A study lounge in the student library at Villanova University was dedicated yesterday to the late professor Mine Ener before a group of about 100, while a tiny group of those opposed to the memorial stood outside.
“There were five of us,” said Matthew Clay, a Villanova freshman, who said the Catholic school should not appear to honor a woman who killed her 6-month-old baby and then herself in 2003.
Campus security kept television crews and other media well away from the low-key ceremony in the library. Anyone entering the library was required to sign in with a Villanova ID.
“It was private,” university spokeswoman Barbara K. Clement said of the ceremony to remember and honor Ener, a respected scholar of Middle Eastern culture who was noted as a mentor to many students.
Ener had given birth in early 2003 to a daughter, Raya, whose Down syndrome was not diagnosed before birth.
Raya required feeding through a nose tube, and friends said the exhausting practice, and despair about her baby’s prospects, took their toll on Ener.
She was reportedly taking antidepressants for postpartum depression and considering suicide when she returned to her family home in Minnesota.
Police were called to her mother’s home on Aug. 4, 2003, to find her with blood on her hands and the baby’s throat slit.
Police said Ener told them she considered the baby’s case “hopeless.” While in jail, she suffocated herself with a plastic bag.
Clement said that about 100 people attended the dedication of the new study lounge in Ener’s name. Her friends and family contributed funds for several chairs, a sofa, an Oriental rug and a small plaque, Clement said.
But Villanova senior Jeanne Marie Hoffman, editor in chief of an irregularly appearing conservative campus newspaper, had returned from semester break dismayed to find that the school planned to name a facility for someone who had committed the acts Ener had.
Hoffman said memorializing Ener that way ran counter to the Catholic Church’s teachings on the sanctity of life. With only about a day before the ceremony, she tried to rally opposition by Internet and word of mouth.
One of the other protesters, Kathy Clay - mother of Matthew Clay - said it would have been more fitting to have made donations in Ener’s memory to a Down syndrome support group or other organization.
Clement said that Ener’s friends wanted to honor her for her life, “not in her last days when she was extremely ill.”
Hoffman said she had not sought out anyone in charge of the ceremonies to express her concerns before going public with them. She said that many students were simply unaware of the issue because they had just returned from break.
She said the incident had inspired her to publish her paper, Villanova Times, which has not appeared in some time, more regularly.