View of UB from the top: Success

The view from the glass- walled, eighthfloor office of Neil A.

Salonen, president of the University of Bridgeport, is idyllic.

To the southwest,

Seaside Park and Long Island Sound — essentially parts of the campus — offer a stunning vista, even on a gray- veiled spring afternoon.

The old homes of the industrialists that the university acquired over the years appear as elegant Monopoly pieces from the eighth- floor perch.

Hard to believe today the fears — real ones at the time — that this place could have been a squatters’ colony.

That gruesome possibility was a nightmare shared by city leaders in 1990 when an insolvent UB was in crisis, insolvent, its faculty in rebellion, students fleeing and a third of the school’s 50 buildings empty.

Hence, the prospect of an 85- acre ghost town in Bridgeport’s South End.

Enter the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, controversial founder of the Unification Church, known best in the media at the time for its “Blessings” or mass wedding ceremonies and dark insinuations of cultism, and the Professors World Peace Academy, a church offshoot.

The PWPA offered a $ 50 million bailout in return for control of the school’s Board of Trustees, creating rifts and cries that now, though financially solvent, the university would become a base camp for the recruitment of “Moonies,” the pejorative of choice at the time for church followers.

Instead, the institution began a long climb back to stature.

The UB story, of course, is not dissimilar to that of Bridgeport itself, once a thriving industrial center, but forced by steady downturns to apply — unsuccessfully as it turned out — for bankruptcy protection.

The PWPA, we know now, provided not only money, but a stable of quality leadership, including PWPA president Richard Rubinstein, who served as UB president from 1995 to 2000, and Neil A. Salonen, a Unification Church member, who succeeded Rubinstein and who will retire at the end of this month.

One wall of Salonen’s eighth- floor office is pockmarked with nail holes left after the removal of pictures and mementos accumulated during his 18- year tenure. Salonen and his wife, Rebecca, are off to Maryland, where their grandchildren live, and also off to new ventures.

Salonen knew the Rev. Sun Myung Moon well.

“He was the most consistent man I ever met. I had no doubt that what he wanted to do here was to help and to advance his notion of global citizenship,” he said during a chat in his office.

Salonen grew up on Long Island. Of Scandinavian ancestry, the family was Lutheran but he attended Catholic grammar school.

As he puts it, “I was Lutheran by birth, educated by Catholics and, coming from Long Island, Jewish by osmosis.”

He came upon the Unification Church in his early 20s. He said he found answers there that had thus far eluded him.

The PWPA was another example of Moon’s work toward a better world, in Salonen’s view.

“In the late ’ 60s, Japanese and Korean political leaders could not even talk to each other,” he said. “But academics could.”

Moon, he said, seized on the possibilities the academic platform could offer for understanding and the PWPA was born.

His view on leadership is that it is the job of the leader is to motivate, “... to help every person in every corner of the organization. There’s very little the leader can control individually.”

Moon’s motive in helping UB, Salonen says, was simply to continue the work of creating a global community. Today, a third to a quarter of the school’s 5,000 students are international students, from some 80 different countries.

Its students, particularly in various areas of technological achievement, have won prestigious national awards.

It’s not hyperbole to say Salonen’s tenure stabilized and returned to health a patient that was in critical condition, but that his treatment of the patient was equally beneficial to the South End of Bridgeport specifically, and to the city as a whole.