Dr. Antoine Garibaldi
In turn, whites fled. As years passed, the exodus they sparked also counted some well-off Blacks. Catholic schools that once put kids in the pipeline to Detroit Mercy — the result of a 1990 merger of the University of Detroit and Mercy College — relocated from the city to its suburbs.
“A lot [of] alumni said, ‘You should move,’” says Garibaldi, recounting entreaties made at the time to the campus’ heavily Jesuit and Sisters of Mercy administrators and faculty. “They said, ‘No, we are not going anywhere. This is where we started. This is our community.’”
Today, that resonates as a righteous defiance for Garibaldi, 70. He has sought to reaffirm what those leaders of Detroit Mercy — where 95 percent of the current 6,000 student enrollees get some amount of financial aid — asserted back then.
Garibaldi has spearheaded what, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, was the campus’ biggest freshman enrollment in a dozen years. That owed partly to what he refers to as “tuition reset” in 2018, when the price tag fell 31 percent, from $41,000 to $28,000 per academic year.
“It was a bold decision,” Garibaldi says. “The conversation we are having nationally about the amount of loans students are carrying is a serious topic. The amount of money for a master’s degree — not to mention a Ph.D. — is a serious issue. We cannot continue to price ourselves out of the market.”
Garibaldi has racked up other wins. Lauded by, among others, members of Detroit’s corporate and grassroots communities, those achievements include:
