Moral Dimension

The trouble with U.S. Catholic colleges is an "abysmal mediocrity" that has made them "almost universally destitute of intellectual leadership" in U.S. life. These words were spoken neither by Paul Blanshard nor by any other Catholic baiter--though some Catholics greeted them as if they were--but by a man who cares deeply about the fate of Catholic education: the Rev. Theodore Martin Hesburgh, C.S.C., president of the University of Notre Dame.

By no coincidence, young (43) Father Hesburgh has made old (118) Notre Dame a striking exception to his charges. In his nine years as president, football-famed Notre Dame, where Knute Rockne was once more revered than St. Thomas, has become a serious intellectual citadel. In the anguishing process, Father Hesburgh has become U.S. Catholic higher education's most public and most bluntly outspoken figure. Last week, at Notre Dame alumni meetings throughout the Midwest, he hammered away at his proposed role for all Catholic colleges: "The exalted work of mediation in our times."

To Hesburgh, mediation is nothing less than healing social schisms--between whites and Negroes, labor and management, science and humanities. Already, he has under way at Notre Dame a $2,000,000-a-year center for the necessary research. The center has launched studies on Latin America, African education and civil rights. "Here is an age crying for the light and guidance of Christian wisdom," says Hesburgh. "What must future judges think of us if we live in the most exciting age of science ever known to mankind, and philosophize mainly about Aristotle's physics?"

Bridge & Brahms. The son of a plate-glass plant manager, Hesburgh spent his undergraduate years at Notre Dame and Rome's Gregorian University, where "the classes were all in Latin, the dormitory talk in French, and the street talk in Italian." In 1945, after being ordained a priest in the Congregation of the Holy Cross, he joined Notre Dame's faculty. In seven years, he was successively head of the religion department, executive vice president of the university and, at 35, Notre Dame's 16th president.

A handsome hustler, Hesburgh likes to work until 2 in the morning with Bach or Brahms humming away on his office stereo set. He speaks six languages, has a passion for fishing and flying. He and Notre Dame's executive vice president, Father Edmund Joyce, once licked Bridge Expert Charles Goren. Nowadays his playtime is limited. He is the Vatican's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and this year's president of the Association of American Colleges, where his Roman collar no longer stamps him as an outsider.

What Hesburgh did to Notre Dame can be summed up in its football record--from a long winning streak when he took over, to a 2-and-8 losing season in 1960. Last fall, the Ford Foundation awarded Notre Dame something incomparably more valuable than a football championship: the honor, as one of five rapidly improving universities (none other Catholic) of receiving millions in unrestricted grants. Notre Dame's operating budget is up threefold, its science budget tenfold. Hesburgh has put up twelve new buildings, ranging from dormitories to a science center. To house an eventual 2,000,000 books, five times more than now, Hesburgh has under way a new $8,000,000 library.

All but Birth Control. Buildings are only half the story. Hesburgh completely revised the curriculum, tossed out vocational courses. To get better students, he held down enrollment (now 6,467) and raised admission standards. This year scholastic aptitude scores were 74 points higher than in 1955. To get better professors, Hesburgh raised salaries 150%. Today Notre Dame's 483 fulltime faculty members, less than one-fifth of them priests, include men of many faiths. The head of the mathematics department, for example, is a Jew. Says Hesburgh: "Mathematics is mathematics."

Hesburgh aims to break free of any narrow Catholic mold--yet retain the "moral dimension" of Catholic teaching. "This moral belief," says he, "is simply the dignity of man as a child of God. All branches of knowledge are seen as being of service to man." Notre Dame's business school, for example, has a separate course on business ethics. In English classes, famed Professor Frank O'Malley focuses on such themes as the nature of suffering. Hesburgh himself is particularly interested in science: "I don't sit around worrying that tomorrow science is going to come up with something that will make me say 'There goes God.' There's nothing to be afraid of in science, except that it will be misdirected."

Academic freedom, insists Hesburgh, can and should flourish at a Catholic cam pus. Restrictions may occur, he concedes; in population studies, for example, birth control cannot be approved as a solution. But there restrictions end--or should end: "In nine years, I have never said to a single professor that any book or doctrine is out of bounds. I have no wish to be a medieval man."

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