.- A commercial that features Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, surrounded by beautiful women, led to the resignation of a Thomas Aquinas College board member yesterday.
The president of the Catholic college, Thomas Dillon, announced that Andrew Puzder, president and CEO of CKE Restaurants, Inc., resigned from the college's board of governors.
CKE Restaurants recently launched an ad campaign for its Carl's Jr. restaurants those features Hefner “surrounded by beautiful women, philosophizing about how men require variety just before he bites into a bacon-cheeseburger. He adds that he loves bacon cheeseburgers, but wouldn't have them for dinner every night, touting the array of choices at Carl's Jr,” reported the Associated Press.
"Thomas Aquinas College stands for principles that are in direct conflict with those of Hefner and Playboy,” said college president Thomas Dillon in a press release. “I spoke with Mr. Puzder … about this issue, and it was agreed that he would resign from the college's board, effective immediately."
"It's common knowledge that Hugh Hefner and Playboy stand for hedonism and unbridled pleasure-seeking, and that is impossible to reconcile with what we stand for," Ann Forsyth, a spokeswoman for the college, told the AP.
Puzder declined to comment
Thomas Aquinas College is a highly ranked Catholic college located in Ventura County, California. It offers a four-year program of Catholic liberal education, devoted to the study of the Great Books, using only the Socratic method of dialogue in all of its classes. There are no textbooks, no lectures and no electives. Instead, the college offers an entirely integrated curriculum using only the original texts of the greatest thinkers who have helped shape Western Civilization. These authors include St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Augustine, Aristotle, Plato, Shakespeare, Euclid, Dante, Galileo, Descartes, the American Founding Fathers, Adam Smith, Copernicus, Kepler and Newton.
