Loyola News

Future members of the Loyola community may well remember the 2009-2010 school year as the worst of times.

After all, Illinois cut funding to the MAP grant that goes to a quarter of Loyola students, Swine Flu sent us scrambling to the Wellness Center (lower right) and four of our fellow students passed away — and that was all before Haiti’s devastating earthquake struck in January (left).

But, as Dickens’ famous prose goes, this school year may also be remembered as the best of times: Our students and others successfully rallied to restore the MAP grant (below) and then went on to march on Washington to lobby for immigration reform, all the while supporting recovery efforts in Haiti.

This year, Loyola received the largest donation in university history when the Cuneo family donated their estate to their alma mater (above right), a $50 million donation.

Big changes also came to campus when Loyola announced its Reimagine campaign, a series of construction projects that will change forever the face of the Lake Shore campus. The announcement came on the heels of a September rollout of plans to add a Center for Varsity Athletics onto the side of the Gentile Center.

But also in September, U.S. News and World Report found that Loyola is 15th on a national list of universities whose 2008 class graduated in the most debt, ahead of more expensive area colleges like Northwestern University and the University of Chicago.

Market 820, a Loyola-owned dining facility on the Water Tower campus, earned a liquor license in the fall semester. That same semester, 17 students had to be hospitalized for suspected alcohol-related illnesses — nine more than the entire 2008-2009 school year.

Loyola students joined other Chicago colleges to create a flash mob supporting gay rights in the same month that Loyola student Sean Little faced felony hate crime charges for allegedly beating up Daniel Hauff (above left), a gay man, during an incident on the el. 

We even survived the CTA doomsday (top left) and a body washing onto the shore beside the IC (right).

Soon, Loyola will graduate its 140th class of students, and as we do, we hold in loving memory our friends and colleagues who passed away this year: senior Sarah Thomas, senior Liza Whitacre, freshman Nicole Dwyer, law students Daniel Krippes and Mark Greable and administrator Kay Buus.

Onward we go to 2010-2011.

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