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$5 Million Pledge Will Fund Three
Professorships
by Jack O’Connell ’81
When you ask Neil Prior how the Connecticut native ended
up in the Virgin Islands owning a telephone company, he says,
deadpan, "By total accident."
In fact, nothing seems very accidental about this world traveler’s climb
toward the kind of success that has allowed him to make an unprecedented $5 million
pledge to his alma mater – a pledge that will establish three professorships
in the Humanities. By means of a charitable remainder trust, Prior will create
the Rev. Gerard Mears, S.J., Professorship in Fine Arts, the Rev. Maurice F.
Reidy, S.J., Professorship in History, and the Stephen J. Prior Professorship
in Humanities.
"Neil has always been interested in the academic life," says
Holy Cross President Rev. Gerard Reedy, S.J. "He and
his wife, Trudy, are both multifaceted people. They’re
intellectuals and they’re extremely interested in and
supportive of the arts."
After meeting in the fall of 1994 at a Holy Cross Club
of San Juan reception, Reedy and the Priors became fast friends.
Since that initial meeting, Reedy has visited them each year
at their home in St. Thomas.
"I think Fr. Reedy and I have the same vision of the
College," Prior says. "I like what we’re
doing. I want to see a continued emphasis on academic excellence."
Academic excellence is something Prior knows about firsthand.
He graduated from his high school ranked third in a class
of 300 and was admitted to Dartmouth, Yale, and Amherst.
But there was a Holy Cross tradition in the family. Prior’s
father, Cornelius Prior, was a 1923 graduate, and a cousin
and an uncle had also studied on the Hill. One other factor
may have contributed to his choice of college -- the childhood
thrill of being taken to see Bob Cousy play against Trinity.
"So give the Cooz some credit for this donation," he
laughs.
There was also a spiritual component to his choice of Holy
Cross.
"I liked the idea of a religious education," he
explains. "I was a Catholic growing up in a Protestant
town. I didn’t know enough about my own religion and
I felt I needed to understand it better."
With an NROTC scholarship, Prior arrived on Mt. Saint James
in the fall of 1952 and declared himself an English major.
From the start, his teachers had a profound effect on him.
"I’ve established two of the professorships
in memory of the two teachers who had the most influence
on me," he says. "Fr. Mears was my corridor prefect
in O’Kane my freshman year. He was a very quiet, gentle
man. During my junior year, I took his Fine Arts course and
came to understand something I had previously known nothing
about. It was such an exciting and stimulating experience.
Fr. Mears was just a wonderful man who could convey his love
of the arts in a hundred ways."
That influence has endured. Prior has recently become chairman
of the Birch Forum in St. Thomas, a group dedicated to bringing
the fine arts to the island.
Prior’s second mentor at Holy Cross was the Rev.
Maurice Reidy.
"Fr. Reidy was the one who got me interested in fine
scholarship," Prior says. "We had a seminar in
Tudor-Stuart history that took place in his room in Wheeler.
That was the first time I really understood what the Harvard
Tutorial system was like and what it meant to get excited
about an intellectual subject, to run to the library and
start reading books on your own and getting into this little
world that had its own life. That was a very important thing
for me. Fr. Reidy ignited for me the life of the mind."
It was a fire that never diminished. Following three years
of service in the Navy on the USS O’Hare, Prior entered
Harvard Law School.
"The truth is," he says, "I was comfortable
with the intellectual challenge presented by Harvard because
of people like Fr. Reidy. To be honest, I don’t think
law school was up to the standards of Fr. Reidy. It was much
more lecture courses than intensive seminars."
During his last year at Harvard, Prior won a Fulbright
Fellowship and spent a year studying at the University of
Sao Paulo in Brazil, a country he’d come to know during
his first Naval cruise.
"The Navy gave me a taste for international travel," he
explains, "so it seemed natural for me to pursue international
law. That’s one of the reasons I took my first position
at (the law firm) Sullivan & Cromwell. They were very
big in international law. In time, this led to my move to
Japan as general counsel for a development company based
in Tokyo."
When asked about the travails of moving his entire family
to the other side of the world, Prior says, "It was
an adventure! In an odd way, it was akin to my wanting to
go to Holy Cross to discover what my Catholicism was all
about. I knew nothing about the East and here was an opportunity
to plunge into the middle of things."
Prior’s job took him all over Asia. "We lived
in Tokyo," he says, "but I spent a lot of time
in Korea, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Taiwan, which in
those days were still poor, developing countries. So I ran
around Asia trying to find projects that would simultaneously
make money and make an economic contribution to the area."
The experience, Prior says, ultimately got him interested
in the banking industry and he eventually returned to Manhattan
to become an investment banker with Kidder Peabody, working
mainly in the area of utilities.
Upon his return from Japan, he also reconnected with the
Holy Cross community, becoming an officer of the Holy Cross
Club of New York. But his strongest connection with the school
was born out of tragedy. In 1971, Prior’s seven-year-old
son, Stephen, drowned. Grief-stricken, he and Trudy set up
a memorial scholarship at the College.
"That led to a long correspondence with (then president)
Fr. Brooks," Prior says. "He’s a wonderful
man and he steered the school down the correct path."
The third funded professorship has been established in
memory of Prior’s son. The Stephen J. Prior Professorship
in Humanities has recently been awarded to Maurice A. Geracht,
a professor of English and a specialist in the works of Henry
James.
"Neil was very active on the Academic Planning Committee," says
Fr. Reedy. "He understands how essential these types
of professorships are to our continued pursuit of academic
excellence."
Prior also understands how to tell a good story. When pressed
to explain how he ended up living in the Caribbean as owner
of the Virgin Islands Telephone Corp., he says, "One
day a guy walked into my office at Kidder Peabody and said
he had just signed a contract to buy a telephone company
in the Virgin Islands. Could I help him find the $85 million
he needed to do this? At this same time, General Electric
purchased Kidder Peabody. Because I had been a shareholder,
I suddenly had some cash. So I gambled. I put up basically
everything I had and became a partner in the deal. In 1987,
without ever having been to the Virgin Islands except for
one vacation, we bought the company and I’ve lived
here ever since."
"It’s pure luck," he says, then pauses,
laughs, and adds, as if an afterthought, "and the ability
to finance the deal."
When asked what prompted him to make such a historic gift
to his College, Prior says, "I made this gift as a challenge.
And I guarantee that someone is going to come along to break
this record. It’s like the Olympics. I expect the record
to fall. And I hope it happens soon."
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