Co-Authored by Andrew Stovenour
Transparency is a virtue, but not always a given. Cabrini alumni are still searching for transparency from the university.
As Cabrini enters its final year of operation, many questions remain about the school’s past financial dealings. Alumni wonder how Cabrini ended up in this position, and if this situation could have been avoided.
James Cooper, former vice president of Finance and Administration, who served under both former President Donald Taylor and President Helen Drinan, said in a statement to the Loquitur via email, “Cabrini leadership has been transparent with alums, employees, students, and the community about our financial challenges. The financial circumstances impacting Cabrini were discussed publicly in a Philadelphia Inquirer article from last November. It was subsequently picked up by other news outlets as well as social media and shared widely. In the article, Interim President Drinan was candid and clear about the financial challenges that Cabrini had been facing and the possibility for alternative options to resolve.”
However, Joe Johnson, president of the Cabrini alumni board of directors, disagrees. “That statement is unequivocally inaccurate,” he said.
A not-so-perfect picture
Johnson graduated from Cabrini in 2009, a dual major in history and political science. Johnson has been a member of the alumni board of directors since 2018, rising to the role of president in 2022. Transparency is an issue Johnson has had with the university since the announcement of a potential Villanova agreement.
“Publishing your financial laundry in a regional newspaper is not being transparent with the community. What is being transparent with the community is having those statements available for examination, for audit, years before this has happened, and being honest with how much money you’re actually 
spending,” Johnson said.
During the early stages of Johnson’s appointment as a board member, Cabrini appeared to be transparent with its alumni. The board was told by Taylor that university business was booming, and often about the new projects and initiatives Taylor’s administration planned to introduce. Since the announcement of the Villanova deal, Johnson said Cabrini has left him and his colleagues in the dark.
Like most Cabrini alumni, Johnson received word of the sale through a D3sports.com article this past June.
Johnson said, “Everybody was blindsided. Why did this happen? How did it happen? Who knows?”
In 2018, when Taylor was still president, Johnson and other members of the alumni board felt something was wrong, and began asking questions. According to Johnson, no matter how many times they asked, they were rebuffed. Members of Taylor’s administration, including former Acting President Brian Eury and Steven Highsmith, former vice president of Institutional Advancement, joined Taylor in painting the picture of Cabrini as a stable and flourishing university.
Fellow alumni board member Janet Gervais, Class of 1996, corroborated Johnson’s claims. Gervais added that it was like “pulling teeth” to get information from the Taylor administration.
The Loquitur reached out to Donald Taylor’s office multiple times for this article, but he did not respond. Additionally, Angela Buchanico, Cabrini executive director of Marketing Communications, said Drinan has no comment on communication with alumni during the Taylor administration.
Why did Cabrini lose money?
Following Taylor’s departure in 2022, Johnson said alumni were finally given an honest assessment of Cabrini’s financial situation.
“Interim President Drinan was transparent. From her view and the seat that she was sitting in, she was fully transparent with the financial state of the institution,” Johnson said.
During the Taylor administration, the university lost an estimated $35,516,479.
“I fully blame this situation on Donald Taylor for driving Cabrini to be something it never should have become,” Johnson said.
Johnson also believes that under the Taylor administration alumni engagement suffered drastically. “There was virtually zero engagement with major donors. You really didn’t see the level of donations coming into Cabrini as you saw under the Iadarola administration,” he said. “Previous leadership in the Office for Development and Alumni Relations did not focus on it the proper way. They just pretty much put their hand out, like, ‘Hey guys, give us money, we need money.’ Okay, well, where’s that money going? Like, why don’t you give us incentives?”
Johnson said the current leadership in the Development and Alumni Relations office is doing the right thing in terms of engaging with alumni. However, Johnson views this as lost time and wishes alumni engagement was better when he first signed on in 2018.
Cabrini is a small Catholic school, and Johnson believes it should have stuck to what the college was known for. “Cabrini was great because of the small class size. It was that personal relationship with the professors that you were able to cultivate. Professors care about their students, and they generally want you to succeed, and they spend time on you,” Johnson said.
An ill-fated transition
In 2016, Cabrini announced it would become a university. In a five–year span, the university announced new initiatives such as building a new dorm building, athletic facility, parking garage, and founding a nursing program.
The implementation of these projects directly correlates with Cabrini losing $23,599,012 during this five-year time frame.
Thomas Nerney, Cabrini Class of 1977, was a major benefactor in university projects and initiatives during the school’s transition from a college to a university. In 2016, Cabrini opened the Thomas P. Nerney Athletic Pavilion. The Loquitur reached out to Nerney for comment, but he declined our request.
Lori O’Fria Cellucci, Cabrini Class of 1987, said, “It was the beginning of the end when Cabrini decided to transition from a college to a university.”
Cellucci said this sentiment is prevalent among Cabrini alumni. She also believes that if Cabrini focused on the programs it was known for and expanded on them, the school would not be in its current position.
Further, Cellucci agreed with Johnson that alumni were asked by the university to provide donations to the new buildings, but were unaware of its accumulated debt.
Cellucci has a deep–rooted family connection to Cabrini, as her mother, Loretta Dellapia O’Fria was a member of the first Cabrini graduating class in 1961. In addition, Cellucci’s daughter, Gabrielle, graduated in 2022 as a communication major.
Gabrielle Cellucci was a member of the Loquitur editorial staff in 2021, and along with her fellow staff members began digging into the financial history of the institution.
“Gabrielle came to me and said, ‘Mom, I am scared the school is going to close,’” Cellucci said.
According to Cellucci, soon after the Loquitur began asking Taylor’s administration about issues relating to COVID-19 protocols and social problems on campus, the president’s office cut off all contact with the student newspaper.
Smoke and mirrors
According to Johnson, “The university should have focused on little niche departments. What ended up happening as the school tried to transition over to university status is that I think they were trying to chase more money to dump into the institution.”
The school was spending more money than it was bringing in, and Johnson believes Cabrini was basing its budget on projected enrollment numbers it failed to meet. “I don’t wanna call it smoke and mirrors, but it really felt like it. We saw things that were happening. But we were assured everything was fine, but obviously it wasn’t,” Johnson said.
On Wednesday, November 3, Johnson was informed by Laura Chisholm, executive director of Development and Alumni Relations, that the alumni board would be dissolved, effective immediately. This announcement coincides with the Villanova deal, and a plan to form a new alumni association that will be managed by Villanova University’s Office of Alumni Relations.
If interested, please fill out the Cabrini alumni volunteer interest form.
Go out to ProPublica and look at the nonprofit instituions’ annual Form 990, e.g., their tax returns. Cabrini’s most recent, 2022, shows an operating loss of 7.352 million. The annual losses go all the way back to 2013, every year! A quick tally shows over 45.479 million in losses over that time. This information is public access, available to all.
It is, therefore, hard for me to understand how anyone can claim they were blindsided by the school’s fiscal condition. A concerned stakeholder might well have, sometime around 2018 given the track record of losses at that time since 2013, started raising unholy hell about the fiscal hemorrhaging! At THAT point in time the consecutive annual losses totalled 23.635 million. As everyone knows, concurrently, the pool of entering college students is steadily dwindling and will for the foreseeable future. Given THAT knowledge, the annual losses should have been an especially alarming trend. Planning might have been undertaken to determine how to budget with less student tuition revenue, where to trim programs, how to economize.
Mostly, this all makes me very sad. I loved watching Cabrini soccer and LAX! I have been a fan for 25 years. I will miss it. The greater Main Line community will miss this institution. So farewell to a great school that didn’t have to disappear…
Great Job! I graduated in Dec. of ’19 and have the unfortunate luxury of knowing the issues with the school. The “smoke and mirrors” was Taylor trying to hide his errors from the board. Between pulling debt to build the new dorms when there wasn’t enough students to fill the existing buildings and the firing of administrators and professors in the business department who tried to expose and rectify the issues (which reminded me of the great purge) led me to the school would not last long after my own graduation. I remember arguing with DT’s staff and Robert Reese about donations and spending – I could use some colorful language to describe those interactions. At the end of the day, I believe it was in early ’19 sometime, the board found out they were being fooled – and with internal conflict and poor leadership from the administration, it all went down hill. It is truly sad. Although a shout-out is needed for the good ones. I wont name them in public but there were fighters in the administration and professor pools – they did what they could to try to change course but got shut down. Alum and students just need to know that this doesn’t define them or their education – this was the unfortunate result of poor cash management and strategic vision.
Nice work by a Cabrini newspaper.
Better than all the area papers have done in investigating how the COLLEGE got to this moment in time . The present President has not engaged alumni or key personnel in ANY decisions. The fact that some woman with no ties to the school should be making a decision to shut it down is a travesty. The alumni is not happy and nor should they be .