Raiger asserted that he had a duty under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the federal law barring sex discrimination, to report the alleged wrongdoing, which involved among other things the other professor's purported spreading of false accusations of homosexual activity involving professors and students. Raiger's allegations, contained in a lawsuit he filed in state court last spring, are that he ran afoul of Towey by reporting "seriously disruptive, scandalous and disreputable behavior" by another professor to numerous administrators at Ave Maria. The university has the stamp of approval of the Cardinal Newman Society, which urges universities to closely adhere to traditional Catholic teachings, and during Towey's time there, its enrollment has grown to about 1,100 students and its finances have solidified.Īs at Saint Vincent, though, Towey has alienated many faculty and staff members at Ave Maria, on several occasions accused of forcing out those with whom he disagreed. Bush's Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, left Saint Vincent in 2010, a year before his contract expired, and became president of Ave Maria in 2011.Īve Maria, founded with a $250 million donation from Monaghan, the pizza magnate and philanthropist for Catholic causes, has sought to carve out a niche as a "fresh, faithful voice" - part of a new wave of Catholic institutions whose mission was to "explicate the truths of the faith, and measure against them the evolving societal propositions or practices in politics, the arts, the economy, etc." In the past, those practices included slavery and Nazism, the history tab on the university's webpage states today they are "abortion, fetal research … same-sex ‘marriage’ … and world terrorism." Towey, whose diverse professional history included stints working for Mother Teresa and in President George W. Saint Vincent and Towey didn't stop there, though, pushing the Vatican to oust Gruber as a priest, which its leaders did in 2012. (Another Saint Vincent employee later came forward and took responsibility for having downloaded the images.) The charges were dropped after police concluded that no images on the computer had been of men under the age of 18, and that the computer was in a common area and many people had access to it. A year later, the university barred him from the campus and reported him to local police after saying its officials had found child pornography on a computer in a common area outside his office. Mark Gruber, at the time a priest and professor of anthropology at Saint Vincent, was among the only university employees identified by name in a 2008 Inside Higher Ed article about allegedly autocratic management practices there. Jim Towey's name may be familiar to those who follow national headlines for his defense last spring of Pope Francis against Vatican whistle-blowers who criticized the pope for allegedly covering up sex abuse by a former cardinal.Ĭloser to home, longtime readers of Inside Higher Ed may remember Towey for his treatment of one of the few faculty members willing to criticize him publicly when he was president of Saint Vincent College, in Pennsylvania. "He borrowed the money and had to repay it, and they haven't repaid it," Reyes said in an interview. Reyes, whose Tobin & Reyes law firm represents Ave Maria, roundly rejected the assertion that the university is trying to punish the Raigers. "They know we don’t have the kind of money to fight this, and that if they take away our house, there’s no way we’re going to be able to fight this lawsuit." "It's another form of retaliation," he says. The real reason, Michael Raiger asserts, is because he and his wife are suing Ave Maria, and Towey and other administrators want the couple, and their lawsuit, to go away. James Towey, notified them last spring that it was calling the mortgage loan. The stated reason is that the Raigers did not repay Ave Maria when the university and its president, H. This month, Ave Maria sought and won a court order to sell the house out from under Raiger, his wife, Caitlin, and their nine children who call it home. "We were basically the pioneers," Raiger says. With their loan from Ave Maria, the Raigers bought their home for $353,000. To encourage professors to live close to the campus, for their benefit and that of their students, university administrators offered employees like Raiger and his wife loans of $150,000 to make homes more affordable. As an early faculty member at Ave Maria University, the Roman Catholic institution established by the Domino's founder Tom Monaghan, Michael Raiger was also the first professor to move into Ave Maria, Fla., the planned community Monaghan opened near the university in 2007.
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