As H. James Towey finishes his second year as St. Vincent College president, there are benchmarks he enjoys sharing, including a 38 percent rise in student applications and an endowment that grew by a third last year.

Yet whenever he speaks to campus groups he also must be ready to confront persistent rumors at the college.

He hopes to lay some of those to rest tonight at a town hall meeting he regularly holds with students. The meeting may also provide an opportunity to address a recent letter some faculty members sent to St. Vincent's board of directors that was highly critical of him.

As for the rumors, it's simply not true that he wants to require students to begin wearing uniforms, Mr. Towey told the campus last week in a recent blog. Nor is there a plan to make St. Vincent a dry campus, require prefects (residence hall assistants) to attend Sunday Mass or change the school's green and gold athletic colors.

And he does not intend to get a hair weave, either. "OK," he wrote. "I made that one up."

But levity aside, the rumors have surfaced as tensions have grown between part of the campus faculty and the ex-Bush administration aide.

He makes no secret that for all the college's gains, he remains unpopular with a portion of the Catholic Benedictine campus faculty that has never been fond of the school's second lay president, a man seen as more conservative than his predecessors.

The rift escalated recently with a letter sent confidentially to the school's board of directors and signed by about three-quarters of St. Vincent's tenured faculty. The letter asserted that Mr. Towey's actions had created "an unparalleled crisis."

It accused Mr. Towey of, among other things, sanitizing the self-study portion of the school's re-accreditation effort and displaying heavy-handed tactics in the search for an academic vice president.

"The faculty at Saint Vincent is gravely concerned about the current president's systematic and pervasive disregard for collegiality and shared governance," the letter began. It said that "much damage has already been done to the academic integrity" of the college.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette obtained the text of the letter, and the college verified its authenticity. Faculty contacted in recent months had generally declined to be interviewed about issues raised in the letter.

"What I make of it is these are growing pains of a college that is moving forward quickly," Mr. Towey said yesterday about the letter. "Creative people can disagree on issues of importance."

A lot has happened since the letter's submission to the board before its March 14 meeting, said Mr. Towey, who denied being heavy-handed and said language changes he sought on re-accreditation were not intended to sanitize it.

The directors passed resolutions that backed his actions but also urged him, the faculty and others to "work together in the Benedictine spirit of cooperation" to resolve tensions and follow campus procedures.

Mr. Towey, who served as a Cabinet-level assistant to President Bush and director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said he's met with about 25 of the letter signers and that a dialogue is under way.

Early on, some employees and alumni were irritated by a flurry of employee departures, an exodus not unusual after a new campus president arrives. Those tensions spiked after President Bush accepted Mr. Towey's invitation to deliver last spring's commencement address on the 1,900-student campus.

Sometimes, the goings-on have been bizarre.

Mr. Towey said that on one Sunday morning last fall, he encountered a stranger taking photos of his residence and tried to approach him, but the man jumped into a van and sped off. Mr. Towey said a photo of his house later appeared on an unofficial alumni Web site that for months has meted out anonymous attacks on his presidency.

Among the complaints were the college's decision to put a depiction of Mother Teresa, with whom Mr. Towey once worked, on the school Web site..

Susan Mitchell Sommers, head of the school's elected faculty council and one of the letter's 32 co-signers, declined to discuss the letter and said in a recent interview that the matter is better handled internally.

"We do have a relatively new president and he comes to us not out of academia, so there are going to be inevitable tensions, but I think that's just par. He's learning about us and we're learning about about him," said Dr. Sommers, history department chair.

J. Christopher Donahue, chairman of the college's board, said the matter is to be taken seriously, but is hardly a crisis.

He said many non-tenured members of the school's 120-member teaching force were not represented on the letter, and that the school, with its $70 million endowment, has never been in better financial health.

"Overall, Jim Towey has done an excellent job," he said.

Dan Brett, president of the student government that is hosting tonight's 9:30 forum in the Carey Center, said there is campus concern and a communication problem. But "the big problem are the rumors. The rumors have been ridiculous."