A Brief History of Thomas Aquinas College
(Spring 2001 Newsletter)
Peter L. DeLuca III: Founding Catalyst
 “This
College simply wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for
Peter DeLuca.” Founding President Dr. Ronald McArthur
is direct and insistent when he describes the role Peter DeLuca
played in the founding of Thomas Aquinas College. “I
was the guy in the suit who would go talk, but Peter was the
one who found me people and places to go to.”
Peter L. DeLuca III – founding member, senior tutor,
business administrator, college fundraiser, building supervisor
– has done it all in his thirty-three year stint with
the College. But as DeLuca tells it, it all started with McArthur.
In 1961 DeLuca was a junior at St. Mary’s College, Moraga,
when he was captivated by the instruction of his new ethics
and philosophy professor. DeLuca had already come under the
influence of McArthur’s fellow Laval-trained Thomistic
philosophers there, brothers Duane and Marc Berquist, and
Br. Edmund Dolan.
A moment with Br. Edmund stands out in particular. “He
was making bed-check rounds one night around 11:00 p.m. He
came in and talked with my roommate and me about the disintegration
of Western Civilization. He started with William of Occam
and finished a sustained lecture about two hours later. It
was a moment of realization for us,” he said. McArthur’s
lectures then drove those points home.
DeLuca came to see that the roots of this disintegration
were intellectual, not political, and that the remedy lay
in education. The young student then decided he wanted to
spend his life helping to defend and restore Western Civilization.
Politics had been his primary interest. He helped launch
a conservative club and was active in the Young Republicans.
He organized a large event to bring William F. Buckley to
campus. But through the influence of McArthur and colleagues,
educational matters were to became DeLuca’s primary concern.
Following graduation in 1963, DeLuca married Kay Roberts,
a student from the San Francisco College for Women he had
met in his junior year. He also became the Western Regional
Director for the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, where
he coordinated speakers and events on educational matters
at Western colleges. Two years later, he became ISI’s
National Director in Philadelphia, but was forced to return
to Southern California the following year due to a family
illness. There he worked first as a personal assistant to
Henry Salvatori, the oil magnate and ISI benefactor, and then
again as ISI’s Western Director.
Throughout this time, he remained in touch with his professors
at St. Mary’s and later, with McArthur’s projects
within the Great Books program there. DeLuca sought to give
McArthur’s views an airing. He arranged to have McArthur
speak at the western meeting of the Philadelphia Society,
an ISI spin-off group he had recently helped form.
He then cultivated interest in McArthur’s prospective
talk. Among those he interested was Doyle Swain, a fundraiser
for what was then Pepperdine College. Swain met with McArthur,
and on hearing news that his prospects at St. Mary’s
had proven fruitless, persuaded the skeptical McArthur to
think about starting his own college.
ISI President E. Victor Millione then permitted DeLuca to
help McArthur on ISI time. After McArthur and Berquist produced
a draft of the new college’s founding document, DeLuca
had it typed and printed. He sent it to Henry Salvatori and
persuaded him to meet McArthur about it. Salvatori gave them
$10,000, the first seed money for the College.
The group then formed a corporation and used some of that
money to host a November 1968 conference on the founding document,
from which National Review columnist Russell Kirk wrote an
endorsement the following March. When the opportunity arose
to establish a joint campus with the Dominican College of
San Rafael in June 1969, DeLuca left ISI and became Thomas
Aquinas College’s original employee, opening an office
in an unused classroom.
He helped develop a fundraising brochure and helped McArthur
meet potential benefactors. He also helped organize the kick-off
fundraising dinner, and through various connections, engaged
the celebrated Archbishop Fulton Sheen and publisher L. Brent
Bozell as speakers.
Since then, DeLuca has been at the center of the College’s
development. He often looks back in amazement. “If we
had known then how difficult it would be, we probably never
would have tried it. But we could see over the years the Hand
of Divine Providence at work. We’ve always been conscious
that this was God’s work because of the many things God
did to make it happen. The whole is far greater than the sum
of our meager efforts.”
Over the past thirty years, he has worn almost every hat
in administration, in charge at various times of the College’s
business affairs, finances, fundraising, and development.
Probably the hardest aspect of his job, back in the early
years, he says, was trying to run the business office without
enough money. "For too many years, we were unable to
pay our bills promptly. This is not something I did in my
personal life, and I didn't like to do that for the College.”
“Eventually,” he says, “everyone was paid and
we never missed payroll. And now, thankfully, we have maintained
some measure of financial stability, and operate within our
budget. Our biggest challenge now is to raise enough funds
to complete the campus and fund our endowment. I'm confident
that will happen soon."
He is currently Vice President for Finance and Administration
and is also responsible for all building and construction
projects. And as a senior tutor, he has taught more than half
the courses in the curriculum.
In spite of his life-long contributions, DeLuca sees himself
more as a beneficiary. Three of his six children have graduated
from the College and one is a student now. “I’ve
been a customer as well as a producer. I have all the same
good feelings that other parents have because of that. And
also, it’s been a tremendous honor to spend my life doing
something so worthwhile and seeing it work. I feel as if I’ve
been able to strike a blow in favor of Western Civilization
after all.”
-- Qtrly Newsletter, Spring 2001
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