in Maryland, where he received degrees in English literature and philosophy. He spent four years at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium, receiving a Licentiate of Sacred Theology. He then completed a year of postgraduate work at the University of Valencia in Spain. Healy returned to the United States and taught English at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. In 1953, he was ordained a priest, and he received his Master of Arts in English literature from Fordham University. He then completed his education in 1965 at the University of Oxford, earning a Doctor of Philosophy in English literature. His doctoral thesis, titled John Donne's Ignatius His Conclave: An Edition of the Latin and English Texts with Introduction and Commentary, was published by Oxford University Press. Healy returned to Fordham University, where he began teaching. Shortly thereafter, the Jesuit superiors at Fordham noticed his potential as an administrator. First named the director of alumni relations, he rose to become the executive vice president of the university. In this office, he was responsible for increasing the number of minority students at Fordham. In 1968, Healy attempted to establish a new liberal arts college for poor students in the Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn; this project did not materialize for lack of funds. City University of New York In 1969, Healy was appointed the vice chancellor for academic affairs of the City University of New York. The arrangement of a Catholic priest occupying a senior administrative role at an American public university was highly atypical; Healy donated the salary he drew from CUNY to the Jesuits and lived at America House, the Jesuit residence in Manhattan. Healy saw as his primary mission the return of CUNY to its founding purpose: the education of the poor. At the time he assumed office, there was an ongoing controversy over whether to implement an open admissions plan, which would guarantee every graduate of a New York City high school admission to a CUNY college, regardless of their academic performance. That year, CUNY, as well as the entire city government, faced a budgetary crisis so severe that the chancellor, Albert H. Bowker, announced that without outside funding from New York State, no freshman class could be admitted in 1969. At the same time, black and Puerto Rican students increasingly protested what they considered inadequate representation at CUNY colleges. The significant majority of students at the City