Fordham: A History and Memoir, Revised Edition

13 Leo

13. Leo Sometime during the 1969–70 academic year, Leo McLaughlin, who had lost the Fordham presidency in December 1968, and taken the position of chancellor, came up to me in the Loyola Hall recreation room during drinks before dinner with some personal news. “I’m telling you this because it’s something you might want to do yourself someday. I’m leaving Fordham to go to Johnson C. Smith, a black college in North Carolina. I’m going to run a new experimental program to teach writing with the help of video. It sounds like an exciting idea.” It struck me as typical Leo, as he was fascinated by the media and their possibilities. He would want to do something for social justice, such as help black people. And he was restless, and this was a new venture. He was also a terribly wounded man. A high percentage of the men in that very room were convinced that he had “sold out” their university. They had played a major part in driving him from office, and it must have been excruciating for him to live with them. In recent memory, Fordham deans have had generally good reputations for being personal friends with students. Depending on their talents and the restrictions of the legal drinking age, various deans have played basketball and tennis, run marathons, led long walks, cooked dinners, downed beers in local pubs, or just sat up late in residence-hall bull sessions with young men and women. When 264 16950-07_Fordham_264-308 6/4/08 11:45 AM Page 264 the students who knew him well speak of him today, Leo McLaughlin is always “Leo.” What struck us most was his mix of exceptional intelligence, lively imagination, and human warmth. He was tall and lean, with dark, brush-cut hair flecked with gray, alert eyes, and an ever-so-slight lisp that some thought he had acquired at the Sorbonne in Paris by mastering French pronunciation so well. The word love came naturally to him, though not so often as to water down its meaning. For those who had known him as dean, the 1965 news that Jesuit superiors had suddenly yanked him out of the presidency at St. Peter’s College to replace Fr. O’Keefe, who had just been elected assistant to Fr. Pedro Arrupe, the Jesuit general in Rome, seemed to promise a Fordham golden age. He had the kind of openness the 1960s required and the spirit to ride the winds of change without being blown away. II ∞ In The Anxious Years: America in the Vietnam-Watergate Era (1984), Kim McQuaid, like many historians, names 1968 as the year that “things fell apart.” It was the year of Robert F. Kennedy’s and Martin Luther King’s assassinations, the Tet offensive, the “police riot” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and the flowering of the New Journalism, that hybrid literary form that came into vogue because nonfiction and fiction writers alike needed both techniques to do justice to those mysterious and tragic days. McQuaid lists phenomena that startled some educators as well as others who saw their world crumbling. “Alarming mixtures of hallucinogenic drugs, cannabis, crime, premarital sex, coddling of offenders, uppity kids, foul language, and irreverent and possibly dangerous Black Power advocates sporting Afros, biker glasses, berets, and black leather jackets appeared to millions of the normally faithful to add up to a compelling argument for the immediate restoration of traditional values and behavior.” Within the church and universities, six events were setting the stage on which McLaughlin’s pledge in his inaugural address of October 18, 1965, that “Fordham will pay any price, break any mold, 265 L E O 16950-07_Fordham_264-308 6/4/08 11:45 AM Page 265 in order to achieve her function as a university,” would become a battle cry. First, Catholic intellectuals were facing issues of mediocrity raised by documents such as John Tracy Ellis’s 1955 Thought article and Fordham’s self-study. Among the Jesuits, the decision to send men for Ph.D.’s to leading Catholic and secular universities was bearing fruit, and Fordham’s Loyola Hall community of 128 men, one of the largest in the country, was strong in scholars, particularly in philosophy and theology. Second, the younger Jesuits, still in studies but aware of the new era’s opportunities and challenges, began asking what was the...