“I had this fantasy the whole time I was at Notre Dame,” says a young alumnus named Kevin O’Reilly. “One night, I would climb the fire escape and talk to Father Ted.”
Every student at the University of Notre Dame has heard the story. It is chapter 1, verse 1 of a collection of tales — a kind of folklore — that has grown up around the Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh, who has been Notre Dame’s president for 30 years, longer than anyone now in office has been head of a major university.
He routinely works until 2 or 3 or 4 a.m., warding off the early morning chill with a charcoal-grey cardigan over his priest’s garb. His drafty office is cheered by the strains of classical music from a Magnavox stereo, the gift of an admirer. He interrupts himself only to change the record or to eat canned soup warmed on a hot plate in a small room next door.
Anyone, even a freshman, can meet him face to face, so the story goes. Look for the light in the window of the gold-domed building in the wee hours. Climb the fire escape. Rap on the window. He’ll let you in.
Few students do it. Not because of the physical exertion required — the office is only on the third floor. The problem for most is that meeting Father Hesburgh means coming face to face with the stuff of legend. “Some people here have Hesburgh almost canonized,” says one faculty member.
Theodore Hesburgh set out 30 years ago to transform Notre Dame into a “great Catholic University,” and, in the attempt, transformed himself into a national figure who is influential far beyond his roles of Catholic priest and university president.
Father Hesburgh has been tapped for advice or service by every American President since Eisenhower. He has headed or served on the boards of organizations as diverse as the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, the Chase Manhattan Bank, the Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy, and the Presidential Clemency Board, which decided the fate of young men who dodged the draft during the Vietnam War. Most recently, he served at President Reagan’s request among those monitoring the election in El Salvador.
“For every thing I take on, I turn down 10,” Father Hesburgh says. He turned down Lyndon Johnson’s request that he head the space effort, and he declined when Richard Nixon asked him to take over the poverty program.
(Father Hesburgh recalls that he said to Nixon, “Well, the poverty program is a mess and I think I can clean it up and make it work, but it would make you the most unpopular guy in the country, because it’s turned into a patronage program for all the big-city mayors who’ve got all their buddies making $30,000 a year. The first thing I’d do is fire the whole kit and caboodle, and every mayor in the U.S. would be unhappy, beginning in Chicago and going to Atlanta. The farther south you go the more unpopular you’d be because I’m a priest.”
(“So [Nixon] thought a minute,” Father Hesburgh continued, “and said he hadn’t thought of that. And I said, ‘I’ll forget you ever mentioned it.’ ")
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He has received numerous awards, including the Medal of Freedom, this country’s highest civilian honor, and the Meiklejohn Award for academic freedom of the American Association of University Professors. He holds honorary degrees from 90 colleges and universities, replacing Herbert Hoover (had 89) in the Guinness Book of World Records. His most recent honor, the Jefferson Medal, was awarded last Saturday in Washington by the Council for Advancement and Support of Education at a ceremony attended by — among others — the representatives of those 90 colleges and universities.
Father Hesburgh has become known as a champion of human rights and moral causes at home and abroad. After United States forces invaded Cambodia in May, 1970, and students were killed at Kent State and Jackson State Universities, Father Hesburgh was the main speaker at a protest rally at Notre Dame. In a sermon at mass a week later, he said that an Administration that would continue the Vietnam War was composed of “mental midgets.”
In 1972, President Nixon fired Father Hesburgh from the chairmanship of the Civil Rights Commission after he publicly criticized the Administration for its antibusing policies and for dragging its feet on enforcing integration.
“Every kid in the country stands up and say, ‘One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all,’” Father Hesburgh said. “But for the Negro, there’s neither liberty nor justice.”
He has been a leader in trying to deal with world hunger. In 1979, when reports surfaced of mass starvation in war-torn Cambodia, he headed a relief effort that raised $70-million in five months.
Most recently, Father Hesburgh has played a key role in organizing an international movement against nuclear weapons among educators, scientists, and church leaders.
Last month, he helped organize a meeting on the nuclear-arms race that was attended by some of the world’s top scientists — including several from the Soviet Union. Convening in Rome under the auspices of the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Scientists, the scientists presented Pope John Paul II with a statement denouncing nuclear weapons and calling upon all nations to take steps to “curb the development, testing, production and deployment of nuclear weapons systems.”
Father Hesburgh’s activities have required that he spend much of his time away from the Notre Dame campus, eliciting criticism from some here — mainly students. There’s an old joke they like to tell that goes:
QUESTION: What’s the difference between God and Father Hesburgh?
ANSWER: God is everywhere. Father Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame.
The butt of the joke does not take it too seriously, “I’m away from campus at most 40 percent of the time,” he says. “And when I’m here, I work double shifts, so they are getting more than 100 percent of me here.”
He usually appears in the office around noon, taking phone calls, holding conferences, and receiving visitors during the rest of the afternoon. After a meal with his fellow priests, he returns to the office and settles in for the famous long night.
“He’s blessed with great good health and needs less sleep” than most people, says the Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, executive vice-president of the university and a friend and colleague of Father Hesburgh’s for 30 years.
In addition to “doing an awful lot while other people are sleeping,” Father Hesburgh says he has “developed the facility to do one thing at a time and give full attention to that while I’m doing it.
“It’s a question of concentration, of being able to read fairly quickly, and of being able to make decisions without worrying about them. They’re not all going to be right, but if the majority are, you’ll get through the night.”
When he finally quits for the night and flops down on a cot in his cubicle in the priests’ residence, he falls asleep immediately. “I don’t lose sleep,” he says.
Those who work most closely with him say they find themselves adapting to his schedule. In addition, they say, he is a “superb delegator” who, in the words of the Rev. John J. Egan, his special assistant, “never interferes with your job.”
“You can’t do outside things if you’re a ‘busy’ administrator,” says Father Hesburgh. “When I get out of here, I’m out of here. There’s no calling back or having mail delivered in the field. When I come back, they bring me up to speed right away.
“You learn to have good people associated on tasks and give them their heads and let them do the job without second-guessing them.
“If that’s true, you can multiply yourself 100 times.”
Nevertheless, Father Hesburgh makes many of the decisions affecting Notre Dame and all of the major ones, according to Timothy O’Meara, Notre Dame’s provost. “Those decisions made without his signature are infrequent,” Mr. O’Meara says.
Even the decisions made by others bear his input. “The fact that I’m in this job indicates a certain compatibility of point of view,” Mr. O’Meara says.
Although Father Hesburgh is, according to those who work most closely with him, a strong, decisive administrator who knows what he wants, that does not mean he is closed to argument or new ideas. “He encourages you [to disagree with him],” says Father Egan. “He doesn’t like soft people who say yes to him on everything, who will break apart just because he says this or that or disagrees. He likes good discussion, people with strong opinions.
“But he and the rest of us know who’s boss.”
Father Hesburgh’s management style annoys some at Notre Dame who feel they occupy the lower echelon in the hierarchy — primarily faculty members. They call his style “paternalistic” and say they would prefer a more collegial approach.
“The whole structure of the university is designed to keep other sources of power from emerging,” says Vaughn R. McKim, professor of philosophy and chairman of the faculty senate. “There is no direct access to decision making.”
Faculty members made an abortive attempt to unionize in 1977. Today, although there is an A.A.U.P. chapter on campus, it has very low visibility. “This faculty has relatively little experience in governance,” says Thomas R. Swartz, professor of economics. “It would take something pretty drastic to get them agitated.”
Although many faculty members may be unaware of it, and none would like to admit it, that may have to do partly, he says, with the “Catholic mentality regarding authority. Perhaps it’s a willingness to accept authority in the old Catholic sense of ‘do what the good Father says.’ "
In the case of Notre Dame, a lot of it has to do with who the “good Father” is. Father Hesburgh rules through persuasion and “the sheer power of his force of personality,” says Mr. McKim.
“People have respect for him and can see what he has accomplished,” says Mr. O’Meara.
Father Hesburgh became president of Notre Dame in 1952, when he was a 35-year-old priest in the Congregation of the Holy Cross and it was a small, somewhat parochial institution better known for its “Fighting Irish” football teams than for academic excellence. “Before World War II, this was basically an undergraduate school that carried the name ‘university,’ " says Mr. O’Meara, the provost.
Father Hesburgh’s conviction that Notre Dame had to overcome its “football factory” image jelled at one of his first press conferences as president.
He came prepared to talk about academic programs. Only sportswriters attended. At one point, a photographer tossed him a football and asked him to pretend to hike it.
The drive toward academic excellence became “the overriding passion of his life,” says Father Joyce. Money was a key. “If you take 10 universities in the country with the largest endowments, you will likely have the 10 best universities,” Father Hesburgh says.
With Father Joyce, a fiscal conservative who trained as an accountant before joining the priesthood, carefully shepherding the university’s tiny endowment — about $9-million in 1952 — Father Hesburgh set about hiring new faculty members, appointing new deans, building new buildings, and placing more emphasis on graduate studies and research.
It was a “traumatic change,” says Mr. O’Meara. Notre Dame, at the beginning of what many like to call the “Hesburgh era,” was rigid and anachronistic. Legally, the university was run by the Congregation of the Holy Cross, and the order’s priests dominated the administration and faculty. (In 1967, Notre Dame because the first Catholic university to transfer power to a lay board of trustees.)
Although strong in the physical sciences — most notably chemistry — and mathematics, Notre Dame was weak in the humanities and social sciences. There was no psychology department, and the religion department confined itself to teaching accepted church dogma.
Through a long, often painful, but never slackening process, Father Hesburgh gradually succeeded in bringing Notre Dame “into the mainstream of American life,” the late George N. Shuster, a Hesburgh adviser and former president of Hunter College, said in 1969.
“It was a very exciting time. We had a sense of a new world to create,” says Mr. McKim, the faculty-senate chairman. He arrived at Notre Dame in the mid-1960’s, fresh from a doctoral program at Yale University, one of many promising young scholars lured by the university’s goal of becoming the best it could be academically.
In addition to attracting new talent, the Hesburgh era saw a rise in endowment from $9-million to $215-million, putting Notre Dame in the top 20 of all universities in the country. “We had more endowment than Harvard had at the end of World War II and they’re a lot older than we are,” says Father Hesburgh proudly. A recent five-year fund-raising campaign brought in $180-million, $50-million more than the goal.
In its efforts to attract top-rank faculty members, Notre Dame has added 61 endowed chairs, of $1-million each. They helped the average faculty salaries reach respectable levels, ranging in 1981-82 from $21,400 for instructors to $36,200 for full professors.
Enrollment, now 9,000 including undergraduate and graduate students, is nearly double what it was in 1952. Research grants have increased sixteenfold to $12-million. Forty new building have been constructed, including an $8-million library and a $9.3-million chemistry-research facility, dedicated just last week. Construction is under way on a new $6.2-million office building for the faculty of arts and letters. And although the library is still small in comparison with other major research universities — the Association of Research Libraries ranks it 96 out of 101 — it contains four times the number of volumes it did when Father Hesburgh took over.
Exactly how good Notre Dame has become is, of course, difficulty to judge. Father Hesburgh says he “feels happy about the place,” but “I’m not going to tell you it’s as good as it should be in every way.” The graduate school needs upgrading, he says, and so does the library. And he would like “every professor in the place to have an endowed chair.”
“The main thing is to keep moving forward,” he says. “The day you stop, you’re dead.”
Officials at Notre Dame used to take pride in calling it a “Catholic Princeton,” or the “Harvard of the Midwest.” Now, says Richard W. Conklin, director of information services, “with increasing self-confidence, we say we’re not modeled on any place else; we’re just unique.”
All along, Father Hesburgh has been determined to refute George Bernard Shaw’s observation that “a Catholic University is a contradiction in terms.” That has meant emphasizing the quality of scholarly endeavor, without abandoning a commitment to moral leadership and to infusing a sense of values into the educational process.
In recent years, though, the drive toward excellence has resulted in a curious side effect. Although the undergraduate student body has remained solidly Catholic — at present about 92 percent — that is not the case with the faculty. Several years ago, Notre Dame administrators reached the conclusion that in 15 or 20 years, given current hiring trends, many departments would have few Catholic faculty members and some departments would have none.
Top officials began to put renewed emphasis on maintaining the university’s “Catholic character.” That meant, in addition to stressing the importance of values, hiring more Catholic faculty members.
The issue has become “a bucket of worms I don’t think anyone can get untangled,” says Mr. Swartz, echoing the comments of many other faculty members. “It’s clear that if you have no Catholics on your faculty, you’ll no longer be a Catholic university.”
But like many of his colleagues, he says that it is difficult to measure such things reliably, to know “what a ‘Catholic’ is” and “what number is enough.”
“It’s an unresolvable kind of tension,” says Robert A. Vacca, professor of classics and former chairman of the faculty senate. “There is a small pool of people. We have to bid for them with the Harvards and the Berkeleys. [The administration] wants two different values: they want impeccable scholarship and religious, moral commitment. You don’t get the two of them in one package.”
While some criticize the university’s top administrators for pressuring departments to hire Catholic faculty members, other contend that those officials are not making enough of an effort when it comes to recruiting and hiring women and members of minority groups.
A few years ago, about half of the university’s female faculty members sued the university. The suit, which sought to prove that Notre Dame had discriminated against women in hiring, promotion and tenure, was settled out of court last year.
Today, how female faculty members feel about the way they are treated appears to vary from department to department. “My department has been lovely to me,” says Wendy A. Carlton, an assistant professor of sociology. “There is no intentional or unintentional sexism.” Nevertheless, Ms. Carlton and other says they do not see a sufficiently strong commitment to hiring and promoting female faculty members.
The number of minority-group faculty members — 59 total, 16 black, according to 1981-82 figures — has remained fairly constant over the last few years, according to Joseph W. Scott, professor of sociology, who is black.
In addition to citing the statistical evidence, some critics say the university has a “poorly organized” and “ineffectual” affirmative-action plan and offers “limited upward mobility,” in the words of James B. Stewart, formerly the director of the university’s black-studies program and now an assistant professor of economics at Pennsylvania State University.
Nicholas F. Fiore, a white former professor, says that when he was chairman of the department of metallurgical engineering and materials science, “we worked hard on affirmative action,” and Father Hesburgh strongly encouraged those efforts. “He at one point said, ‘There won’t be another engineering faculty member hired unless he’s black.’ "
The university’s record on minority-group enrollment at the undergraduate level has been the subject of much criticism over the years. Only 10.1 percent of this year’s freshman class are from a minority group; only 4.2 percent are black — and that is the highest proportion in the last 10 years. Some view the situation as an embarrassment to Father Hesburgh, given his outspokenness on civil-rights issues.
He has repeatedly said that increasing the proportion of minority-group students is a top priority and “purely a question of money.” He has set up a $4.6-million endowment to finance scholarships for minority-group students, a fund that he would like to see increase to $12-million over the next five to ten years.
“I’ve said frankly we ought to have twice as many minority students as we have, and we’ll have them as soon as we have the resources to do it,” he says. “Once we’ve got [the additional endowment], we’re home free.”
Father Hesburgh says he never wanted to be president of any university. “That was the last thing on my mind,” he says. He would have preferred to be a parish priest or a missionary.
“But when I joined the order, I had to take three vows — poverty, chastity, and obedience,” he says. Every year for the first three years of his presidency, he asked to be assigned to missionary duty, always with the same result: They told him to stay put. After a while, he says, he stopped asking.
Father Hesburgh made the decision to become a priest quite early in his life. He has been one for 39 of his 65 years. Of Irish and German descent, he was born Theodore Martin Hesburgh on May 25, 1917, in Syracuse, N.Y. His parents were Anne Marie Murphy and Theodore Bernard Hesburgh, an executive with the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. He has a brother and two sisters living. A third sister died in 1957.
He attended Catholic elementary and secondary schools, then entered the Holy Cross seminary at Notre Dame. Three years later he left to attend Gregorian University in Rome, where he received a bachelor-of-philosophy degree in 1940.
Father Hesburgh studied theology at Holy Cross College in Washington, D.C., from 1940 to 1943, when he was ordained a priest. He received his doctorate in theology from the Catholic University of America in 1945.
He asked to be assigned to missionary duty abroad, but his superiors sent him to Notre Dame to teach religion and serve as chaplain to the World War II veterans enrolled there. Father Hesburgh was appointed chairman of the department of religion in 1948, and executive vice-president of the university in 1949.
Even today, Father Hesburgh says he views himself first and foremost as a priest. “If you said to me, ‘What are you?’ I wouldn’t say ‘university president.’ I wouldn’t say ‘educator.’ I wouldn’t say ‘world traveler.’ I wouldn’t say, ‘I’m involved in government or foundations or things of that sort.’ I’d say, ‘I’m a priest.’ "
“I have no recollection of ever seriously wanting to be anything else.”
He never misses offering his daily mass, although he says he’s had to do it in some strange places — in a tent in the Antarctic, for example, or in an airport lounge.
“As St. Thomas Aquinas said very well, being a priest means being a mediator standing between God and man,” Father Hesburgh says. “It means being a visible sign or a kind of walking sacrament in the world.
“If you’re doing your job, people should look to you for things godly, the Good News, the grace of God.”
Those who know Father Hesburgh well — and “only a handful get behind the public mask,” says Mr. O’Meara — says his priestliness translates into thoughtfulness on a day-to-day basis. But Father Hesburgh maintains a strict reserve, a kind of untouchable quality that keeps people from getting too close. “You rarely see him with the full extent of his humanness showing,” says an observer. “It’s that priest training — guard emotions, keep confidences.”
Two years ago, Father Hesburgh announced that he would retire from the presidency in June, 1982. Last year, the board of trustees announced that he had agreed to stay on for five more years.
Edmund A. Stephan, a Chicago lawyer who was chairman of the board at the time, said publicly, “The conviction finally came to us that we should not change the leadership when we have such a winning situation.” However, he recently acknowledged to The Chronicle that there simply was no successor groomed and ready to take over.
According to university bylaws, the president of Notre Dame must be a Holy Cross priest from the order’s Indiana Province, which consists of about 366 priests.
The search committee formed when Father Hesburgh announced his retirement found “several very talented younger” priests who had the potential but not the experience to take over, according to Mr. Stephan and others. Four of those priests were recently appointed to high-level positions in the Hesburgh administration to give them a chance to gain that experience.
Why, with Father Hesburgh approaching 65 and the end of this third decade in office, had the trustees apparently left the grooming of a successor to the last minute?
“I suppose we could be faulted for not having more people ready to go,” says Mr. Stephan, “although we continually surveyed people we thought showed promise.”
Then he adds, a bit sheepishly, “But I guess that down deep in our hearts, we really didn’t want Father Ted to quit.”
Zoe Ingalls, a longtime reporter at The Chronicle, went on to become managing editor of Duke Magazine and, currently, special assistant to the president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York.
