The following comes from an Apr. 8 story in the San Francisco Business Journal.
Paul Fitzgerald was selected Tuesday by the University of San Francisco’s board of trustees as the 28th president of the city’s oldest university.
The Rev. Paul Fitzgerald was named Tuesday as the 28th president of the University of San Francisco.
Fitzgerald, a California native who currently senior vice president for academic affairs at Fairfield University in Connecticut, will replace the Rev. Stephen Privett as head of the roughly 10,000-student Jesuit Catholic university.
Privett in September announced that he would retire after serving USF as president since 2000.
Fitzgerald will oversee an institution — the oldest in San Francisco with its formation in 1855 — with a fiscal 2015 budget of $400 million and 2,100 faculty and staff. He will take office Aug. 1.
He was ordained to the priesthood at St. Ignatius Church on the USF campus in 1992.
Before Fairfield, where he oversees the recruitment and retention of faculty, develops curriculum and works directly with deans, Fitzgerald was associate dean and senior associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at Santa Clara University. He also has severed on several university boards, including the Ecclesiastical Board of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College, the trustees of Loyola University Chicago and the trustees of Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Fitzgerald grew up in Los Gatos, after his family moved from Southern California when he was five, according to USF. He received his bachelor’s degree in history from Santa Clara in 1980 and entered the Society of Jesus two years later.
The search for Privett’s replacement began in October and was led by board Vice Chair Chuck Smith, retired president and CEO of AT&T West. Search firm Isaacson Miller guided the national search.
Privett is the third-longest-serving president in USF history.
To read the original story, click here.
I hope and pray that Fr. Fitzgerald, the new President of the University of San Francisco, will bring a bit of orthodoxy back to the University. Let us keep him in our prayers as he will most definitely need them. I had a not so pleasant experience as a graduate student at USF back in the Fall of 1980, but my quick departure from USF in December of 1980 led me to Rome and to the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas in February of 1981, where I spent the next six and one half years until June of 1987! Before leaving USF I went to see the University President at that time and told him that my reason for leaving was the theology courses that were teaching things such as the Resurrection of Jesus was just a mystical experience; there is no such thing as original sin; and situation ethics. I could go on and on to elaborate, but I will spare my fellow readers.
Wishing everyone a truly Blessed Holy Week followed by a joyous celebration of Easter.
Mary Jo Gretsinger,
Thank you for your loyalty to Christ and for your charitable act of telling the past USF University President, at that time, the reasons why you were leaving. You could have silently left but you cared enough about the souls of the students and even the souls of those responsible for undermining the Truths of our Catholic Faith. Wishing you also a truly Blessed Holy Week followed by a joyous celebration of Easter.
Mary Jo,
Please tell us what the reaction of the then President of USF was to your act of charity in informing him of why you were leaving!
God have mercy May on an amoral Amerika!
Viva Cristo Rey!
Yours in Their Hearts,
Kenneth M. Fisher, Founding Director
Concerned Roman Catholics of America, Inc.
Is there any chance that USF will return to being a Catholic University under the reign of Fr. Fitzgerald?
I don’t give it much hope of becoming a true Catholic university. Fairfield is just another one of those typical Jesuit universities and all that entails.
Paul Fitzgerald, S.J., likes to wear civvies more than clerics, as evidenced in a number of photos (google his name under images). He was attracted to the academic vice-presidency at Fairfield because of the work of several liberal faculty in that university’s religious studies department: John Thiel, Nancy Dallavalle, and ex-Jesuit Paul Lakeland (see https://fairfieldmirror.com/2009/02/04/anintroductiontofitzgerald/). He thinks that the most important religious conversation is “the dialogue between Catholicism and Eastern religions, especially Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam” (see https://works.bepress.com/paul_fitzgerald/19) .
I will give you my perspective based on listening to and observing some of Fr. Fitzgerald’s homilies and his comments when I was then at the SCU campus: Homilies, I am sorry to say that were the standard liberal tripe. In one renowned sermon, he appeared to blame the good, loyal Catholics of a special group that had been gathered for a particular occasion for the issues of racism. poverty, and inequality in society. It was breathtaking. (Gee, Fr. F., it seems you and your fellow SJ’s have done quite well, and live quite well, by gladly relieving the racists, oppressors, and capitalists of their wealth and endlessly talking, talking, talking about it. ( I wrote him and told him so. I know of no response.)
He follows in the footsteps of a USF disaster, Fr Privett, insofar as being a leader in what the Church has always taught and held and believed, in my view.
I have no doubt USF’s puppet-masters would ever allow someone different to their progressive, post-Catholic views assume the throne of puppet-rex.
So, in summary, my long-term impression of this person has been confirmed: he was always attracted to power; much less so, in my experience, than to priesthood and being an alter-Christus. He has his reward. And no, you are not going to hear a Sr. Jane Laurel-type address from him, that is not how he got here.
Will he follow in the footsteps of the Jesuit Bishop of Rome?
USF can only hope Fr. Fitzgerald is as good a President as Fr. Schlegel was.
Awesome. Let’s got SJ.