His Trumpet Was Never Uncertain

By Ezra Bowen

Notre Dame's incoming president was holding one of his first press conferences. Only sportswriters had shown up, one of them carrying a football, which he tossed to Father Theodore Martin Hesburgh, with a request that the priest assume the hike stance. "I'm not the coach," snapped the new leader of America's foremost collegiate football power, "I'm the president!" And he strode from the room. "That happened only once," recalls the 69-year-old Hesburgh, who is now preparing for his retirement; it will come next week, after a reign that is the longest and, by some accounts, the most distinguished of any major U.S. university head. The school he took over in 1952 was, according to Hesburgh's own blunt estimate, "ordinary." Since then:

-- Enrollment has nearly doubled, to 9,676, and the proportion of undergraduates rated in the top tenth of their high school classes has risen, from 30% to 95%.

-- The graduate school has moved from the doldrums to solid rankings in theology, philosophy and mathematics.

-- Endowment has jumped from $9 million to $400 million-plus and the budget from $9.7 million to $176.6 million.

-- Campus buildings have increased from 48 to 88, including an imposing 14- story library, renamed for Hesburgh last week, which holds 1.6 million publications.

Far more important to Hesburgh have been the changes in Notre Dame's governance and its amalgam of scholars. In 1967 he persuaded the Congregation of Holy Cross, his order of priests and the founders of Notre Dame, to cede control of the institution to a lay board of trustees, though the school would remain Catholic and its president a priest of the order. This was a radical step in Catholic education, where virtue and even legitimacy are often judged by proximity to the church hierarchy. To Hesburgh, however, ecumenical leadership was essential to turning the university's vision outward toward the world.

Hesburgh is openly proud of the result. "We have trustees who are black, white, men, women, Hispanic, Protestant, Jewish," he told a campus newspaper + recently, "and they come from all over the country and beyond." He is equally pleased to have opened the doors of the formerly all-male school to women in 1972. Today about one-third of Notre Dame's students are female. To replace what he once described as "academic programs encrusted over the decades," Hesburgh insisted that students take an unusually extensive requirement of core courses (currently 39 hours out of the baccalaureate's 120), and he held to that principle through the curriculum-battering '60s.

As for football, it still has its place at Notre Dame, though an increasingly modest one (since 1981 the team has posted a 34-31-1 record). More impressive, however, are the team members' academic statistics. Some 95% of the football players in the past 25 years have graduated, compared with a figure as low as 20% at unrepentant jock factories. Adds Father Edmund Joyce, Hesburgh's longtime executive vice president, who will also retire next week: "We're playing by another set of rules."

Those rules, along with the other elevating standards Hesburgh has pounded into Notre Dame, leave other college presidents somewhat in awe. Says Jesuit Father Timothy Healy, president of Georgetown University: "If you ask American college presidents who is the most successful president they know, they'll say, 'Ted Hesburgh.' " Harvard's reticent Derek Bok will venture from Cambridge, Mass., to South Bend, Ind., this Sunday to deliver a rare extramural commencement speech in tribute to his old friend.

Hesburgh, who attended Notre Dame's Holy Cross seminary and later taught theology at the university, has gone at his prodigious works with unwavering energy and focus -- plus a regal self-assurance. A globe-trotter who covers as many as 150,000 miles a year proselytizing for Notre Dame, he has said Mass at the South Pole and at the Faculty House of the University of Moscow. (The difference between God and Hesburgh, goes an old campus joke, is that God is everywhere and Hesburgh everywhere but Notre Dame.) With this spiritual nourishment fed into a healthy ego, he retains a natural sense of command. "The very essence of leadership is you have to have a vision," he says. "It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet." During student unrest in the '60s, he told the university community that protesters would be given 15 minutes to decide whether to desist or be suspended. Despite some grumbling from students, the ultimatum resulted in a calm few other campuses experienced.

The Hesburgh vision and trumpet have reached far beyond South Bend. He has always insisted that "my purpose is to produce educated Christians. I don't want to be Harvard, I want to be the greatest Catholic university in the world." Nevertheless, last fall he acted as point man for 111 Catholic college presidents who rebutted a Vatican schema for greater control over the appointment of theology professors at Catholic schools. Their objection was that such control could infringe academic freedom. "The church proclaims the word of God loud and clear without any doubts," says Hesburgh, whereas the "university is in the business of pushing the frontiers of knowledge."

This was not Hesburgh's first exchange with the Vatican. He declined a Cardinal's red hat from his friend Pope Paul VI. His commanding presence also elicited an offer from Lyndon Johnson to run the space program, which Hesburgh declined, commenting that a priest with poverty vows should not be running a $6 billion agency. He also rejected a Nixon proposal to head up the poverty program. "I never wanted to be a sort of Cardinal Richelieu," he commented of these Government offers. However, he has sat as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and as a board member of the Chase Manhattan Bank. And his deep feelings against racism led him to serve as chairman of Nixon's Civil Rights Commission until his political independence led Nixon to demand his resignation in 1972. "They'll probably appoint some rabbit in my place," growled Hesburgh.

In the course of this odyssey, Hesburgh has collected a record 112 honorary degrees (runner-up: Herbert Hoover, with 89). These days are being filled with further honors as Father Ted says adieu. Last Saturday he gave a televised address via satellite to some 50,000 Notre Dame alumni around the world. He opened on the jocular note that "these recent weeks and months have been like attending one's own funeral," and he summed up with sentimental elegance, "I leave this university . . . in the hands of Notre Dame, Our Lady."

After commencement, the university's presidency will pass from Father Ted to Father Ed: Edward ("Monk") Malloy, 46, a former Notre Dame basketball player who has been an associate professor of theology and associate provost. At that point, Hesburgh and fellow Retiree Joyce will take off for a vacation tour of the West in a 26-ft. motor home equipped with auxiliary mopeds. The two priests have been warming up for the journey by buzzing around campus on the red bikes, wearing red helmets and black jackets.

Through all the hoopla, as through all the years and honors before, Hesburgh has not wavered from his inner call. "I always wanted to be a priest, ever since I ever wanted to be anything," he says. "Faith keeps him going strong," confirms Georgetown's Healy. "He says Mass like the day he was ordained. That's his real greatness. He's what the Irish call a darlin' man." And, by every appearance, a deeply fulfilled one.

With reporting by Barbara Dolan/South Bend