A GANDHI SOLUTION

According to the AAUP guidelines for colleges and universities, when a tenured faculty member is terminated because the college is being closed the faculty member is entitled to a year’s severance pay. When the Bishop of Cleveland and his board of trustees closed Saint John College (SJC), every tenured faculty member received a year’s severance pay – except me - even though I had the rank of professor, had taught at the college for seven years, and had also been dean of the graduate division.

My salary at the time of the closing of the college in 1974 was $3600. When I protested to the college president that I should be given a year’s severance pay, he told me I was an administrator and not a faculty member.

It was time to consult a lawyer. Fortunately, I had been doing some consulting work for the East Cleveland public school system and met their lawyer, Don Pace, a partner in the law firm of Baker Hostetler. Larry Perney, assistant superintendent at East Cleveland, told me Don Pace had never lost a case. He was a lawyer who was not only very competent but also feared by opposing lawyers.

Pace, a Catholic, was upset with the closing of the college because he thought that SJC was a great asset to downtown Cleveland and that its closing diminished Cleveland. He also believed that an injustice was being done to me.

A few days after my conversation with him, he told me his firm would take my case pro bono. He also told me that I would be expected to pay for the cost of paper used in the trial, and this might total four or five thousand dollars.

There would be three phases to the trial:

• The first and least important phase would be my lawsuit against the college.
  
• The second part would be a class action suit that would involve the 600 students who started their classes in early September and then were notified that the college would close in June.
  
• The third part would be a class action suit which would involve the people of the diocese of Cleveland who had contributed to the college over the past 47 years. Every parish in the diocese would have to produce proof that it had an annual collection for the college and that the money had been used to support the college.

Pace said that whether to proceed was my call. I must admit that I was tempted to tell Pace to go ahead with the lawsuit he had outlined. However, at that time I was reading a book about Gandhi (Freedom at Midnight by Collins and Lapierre) and was greatly impressed by this little brown skinned Hindu who used tactics of nonviolence to defeat the mighty British Empire. Whenever the British used violence against Gandhi, he would for days meditate on how he could respond non- violently. Then he would act nonviolently.

For example, when the British authorities imposed a tax on salt which Indians needed desperately because of the hot, humid climate, Gandhi prayed for a couple of days and then organized the people in a march to the sea. He made sure that newspaper reporters and photographers recorded this event.

When the crowd reached the sea, Gandhi waded into the waters and with his cupped hands reached into the water. When the water dried in his hands, there was salt. Gandhi then gathered the grains of salt and showed them to the people. He was teaching them how to get their own salt from the sea so there was no need to pay a tax to the British, who without that tax would lose great sums of money. Gandhi’s example gave me an idea.

When Pace reported to me that the Diocese was offering $2400 to settle the suit, I decided to accept the offer but not use the money for myself. Instead I added $1200 of my own money so that the total would be the $3600 I believed I was due.

I then had Pace draw up a contract to establish a trust fund in honor of George and Ann Eppley, my mother and father. I then gave the money to the Saint Ann Foundation with instructions that the money and its interest not be used until the year 2024, the fiftieth year of the closing of Saint John College. Beginning that year the annual interest from the foundation will be used to establish a grant for a student in nursing education or teacher education.

My purpose was to fund a project to further the goals of the original Saint John College. My hope is that a hundred or more years from now the spirit of Saint John College will still be alive and flourishing in our city.

The last time I had a report from the Saint Ann Foundation the sum was over $50,000 thanks to the interest accrued from that original $3600 donation and the contributions and generosity of friends and relatives.

Posted July 28, 2010

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