Habemus Villanovam

Richard J. Salvucci, Villanova ’73

Don’t worry. I’m not about to try to bask in Pope Bob’s reflected glow–although I may be one of a very few. I’ve had my differences with Villanova for fifty years. I studied there. I taught there briefly and then went on to greener pastures. I have occasionally suggested that they might be doing something wrong. And, in fairness, I have also said more than once when I thought they had done something very right (or is that Wright, as in Jay?). At the moment, I am laughing myself silly at Vanillanova’s good fortune (that’s what we called it in my time). Lightning struck, and damn, “tolle, age.” Fr President is all togged out as an Augie on national tv and people are falling all over themselves to climb on the bandwagon. Who, really, can blame them? Not me.

Leo XIV was just out of synch with me, but I can’t imagine he didn’t cross paths with a few teachers and friends. No one has volunteered yet, and, no, I did not teach him–although I did teach one former member of the Board of Trustees who clearly helped hook up Wall Street to Villanova, which is at the bottom of this story, really. Pecunia non olet, dude. That’s very old Italian for “show me the money”.

I went to Nova from 1969 through 1973, and turmoil was our constant companion. In those days, Villanova was a commuter school (and I was a commuter), symbolized by the huge parking lots on Route 30 where impressive Villanovarei are now situated. It’s quite a change, really. In fact, my Villanova, the Pope’s Villanova, and today’s Villanova are not at all the same. A lot of water under the bridge in 50 years and therein lies the story.

Villanova in the 1970s was probably not all that different from Villanova in the 1950s, the major change being the admission of women (nuns and sisters) as undergraduate students to something other than nursing in 1969 (Summer Sessions were coed back into the 1940s, as far as I can tell). There were still a lot of Augustinians around–although their numbers were by then already dwindling, but except for a few new facilities, like Falvey Library, notwithstanding, I guess it was mostly unchanged. The hideous Kennedy Hall had been thrown up in the late 1960s (it is now gone, no?), but you could still look out over Corr Hall across what one of my teachers called Via Rongione (insider joke) from the library, Corr being one of the original campus buildings from 1847. Nova was changing, but there was still a lot of the old place left–in spirit, in ethos, and in stubbornly pre-Tridentine outlook. Yeah, we sang Kumbaya at Mass (if we went, and many didn’t), but sleeping with a girlfriend was still a novelty–unless you had been together for more than the now requisite 25 minutes. But I digress. For once, I really don’t want to say much about the Church and sexuality. Oh, it was there, and a couple of priests were well into the “taste and see” style of Catholicism. One or two were particularly shameless about it, but it really was one or two (of whom you could be sure).

Intellectually, Villanova was hit or miss. You could get a fabulous education, or you could graduate functionally illiterate, especially in business. Now, now. This was the era of the Bartley Bums and Commerce and Frolics, and the business school, run in my day by “Pocono Phil” Barrett OSA. Here they are, just for reference, a holdover from the days when Villanova was an Augustinian fief, Fr. Bartley and Fr. Barrett. Not exactly great minds, but what the Hell. Who said accountants needed to know from James Joyce or quantum mechanics? Probably true, but Bus Ad was a standing joke. The Villanova School of Business (VSB), as it Six-Sigma proudly styles itself

lay well in the future, and I never got to know Al Clay, its first secular Dean, until I taught there in Economics from 1978-1980. My impression is that the standing of the program rose with the S&P in the 1980s, which would make plenty of sense. I think you’d have to do some serious digging to come up with pre-2000 Endowment figures, although my impression is that 1980 was a break point of sorts. As late as 2024, the University’s financial statements listed about 1.4 billion in investment assets. In 2005, that number was only 241 million. From what I can see, Villanova (yay!) still basically runs off tuition and fees, and all I can think is that that had to be even truer in the 1970s, let alone before. By contrast, Notre Dame (boo!) has over 20 billion in what it calls “endowment pool” and makes a point of stating endowment income provides more revenue than student fees.

So, not to put too fine a point on it. Notre Dame has the money, but we got the Pope. My guess is that Villanova wants both the money and the Pope, so you can be damn sure they’re gonna be out callowly realizing the value of the Sacred Asset faster than you can say Santo Subito. I know. Such a cynic. Guilty. Villanova’s stash is growing by leaps and bounds, but bets that Pope Bob really adds incense to the censer?

Villanova in the 1970s was a sort of microcosm of middle class Catholic America. There were the antiwar types, the hardcore Nixon Republicans, the strivers, the upwardly mobile wannabe, the intellectuals, the frat kids, some lower middle class types, the jocks and every possible permutation thereof. We had some wonderful teachers and scholars, a lot of them in the humanities, and our share of very dead wood, but, who doesn’t? Lots of social justice warriors and a lot more just trying to get through. Aspiring pols and an oddball contingent. It was tranquil, for the most part, but creative people can never leave well enough alone. David Rabe, in his pre Jill Clayburgh days did “Pavlo Hummel” and “Bones” in the Veysey Theatre. He always struck me as some kind of dour oddball trapped on a campus of conventional people, but he was a name. I had a philosophy teacher, Jack Caputo, who became a world reknowned Heidegger scholar. He was amazing, and the same philosophy class included Bill Atkinson, who is up for canonization. Yeah. Me in the same room with a posible saint. I know. Not likely. And there was track and field with the Irish flyboys, going back to Ron Delany and Don Bragg who took the Gold in the Rome 1960 pole vault. I’d see Marty Liquori training and Davey Wright working in the library. But for all that, there was a downside. Villanova was a wannabee in an educational oasis of Penn, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr and Haverford. We might have been a King of the Big Five, but those insufferable bastards were always the Big Four where the Smart People went to think. Villanova? Forget it. And they let you know it. Villanova was, for them, I think, a glorified high school. Honestly, they really weren’t wrong, but give it a rest, why don’t you?

Penn may have been the best Ivy League school in Philly, but it was, like, serious, in a way Nova was not. Why? Hey. When I went to Nova, there were still books in the card catalog (I’m old) stamped “On Church Index.” How the Hell could a Catholic university be serious? “You don’t believe all that stuff,” a Harvard graduate once said to me? “Stuff” like The Resurrection, or, Hell, some Ontological Proof out of Aquinas? Or, yuck, that Guadalupe fable (no, in fact, not that one). Surely, you’re joking. Never mind that I had to translate Cicero for some schlub when I was in grad school at Princeton. Villanova was “priest ridden.” And, by extension, so were you. A chip, you say? Yes, a rather large one.

I once was talking to a fairly well known faculty member from Bryn Mawr about a reading list in history. She seemed a bit astounded that I had read anything (I was already Nassau-certified by then…..). “But,” she sputtered, “have you discussed them?” No, I thought, I only look at the pictures. That crap never really stopped. A faculty member from Penn’s history department basically ignored me whenever he saw me until I got a job at Berkeley. All of a sudden, I became a person. And the source of an announcement to his seminar. Tacky, right? And then a guy at a place in Connecticut (a Swarthmore alum) who told me he and his homies would go over to Nova as an “infra dig”–white boy talk for slumming. He said that with a knowing smile like, “we all know, right?” Yeah, we certainly do. There’s more, especially from Belichick’s alma mater, but they now could spend their time explaining him and his barely-legal girlfriend and not insinuating that Catholicism must be some sort of genetic intellectual disability.

Look, we can do this crap all day. Now that Nova has had Rhodes scholars, respectable alumni in every walk of life from investment banking, to politics, to the military, I assume it will no longer be necessary. Hey, I went to grad school with someone who is a Dean there, and I know how smart she is, and Princeton-educated too. Until Leo XIV comes out and says he’s not going to ordain women (all by hisself, right?), and then it will all start again anyway, right? Hell, I’m not sure even the Pope could do that motu proprio, but I am not a canon lawyer. But then again, that has never seemed to stop a torrent of mind-bending ignorance from people who should know better, so why should it now?

Hey, it doesn’t really matter, does it. Leo XIV is Villanova ’77.

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,

         “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Quite. RJS ’73