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January 2, 2025
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By Peter L. DeLuca
Co-founder and Fourth President
Thomas Aquinas College
California Thanksgiving Dinner
November 24, 2024

 

Dr. DeLuca Thanksgiving Dinner Address

 

Thank you very much, Mr. O’Reilly, those were very kind words. We heard some wonderful words this evening about the working of Divine Providence and about how much we need to thank God for all the good things in our lives. One good thing that we here, in this room tonight, have in common is Thomas Aquinas College. And so, I thought that I would say a few words about how it came to be, how it happened that Thomas Aquinas College was started. So, I am not intending to give you the whole history, but rather an account of the period before we had any students.

There was a period of about three years when we were trying to get this college started. That period is little known now because most of the people who were involved have passed on. I am very grateful that I have not gone yet myself, but I assume I will soon. So, let me begin on December 1, 1967. There was a meeting of an organization called the Philadelphia Society in Los Angeles at the old airport hotel, and it was a meeting about some other subject, but Dr. McArthur was giving a paper at that event, and his thoughts about education had been conveyed to a man who was a development officer for Pepperdine, but who was very interested to meet Dr. McArthur, and so, I introduced them.

While I was going about closing up the day’s meetings, they began a conversation. I joined them later, as well as several other people, but mostly it was those two speaking. And finally, this other gentleman said to Dr. McArthur, “Well then, why don’t you start your own college?” and he said, “You can’t start a college!”

For those here who remember Dr. McArthur, I am sure you can imagine that better than I can imitate it, but he had a way of being a powerful speaker. At any rate, that sparked a further discussion and several meetings. There were a couple of additional conversations and meetings held with the same gentleman at my house in Los Angeles; and Marcus Berquist came up from San Diego, where he was teaching at the San Diego College for Women. Following those conversations, they drafted the Blue Book, A Proposal for the Fulfillment of Catholic Liberal Education, because, quite reasonably, we thought that we should not try to start a college at least unless we were absolutely clear about what we meant by education, and so they got that drafted in June of 1968.

I got it duplicated, and we sent the copies out to a number of people. I sent one to a man named Henry Salvatore, who was a philanthropist in Los Angeles. He agreed to see us, and so Dr. McArthur and I went to see him, and he heard us out. He was very skeptical, as skeptical as Dr. McArthur had been about the possibility of us starting a college, but he did say then, however, that he thought that everybody ought to have a chance to fail. So, he gave us $10,000. Now, that was a lot larger amount of money then than it is now, but it was still not very much. But we were delighted. The one condition was that we had to find some way to accept the gift into a tax-exempt organization. Dr. McArthur was quick to make the necessary connections, and we got the Archdiocese of San Francisco to accept the gift. So, I have always said, in a way, you could say that the Archdiocese of San Francisco started the College.

At any rate, that gift then gave us a little capital, and we incorporated so that we would not have that problem about the gifts anymore, hopefully. Actually, it turned out we had to redo it later, but that was another problem; the lawyer we used wasn’t that good.

Anyway, we went ahead and got incorporated, and we held a meeting in San Francisco in November of that year, where people gathered to discuss the proposal. Pretty much it was a collection of people who had some prominence and who at least one of us knew. I don’t really remember how many people there were at that meeting, but one of them was a man named Russell Kirk. Rusell Kirk wrote a book called The Conservative Mind and was pretty well known. He was a columnist for National Review magazine, and he had a column called “From the Academy.” So, it was a very natural thing, having been at the meeting, for him to discuss the meeting and what we were planning to do in that column.

That column generated 120 or so responses. He had put Dr. McArthur’s home address in because our college didn’t have an address yet. At any rate, that was all progress. I cannot emphasize enough here that, at this point, it was all talk. None of us had quit our jobs or moved our families or given away our fortune, we had just talked about it. We had talked about this college, but it didn’t yet really exist except notionally. Dr. Neumayr somehow made a connection with the Dominican Sisters in San Rafael; they had extra capacity at Dominican College because, shortly before that, all three of the Catholic men’s colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area went coeducational.

The silence tells me that this is puzzling to somebody. So, this is one of the consequences, I think, of Vatican II, that most of the Catholic colleges almost overnight went from being single-sex to being coeducational. This had a disastrous effect on the enrollment of the four women’s colleges. Dominican was left with a certain number of extra facilities, shall we say, an empty building or two. At any rate, after some discussion, they offered to have us start our college as a coordinate college on their campus, share the use of their relatively new library and dining commons, and then they would lend us some of their vacant facilities, including a classroom, which we got to use as our office immediately.

This sounded tremendous. It sounded like an answer to a prayer — and, suddenly, we existed. We had a place. And so, we went from that position of not having a place to having one very quickly. Maybe we jumped too fast and didn’t look hard enough, but at any rate, that’s what happened, and then we had to start making commitments.

Mrs. DeLuca and I took our two small children and moved to San Rafael. That is one of the nicest things about renting. We opened the office on the campus of Dominican College. Dr. Neumayr came fulltime as the dean, and Dr. McArthur was there half-time. And we hired a very, very helpful young woman who was a recent graduate of Dominican, who worked with us through this whole period, running our office.

So, suddenly, we had this reality, and we started doing all kinds of thigs. We published a final version of the proposal. Dr. Neumayr edited it, and we got it off a real printing press. This was when photo-offset printing was just coming in, so real printing was done with type. We had a little print shop in San Rafael that printed us the first copies of the Blue Book that were formal. We created a fundraising brochure with nice glowing pictures of the buildings of the campus of Dominican and all about the program. We got our tax exemption, we got some additional Board members, some outside Board members, people who could help us financially. We started to raise money and, finally, we decided that the thing to do was to have a big kickoff dinner for our fundraising campaign.

As it turns out, the Archbishop of San Francisco, Archbishop McGucken, was more of a motive factor here than I was aware of; I found this out recently. It was through his connections that we got Fulton Sheen as the featured keynote speaker at this dinner. For those of you who don’t know who Fulton Sheen was, he was probably the first and best Catholic televangelist; first it was the radio, and then television. He had had a heart attack at this point, and so he was on reduced duty, but he did come all the way to San Francisco and to that dinner for us. And, of course, his name was a huge draw for the Catholic audience.

So, at the dinner, not only did he speak, and Dr. McArthur, which you would expect, but we also had Brent Bozell from National Review — well, actually, at that point from Triumph magazine. The Archbishop of San Francisco himself gave the invocation, and I believe we had a few words from the mayor of San Francisco; at least he was there.

So, considering we didn’t have a college yet, we had 450 people at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, which was the best address in San Francisco at the time, and the College looked like it was going to really go. And then, two weeks later, Dominican College’s new lay board chairman informed us that they were going to pull out of the agreement.

I am sure you can imagine what sort of blow that was to all of us. We felt that all was for nothing and that we were back to square one. Now, it wasn’t actually that bad, and I guess what I would say is that this kind of shows you how Providence works. Because it’s not clear that we would have ever made it past the conversation stage if Dominican hadn’t made that offer, and — even though they didn’t maintain it — we, nevertheless, because we had accepted it, were a real entity. But what we still needed was a place.

The rest is pretty much history. We found a religious order’s vacant seminary and novitiate in Malibu Canyon called the Claretian Order, and it was perfect for us because, unlike most seminary properties, there were two separate buildings and even two separate chapels, one for the postulants and one for the seminarians. At any rate, it was perfect for us to start in. We started there in 1971 and we were there for eight years before we came here. In those eight years, we became an established institution.

It shows you that we do need to thank God’s providence for all the good things and, especially, for this college. Thank you.