Domino's Pizza Founder to Open Ave Maria University in Florida

By Catholic News Service
(From the issue of 11/28/02)

NAPLES, Fla. (CNS) -- Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino's Pizza, is putting about $200 million toward the opening of a new Catholic university outside of Naples and building a town to go with it.

The school, Ave Maria University and its accompanying town, Ave Maria, are expected to be completed by 2006.

"We wanted to build a major Catholic university in the southern part of the United States with the highest standards," Monaghan said Nov. 20. "I can't think of a better place than one of the fastest-growing areas in the country."

Monaghan, who was also a former owner of the Detroit Tigers and is current chairman of the Ave Maria Foundation, sold his pizza chain in 1998 and donated some of the proceeds to the Ave Maria Institute, a two-year Catholic college in Michigan that grew into the four-year Ave Maria College, now set to become Ave Maria University.

Ave Maria University will be the first major new Catholic university in the United States in 40 years. Its town will have an integrated town-university center and will be developed in phases in conjunction with the school. The campus will cover approximately 750 acres, including a golf course.

Construction has already begun on a seven-acre interim campus for the university in Naples, with classroom buildings, student and faculty residences, a campus chapel and an indoor-outdoor recreational facility, that will be ready for the fall of 2003. The permanent campus, scheduled to open in 2005 or 2006, is about 15 miles away on farmland that is surrounded by undeveloped woods and adjacent wetlands.

The development of the town of Ave Maria, including residential areas for university students and faculty, will be a joint venture between the school and the Barron Collier Companies, a major southwest Florida real estate and agricultural company that currently owns the property. The partners plan to invest more than $100 million to create the first phase of the town.
Florida Gov. Jeb Bush congratulated all those responsible for their dedication to making a new major Catholic university in Florida a reality.

"As a Catholic, I am very proud that students will be able to obtain an education with the highest academic standards and with a firm grounding in religious and moral values," he said in taped remarks during the Nov. 20 press conference in Naples.

The university is planning initially to have 650 students at the new campus and to grow to approximately 5,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The school will have a full curriculum of traditional liberal arts, sciences and engineering programs and a comprehensive graduate program offering master's and doctoral degrees.

Officials at Ave Maria had announced last spring that they were seeking a location and that the Naples area was of particular interest. Initially, Monaghan had intended to build the university near Domino's headquarters in his home town of Ann Arbor Township, Mich., but the town rejected the school's zoning requests.

Nicholas Healy, the current president of Ave Maria College, who also will be the president of Ave Maria University, said the Ave Maria College campus in Ypsilanti, Mich., will remain open for at least four more years, until all of its 230 students graduate or transfer to the Florida campus.
Also located in Michigan is the Ave Maria School of Law in Ann Arbor. It also was launched with principal initial funding by Monaghan and opened two years ago. The dean is Bernard Dobranksi, former dean of the law school at The Catholic University of America in Washington.
Bishop John J. Nevins of Venice, which includes the Naples area, described having the new Ave Maria University in his diocese as "exciting to think that our diocese will include what may some day become the Notre Dame of the South."

Michael Healy, a former dean at Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio, and no relation to Nicholas Healy, will be the university's provost, and Jesuit Father Joseph Fessio, founder and editor of Ignatius Press, will be the chancellor.

President Healy said that the Catholic educational market in southwest Florida is underserved and locating Ave Maria in the area "will raise the visibility of Catholic higher education that can benefit all Catholic colleges and universities in the South."

Noting the rapidly growing Hispanic Catholic population in the United States, Father Fessio said the new university "will be positioned to help prepare these Catholics for future leadership roles." Florida's proximity to Central America will be beneficial because Ave Maria already operates an international campus in Nicaragua, he added.

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