Gannon University - Lance Yearbook (Erie, PA)

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today and tomorrow he'd make them an associate professor. Well, that was it. The archbishop decided to accept the faculty's posi- tion and make the change. So Fr. Nash, then 41 years old, became the second president of Gannon College. T hat whole year was hell, he said, looking back on his first year as president. Well, I imagine if I over- threw the President of the United States — I would not be so proud of being President if I got it that way. Mingled with these feelings are Msgr. Nash's memories of Dr. Wehrle the teacher, Dr. Wehrle the person, and Dr. Wehrle the prime mover behind Cannon College. He's the reason Gannon is here. And he could never be played down for that. Msgr. Nash was one of Dr. Wehrle's students at Prep and Cathedral Col- lege. He didn't even have to use a book. He could go right down those pages word for word. He taught everything. What he liked best was to teach math. A favorite Dr. Wehrle math anec- dote runs thus: He works out a problem on the board, and when he gets to the end he doesn't get the answer that the book says. So he says, The book is wrong. The next day, his students ask him to do the same problem. He forgets that he just did it the day before, and this time he gets the same answer as the book. One of the students yell out, Hey, yesterday you didn't agree with that. Well, he says, the book is right today. A broad grin covers Msgr. Nash's face. You can see how the kids would grow to love a character like that. Or another time. Msgr. Nash and some fellow students are hanging around Dr. Wehrle's office at Cathe- dral College. One asks him, Hey, Doc, how about lending me a buck? So Dr. Wehrle pulls out his wallet and says, Well, there's only one buck in there — you may as well have it. This is the man Msgr. Nash wants remembered. Anyone who knew him on that basis— he could do no wrong. That first year was indeed diffi- cult. In addition to the upset caused by the changeover, the Middle States evaluation was coming up. The trustees were looking over my shoulder like I was a little boy with a pen. And that's what I mean by being tough. If we didn't pass Middle States, we'd have gone out of business. Well, Gannon made it through that crisis. And in the years that followed, Gannon positively prospered. Under Msgr. Nash's leadership, enrollment more than doubled; Beyer, Wehrle, Finegan, Zurn Science Center, and the Learning Resource Center were built; the graduate school was estab- lished; and 53 new programs on the graduate, under-graduate, and two- year level were added. T hen, around 1969, the tough years began again. The Vietnam War years — the years when protest against the war became felt at Gannon. Msgr. Nash looks back on these years with a curious mixture of bitterness and understanding. Students at that time lacked a future to loo k forward to, he said. College was a stopping point before Vietnam. And the col- lege was turned into a night club. The commitment to study wasn't there. College was a refuge. Add to this Gannon's great experi- ment in a Social Cause — an experi- ment that backfired miserably. The idea — recruit inner-city blacks and give them an education and an equal chance to succeed in life — was part of a national trend. It was conceived with the best of intentions. And it was also incredibly naive. During those years, there was a strong influx of black students from Philadelphia and New York City. They came in and we had no pro- fessional personnel to handle them. We were all ignorant. We didn't realize the depth of the problem, he said. We were demanding that they live according to our culture and they were demanding that we follow their culture, so it was a natural conflict. The black students felt out of place at Gannon — a Catholic, middle class working class college in conservative Erie, Pa. All these feelings of aliena- tion, division, and conflict were final- ly touched off— for both blacks and whites — by the incident in South Hall, when black students attacked a white. Msgr. Nash looks back on these extrememly trying days and finds the racial tensions loaded with many underlying problems. I think that in that period of time, whenever a black and a white met, it was a racial problem. Superficially. And everyone was satisfied to solve it superficially rather than going any deeper. That's why I'm saying rooted in this problem was the draft and everything con- nected with it. There certainly were other things connected with the student unrest of those years. Like the 24 credits of philosophy and theology demand- ed of every student. And a sizeable helping of paranoia — reports of Drug Suspicion Lists, R.A. spies and the like. Drinking rights and 24-hour visitation rights in the dorms — also big issues. The college never did allow 24- hour visitations or drinking rights. I'm still convinced we give more priviledges in our dorms than we should give as a Catholic college. I guess I'm old-fashioned enough that I think there should be a dormitory for the men and a dormitory for the women and if they want to meet they should meet in general areas — but not in their rooms. The theology philosophy require- ments were eventually reduced to 6 and 6 in 1974 with the introduction of the liberal studies curriculum. But other than that, Msgr. Nash said we would never budge on Gannon's Catholic commitment. I always told everybody, the day that we do not teach Catholic theology, and philosophy as a buttress for Catholic theology, I'm not going to be here. Because that's my purpose in life. If I can't achieve my purpose here, there's another place where I can. I'm not going to stick around here and be a secular institution. During those years, Msgr. Nash thinks that rebellion was the prime factor, not necessarily the specific complaints. They just did not want to be told. They wanted to develop their own thing, and do it in their own way, without any interference on anyone's part. How did he deal with the various protests, sit-ins, and demonstra- tions of solidarity — a clever phrase for mass intimidation — with the ca- joling and demanding and accusing? 18

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Welcome home, bishop. Oh, by the way, we started a college while you were away. Msgr. Nash didn't say whether the bishop hit the roof over this develop- ment, but it doesn't really matter now. Cathedral College continued very nicely until 1941, at which time it became the four-year Gannon School of Arts and Sciences (in conjunction with Villa Maria Col- lege), and then in 1944, Gannon College. M sgr. Nash was in that first class in 1933. He was once one of the boys for whom Cathedral College was founded and even now, in 1977, he maintains that the purpose of Gannon College has not changed. In that first class there must have been almost 50 of us, and boy, I can men- tion doctors . . . there are about 16 priests out of that class. They're really talented people who didn't have any money. And that's why — even right now, when I talk to the faculty about tui- tion— our tuition has to be what the ordinary family in Erie can pay, he said, referring to the recent Faculty Senate argument that Gannon tuition should be raised because the average family's income has increased. Even if our graduates now are coming from college-trained parents, that still is not the point. The point is, that any kid in Erie who wants to get a Christian, Catholic education should be able to come here. The more people that can't come here because of money, the more we're losing our purpose. The man should know. He has been president of Gannon College for 21 years, ever since 1956. Just how he became president is yet another incident in Gannon's rough- and-tumble history. The truth of it is, Msgr. Wehrle did not retire voluntarily. The teachers said that if they didn't get rid of the president they'd all quit, Msgr. Nash said. Msgr. Nash was Fr. Nash back then and was dean of the college. Im- mediately after his ordination in 1942, he was assigned to Gannon and began as a philosophy teacher. This quickly changed with the beginning of World War II. By February of 1943 all but 35 of Gannon's 250 students were drafted into the military service. So we had 35 students. We couldn't afford to have many teachers, so the ones of us that taught here taught everything, he said. Everything for Fr. Nash included philosophy, theology, psychology, ' I'm still convinced we give more priviledges in our dorms than we should give as a Catholic college. ' Shakespeare — an experience he looks back upon with horror — and German. When the enrollment went back up he was able to return to his specialty, psychology. In fact, he completed all of the credits for his doctorate in psychology and only needed a year of residence at Ford- ham University, but the diocese couldn't afford to let him go for that year. He stayed at Gannon. Of course, there were many thing? to be done here. One choice piece of information on his biography sheet is that he served as Director of Athletics. He laughs about the title. It was just a question of having a bunch of students interested in playing basket- ball. They needed somebody to work out the schedule and get the equip- ment and that's what I did. It was the only athletics we had here so you could say I was directing it, but not in the sense that Elwell is today. Be that as it may, how did he manage to schedule competition for a fledgling, unproven team? Well, he wrote in an old alumni magazine, the thing to do was to send a begging letter to every college within a hundred and fifty mile radius of Erie. It worked: Alliance, Allegheny, St. Bonaventure, Baldwin-Wallace, Canisius, Kent State, Ohio University, Niagara University, and St. Vincent all agreed to give Gannon a try. Some heavy schools there. And yes, Gan- non lost to Canisius, Baldwin-Wal- lace, and Ohio U. But the others were all victories for the team of 1944-45. Not a bad start. Then, too, Msgr. Nash was vice- president of the college, something he didn't even know about until he saw it in the catalog. He laughs about this title, too. They were meaning- less things— they didn't change your duties. It just looked better in the catalog to have a vice-president. His appointment as dean came sometime in the early fifties. Nine- teen fifty-six rolled along and he was dean, the priest with the most seniorty, and soon to be the second president of the college. It happened in April. As Msgr. Nash remembers it, I was out on a weekend — I was giving a retreat. And when I got back in town on a Sunday I had a call that the bishop wanted to see me — right away. So I went up and he said, 'Tomorrow morning when you go in the office, you take Dr. Wehrle's office and you're the president.' It was that quick — an overnight coup d'etat. It was that quick and it was nasty, he said. You know, when you came in on a situation like that, the arch- bishop— it almost killed him because Dr. Wehrle had given all those dedi- cated years of service. Then why force him to leave? As it turns out, Msgr. Wehrle proved to be an unpredictable administrator. A tremendous teacher, but as an ad- ministrator . . . Some of his actions as president, in retrospect, take on an almost impish quality. Take the case of the student who wanders in at nine o'clock on Tuesday night. Classes are to begin the next morning. This kid can't get any of the courses he needs, so to satisfy this one student Msgr. Wehrle changes the whole schedule, then hands it over to Msgr. Nash and the other administrators on Wednesday morning. This is true. What a stunt! It sounds great today — a funny anecdote, great dirt, whatever — but think if you were a teacher or administrator or student on that Wednesday morning. Pandemonium. And then we had to cover up, Msgr. Nash said, How did we cover up? Well, any of the kids that had conflicts — we'd put them in one room and solve the conflicts as quickly as possible so the students were all settled within a couple of days. Then problems with the faculty were building up. There were grumblings about salary, but What really riled up the teachers more than anything else— they'd be a professor 17

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Msgr. Nash addresses students at a Baccalaureate Mass as Arch- bishop John Mark Cannon looks on. An everyday photo, now valued because one of the long-since-vanished Old Main lions is shown. Tradition has it that the lions now sleep at the bottom of Lake Erie, though no one seems to know what happened for sure. Msgr. Nash announces the ap- pointment of Dr. Joseph Scotti- no as President of Gannon Col- lege— June 1, 1977. During that whole period of time, no matter what group it was, if you could get them separated into ones, or twos, you could have a good talk with them, he said. You put them together in a group and you may as well shut up. I'm no match for 20 stu- dents who all want to talk at once. October 1976. Msgr. Nash, now 61 years old, wants to retire. He doesn't have to retire until he is 65. But by then there may be new problems — decreasing enrollments, scrambling for federal aid, creating new, spe- cialized programs to help keep Gan- non afloat. These are problems enough without the added task of a lengthy and detailed presidential selection process. So, he tells the trustees, he wants to retire. Find a president to take over in July, 1977, he tells them. There are good years at Gannon, he says in his prepared statement. Years of sound budgeting, good enrollment, and positive campus at- titudes. This is an appropriate time to transfer the responsibilities of the presidency. In selecting a new president, he instructs them: I want every one of you to think of the good of the college. T he good of the college. The phrase was appropriate in October, and it is appropriate now, upon his retirement: For these words describe the entire career of Msgr. Nash. '77 19