Chronicle of Higher Education, November 29, 2002
From Baptist to Catholic
A Nicaraguan college with Michigan connections makes a difficult
transition to another faith
By MICHAEL EASTERBROOK
San Marcos, Nicaragua
Sitting stiffly in his air-conditioned office in this leafy Nicaraguan
town, the president of Ave Maria College of the Americas chooses his
words carefully -- and for good reason. His ardent speeches were partly
to blame for the recent turmoil from which the Roman Catholic college is
now emerging.
"We were telling parents that this was going to be a jewel of
Catholicism in Nicaragua, and didn't realize that some could have
perceived that as a threat," recalls Humberto Belli, president of the
college, which is affiliated with a college and a law school in Michigan
that share the "Ave Maria" name. "We should have taken some more time to
ease their concerns."
That the college had failed to soothe those anxieties was what set the
stage for the latest episode in its short, turbulent history. Misgivings
over the administration's goals prompted accusations that college
officials wanted to remake the English-speaking campus into an outpost
of the Vatican. That tempest riled students and led some professors to
pick up and leave.
The commotion led many people to question whether Ave Maria could
survive in San Marcos, but the 430-student college appears calm. Owned
by Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Mich., it charges the highest annual
tuition in Nicaragua, at $8,690 -- even though, like its related
institutions in the United States, it has received substantial donations
from Thomas S. Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza. Last week, Mr.
Monaghan announced yet another addition to his academic empire: The
creation of a Catholic college near Naples, Fla., in a new town. Both
the town and the college will be called Ave Maria.
In Nicaragua, the college seems to be living up to the "of the Americas"
part of its name: Despite the high tuition, it is drawing students from
throughout Central America and the United States. Officials hope soon to
expand recruiting into Peru, Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador.
"I can assure you that in five years, Ave Maria will be very well
known," says Azalea S. Llanes, executive director of marketing.
An Expatriate Returns
The story of the college begins with Roger Gonzalez, a Nicaraguan who
fled the country in 1979, when the Sandinista National Liberation Front
came to power. Relocating to Alabama, he helped run a shipping company
in Mobile with his brother, but returned to Nicaragua in 1990, after the
violence had subsided.
Finding his town in a state of ruin, and eager to help rebuild it, Mr.
Gonzalez contacted Michael Magnoli, who was president of the
Baptist-affiliated University of Mobile, about opening an
English-language institute in San Marcos. The idea grew into a branch
campus of the university itself. Classes began in the fall of 1993, with
93 students.
Mr. Magnoli promoted the institution as a Baptist beachhead in largely
Catholic Latin America, says Patrick Werner, an assistant professor of
business law and humanities who has been with the institution since the
beginning. He is a one-time friend of Mr. Gonzalez. The institution was
popular locally; Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, who was Nicaragua's
president at the time, called the campus a "miracle" at a commencement
ceremony.
With Mr. Magnoli as president and Mr. Gonzalez as vice president, the
college grew to 539 students by the time it graduated its first class,
in 1997. But it also amassed a $3.3-million debt to the university,
which, in June 1997, opened an investigation into financial
irregularities at San Marcos. Both Mr. Magnoli and Mr. Gonzalez resigned
in 1997. The same year, police showed up to arrest the college's
business manager on charges of embezzlement. Smuggled from the campus in
the back of a pickup truck, he hid in a nearby forest for six weeks
until a lawyer got the charges dropped, says Mr. Werner.
Mr. Magnoli pleaded guilty to felony income-tax fraud in a U.S. District
Court in September 1999 for failing to report $15,000 that he received
from Mr. Gonzalez and later used to buy property on Alabama's coastline,
according to the Mobile Register. Mr. Magnoli apologized at the
sentencing; the judge gave him three years' probation and ordered him to
perfom 300 hours of community service. Mr. Gonzalez has not been
convicted of any charges stemming from his dealings at San Marcos.
Pizza Money
In late 1998, Mobile announced that it would pull out of the Nicaragua
campus on June 30, 2000, says Mr. Werner. Officials of two universities
in the United States visited the campus to consider running it, but no
plans materialized. At last, with the deadline looming, a financial
lifeline was thrown by Mr. Monaghan, who, having made his fortune with
Domino's, created the Ave Maria Foundation, a Catholic enterprise.
The foundation in 1998 opened Ypsilanti's Ave Maria College, where Mr.
Monaghan, who has a reputation as a very conservative Catholic, is
chairman of the Board of Trustees. "We would have been dead ducks if
that had not happened," says Mr. Werner, who before Mr. Monaghan's cash
infusion had to dig into his own pockets to buy diesel fuel for a campus
generator to keep the lights on. Mr. Monaghan has now given more than
$3-million -- a lot of money in Nicaragua -- to Ave Maria College of the
Americas, says Robert Falls, who handles his public relations.
Among Mr. Monaghan's other Catholic-related philanthropic beneficiaries
are an international organization of Catholic business leaders, a
secondary school, a public-interest law firm, the Ave Maria School of
Law, and St. Mary's College, in Orchard Lake, Mich.
Some observers worry that he's using those pursuits to push a
conservative brand of Catholicism and conservative politics in general.
The Rev. Robert F. Drinan, a law professor at Georgetown University and
former dean at Boston College Law School, whom many would regard as a
liberal, describes Mr. Monaghan as a "superconservative Catholic."
"I think it's fair to say that he has a political agenda, and that he's
clothing it in Catholicism," Father Drinan says.
News that a sponsor had been found came as a relief to people on the San
Marcos campus. But soon after the new administration took control and
renamed the college, on July 1, 2000, it was nettling professors and
students alike.
Professors say a push by the administration, led by Mr. Belli, to hire
conservative Catholics for the faculty created a climate of suspicion.
The worried professors accused the administration of reading faculty
e-mail messages and monitoring their use of Web sites, and say
non-Catholic professors and even some Catholic ones were treated coldly.
Although Mr. Belli denies charges that officials were reading
professors' e-mail messages and tracking the Web sites they visited, he
says a computer technician last year accidentally discovered that
several campus employees were visiting pornographic Web sites. When he
told college officials, one person was fired, says Mr. Belli, who will
not say whether the person was a professor or a staff member.
"Those of us who weren't Catholics or [were] Catholics of the wrong
stripe felt like we were just barely tolerated, and that they were
looking for the chance to get rid of us," says Robert Forsyth, a
mathematics professor. Meanwhile, discussions among college officials
about imposing a dress code and requiring mandatory attendance at midday
Mass angered many students.
"Their attitude back then was, �If you're against what we're imposing,
the door's open,'" says Allan Amador, current vice president of the
Student Government Association.
"They wanted to turn the place into a convent," says Silvio Sirias, the
renamed college's first academic dean, who left in June 2001 and is now
a professor of Spanish and literature on Florida State University's
campus in Panama. "It went over like a lead balloon."
During the 2000 and 2001 academic years, 14 professors and 2 deans out
of 31 full-time faculty members left the college, about six of them as a
result of their concerns over job security, says Douglas Schirch, the
current academic dean. Between the spring and fall of 2001, enrollment
dropped by 43 students, to 399.
New Leaders Needed
Speaking from his office last month, Mr. Belli recalls that when he was
offered the position of president of Ave Maria College of the Americas,
he was the country's education minister, but was growing uncomfortable
with what he felt was an air of "waste and intrigue" drifting through
the government. The country's president at the time, Arnoldo Alem�n,
left power this year. In August he was accused by the new president of
having stolen $95-million from the state for personal enrichment. Mr.
Alem�n denies the charges.
Mr. Belli says he saw the job offer as an opportunity not only to leave
the government, but also to help "prepare the new generation of Latin
American professionals."
"There is almost a sense of despair here because of the shortage of
principled leaders," he says. "We want to produce people who are both
professionally competent and ethically competent."
One of his goals, he says, is build a college that lives up to the
ideals defined for Catholic higher education by Pope John Paul II in the
1990 document Ex corde Ecclesiae. It calls for Catholic colleges and
universities to choose Catholic presidents and says the majority of
their professors and trustees should be Catholic as well.
Ex corde has met with some resistance at Catholic colleges because it
reiterates the need for theology professors to seek a mandatum, or
teaching mandate, from the local bishop -- a requirement that some
professors view as a limitation on academic freedom.
Mr. Belli acknowledges that the struggle to fulfill that vision during
the college's first two years as a Catholic campus was handled clumsily.
It was "naive" to have spoken publicly about creating a "vibrant,
faithful, Catholic community" without clarifying what was meant by that,
he says, adding that he regrets having referred to non-Catholic
professors as "guests" in a speech to an academic conference last year.
That statement alarmed many professors on the San Marcos campus, who
assumed that their employment might soon be over.
"We might have been too blunt," says Mr. Belli, who taught sociology at
Franciscan University of Steubenville, in Ohio, during the 1980s, after
fleeing the Sandinista regime. "We might have lacked some diplomatic
skills. We humbly accept that we made mistakes in our relations with
some of the people who were here."
Non-Catholic professors are welcome at Ave Maria and always will be, he
and other officials insist.
"Having some non-Catholics and even nonbelievers provides diversity and
necessary debate," says Mr. Schirch, the academic dean, who is a Mennonite.
Jeans and Cuddling
These days, the verdant campus, which has become a vital part of the
economy of this coffee-growing region in Nicaragua's highlands, shows
few signs of the recent discord. Attendance at midday Mass is still
voluntary. Students, many of whom are not Catholic, can be seen cuddling
in the shade or walking to class in miniskirts or tattered jeans --
happy once again now that talk of the dress code has been dropped. As in
the days when the University of Mobile was in charge, they seem to be
attracted to the college not for its religious mission, but for its ties
to the United States. "You get an American diploma, and that is what
most Latin Americans are looking for," says Ram�n Oyuela, a senior.
Even though some current and former professors have complained that a
few officials have been heavy-handed in attempts to influence reading
material in courses, most professors say they feel relatively free to do
what they want in their classrooms. "I teach David Hume!" says Robert
Mullin, an associate professor of English literature who came to San
Marcos last year from the University of Memphis, referring to the
18th-century philosopher banned from teaching at Scottish universities
because of his attacks on religious dogma. "Who could be more repugnant
to anyone in organized religion?"
Hopeful Times
While most of the administration's strongest critics have left the
faculty, some of those who remain say officials have gone a long way
toward easing their apprehensions. Professors say the atmosphere
lightened after officials of the Michigan college visited San Marcos
during the 2001 academic year with assurances that non-Catholic
professors should and would continue to be embraced there.
College officials, too, are optimistic. They say they've cut last year's
$600,000 annual deficit in half, while at the same time spending
hundreds of thousands of dollars to construct a chapel, buy computers,
and build ramps and walkways to improve access to the campus for people
with disabilities. The college is provisionally accredited by the
national American Academy for Liberal Education, which entitles students
to receive Pell Grants and other financial aid from the U.S. government;
officials are now seeking accreditation from the North Central
Association of Colleges and Schools as well.
Noting Ave Maria's rare status as an English-speaking Latin American
college with connections to the United States, officials insist that in
the next two or three years they will increase enrollment by almost 200
students, to a total of 600, and make the college financially
self-sustainable. "Last year, there was a lot of talk about people
leaving," says Mr. Amador, the student-government leader. "Now you don't
hear that."
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