By M.C. Thomas
Loyola has been wrestling with financial problems since 1995, when it decided to turn its Maywood medical center into an independent subsidiary so that the center could form cost-saving partnerships with other hospitals and health-care organizations. As part of that restructuring, Loyola had to sacrifice $50 million of its $450 million endowment, and between 1998 and 2000 that endowment plummeted by another $100 million, even as most university endowments were growing in response to the booming stock market. The school is enduring a second year of deep faculty and program cuts to compensate for the shrunken endowment, and the resulting firestorm of protest has driven its president, Reverend John J. Piderit, to announce his retirement this June. His replacement will be Reverend Michael J. Garanzini, currently a professor of psychology and special assistant to the president at Georgetown University.
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The debate on campus will continue until at least May 15, the earliest date Larry A. Braskamp, Piderit’s senior vice president for academic affairs, can take action to close the classics department. He refuses to comment before then, calling the matter a faculty issue, yet Hugh Miller says many faculty are upset that Braskamp recommended the closing without informing or consulting the academic council. When DeRousse and the other students crashed the SCC meeting on March 22, Braskamp said he wasn’t aware of the council’s unanimous vote against the decision.
“They’ve done a pretty good job at scaring the hell out of people about talking,” says Pollock. “The world has been divided into good guys and bad guys, and the bad guys are anybody who has made us look bad in the media, and they’re going to get the bad guys while they can.”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Jim Newberry.
