Question: who’s got the tougher job-Justin Bieber’s parole officer or Jack Dunn’s fact checker? As I read the story on the Campus School [Heights, January 23], my stomach getting tighter with each paragraph, I hoped for something I never hoped for in my life-that The Heights was misquoting the administration; that Jack Dunn had never really said the things he was quoted as saying. Here’s the spokesman for a Jesuit University, a university committed to the ideal of men and women for others, for the faith that does justice, sounding like a slimy mob lawyer, sowing just enough confusion to get a hung jury.
Dunn tells The Heights: this is just an affiliation, a merger, an opportunity to meld all that’s best in the Campus School with the superior amenities of KDS. Who could be against it? Just some closed-minded parents who for some reason don’t trust a university administration that’s willing to trash them-these heroic people-to make its case to the campus newspaper! Even some mob lawyers wouldn’t stoop that low.
Let’s be honest. What’s planned is NOT a merger, NOT a partnership of two schools working together. BC’s plan means the elimination of the Campus School and the dispersal of its students-some to KDS, others to God knows where.
Dunn even says he wants to foster the spirit of the Campus School at KDS; so BC will provide a van for student volunteers to visit the facility. But the spirit of the Campus School is the constant human interaction, the hubbub, the life communicated to these kids from the volunteers, the staff, the steady stream of buddies. I worked at the Campus School as an undergrad, and that spirit flows in two directions. I may have given them something.
But they gave me more. I think everyone who’s worked at the Campus School would say the same. That’s why, when Dunn talks about fostering the spirit of the Campus School by running vans of volunteers to KDS for occasional visits, he shows that he knows nothing at all about that spirit and has no real interest in fostering it.
But Jack Dunn isn’t really the problem. He’s just a mouthpiece. He’d never be able to spin and talk trash if Fr. Leahy weren’t behind him. And that’s why the Campus School will close. The Jesuit President wants that space for some Big Plan. The kids are in the way. And so the kids must go. It’s that simple.
In a few years, when the Big Plan is completed, there’ll probably be a grand opening, specially catered. And three miles away, in a nicely renovated facility, there’ll be some lonely kids, who used to feel the loving chaos that was the spirit of the Campus School, sitting in their wheelchairs, waiting for the van to come.
Shame on you, Boston College. Shame on you.
Adam DeMuro
BC ’97
