25 February 1969

An
open letter
to the Students
of
the School of Foreign Service

 

The SFS Executive Committee will continue its discussion
of Dean Mann's Core Faculty proposals
at 2:30 p.m. Thursday, 27 February l969, in the Hall of Nations.
A primary reason for the opposition which the Core Faculty proposals will encounter
is the queation of control of the purse strings..
A Core Faculty implies SFS control of SFS finances.
SEIZURE OF THE SFS TREASURY WAS ONE 0F THE FIRST STEPS
IN THE UNIVERSITY'S SYSTEMATIC EMASCULATION
OF THE SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE.

 

The "Conference on the SFS", held here in October, established the following facts:

Until 1950, the SFS had its own independent treasury,
supported by tuitions ($300/semester) and the genius of Fr. Walsh.
Fr. Walsh had accumulated a surplus in excess of expenditures,
with which he planned to build an SFS building
(the School at the time was housed in the Healy building).
A conservative estimate placed the size of that surplus at $2 million
(some said $4 million).
Fr..Walsh also helped other divisions oi the University out of his School's funds.

The Univeraity
was then a congeries of semi-autonomous Schools,
with the SFS probably the most successful.
"Integration" was initiated to correct that situation.

On 22 February 1950 [sic, actually 1951], Washington's Birthday, a school holiday,
Fr. Wilkinson, University Treasurer,
sent people with wheelbarrows to the SFS Office.
Edgar L. Mitchell, School Treasurer, happened to be in the Office on that day,
but he only could watch as Fr. Wilkinaon's squad
unceremoniously clean out the SFS Trensury vault.
According to Harry E. A. Zimmermann ("Records and Curriculum"),
thousands o£ dollars in invoices were lost in that act of legal piracy.

Fr. Walsh,
Founder and Regent of the School of Foreign Service and Vice President of the University,
was told nothing of the impending rape of his School.
J. Raymond Trainor, SFS Secretary, from whom this account comes,
remembered that the SFS people were aware that something was coming,
but had no idea what it was.
Authorization for this seizure had to be secured in Jesuit headquarters in Rome,
because of the great power wielded by Fr. Walsh
in the U.S. and in the Vatican.
An order from the head of the Society of Jesus
was needed to legalize the so-called "midnight raid."

Fantastic as this story seems,
it has been substantiated by several persons associated with the SFS at the time.
Although it may be the most brazen example,
it is but one of the outrages committed in the name of integration,
These and other related acts may not indicate
a "conspiracy to destroy the SFS,"
but they have helped immensely in the educational sterilization
of the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.
We are witnessing merely the latest stages of that process. .

Don Panzera
Friends of the
School of Foreign Service

 

Click here for the rebuttal
by
Rev. Gerard F. X. Yates, S.J.