McGinniss reflects on past,present and future of La Salle

By Jen Colletta
Collegian Editor
August 30, 2006

C: After all of the negative press coverage from the basketball scandal, do you think that the Affirmation strengthened the morale of the community and was able to show the public that we are taking steps to try to curb any future incidents?

M: I think anybody who put the three things together—the basketball troubles, the morale and the Affirmation—would see it as a strong student response. I know that it grew out of that context, as well as did the I AM LA SALLE campaign, and I think those were terrific responses. When I said the distinctive thing about La Salle is the kind of community that constitutes the place, the people who made up that community were basically saying, “This is who we are.”

C: Focusing on the community and its growth, how smoothly do you think the opening of St. Basil’s and Treetops went?

M: From my perspective as President, I thought it went pretty smoothly, better than I had hoped. I think students have really taken well to both places. I think the students who live in St. Basil’s probably have liked it more than people who didn’t live there and would have liked to have been living in there. I think Treetops has been very well-received also.

C: At the start of the year, there seemed to be an influx in crimes either near or on campus. Do you know how much crime did increase this year, as compared to the past few years?

M: It actually decreased this year. There seemed to be a number of crimes, but I think on the whole over a 12-month period I don’t think that the trend increased. The 35th police precinct did do an awful lot of work on prevention and apprehension of perpetrators. In some instances, landlords aren’t really taking care of the security of their off-campus houses. La Salle is really limited in what we can do to get off-campus landlords to improve the security of their properties. On-campus crime, though, is much lower. When I was looking at a map of the crime statistics for the 35 th precinct—which is a very large precinct geographically—there’s a relatively open area right around La Salle, which indicates the absence of crimes. We don’t have the kind of crime that many other parts of the city experience. I think that’s largely because there is the presence of La Salle security, and our students typically are careful.

C: Do you think that students do pay attention to the memos and warnings that are posted about how to stay safe on and around campus?

M: I hope they listen to them. I believe that students are typically cautious. When they’re not cautious is when it’s late at night and they’ve been partying or they are just not paying the kind of attention to the street smarts that you need to have in any urban area. But I think that La Salle students are cautious and, going back to the Affirmation, I’d like to think that they take care of each other. It is distressing when I have read the Security Report and see somebody’s friends left them at a party or somebody got separated from the group and had to walk by themselves. Basically, the message of the Affirmation is that we take care of each other.

C: How are plans progressing for the supermarket?

M: Right now, the contract for the developer is being completed, and I anticipate that we will have a signed contract early in the fall. Construction will begin after a period of due diligence.

C: What do you feel having the supermarket in that area will be able to bring to the La Salle community? Do you think it will offer them items that they won’t be able to find here on campus?

M:  It’s going to be a supermarket plus a small mall, so, yes, we expect it to provide amenities that we can’t provide in the Market. It is going to be one of the Fresh Grocer market; there may be only about a half dozen of them in the city; they’re high-end with high-quality products. If you step back and look at what kind of community impact this will have, statistics say it should have an enormous impact. This is an area in which the nearest supermarket is about a mile and a half away, and there are an awful lot of elderly people in this area and people without cars. It will be easier for them to shop. State Representative Dwight Evans, who is a La Salle alum, is the person who championed the state initiative to provide the kind of opportunities for developers to take the business risk to invest here. It’ll improve the quality of life and health, and it’ll be a nice opportunity to provide another place where students can interact with people from the community.  

C: Is it true that freshman residents won’t be able to have cars on campus?

M: We made an announcement in the spring that we were making a change in our freshman parking policy.

C: Has this, or do you think it will in the future, affect the enrollment, since many new students may like to have their cars on campus?

M: It doesn’t seem to have, because we’re expecting a pretty big class. I don’t know if La Salle students would be aware of this, but we were probably the only significant size college in the city that allowed so much vehicular use. To be honest, I was really surprised myself when we did a survey about this. The security office had been suggesting this for a while, and I kept resisting it, because if we had the space, I didn’t see any reason to be restrictive. Now we have a construction issue that we have to account for, so it makes sense.

C: Speaking of traffic, are you relieved that the 20th Street protestors are finally gone?

M: Yes, and I think a lot of other people at La Salle will agree. I think one of the things that the cessation of that activity suggests is that a lot of people in the neighboring community want to become a part of the positive things that La Salle is trying to do in terms of community development, the supermarket being the biggest symbol of that. I think that really helped to take some of the air out of the protestors. With the opportunities for volatilities there, we’re very fortunate there were no serious incidents.

C: At the end of the school year, there were several memos about the usage of the Wister Woods. Did you find that students complied with these rules, and do you think that there are going to be any new measures taken this coming year to prevent any illegal activities in the woods?

M: It is my impression that students did comply, and I don’t think we’d do anything differently than we’ve done in the past. So there may be the same kinds of memos you saw reminding students not to break out kegs down there. It’s actually Fairmount Park space, and it’s illegal to drink on it.

C: Is the new science center also a definite plan?

M: We’re not ready to break ground yet. The way a building project of this magnitude goes is that you do the fundraising for it first, which we’re almost finished doing. We’re between $22 and $23 million dollars towards an initial $25 million dollar goal, but we will now be raising funds until we reach $28 million. What you also do is that you have schematic drawings, site drawings, prepared, which you can show to donors. The original intention we had was to put it on the site of the tennis courts and relocate the courts to another section of the Fairmount Park property. In order to get ready to build, it takes about a year to design the building, and we haven’t yet started the design. But we’re very close to that, and I feel confident that we’ll have a new science center. Since so much time has passed, we’ve actually gone back and looked at several other possible sites.

C: At the end of the year, we learned about the plans for the laundry services to be free for this coming year. How is this possible, and what effect do you hope it will have on the students and campus?

M: It was just a decision that we made, that it was a cost that we could absorb into the budget. It’s an amenity. We were doing things a certain way, and we experimented with certain washing machines and new facilities, and this just seemed like a good move.

C: There were several times this year when the La Salle community experienced difficult times—from the racist graffiti in St. Neumann to [football player] Preston Plevretes’ injury to the death of [student] Danielle Leonard—how well do you think the community as a whole was able to band together and support each other through these events?

M: I’ve been President now through a number of challenging things. I guess anyone who’s been President for seven years has experienced several challenges. Everything I’ve seen at La Salle, whenever there’s been a challenge to the community’s faith or self-confidence, an injury to an individual member that’s been as profound as we saw for Preston or the death of a student as in Danielle’s passing, the community really does rise up and in a certain sense I think it gets stronger by expressing our faith in each other and in God and our confidence that we can get through things. Those were particularly challenging times, probably with effects beyond what I can even imagine. I do think that we got through them well. I would prefer that we don’t have to test everything with tragedies, and I think everyone would feel the same way.

C: What would you say in your opinion would be the high point and the low point of this past school year?

M: I don’t think this school year had a single definite low point. Emotional low points for me were the injury to Preston and Danielle’s passing away. In Danielle’s case, because I have been well-acquainted with her family, I had some personal loss that transcended just being President of La Salle. With young people, it’s like a ripple effect. I think those two losses were the low points. We, of course, are following Preston’s recovery, which is very slow, but he is very determined. As for the high points? Well, it’s pretty hard to beat the opening of St. Basil’s and Treetops, but I think there were a couple of other things. I think that we had a wonderfully exciting men’s basketball season, so we had an emotional high during the winter. In addition, the Middle States’ Accrediting Association came through at the end of March, and we received a great accreditation report. It was a terrific experience. Commencement was a high point also. And then right after that, we started the turfing of the fields project. T here have been a lot of high points, so I don’t know if there’s been just one.

C: If you could sum up this past academic year in one word, what would it be?

M: A time of “growth” for La Salle, growth in the quality of our facilities, growth in our stature as an institution and growth in our investment in the community.

C: What do you think will be the biggest challenge facing the La Salle community this coming academic year?

M: I actually think the hardest thing is going to be we as a community—as Brother Ed Sheehy always says “younger adults and older adults”—look at the world situation and look how tumultuous it is and how threatening it is. As we start school right now, the news is about as depressing as it has been since the attack on the World Trade Center in 2001. The worldwide violence that’s on the front page of our papers is very dismaying and threatening. So in one sense, I think one of our biggest challenges as a community, a learning community, a faith community, a community of just good people trying to live out the challenge of the Affirmation, is just to look out there and say this is a very challenging world. The one thing that underlies that Affirmation is that these are people who are saying they’re committed to making the world better, but the challenges are enormous. They’re not the usual kind you think of when you think of usual institutional challenges, like is there enough parking. I think we’re going to start the year with our focus on big issues, threatening issues, but issues that call for the best of us.

collettaj1@lasalle.edu