Access, Tradition that Benefits the World

With gratitude for his Holy Cross education, Tony Vacchione ’74 created the Bonnie and Tony Vacchione Memorial Scholarship, to honor the memory of his parents.

“Without their personal and financial support, I probably wouldn’t have gone to a school like Holy Cross,” Tony says. “For myself, and my brothers and sisters, they were always extremely generous and supportive.”

After Holy Cross, Tony went on to Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, before embarking on a 40-year career as an architect at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, LLP (SOM), the firm best known for designing Chicago’s Willis Tower and One World Trade Center in New York City. Tony spent his entire career at SOM, becoming a partner in the firm and focusing on transportation projects. He worked on the expansion of Terminal E at Boston’s Logan Airport, the development of Terminal 4 at New York’s JFK Airport and renovations at Dulles Airport in Washington, DC, plus projects in Ireland, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Singapore and Toronto.

“It kept my mind active, because I wasn’t doing the same thing all the time and I was meeting people with different values, different ideas. It keeps your mind open,” says Tony, who was a history major at Holy Cross and studied abroad in Vienna, Austria.

When Tony finished his education, he said he had some debt, but, thanks to his parents’ support, it was a manageable amount. But throughout his career, he noticed that the new young architects joining the firm were not always so fortunate.

“The amount of debt they were carrying was enormous, and it’s going to take years for them to dig their way out of it. That’s not a way of starting life,” Tony says. “It’s clear that even upper middle-class families are having a harder and harder time affording college, but we just can’t, in the end, have only very well-to-do families send their kids to school. That’s going to be detrimental to our country, because it means we’re creating a class that is going to have most of the benefits of society and other people very little of it, because you do need an education.”

A good education, and more specifically the Jesuit, liberal arts education at Holy Cross, is important to Tony and, he says, for the world. He supports financial aid to help ensure that a Holy Cross education is accessible to all, because he feels that the students who benefit from his scholarship will go on to impact a world in need.

“Holy Cross prepares students to have their minds open and be critical thinkers; to be able to encounter problems, be able to really investigate them and solve them for that they are, as opposed to becoming very focused in one area,” Tony says. “Having a broad education is an important asset. It’s a luxury, but I think it’s important, and so I enjoy contributing to Holy Cross so that tradition can continue. We need to be able to continue this tradition or, ultimately, we will lose out in the long run.”

Make a gift today in support of financial aid.