Cabinet Corner
John T. Sebastian, Ph.D.
Vice President for Mission and Ministry
I have a habit around this time of year of greeting people I see on campus with a boisterous “happy new year!” While my salutation might seem out of season elsewhere — 2024 is still more than four months away, after all — here on the bluff the new year formally begins with the arrival of first-year and transfer students at the end of August. The sudden appearance of duffle bags and plastic bins and microfridges strewn about residence hall entrances heralds the revivification of campus following the languid quiet of the warm summer months.
This year, however, I’m considering trading in “happy new year!” for “happy birthday!” You see, while students were back home with their families or pursuing exciting internship opportunities, and faculty were traveling the world conducting their research, and those of us still on campus were counting down the days until Starbucks reopened in increasingly desperate states of under-caffeination, Loyola Marymount University celebrated a milestone: July 1 marked 50 years since Marymount College merged with Loyola University to birth something new and wholly unprecedented in the history of American higher education. That’s a lot of candles!
It was on July 1, 1973, that the merger agreement negotiated by Father Donald Merrifield, president of Loyola University, and Sister Raymunde McKay, president of Marymount College, went into effect and officially established a single university on a bluff in the Del Rey Hills where since 1968 there had been two separate institutions of higher learning sharing facilities and faculties. The resulting university was notable for having not one, not two, but three sponsoring religious congregations: the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, and the Sisters of Saint Joseph of Orange. (The two women’s orders had previously forged their own partnership.)
But it didn’t have to be that way. In his recent book “Jesuit Colleges and Universities in the United States: A History,” Michael T. Rizzi devotes about 10 pages to recounting the history of the affiliation of Jesuit schools for men with institutions for women run by religious sisters. Throughout the course of the 20th century, colleges for men administered by the Society of Jesus pursued a variety of relationships with neighboring women’s colleges, not only Loyola University in Los Angeles but also Boston College, Fordham University, Loyola University Chicago, Loyola University Maryland, Loyola University New Orleans, Regis University, the University of Detroit Mercy, the University of San Francisco, and Xavier University. In all cases except in Los Angeles in 1973 and in Detroit in 1990, what began as an affiliation ended as what can only be called an absorption, with the women’s schools disappearing into the men’s as the latter “went co-ed.”
Erased for the most part from the history of Jesuit higher education in the United States, and absent from the names of most those universities, are the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Ursulines, the Dominicans, the Sisters of Loretto, the Sisters of Mercy (except in Detroit), and the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary (except here in Los Angeles) along with the generations of women they taught and formed.
Not so at LMU. The stories of the women who made LMU what it is today are not mere historical curiosities relegated to footnotes; they are central to our narrative. The unprecedented spring rains earlier this year may have caused the M on the side of the bluff to start sliding down the hill, but the word “Marymount” has an indelible place in the name and soul of this great institution because of the vision, courage, and tenacity then and now of the likes of Raymunde McKay, Mary Felix Montgomery, Renée Harrangue, Mary Milligan, Peg Dolan, Agnes Marie Schon, Genevieve Underwood, Judith Royer, Joanna Carroll, Maria Lai, Mary Beth Ingham, MaryAnne Huepper, Joan Treacy, and Mary Genino to name but a few of the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary and Sisters of Saint Joseph who made — and continue to make — LMU what it is today: a Catholic university borne of the intertwining of three religious charisms to form something wonderful and enduring.
The refrain of the hymn composed by Tony Alonso on the occasion of the centennial of the founding of Loyola College of Los Angeles celebrates this coming together by combining the individual mottoes of the three orders into a single statement — “that all may have life, that all may be one, for the greater glory of God” — that embodies the awesome aspirations of the institution born 50 years ago.
Happy birthday, Loyola Marymount University!