And, finally, when you talk about De Paul-Loyola similarities, you have to talk about alumni. Each university can point to an honor roll of graduates who are or have been major movers and shakers in the city, the state and the nation.
Loyola lays claim to such alumni as:
U.S. Rep. Daniel Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee; the two Democratic leaders of the Illinois legislature, Senate President Philip Rock and House Speaker Michael Madigan; Cook County Assessor Thomas Hynes; Carter Henry Harrison Jr., the first Chicago-born mayor of the city; former U.S. District Court Judge Susan Getzendanner; comedian Bob Newhart; CBS news correspondent Bill Plante; and Michael R. Quinlan, McDonald`s Corp. chairman and chief executive officer.
That`s a lineup that`s hard to top, but consider the names De Paul can field:
Richard J. and Richard M. Daley, the past and present mayors of Chicago;
Samuel Skinner, George Bush`s chief of staff; NAACP executive director Benjamin Hooks; Michael A. Bilandic, a former mayor and now Illinois Supreme Court Justice; City Treasurer Miriam Santos; Andrew McKenna, a member of the board of the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cubs; Phil Corboy Jr., prominent personal injury lawyer; Amoco Corp. president H. Laurance Fuller; and actors Elizabeth Perkins, Karl Malden and Joe Mantegna.
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OK, enough with the similarities. What about differences?
To begin with, there`s basketball. De Paul`s Blue Demons have been a national power for much of the last half century, going 20 times to the NCAA tournament, including its ill-fated 1992 visit, and 10 times to the National Invitational Tournament (NIT).
In the mid-1940s, George Mikan was the first Big Man in basketball when he loomed over opponents as the 6-foot-10 center for the Blue Demons, long before the era of 7-footers. Mikan, who played in the NBA with the Minneapolis Lakers, was a charter member of the Basketball Hall of Fame, as was Ray Meyer, the De Paul coach from 1942 to 1984.
Five Blue Demons are now playing in the NBA: Mark Aguirre, Tyrone Corbin, Terry Cummings, Kevin Edwards and Rod Strickland. However, only Corbin and Edwards graduated from the university.
Yet, for all of De Paul`s success over the seasons, it usually hasn`t won the big ones.
Only once have the Blue Demons made the NCAA Final Four. That was in 1979 when they lost to Larry Bird`s Indiana State Sycamores in the semifinal. In 1983 they placed second in the NIT, and, with Mikan at center, they won the NIT title in 1945.
In contrast, the Loyola Ramblers were able to put it all together one golden season when they triumphed at the NCAA tournament in 1963. That was a shining moment, but, overall, the team has been less successful than De Paul`s.
”People are generally supportive, but no one`s going to lose sleep if they lose,” says senior Mark Guarino, editor of the Loyola student newspaper, the Phoenix.
De Paul has theater and music programs that are stronger than those at Loyola. Four De Paul alumni are members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, while 20 faculty members are from the CSO or the Lyric Opera Orchestra.
On the other hand, Loyola has a campus in Rome where some 300 students are able to study abroad for a semester or a full academic year. De Paul doesn`t.
There are other differences as well, of greater or lesser substance:
– Loyola has more women. Sixty percent of its students are female, compared to 52 percent of those at De Paul. One reason for this is the merger last fall of Loyola with all-women Mundelein College that brought some 600 additional women into the Loyola student body.
– Loyola has more Catholics. Two of every three Loyola freshmen are Catholics, compared to 57 percent at De Paul.
– Loyola requires its undergraduates to take three courses in theology and three in philosophy; De Paul`s requirement is four courses in philosophy or religious studies. On the other hand, the total number of required courses for undergrads at Loyola is 18, compared to De Paul`s 18 for commerce students and 22 for those in the liberal arts program.
– Nearly half of all De Paul students are studying for business or law degrees. At Loyola, the figure is 20 percent.
– Loyola is richer, with an endowment of $338 million, one of the 50 largest in the nation. De Paul`s endowment is a comparatively modest $42 million. Both universities are engaged in $100-million fund-raising campaigns. – Loyola has 67 academic departments, compared to the 47 at De Paul. And it has 28 Ph.D. programs, compared to just 4 at De Paul.
– De Paul`s current freshmen appear to be a tad smarter than those at Loyola. The average ACT score of freshmen was 24.2 at De Paul and 23.3 at Loyola.
There is one other major difference between De Paul and Loyola that overshadows all others: the Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood.
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A corridor half a mile long runs north and south along almost the entire length of the Loyola Medical Center grounds, connecting many of the 39 buildings of the 65-acre site. It is the lifeline of the medical center complex, the passageway by which doctors, nurses, technicians, maintenance workers, an occasional patient and medical students move, usually briskly, in the execution of their jobs.
Throughout the Chicago area, it would be difficult to find a corridor quite as long as this one. It is symbolic of the institution it serves, a medical center ranked among the best in the nation. And it is one that gives Loyola a dimension that is completely absent at De Paul.
”We`re in two lines of business: higher education and health care. You have to understand that element of us, or you can`t understand us,” says James Reilly, Loyola`s associate vice president for public relations.
”The other institutions in the city that are like us are Northwestern, the University of Chicago and the University of Illinois at Chicago because they`re in two lines of business too. It makes us a very different thing from De Paul.”
It was because of the medical center, at 2160 S. 1st Ave. in Maywood, that Loyola was ranked among the Chicago-area`s top 20 employers by Crain`s Chicago Business last fall. More than 7,000 of the university`s 11,000 employees work at the medical center. (That`s more than twice as many as De Paul`s total workforce of 3,275.)
It`s also why Loyola`s faculty is nearly twice the size of De Paul`s. Some 750 of Loyola`s total of 1,964 full- and part-time faculty teach at the medical center. That`s about two instructors for every three of the 1,113 medical-center students. De Paul, in contrast, has a total of just 1,125 faculty members.
Loyola is exceedingly proud of the medical center, and with good reason. The complex, which includes the university`s medical school, dentistry school, outpatient clinic and hospital, was opened in 1968 and is now a key element in the Chicago-area health-care network.
Last year it cared for 21,000 inpatients and 400,000 outpatients. It has a burn center serving a four-state region, a high-risk neonatal intensive-care unit, a helicopter described as a ”flying intensive-care unit” and a 10-bed intensive-care unit solely for heart-transplant patients. Some 270 heart transplants have been done at the medical center since 1984.
According to university officials, the medical center ranks third in the nation among university hospitals in the severity of cases that it handles. Among all hospitals, it`s 18th.
There is, however, one far-from-minor source of frustration in all of this for the Loyola administration.
”Pretty much everybody in Chicago,” Reilly says, ”knows about the medical center, and they think it`s a high-quality operation. But when you ask people about its connection with the university, they say, `Oh, is that connected to the university?` ”
The sound you hear is Reilly gnashing his teeth.
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The top people at Loyola don`t like to see their university compared to De Paul. And those at De Paul would rather not be contrasted with Loyola.
Yet almost from the beginning, the two schools have been competitors. In fact, it was a failure of the forerunner of Loyola that led to the creation of the college that became De Paul.
It happened this way:
In 1857 the Right Rev. Anthony O`Regan, then bishop of Chicago, finally succeeded in persuading the Society of Jesus, the religious order of priests more commonly known as the Jesuits, to come to the city to establish a church on the Near Southwest Side for Irish and German immigrants.
O`Regan also wanted the Jesuits to open a college right away, and the Jesuits, who operated colleges and universities throughout the world, wanted that too. But the Civil War intervened, and it wasn`t until Sept. 5, 1870, that St. Ignatius College, named for Jesuit founder St. Ignatius Loyola, opened.
Thirty-seven students were there that first day, although enrollment rose to 98 by the end of the school year.
The college was a success. But by the turn of the century, the Catholic population in its neighborhood was dwindling, and the Jesuits were asking the diocese for permission to move to the Far North Side neighborhood of Rogers Park, which was just starting to fill up with Catholics.
The request, however, put the college on a collision course with another Catholic institution of higher learning that was already on the North Side, St. Vincent`s College, operated by the Congregation of the Mission, a religious order founded by St. Vincent De Paul and known as the Vincentians.
The Vincentians had come to Chicago in 1875 to establish a parish and elementary school in Lincoln Park. They had had no thought then of starting a college. In fact, their specialty in the church was running seminaries that trained young men for the priesthood.
But in 1897 Bishop Patrick Freehan asked the Vincentians to open a college at their Lincoln Park site to serve North Side Catholics, and a year later, the order did so.
Freehan had turned to the Vincentians because a Jesuit attempt to establish a branch of St. Ignatius College in the area of North Avenue and La Salle Street had failed. Now, seven years after they had opened their college, the Vincentians learned that the Jesuits were trying to move north.
”The Vincentians … claimed that the colleges would be too close together with neither enough Catholics nor enough resources for both colleges on that side of the city . . . ,” wrote Lester Goodchild in his 1986 University of Chicago doctoral dissertation on the histories of three Catholic universities-Loyola, De Paul and Notre Dame.
”Yet, distance was not the real issue for either the Vincentians or the Jesuits. They both hoped the growing middle class and wealthy Catholic population along the Lake Michigan shoreline would send their children to their college.”
The Vincentian complaints went for naught, and in 1913 the Jesuits held their first college classes in Rogers Park.
By then, both schools had chartered themselves as universities. St. Vincent`s College has become De Paul in 1907 and St. Ignatius College had become Loyola in 1909. But, initially, they took different approaches to education, according to Goodchild, who is now coordinator of the higher education program at the University of Denver.
Although neither university excluded non-Catholics, Loyola was more concerned about using education to bolster the Catholic faith. At De Paul, the key ministry was seen as providing a high-quality education without as much of a Catholic overlay.
”The Jesuits were training Catholic leaders for the Catholic community. De Paul was interested in helping whoever came in the door. They weren`t as elitist,” says Goodchild, who has worked at both universities.
Those differences disappeared to a great extent, starting in the 1930s, when, under pressure from church authorities, De Paul instituted mandatory religion courses and began more and more seeing itself as ”a teaching arm of the church,” according to Goodchild.
And the differences almost disappeared completely at one point during the Depression when there was serious talk of merging De Paul and Loyola as well as other Catholic colleges in the Chicago area. The idea was to save money and improve the academic programs.
The proposal, however, never got beyond the talking stage, Goodchild says.
