Francis X. Shea

Francis Xavier "Frank" Shea (1926–July 9, 1977) was an American Jesuit priest and educator who served as president of the College of St. Scholastica and, after leaving the Jesuit order, as chancellor of Antioch College.

Biography Francis X. Shea was born in the Dorchester section of Boston, Massachusetts, in 1926. He attended the old Boston College High School in Boston's South End, graduating in 1943. Shortly after graduation, in July 1943, he entered the Jesuits and began several years of training and study at the Shadowbrook novitiate in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, and at the Weston Jesuit School of Theology in the Boston area. He acquired his first experience as an educator at St. George's College in Jamaica, where he taught high school from 1950 to 1953. In that position, he is remembered as an enthusiastic innovator whose effectiveness was sometimes diminished by his lack of administrative experience.

In 1974 Shea resigned both his position at St. Scholastica and his priesthood to marry Susan Gussenhoven, a physicist, then at Boston College, whom he had met when both were graduate students. Although he resigned his priesthood, he did not leave Roman Catholicism. He moved to Ohio to become chancellor of Antioch College. He presided over Antioch during a period of financial difficulties and other disarray at the school. Describing the school as he found it, he said: "The entire administration has levitated out of sight, departed, or become otherwise incapacitated or unavailable." Shea's widow, Susan Gussenhoven Shea, has donated forest land in Corinth, Vermont, to the town for establishment of a town forest to be named the "F.X. Shea Forest" in his honor.