Teaching Corps

THE CATHOLIC NEW WORLD, March 18 — Loyola University of Chicago's School of Education is launching a two-year program for graduate students to earn a master's degree while teaching full-time in Catholic schools, reported Chicago's arch-diocesan newspaper.

The program, LU-Choice, is designed to help Catholic schools deal with a shortage of teachers while providing a graduate education and a unique experience of service to students.

Participants must be willing to live in community, share daily chores, meals and prayer, and they must be willing to share the Catholic faith with their students. The teachers will receive a small stipend, but the bulk of their salaries will go to offset tuition.

Publicity's Sake?

THE HARTFORD COURANT, March 25 — In a lawsuit, Tara Brady, 21, claims that Connecticut's Sacred Heart University in Fairfield violated her civil rights by dismissing her from the women's basketball team and suspending her athletic scholarship because she became pregnant in 2001, reported the Connecticut daily.

Sacred Heart officials called Brady's lawsuit “un found ed” and promised to fight it.

The university also rebutted Brady's insinuation that it punished her for completing her pregnancy, saying the claim had been made for the “sake of publicity.”

New Chief

UNIVERSITY OF SAN DIEGO, March 31 — Mary Lyons, president of the College of St. Benedict in St. Joseph, Minn., has been named San Diego's new president, the university an noun ced. She will replace Alice Hayes, who is retiring after eight years on July 1.

Lyons is a former professor of rhetoric and homiletics at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Flag's Fabric

THE CATHOLIC EXPLORER, March 7 — Toni Smith, a women's basketball player at New York's Manhattanville College who protested during the run-up to the Iraq war by turning her back to the American flag during the playing of the national anthem, was “misguided,” according to an editorial in the newspaper of the Diocese of Joliet, Ill.

The editorial agrees with Smith about the war but not with “directing her anger at the American flag” because the flag “represents much more” than the government. It is the emblem of “the sturdy fabric of this country — those [people] who have always been willing to fight for all kinds of freedoms.”

The newspaper also faults the school's administration for making “no attempt to thwart Smith's actions” and for passing up an opportunity to better form students’ understanding of their “right to freedom of expression.”

Woes Mount

THE STAR LEDGER, March 10 — “Around the nation, small private colleges like St. Peter's are hurting,” reported the Newark, N.J., daily.

The problems for the Jesuits’ Jersey City, N.J., college include an enrollment decline, the unexpected loss of promised state funding and an endowment that has, been depleted by the sagging economy and a need for funds.

Finally, flaws in the college's 20-year-old computer system became too great to ignore when it was realized the system had been inadequately tracking the amount of scholarships and grants the inner-city college had given to its students.