To the Editor:
I am writing this letter in response to Fairfield University’s decision to cut the hockey program last Thursday. This decision came as a shock to everyone on and around campus with the exception of a distinct few. The decision was headed up by Father Kelley and his so called “Board of Trustees.”
The truth is Fr. Kelley has never supported the hockey program and in my four years as a player he attended just one game. He even lacked the courage to tell the players and coaches himself, instead he had Gene Doris, the Athletic Director, break the new to all of us. We see this as a cowardly move because Gene Doris and the rest of the Athletic Department had very little to do with this decision and yet many are putting the blame on them.
Fr. Kelley’s decision was supposedly a financial one; he claims that the school needed to free up over $500,000 in the budget. However, he never even went to the coaches, Jim Hunt and Pat Nugent, or ex-coach and head of the Psychology Department, Dr. John McCarthy and informed them of the situation.
If it was clearly a money issue, Fr. Kelley would have went to these three men and discussed alternate ways to raise the money needed to save the program such as going to our thousands of alumni.
The truth is Fairfield University is a business and as a member of the Business School, I have sat through numerous amounts of classes with professors preaching business ethics and the proper way to run a business.
They preach that is business isn’t all about the bottom-line but also about the people that are involved. The way this particular situation was handled was extremely unethical and wrong, which leads me to believe that this school is being run by a bunch of hypocrites.
Sincerely,
Joe Whelan Class of 2003 Fairfield Hockey 1999-2003
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