A Leader's Legacy

“We’ve been closing our doors since 1877.” 

Financial exigency, he’d called it.  We’d all gathered at the end of the work day in the Student Union Ballroom to hear the university president tell us how we were doing financially, or more correctly, how badly we were doing.  Eight years earlier I’d been part of an enrollment surge that swelled the campus, a double wave of baby boomers seeing college as a way of staying out of the military draft during the Vietnam War.  Now with the draft ended, the enrollment tide had turned, and males were free to drop out without the fear of their Draft Boards.  Dorms that we had built for the incoming surge in the 60’s were half-empty now in the 70’s.  In my work as an academic advisor for freshmen, the problem was especially obvious.  Incoming classes of 1000 high school grads in 1969 shrank to 650 or so in 1972.  The slowing postwar economy added to a “perfect storm” with high inflation and recession cutting further into the affordability of colleges.  At the helm was our calm, smiling Jesuit president, the guy who everybody called “Mal”.

That comment of his about us closing our doors was spoken to me.  I’d been walking behind a gaggle of Jesuits moving toward Lansing-Reilly Hall, their residence that happened to be on my way home, a block and a half north of campus.  Fr. Carron had noticed the worry on my face, the worry of a young father with two babies to feed, the worry that maybe the university would close just like the stores across Livernois, abandoned by the white owners who fled to the suburbs after the 1967 Riots.  He’d smiled, turning from his black-robed companions and asking me “What, do you think we’re in trouble?”  And then he’d made the comment about struggle as part of the character of the place, almost like the keel on a boat that adds weight and drag, but also keeps it upright in storms.

He’d known that I’d been arrested for participating in a student riot as a freshman, not for racial justice or Vietnam, but for football, for God’s sake, the sport that had become too costly to continue.  When I’d taken a job after graduation and appeared at a staff function, he smiled, held his hand out to me, and said “I haven’t seen you for awhile; have you been staying out of trouble?”  “Yeah, Father”, I said; “We haven’t dropped any sports.”  His smile had widened into a head-back laugh, and he said “If we had, I’d be out there protesting with you.”

Everybody in the city knew Father Carron, and he remembered everybody.  Riding with him to a meeting of city leaders one morning, the intimacy of being alone with him in his car gave me the opportunity to tell him how much I admired his leadership style, friendly and warm.  He smiled his smile and explained his egalitarian leadership philosophy.  “You know, I run the University, but in the house I’m just another Jesuit.  If I’m in the kitchen, I work of the cook.” 

One time after I’d been working for a boss who took credit for what I did, I had the audacity to go up to his office and complain that I got no respect, no thanks for my hard work.  When he said “John, I’ve always believed that we get our thanks from those we work for”, I thought he was agreeing with me about my boss, but he went on to complete his sentence.  “…the students.”  Again I was learning about leadership as service.  He’d mention it again on another ride to another breakfast meeting, how our educations at the university were paid not just by us, but by those who sacrifice, working for the low pay I’d been complaining to him about.

But it is the last thing he’d said to me that brings tears to my eyes.  This time he was lying in his bed in his room at Colombiere, the huge, overbuilt seminary that was, like our dorms, built in the middle of the surge of the 60’s, put to use now not for the handful of novices housed in an old convent, but for a number of uses including an infirmary for Jesuits, their last residence, their final service, “Praying for the Order” as they die.  Kathy would see him again as she went for her weekly visits with another old Jesuit there.  She’d be with him briefly two weeks later on the day he’d died.  But for me this my last sight of him.  We’d not seen him for a couple of years or more.  He was frail and thin, having been moved from his wheelchair to his bed for these last weeks or days until the end.  But when he saw us, he smiled that smile of his, and asked us how we were doing, listening and smiling as we told him about grandchildren being born to one of our daughters, and the wedding of the other.  “And how is your son doing; is he still in Europe?” he’s asked. 

Fr. Malcolm Carron’s legacy to me was so much more than keeping a university afloat during “financial exigency”.  It was about holding us in a heart that held everybody in the city, a heart so big that he could remember us so dearly even in that crowd.  It was about death being no different than life, just another time of leading by example, of words being the vehicle of the heart.

 FreeLemonadeStand by John J. Daniels is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.