return to the classroom, leave again and come back once more. Three separate stints. More than two decades of combined faculty service. Along the way she served as a professor of business, director of institutional planning and business department chair.
By 2016, she had formally advised 944 students.
But the number, she has said, only tells part of the story.
“Some of them wandered back at the oddest times,” Bergkamp recalled, “and I’d think — they’re not here for advising. They’re here for advice.”
Those visits shaped her understanding of what teaching actually is. The full picture came into focus years later, at an alumni gathering on campus. A former student pointed to a group of her peers and said, with quiet certainty, that something they’d all just discussed was exactly what they’d learned in Bergkamp’s math class.
Bergkamp was puzzled. It was all philosophy — nothing she had ever put on a syllabus.
“And they said, ‘Yes, you did,'” she recalled. “So I think it was that added dimension — you’re not just teaching a subject, you’re teaching people about life. And while you’ve got their attention, you might as well teach ’em a little philosophy about life.”
Steadying the ship
Teaching was never Bergkamp’s only role at Newman. From the beginning, she was drawn into the institutional life of the place she loved.
She served her first term on the Newman Board of Trustees in 1976, at just 27 years old. By 1988, she was board chair. A month later, following the unexpected resignation of the college’s president, she became acting president — stepping into a role she had not sought, leading an institution she knew she could not afford to let falter.
She gathered the board and asked a question that cut to the heart of the moment: How, she wanted to know, do you tell the community of women who founded this college in 1933 — in the middle of the Great Depression — that you don’t know if you can keep going?
The answer came from the table itself.
“I don’t know how you tell ’em that,” one board member said. “I guess we better get busy and get this place up and going again.”
It was, Bergkamp has said, the moment the room turned. Not because of anything she said, but because she asked the right question at the right time — and trusted the people around her to find the answer.
“Nobody looked at me and said, ‘Well, it’s your job,'” she recalled. “They said, ‘What can we do? How do we help?'”
Most Rev. Carl A. Kemme, bishop of the Catholic Diocese of Wichita, who has known Bergkamp for more than a decade, said her impact on the diocese and the university has been profound.
“She’s a wonderful religious and a wonderful friend of the diocese,” he said. “I couldn’t be happier that she’s getting this distinguished award (St. Newman Medal).”
Leading a global congregation — and discovering Newman’s reach
In 2018, the Adorers elected Bergkamp to a six-year term as leader of its U.S. Region. She was the first member of the former Wichita province to hold the role since the congregation consolidated its three American provinces in 2000. She guided the community through financial restructuring, governance transition and a global pandemic.
From that wider vantage point, she discovered something that still surprises her.
The Adorers of the Blood of Christ operate in 25 countries. Newman University is the only university the congregation sponsors anywhere in the world. And across those 25 countries, people kept bringing it up.
“I didn’t have to remind the community we had Newman University,” she said. “They reminded me that I should be talking about that.”
Sister Maria Hughes, ASC, the congregation’s Superior General, speaking from Rome, confirmed as much.
“Our only university is Newman University in the whole congregation,” she said. “I’m very happy to see that she’s receiving this honor, because I can say that she loves Newman and she’s a great alum.”
The global reach, Bergkamp has said, reframed something she had always known intellectually but now understood in her bones: Newman is not a local institution with a religious affiliation. It is a worldwide mission with a campus in Wichita.
The Newman medal
During the annual Legacy Banquet in April, Bergkamp received the St. Newman Medal — the university’s highest honor. It is given to those who have been instrumental in its growth and development and who exemplify the truths espoused by St. John Henry Newman through scholarship, service or spiritual life.
She is the 56th recipient in the award’s 60-year history, and among the rare few who have touched nearly every dimension of Newman’s life — classroom, boardroom and sponsoring congregation.
When the moment came, she struggled to find the right words.
“I certainly feel like I’m taking it partially because of the community,” she said. “I would not be who I am if it weren’t for the community. And my relationship with this place would not be what it is if it weren’t for the community. Newman is just so much a part of my life.”
She paused.
“So this is sort of the stamp of approval — after 60 years.”
The commencement address: A message for the moment
Six weeks later, she stood at the same podium — this time facing the graduating class of 2026.
Her message was not the kind that comes wrapped in bright promises and soaring abstractions. It was something harder and more honest: a call to the quiet, daily, often unglamorous work of becoming the kind of person a society needs.
She spoke about mindfulness — not as a wellness trend, but as a moral practice. About reflection, not as a luxury, but as an intention. About lifelong learning as a doorway to possibility rather than a professional obligation.
“Learning involves willingness and ability to change,” she told the graduates. “So be prepared. Cardinal Newman reminded us that we need to change often.”
She spoke about balance — and did not pretend it gets easier.
“It’s a moving target,” she said, to knowing laughter, “and I can assure you that it gets much worse with age.”
She spoke about community, about diversity as a gift of the creator, about the power of small gestures — smiles, nods, thank-yous — to generate what she called “ripples of goodness.”
And she asked the graduates to become peacemakers.
“We teach each other mostly by how we behave, not by our words,” she said. “So please, through all the seasons of your life, find ways to show others what it means to be a peaceful person. It’s very contagious.”
The address was rooted in the same conviction she has carried through 60 years of teaching: that education is not the transfer of information. It is the formation of people. And that transforming society — Newman’s stated mission — is not a lofty abstraction.
It is what happens, one student at a time, when the right teacher asks the right question and trusts the person across the desk to find the answer.
“Transforming society is not gonna be splashy,” she told the graduates. “It’s not gonna be appreciated all the time. If you spend the right kind of time with the right people around here, your life is gonna be a lot better — and you can transform society.”
Full circle
After the ceremony, in the way these things tend to go, someone in the crowd no doubt approached her to say that something she said had changed the way they thought about something. She probably deflected the credit. She probably asked what they were planning to do next.
That is, after all, what she has always done.
Bergkamp — farm girl, mathematician, teacher, board chair, regional leader and now St. Newman Medal recipient — has spent sixty years asking Newman students and colleagues and communities what comes next.
The answer, in her telling, is always the same: get busy, and get to work.
Sister Vicki Bergkamp, ASC, is a member of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ and a 1972 graduate of Sacred Heart College, now Newman University. She is the recipient of the 2026 St. Newman Medal.
