The Los Angeles Loyolan, Volume 50, Issue 2 - October 9, 1972

LOS ANGELES LOYOLAN Vol. 50 No. 2 A LOYOLA-MARYMOUNT PUBLICATION Oct. 9. 1972 Committee to select new trustees by Mike Carey Marymount representatives will be admitted to the merged Loyola Board of Trustees after the two schools merge next July 1, ac¬ cording to Richard Mason, Loyo¬ la's vice president of university relations. The present joint Loyo¬ la/Marymount Board of Trustees, set up by the Ш8 affiliation, will cease to exist, Mason said, and the Marymount Board of Trustees as such will be limited to the Palos Verdes campus. The new trustees will come from the present two boards. Ac¬ cording to Mason, the new board will have 33 members: 17 lay trustees, 11 Jesuits and five nuns The nuns and, priests will have veto power over any actions which affect their /Communities, he said. New trustees will be nominated by a committee of four: Rev. 'Donald P. Merrifield, SJ, Loyo¬ la's president; Ernest Sanchez, t^e chairman of Loyola's trustees; Sr. Raymunde McKay, RSHM, Marymount College presi¬ dent; and Rodney Coulson, the Marymount trustees' chairman. *- Merrifield will remain as presi¬ dent of the merged institution, Mason said. Because Merrifield was hired by the present Loyola board which was only being ex¬ panded, not dissolved,* he will just continue in office. Details of the merger were worked out primarily this sum¬ mer by a Committee on Affiliation composed of three Loyola and three Marymount trustees. They were: Rev. Edmond Smythe, SJ, Melvin Doelz and Sanchez from Loyola; Coulson, Sr. Renee Harrangue, RSHM, and T>r. Howard Heckmann from Marymount*. Merrifield has commented that, although he and McKay had dis¬ cussed the possibility of a merger, neither of them had participated in the committee's decision mak- fog. He has also said that he found the committee's final product sat¬ isfactory for both schools. McKay has not yet been avail¬ able for comment. > Mason asserted that, in a spirit of cooperation, the present joint 'Loyola/Marymount Board of Trustees has pushed for the merg¬ er and a unified board — even though the trustees knew the merged board would not have po¬ sitions for all of them; University will not rehire religious studies prof Gary Lea^e Security building proposed, delayed by fund shortage , Plans for the construction of a new security facility have been delayed due to a lack of funds ac¬ cording to John A. Pfaffinger, .Vice President for Business Af¬ fairs. \ > All construction on campus is being delayed until funds become available, Donald P. Merrifield, SJ, 'President of Loyola Univer¬ sity, told the Loyolan. (He said this includes plans for the begin¬ ning of the west wing expansion of the Von der Ahe Library.) The depletion of the building budget is; due to the carpeting of Rosecrans dormitory and the Ma¬ lone Art Gallery, and the renova¬ tion of second floor St. Robert's, Merrifield said. The new security facility under consideration will be located just before the access lane to the Marymount apartment parking lot, according to Clyde Myers, Business Manager. In this loca¬ tion, Myers said, security can control all vehicles entering the Loyola/Marymount c ampu s. P r e s e n 1 1 у , cars entering the Marymount apartment parking lot do not pass the check point. The current constriction plans for the new security building call for a structure ten feet by 28 feet. “It will be the base for security operation and house files, equip¬ ment, the lost and found and a new communications system," Kirkiey said. Explaining the need for such centralized control, Myers and Kirkiey cited the three car theft attempts during the past week. Each attempt met with , a different degree of success. Of the two cars stolen over the weekend, one has been recovered, they repeated. A theft attempt last Monday led to the arrest of three suspects whom the police believe, according to Myers, are solely responsible. Kirkiey said this past week's events had been an “exception" to the otherwise crime-free period since he took over security in July. “Since then, five cars have been reported stolen, one from the (Continued on Page 4) Dr. Gary Lease, assistant pro¬ fessor of religious studies, will not be back next year because Dr. Theodore Erlandson, Rev. Donald P. Merrifield, and Rev. John ‘Clapk have decided not to renew his contract, the Loyolan has learned. Lease, a Loyola graduate, and a controversial professor, received word that his contract would run out in June 1973, while on leave in Munich last April. Lease has declined public com¬ ment for the present on either his termination or prospects of ap¬ peal. The Loyolan has been informed by friends of Lease that he is un¬ happy about the way in which he was terminated. Letters from Er¬ landson explaining the decision, they said, did riot answer their or Lease’s questions. One of Lease’s friends, another Loyola graduate, said that Lease, like other theology professors in the past, was sacrificed to con¬ servative Jesuit opinions about how theology should be taught. Erlandson, however, said the problem was one of overstaffing. One of three untenured instruc¬ tors — Lease, Rev. Donald Malo¬ ney, SJ, and Dr. John Connolly- had to go, Erlandson said. Since Maloney is the depart¬ ment’s chairman, and Connolly its a c t i n g chairman,,. Erlandson noted, it would have been hard to terminate either of them. Maloney, who is on leave in Eu¬ rope and unavailable for com¬ ment, was consulted in. the deci¬ sion on Lease, Erlandson said. The dean denied that Lease's beliefs, teaching or personality had anything to do with this. ‘There is opposition to Dr. Lease by certain members of the faculty who disagree with him. This was not a point, of consid¬ eration," he said. “This was done without malice." (Erlandson is reported to have written Lease that he was picked because he would have the easiest time in finding a new job.) Rev. John Clark, SJ, Academic Vice President, backed up Er- landson’s story. Clark said that he would not have talked about Lease’s termination if anything but overstaffing had been in¬ volved. Erlandson and Clark agreed that Lease was a fine teacher and scholar. Merrifield agreed with Clark's and Erlandson's analysis, that Lease's termination was a matter of overstaffing. Merrifield also stated that Clark had been left with the real respon¬ sibility for the decision. “There is no vote among the faculty. It's Clark's decision and I approve." Merrified “supposed" that if he thought the department , chairman had made an error in select¬ ing a particular faculty member for termination, then he “could intervene." LU Hoard of Trustees Role of provost discussed Questions on the Loyola / Mary¬ mount merger and the powers of the proposed Marymount College provost dominated the October 2 meeting of the Loyola Board of Trustees. Rick Humm, AS'LM director of universit у relations and the board's student representative, reported on the meeting in an Loyolan interview. (Humm refused comment on much of the merger discussion. He explained that he had agreed not to talk about the merger pub¬ licly until it is in a more settled state. He would say that the board had told its legal stuff to have an initial draft of the merger docu¬ ments prepared for a meeting of the Loyola / Marymount Trustees' Committee on Affilia¬ tion October 26. (The Committee on Affiliation is composed of three members each from the Marymount and Loyola boards of trustees. No adminis¬ trators, professors or students are allowed to attend the meetings.) The trustees also discussed the possible appointment by the uni¬ versity president of an associate dean of liberal arts. A candidate for this post, to be created by the merger, could be the proposed Marymount provost. The associ¬ ate deanship also wa referred to the Committee on Affiliation, Humm said. The trustees also talked about the status of Marymount College's real property on the Loyola c a m p u s . Humm said some trustees felt that the Marymount nuns' community should lease its residence, Leavey Faculty Center (Stonehenge), from the University just as the Jesuits lease Xavier Hall. The trustees heard a report on areas in which the merger al¬ ready had been accomplished. Humm said the trustees were told that the admissions offices had been combined and that the deans of both schools had been meeting to work out common entrance re¬ quirements. Humm said, “The education de¬ partments of both schools favor merger.’» He also noted that the Loyola Faculty Assembly and Marymount Faculty Senate had merged. (Humm said that the board was seeking a settlement from the Johns Manville Company, which manufactured the piping used in the university's center water dis¬ tributing plant. The epoxy lining Of the system’s six-inch pipes is flaking and clogging machinery, he said. The board voted not to reconsi¬ der the parietal hours in the men's dormitories, as they had been doing annually, but would maintain* the hours currently in force'. ' ‘ ' I®'