St. Bonaventure University is mourning the loss of its president, Dennis R. DePerro,
who died on Monday from complications of Covid-19. He was 62 and had been hospitalized since late December.
His death dealt a devastating blow to the Franciscan campus of around 2,000 students in Western New York, where he was remembered as a collegial leader who helped increase enrollment, expand graduate programs in the health sciences, and give faculty members a sense that their concerns really mattered.
“He was too young to go. He had just started here and had so many good plans,” said Anne Foerst, chair of the Faculty Senate. “It’s just an incredible loss.”
DePerro, who became president in 2017, tested positive for Covid-19 on Christmas Eve and was admitted to the hospital five days later, after developing pneumonia. In mid-January, university officials said, he was put on a ventilator. Last month, more than 600 people attended a gathering on Zoom to pray for his recovery.
Like other colleges, St. Bonaventure had pushed the start of the spring semester back, to January 25, and about 85 percent of the university’s classes this spring have been in person. But while students welcomed the opportunity to reconnect with their peers amid hopeful signs that the pandemic was receding, their president’s health remained precarious.
During that time, St. Bonaventure’s provost, Joseph Zimmer, was named acting president. “Words simply can’t convey the level of devastation our campus community feels right now,” he said in a statement posted on the university’s website.
“I know when people die it’s become cliché to say things like, ‘He was a great leader, but an even better human being,’ and yet, that’s the absolute truth with Dennis. We are heartbroken.” Zimmer will remain as president until the Board of Trustees meets to work on a succession plan.
The university’s spokesman, Tom Missel, said what he’ll miss most is his boss’s “uncanny ability to make you feel better even on your worst days.”
The last time David B. Couturier, a professor of theology and Franciscan studies, saw the president was a few weeks before he entered the hospital. He was late for a meeting with the university’s priests and brothers and they called to check on him. “When he arrived, he told the truth,” Couturier wrote in an email. “He had fallen asleep in his chair after a hard day at work. We all laughed. It only deepened our respect for a leader we had already come to love and trust. He was authentic; he was credible. He told the truth, as he had always done.”
Foerst said she appreciated the president’s respect for shared governance. “He took the Senate very seriously and always, before he made any decision, would contact me,” she said. It wasn’t just a pro-forma call, she said. He’d listen to her and “either he would convince me or he would change his mind.”
DePerro, she said, supported the faculty’s efforts to raise salaries. “Under his leadership, the Senate has been full, which tells you a lot. He was listening to us.”
John Sheehan, chair of the university’s Board of Trustees, said DePerro exceeded the high expectations the board had when it selected him as president in November 2016. “To see the position he’s put us in, through his collaborative nature with trustees, administrators, faculty, and students, will forever be a testament to his remarkable leadership,” he said in a statement. “The immense grief we all feel extends beyond the campus community,” to the alumni and colleagues at every college where he’s worked, Sheehan added.
In less than four years, the enrollment and marketing strategies DePerro helped oversee brought in the three largest freshman classes over the past 11 years. While the pandemic was causing enrollment to slump at other private colleges, the influx of new graduate students meant it was up this year at St. Bonaventure.
Before coming to St. Bonaventure, DePerro served for 18 years as vice president for enrollment management at Le Moyne College, a private Jesuit institution in Syracuse. He became the inaugural dean of Le Moyne’s school of professional studies and used that experience to help launch St. Bonaventure’s new School of Health Professions. The school “was a big thing for a tiny university like ours,” Foerst said.
Student journalists also appreciated DePerro’s willingness to be straight with them, even when the stories they were uncovering didn’t shed the best light on the university, said Sean Mickey, a senior who is a campus reporter and student-government representative.
Among those paying tribute to DePerro was the Rev. James J. Maher, C.M., president of Niagara University. “While on the surface our schools appear to be competitors, in reality we have collaborated with Dr. DePerro and St. Bonaventure to advance the mission of Catholic higher education in our region and across New York state,” he wrote. The president’s death, he added, “is a great loss for all of us.”
Flags will fly at half staff through the end of March in honor of the president, who is survived by his wife, Sherry, and two sons.
