A contributor and volunteer fund-raiser for Wheeling Jesuit University has withdrawn his promised support amounting to $650,000 in cash and property bequests in protest of the firing in August of Rev. Julio Giulietti, SJ, as president.
The firing was “the most cowardly, deceitful and morally perverse action that I have ever witnessed,” said Stephen E. Haid in an Oct. 18 letter to interim President J. Davitt McAteer. Blithe Spirit has obtained a copy of the letter.
Haid, a 1963 graduate of Wheeling Jesuit and longtime teacher at West Virginia University until becoming a teachers union lobbyist and then campaign chairman and later cabinet member in Gov. Gaston Caperton’s administration, blames the firing on three people or groups:
* Bishop Michael Bransfield of Wheeling, who “wanted to slap [Giulietti] down” because Giulietti “sought to acquire the [adjacent] Mount de Chantal property for Wheeling Jesuit.”
* “An element on the Board of Directors . . . who want to micromanage the University, who want any president to be an errand boy.”
* The three Jesuit trustees who “in an irregular night session” voted to fire Giulietti.
Haid was named last March by Giulietti as one of two Special Assistants to the President for Advancement to work on planned giving, endowment development and alumni partnerships, with an office on campus.
It was a continuation of his working “very closely” with Giulietti “for at least a year,” he said in his letter.
Among Haid’s other activities is to serve with Bishop Bransfield on the board of the West Virginia KIDS COUNT Fund, founded in 1989 by Gov. Caperton, who later became president of The College Board.
Haid has also served on the board of governors of Marshall University, in Huntington, WV — at one time as a member of its executive committee.
Blithe Spirit 
