ALL ETERNITY TO MAKE AMENDS TO JOHN MCADAMS.

Marquette University announces the passing, at a relatively young age, of president Michael Lovell.

Marquette University President Michael Lovell died on Sunday following a three-year battle with cancer and a decade of service to the university, the university announced over the weekend.

Lovell was the first lay president in the Jesuit school's 133-year history and was in Rome on a Jesuit formation pilgrimage when he became sick and was taken to a hospital.

Lovell became Marquette's president in 2014 and focused on devotion and care for the campus and surrounding Milwaukee area.

Mr Lovell made an intra-city move, being called from Wisconsin-Milwaukee to Marquette.  Both he and his successor as Milwaukee chancellor, Mark Mone, recently dealt with cancer.

The article notes a number of difficulties that arose during Mr Lovell's presidency.

Faculty and staff objected to Lovell laying off 39 employees in 2021 as part of an effort to “right-size” the university. More recently, his plan to cut $31 million over the next seven years drew substantial pushback from staff who decried what they saw as a lack of transparency.

Campus climate also drew concern. As racial justice protests swept the country in 2020, Marquette students of color demanded more campus support. The university agreed to fund a Black student cultural center, hire Black mental health counselors and offer 40 new full-ride scholarships for Milwaukee Public Schools graduates.

Two years later, students of color disrupted a freshman welcome event to protest what they saw as a lack of resources for students of color. Marquette sanctioned the students, a move that outraged some members of the campus community who saw the punishment as missing the larger point students were trying to make.

So it has gone with higher education.  Marquette is far from the only university where the administrators have usurped faculty governance, and sanctioning dissidents is not unknown, even when the Jesuits aren't doing the sanctioning.  "The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education notes that President Lovell has done nothing to change Marquette's status among the worst schools for free speech.  It's fitting, I suppose, that a university notionally run by Jesuits would continue a tradition dating back to the Diet of Worms."

Now both Michael Lovell and John McAdams have departed this life.  R.I.P.