Neal Edward Wise PhD

Neal Edward Wise, PhD, was born on August 2, 1940, in Detroit and died peacefully on August 2, 2026, in his Austin home among family and friends. A beloved professor of political science at St. Edward’s University for 45 years, Neal’s embrace of the charism of the Dominican Order of Preachers touched the lives of his many students, colleagues, and friends, inspiring their personal and professional endeavors rooted in Catholic social teaching.

Neal’s teaching, mentoring, and research reflected his grounding in the Dominican ideal of the pursuit, contemplation, and sharing of truth, resting on St. Dominic’s Four Pillars of Prayer, Study, Community, and Preaching. For Neal’s students, the legacy of their study under his care has been an uplifting view of politics as the pursuit of faith and reasoning, working together to support human flourishing. The successes of his students—evident in their prominent positions in business, government, politics, law, education, finance, social work, and foreign service—continue to validate Neal’s integration of rigorous intellectual formation with intentional pragmatism.

Neal’s foundation in Dominican charism was set in motion from his childhood spent at Blessed Sacrament School and Edgewood High School in Madison, Wisconsin. Born to Edward Hiram Wise and Margaret Mary Golden, Neal and his older siblings Peter and Anne lost both parents in the span of 11 months in their youth. Determined to keep the siblings together, Dr. Peter Golden and Dorothy Golden raised the children in Madison in a nurturing, faith-centered home, ensuring the children received rigorous Dominican intellectual formation in theology, scripture, and scholarship.

Like his uncle Peter and his siblings, Neal attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison, ultimately receiving a bachelor’s and three master’s degrees in the course of his studies as an undergraduate at UW and as a seminarian at UW and Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He completed his PhD at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California.

In August 1960, Neal was accepted for formation with the Dominican Fathers, recalling years later in correspondence with friends that “I have gladly and proudly written ‘O.P.’ (Order of Preachers) after my name.” In the Dominican tradition, upon initiating his formation he adopted the name Dominic Neal Edward Wise. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1967.

When Neal shared with family and friends in 1998 that he had initiated the lengthy, onerous process for leaving active priesthood, he reflected that his ordination “remains a powerful, graced way to serve and lead others ... particularly when expressing the charism of my fraternity, [which is] preaching.”

However, after last living in a religious community in 1982, Neal had continued to confront what he described as “a new world, a new church” following the turbulence of Vatican II, a world where he judged that a future that once had “held the promise of light and laughter” with a brotherhood that “prayed and talked together” was no longer possible. Of the twenty-one classmates Neal had entered the Dominicans with in 1960, fifteen completed the novitiate and eleven were ordained. By 1998 Neal understood that the “bonds of fraternity” had “dissolved” and that he had lost day-to-day contact with his Dominican brotherhood.

Neal, it can be said, did not leave the Dominicans so much as the Dominicans had long since left Neal.

Serendipity played a role in effecting Neal’s arrival on the St. Edward’s campus in the late 1960s. He was invited to visit sleepy Austin by a classmate from his seminary days, a classmate to whom his family had offered hospitality during the Thanksgiving break. The impact of his visit is described in a 2014 story about Neal’s retirement in the campus newspaper Hilltop Views.

“[Wanting] to find out if the campus had a sense of place, Wise pulled out a framed photo of the student union at the University of Wisconsin ... and talked about the great sense of place the school has. Once he discovered that St. Edward’s had a sense of place too, he made his decision and has taught almost continuously since August 1969.”

The Hilltop Views story gives voice to Neal’s own thoughts at the time about his legacy at St. Edward’s.

“Wise is unsure about his impact at St. Edward’s, but he knows what he will miss the most about students. ‘I think I will miss the part of the individual students’ story. They come here ... in their early chapters, but when they get here they start writing some new chapters, and that’s fun to see— enormously satisfying. People show up ... just out of high school, and when they leave they are ready to start shaping the world. They know a lot more about who they are. They got some ideas about what they want to do with their life, and hopefully they learned some stuff here about being an ethically aware thinker who’s ready to do some stuff. That’s very satisfying.’”

Neal had found his community in the St. Edward’s family, which mourns him yet celebrates him at this hour. Neal had many loves: the Dominicans, the generations of students he taught, St. Edward’s, golf, road trips, his motorcycle, his extended family, the Green Bay Packers, and certainly his running regimen around Town Lake—a regimen so important to sustain that he quit smoking cold turkey.

If you love Neal and St. Edward’s, consider a gift to support the cause that Neal loved perhaps most of all: the written word. With his own money, Neal established an ongoing endowment for the Lincoln Excellence in Political Science Writing Award, granted by the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences for exceptional political science writing during the senior seminar. Using the donation link below and supporting the endowment is such a Dominican—and Holy Cross—thing to do. Neal would love it.

https://www.givecampus.com/campaigns/38854/donations/new?designation=thelincolnexcellenceinpoliticalsciencewritingawardendowment&in_honor_mem_of=Dr.%20Neal%20Wise&

The Sacred Rite of Catholic Burial with Mass and reception will be held Thursday, September 17 at noon at Our Lady Queen of Peace Chapel on the campus of St. Edward’s University.