It is with deep sadness that I announce the passing of distinguished Associate Provost for Athletic Affairs, Dr. Primo Juan Gomes de Farandula, M.D., PhD. Since arriving to Willard, Dr. Gomes de Farandula shepherded our athletics program from the shadow of criminal indictment to its current position. Born in Spain in 1910, Gomes de Farandula saw action during what he referred to as the “so-called Spanish Civil War.” Following the triumph of Franco, Gomes de Farandula worked in data collection and internal security before earning a medical degree. Thanks to his ground-breaking  research on the impact of electrical currents on brain function, Dr. Gomes de Farandula enjoyed a successful career at a string of state-run hospitals. Following the end of the regime that he helped to establish, Gomes de Farandula wandered the globe, with sojourns in Chile, Indonesia, and Guatemala, before finding his “home away from home” at Willard Psychiatric Hospital. One of the last remaining former hospital employees to transition to higher education, Gomes de Farandula was a tireless advocate of college athletics, which he once described as the “purest, most direct, form of the organic and corporatist perfection. In a society that degenerates before our very eyes, as corrosive and illegitimate ideas destroy our young people, it is athletes which protect that which is most exalted.” Inspired by the medieval Spanish legal doctrine of the fuero, the good doctor held that athletes, like clergy and the military, should only be accountable to themselves. Dr. Gomes de Farandula also put his medical training to good use, and was able to definitively disprove “the s0-called concussion crisis in college football.”

In his later years, Gomes de Farandula made his way around campus by golf cart, often accompanied by the many assistant coaches who he had brought on staff. Despite suffering from diabetes, dementia, progressive general paralysis, and a host of other ailments, he continued working until he drew his last breath. There are no known survivors.

With heavy heart, Dr. Henry Cotton