Letter to the Editor

As a longtime student and proponent of SJU, I have been shocked and saddened by events there lately. I have watched the institution fall from being one of the preeminent Catholic Intuitions of higher education in Canada and possibly North America, to being just another church college affiliated with a Canadian University. SJU even just a few years back hosted and supported events on a global scale, The International Thomas Merton Society, held it's first conference outside the continental US at SJU. St. Jerome's Centre for Catholic Experience once brought in world class lecturers with a great variety of backgrounds and breadth of opinion on Catholic Theology and Social issues. I am thankful to Imprint for bringing many of the issues there to light. I could not be as unbiased as the article in last week's issue and can only hope that new media pressure will help the board to take some much needed action.

(First published in Imprint 2009-04-03.)

Notes:

The situation at SJU has bothered me greatly, I know I do not have the ability to write about it on an unbiased way. But this story needs to get out there in a wider media and the Catholic blogsphere. Here are some of the links and articles I have collected, please feel free to link more.

A Wounded Faith Community
St. Jerome's faculty pursues union drive
Perrin says change is never easy
Faculty at St. Jerome's may move to unionize
St. Jerome's faculty no longer have trust in the president
'No confidence' vote at St. Jerome's
St. Jerome's faculty lacks faith in president
Faculty in revolt at St. Jerome's
St. Jerome's faculty sign union cards
St. Jerome’s, a wounded university: Part I, background
St. Jerome’s, a wounded university: Part II, an editorial
‘There is nothing as Catholic as forming a union’, says President of SJU Academic Staff Association
Supporters of UCC

I will post more links as further news develops. As an aside I wrote a piece about former president Michael W. Higgins called Waterloo loses a good man.