25 YEARS OF AVE MARIA UNIVERSITY A Celebration

BY JOSEPH PEARCE

It would be no exaggeration to say that Ave Maria University (AMU) changed my life. If it had not been founded in 1998, I would have not moved to the United States from my native England three years later. It was in September 2001, four days before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that I crossed the Atlantic to take up a position on the faculty of what was then known as Ave Maria College. As writer-in-residence and associate professor, I taught literature from 2001 until 2012, during a period in which Ave Maria College metamorphosed into Ave Maria

The story begins in the mind and heart of Tom Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza, who had become alarmed at the way in which Catholic education had been undermined by a toxic combination of secular ambition and modernist theology. Having seen so many nominally Catholic schools “dropping the ball,” he decided to bring his own ball into play. In the fall of 1997, he founded the Ave Maria Institute in Ypsilanti, Michigan, a Catholic undergraduate liberal arts institution, which marked the embryonic beginnings of AMU.

University and moved its campus from Michigan to Florida. It is, therefore, a true honor to be invited to write these commemorative words in celebration of 25 years of AMU’s role in the restoration of authentic Catholic education.

It would be an inauspicious start. The school was not able to call itself a college under Michigan state law because it was not yet fully accredited and there were only ten students and three professors. Yet this smallest of acorns or mustard seeds was destined to grow under Tom’s patronage until it would become the pioneering and thriving university we see today.

It was not plain sailing, however. The initial problem was to find a home for the new institute. An abandoned elementary school was purchased in Ypsilanti, which bordered the campus of Eastern Michigan University. This would serve as Ave Maria’s campus until the move to

Florida in 2003. Initially, growth was modest. By 2001, when I joined the faculty, there were around 70 students and 17 faculty members. At this time, differences were emerging among members of the faculty and administration with respect to the future of the college. Some wanted it to remain a small, integrated liberal arts institution, similar to existing schools such as Christendom College in Virginia, offering only a handful of majors, none of which would be in the physical or social sciences. Others, including Tom Monaghan and Ave Maria College’s first President, Nick Healy, envisioned the college as the kernel of what would become a fully fledged university. It was the latter view that ultimately triumphed.

New disciplines, such as biology, physics and economics, were added to the curriculum in 2002 beginning the transition of the college into a university. It was also in 2002 that the indomitable Jesuit Fr. Joseph Fessio, best known as the founder of Ignatius Press, was hired to become AMU’s chancellor. In the previous year, he had been fired from his position at the University of San Francisco (USF) when his robust and uncompromising orthodoxy became too much for the university’s modernist ascendancy to tolerate. At the same time, the St. Ignatius Institute that Fr. Fessio had founded at USF was unceremoniously shut down.

In offering Fr. Fessio a job shortly after his being fired by a heterodox institution, Tom Monaghan was following what was becoming a noble tradition. He had already offered five law professors a position at the Ave Maria School of Law after they had been dismissed by a local Catholic university for their pro-life stance. In addition, he welcomed the Institute for Pastoral Theology, a master’s program that was grafted onto Ave Maria University to accommodate four faculty members who had resigned their positions at another Catholic university in protest at what they considered theological backsliding at that institution. In this way, Ave Maria University was becoming a haven for orthodox academics.

In the spring of 2002, Ave Maria had its first graduation. The first graduating class consisted of only seven pioneering students, four young men (three of whom went on to seminary) and three young women. They would be the first of thousands. In the following year, there were around 180 students, an exponential increase on the 70 students of the previous year. The Michigan campus was bursting at the seams, and the need to move to a new campus was becoming an urgent priority. Since its inception, Tom Monaghan had planned for the campus to ultimatly be built at Domino’s Farms in Ann Arbor. However, difficulties arose when Ave Maria could not obtain the needed re-zoning for this to happen. At this point, with Tom Monaghan’s encouragment, the board of trustees made the major decision that the campus should be moved from Michigan to a new location in Naples, Florida. In the following year, the new interim campus of Ave Maria University was opened on the edge of Naples, which would be home to AMU until its move to its present location at the beginning of the fall semester in 2007.

Providentially, as the University was looking for a campus location in the Naples area, a large real estate/ development company offered to give the University the land it needed for its campus, completely free of charge, if the University agreed to build on its land and the opportunity to be a 50% partner in the development of the newly envisioned town. AMU’s board accepted this offer as a gift from heaven. Construction began on the new site in 2004, marking the beginning of the town of Ave Maria. The new campus opened at the beginning of the fall semester in 2007. After almost a decade of numerous challenges, AMU had finally found a permanent home.

In March 2008, the oratory, now known as the parish church of Ave Maria, was consecrated, setting in place the spiritual heart of both the University and the town that was growing up around it. In 2010, the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS) granted the University full accreditation. program. The University is situated in Ave Maria, one of the fastest growing communities in the country.

In February 2011, Tom Monaghan relinquished the reins at AMU to Jim Towey, who took over as both President and CEO. Towey would be at the helm for nine years. He was succeeded by Chris Ice and then, briefly, by Roger Nutt, who served as the interim President until Mark Middendorf became AMU’s new President at the beginning of last year (2022).

President Middendorf now presides over an inspiring Catholic University that currently has 1,231 students and offers 34 undergraduate majors and 35 undergraduate minors, in addition to three master’s and one Ph.D.

In the quarter of a century since its foundation, AMU has seen many changes but one thing, the most important thing, remains unchanged. Ave Maria University stands as a faithful servant of Christ and of the teaching Magisterium of the Catholic Church. It is a beacon of light and life. May we all pray the light grows ever brighter as AMU enters the next 25 years of faithful service to Jesus Christ and the Church He founded.

— Joseph Pearce Author and Editor of the St. Austin Review