Father O’Malley Has Already Stamped His Mark on Loyola : Education: Incoming president has won high praise and affection from students and faculty at the Jesuit university.

The three students entered the spacious, first-floor office at Loyola Marymount University last November to speak to the new president of the school, which sits atop a hill in Westchester chosen by Jesuits, men of God for whom intellectual detachment is a virtue.

Would the president, the students wanted to know, approve their campaign to raise $6,000 to bring the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt to campus in March?

The new president, Father Thomas P. O’Malley, not only granted the request, but he talked at length about the AIDS crisis. At the end of the meeting, he asked, “Well, aren’t you going to close the sale? . . . Don’t you want a donation?”

O’Malley then wrote out a check for $500.

If Jesuit reserve characterized Loyola Marymount and its presidents in the past, O’Malley is an academic Joshua come to blow the walls down.

Though he arrived only last summer and will be formally inaugurated on Tuesday, he has already inserted himself into every aspect of campus life, winning high praise and affection from students and faculty.

“In all honesty, everybody here loves him,” said student body President Greg Miller, who characterized the 62-year-old Jesuit scholar of early Christian Latin and Greek literature as “awesome.”

“He’s a very open person,” said Joelle Johnson, one of the students who met with O’Malley about the AIDS quilt. “Maybe I think he’s open-minded because he’s so willing to interact with so many different groups.”

O’Malley sings in the choir at Sunday Mass, attends lacrosse games, teaches and has been systematically speaking before every group at the school, sharing with students and faculty his vision for Loyola Marymount.

At his inaugural, he will trumpet another message: that walls are tumbling down in all quarters of Catholicism. The inaugural speaker is Sister Maureen A. Fay, a Dominican nun and president of University of Detroit Mercy, one of 28 American Jesuit colleges and universities.

“She is the first non-Jesuit to be president of a Jesuit university (in the United States),” O’Malley said. “And, of course, she is a woman, which I think is just terrific.”

O’Malley talks openly about the notion that women may yet be priests. Just because church doctrine does not now allow for it, he said, does not mean it will not happen.

“You don’t know what the church can do until she does it,” O’Malley said.

An imposing figure physically and intellectually, O’Malley has a taste for modern Japanese art, ancient choral music and Broadway plays. Between 1980 and 1988, he was president of John Carroll University in Ohio. After leaving there, he spent a year teaching in Nigeria and another year as New York theater critic of a Jesuit weekly.

When Loyola Marymount trustees set out to find a new president, they first took stock of the university, said Roland Seidler Jr., president of the trustee board. The 1973 merger between the once all-male Loyola and the once-all-female Marymount College in Palos Verdes had been cemented and the academic foundation had been enhanced, so the trustees wanted to turn outward, Seidler said in explaining why O’Malley was chosen.

“He is a very engaging person, a very bright person; he enjoys people, enjoys the community,” Seidler said. “At John Carroll . . . he was very successful himself in representing the university at the community level.”

Speaking strictly in terms of bricks, mortar and money, O’Malley said that during his tenure he hopes to complete the new Business School building and dorms and apartments to house 1,200 students. He also wants to expand the endowment fund in order to increase support for faculty salaries and student aid.

Of the 3,378 undergraduates, 36% are minority students. Minority recruitment and financial aid are strong commitments the university plans to maintain, O’Malley said.

On the academic and spiritual agenda, O’Malley said one goal is “to see us relating to the city and especially to the church in the city . . . the poor . . . the Asians, the Latinos, the black folks . . . people who have fallen off the edge of the table of society.”

With an aging faculty, O’Malley said he expects to do a lot of hiring. The challenge, he said, is to find top-flight academics “who also care a little more beyond the boundaries of their discipline” for the disadvantaged and for Mother Earth herself.

Lastly, O’Malley sees a need to maintain an ongoing dialogue on how the university can preserve itself as a place that seeks to educate people spiritually as well as academically.

“If we do nothing at all about it and have no vigorous conversations about it,” he said, “then, we’ll be just another excellent private institution that once had religious roots.”