By Paul McMullen
Catholic News Service
EMMITSBURG, Md. — The new president of Mount St. Mary’s University, Simon Newman, told the executive search committee that after nearly three decades of “making very rich people richer,” he was looking for a change.
Newman founded software companies, led turnarounds, turned a tidy profit in the European pay-TV market and raised more than $3 billion in equity funding, but he has also been an RCIA instructor and a counselor of juvenile offenders.
Thomas H. Powell, the current Mount St. Mary’s president, announced last May that he would retire at the end of the 2014-15 school year.
Newman, 51, was named to the post Dec. 8 by the university’s board of trustees. The position rounds out a career that has brought him from his home in England, where he earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s in natural sciences from Cambridge University, to Brussels, where he worked for a cable film channel, Australia and an international consulting firm, and finally to the U.S. in 1987.
He currently is CEO of Cornerstone Management Group, a private equity, merger, acquisition and strategic consulting firm, and the managing director of JP Capital Partners, a private equity fund.
“Not only had he done his research about our history, he came in talking about the here and now of Mount St. Mary’s, and what opportunity sets he thought it had,” said John E. Coyne III, chairman of the university board of trustees. “The unique thing about private equity people, they connect dots very quickly.”
As president, Newman said, “we will be looking for ways to increase the brand value of the university.” The school has an endowment of $52.3 million, less than one-third that of Loyola University Maryland in Baltimore, the largest of the state’s three Catholic colleges.
Newman said that there are an “awful lot of foreign students who want to do a postgrad study,” and pointed to the potential for growth in biochemistry, a seeming natural given the university’s proximity to a technology corridor along I-270 in central Maryland.
In addition to his business career, Newman served as an extraordinary minister of Communion at London’s Westminster Cathedral. In the late 1990s, he began volunteering as a counselor and religious education instructor in the Los Angeles Juvenile Detention System.
For the past decade, he has been an RCIA instructor at St. Monica Parish in Santa Monica, California.
