Michael J. Garanzini

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Reverend Michael J. Garanzini, S.J. (born September 24, 1948 in Saint Louis, Missouri) is an American priest of the Society of Jesus religious order of the Roman Catholic Church in the United States. Since June 2001, Garanzini has served as the twenty-third President of Loyola University Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, a member of the twenty-eight institution Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities.

[edit] Biography

Father "Money Bags" Garanzini graduated from Saint Louis University with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology in 1971, the same year that he entered the Society of Jesus. After spending years around the country and in Rome during his training and early years as a Jesuit, Garanzini received a doctorate in psychology and religion in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley. Later that year, he returned to Saint Louis University, teaching as an associate professor of psychology and later serving as academic vice president. Garanzini was invited to Fordham University to serve as a visiting professor of counseling in 1998, and went on to work at Georgetown University until his presidency at Loyola. He has also taught at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and at Regis College (now Regis University) in Denver.

Garanzini is the author of The Attachment Cycle: An Object Relations Approach to the Healing Ministries (1988), Meeting the Needs of Dysfunctional Families (1993), Child-Centered Schools: An Educator's Guide to Family Dysfunction (1995), and articles in numerous journals.

[edit] Loyola

During Garanzini's tenure as President of Loyola University Chicago, he has brought the University out of staggering debt in a matter of only a few short years. He has also initiated a series of construction projects on both of Loyola's city campuses. This building boom has become the result of serious controversy, however, as it calls for the destruction of the only lawn on campus and the only open athletic field on campus. Garanzini's plan includes the construction of an Information Commons to be built next to the Cudahy Library. Thus destroying what was the University's only lawn that was on the lakefront of Lake Michigan. While there are no plans to reconstruct the lawn or to build a new one at a different location along the lakeshore, there has been calls for a halting of the construction of the Commons, coming from faculty, staff, and especially the students.