APPENDIX
Rubric for Rhetorical Analysis of Speeches
Title of Speech: Address to Gentlemen Alumni
Section of the Speech: Pentad 1
The perceived elements of the pentad identified are listed in the appropriate boxes.
Elements of the pentad |
Ratios |
|||
Agent Returning alumni |
Act Yes No |
Agency Yes No |
Purpose Yes No |
Scene Yes No |
Act Coming back to campus |
Agent Yes No |
Agency Yes No |
Purpose Yes No |
Scene Yes No |
Agency Walking around |
Agent Yes No |
Act Yes No |
Purpose Yes No |
Scene Yes No |
Purpose To see what is really happening here |
Agent Yes No |
Act Yes No |
Agency Yes No |
Scene Yes No |
Scene New buildings on the University of Notre Dame campus |
Agent Yes No |
Act Yes No |
Agency Yes No |
Purpose Yes No |
Ratios: Agent – Act
Agent – Purpose
Agent – Scene
Act – Scene
Agency – Purpose
Rubric for Rhetorical Analysis of Speeches
Title of Speech: Address to Gentlemen Alumni
Section of the Speech: Pentad 1
Pentadic Terms |
Ratios |
|||
Agent |
Agent-Act |
Agent-Agency |
Agent-Purpose |
Agent-Scene |
Act |
Act-Agent |
Act-Agency |
Act-Agency |
Act-Scene |
Agency |
Agency-Agent |
Agency-Act |
Agency-Purpose |
Agency-Scene |
Purpose |
Purpose-Agent |
Purpose-Act |
Purpose-Agency |
Purpose-Scene |
Scene |
Scene-Agent |
Scene-Act |
Scene-Agency |
Scene- Purpose |
Relationship of the pentadic terms of the ratios.
Thank you very much, Mike. I am delighted to see so many of you here,
and I know what a wonderful weekend it must be for all of you. And I suppose as you come back and walk
around this campus, you wonder, as sometimes all of us wonder, what is really
happening here. I only go back ‘til
’45, which is the year I came back to teach after finishing my studies; and I
recall since that day, which is not very long past, a matter of 13 years, you
have the following things have been added to the campus: the Morrison, the new Lewis Bus Shelter, the
Oshauncy Liberal and Fine Arts building, the sculpture studio, the new science
building, the new student center, this washing hall has been completely redone,
and we have old demarcates underneath the panel there, he is the ghost to the
place. The steam plant has been
completely reconditioned. We make all
our own power now. We have a half
million gallons of water in the tower back there. We have a new television station. We have Vet ville, a new Lobond laboratory, a new warehouse—just
ready to break ground for that out past the heat power lab; a new warehouse and
maintenance shop. Coming ‘round the
other way, we have the Fisher and Peng Boren residence halls by the Wright
Memorial, where that big hall used to be.
Back down in this corner, we have the new dining hall and the Peng Boren
and Stanford Halls. I probably missed a
few things, but, oh yes, the bookstore-—the Harris Bookstore, where bed and Bad
and Bug used to be, and Bad and Bug has now turned from baseball to
basketball. If you’ve seen the new
outdoor basketball courts there, which, incidentally are very popular. When you look at all of these things, I
think you can come to only one really certain conclusion, that our Blessed
Mother is certainly looking after this place, and she has for it some kind of a
design, some kind of a scheme for greatness.
As one of our trustees said,
the place just seems to have a rendezvous with destiny. And even those of us who work here,
intimately connected with the work at
times cannot fathom the depth of what might yet be of this place. I have
started by mentioning the buildings because I think they are the least
important of all. They are what the
lawyers call a sine qua none
condition of the kind of work we are doing here. And without these facilities you can’t begin to do the job
right. And yet you could have all these
facilities here, the very best I think that you could imagine, and still not
have what you might call a great university.
Because a great university is a complex that is compounded of human
factors, not material factors of brick and mortar and money. You can’t begin to work without brick and
mortar and money, but these things must be used wisely; and they must be used
with great intent and purpose. And they
must somehow be used in such a way that they get inside the minds and hearts of
young men. And that is the fundamental
reason why this place exists, and why it is growing. I have, in the past 6 years, visited a great number of
universities in this country, in Europe, in South America. And next month I hope to visit all the new
universities in Africa. And after
looking at what is probably more than 100 to 150 universities, I can honestly
say that I can’t see a single one that I would exchange for this one. Not that there aren’t some of them that have
features that we don’t have, but I think we have features that are lacking in
each one of them--features that in the long run are much more important. And what they have that we now lack we can
certainly gain. And I think they would
be hard put to gain what we have.
That’s why the important thing that one must talk about when he talks
about the State of the University is not necessarily the things you can see—the
buildings, the grounds, the budgets, the material things that are obvious and
visible to the eye; but I think one must look deeper at the human realities and
the deep purposes of the place and the kind of intangibles that have always
made Notre Dame great.
I am sure that as you come
back and walk around and marvel at how beautiful the place is and the wonderful
spirit of peace and serenity that seems to reign here, even when it is full of
returned alumni. I am sure that as you
walk around these grounds you have a sense that there is something here that is
special. That this place in a very real
sense is like no other place on earth.
And that what happened to you in your time here was not simply being in
certain buildings, being in Northern Indiana; but something happened inside of
you, something happened to your mind, something happened to your will. And through those two faculties something
happened to your soul. And what
happened to you had a kind of internal impact; so that perhaps the greatest
reunion that all universities will have (and there won’t be no statistics
published in the educational journal on this one) will be the reunion that we
all hope to have in heaven some day.
And I trust that there will be a great return from Notre Dame when that
reunion is held. And if there is a
great return from Notre Dame that day in heaven, when the whole mass of Notre
Dame men get together, it would seem to me that perhaps that it will be because
of what happened, largely because of what happened during the years that all of
us spent here. Because here in this
place you have a kind of special blessing, a kind of benediction that I think
that comes directly from the hand of the mother of God—something that is almost
unexplainable in human terms. And I
think that the main purpose of each one of us in our association with Notre
Dame as alumni or living here and working here, must be that somehow we too
become instrumentations of that blessing, that somehow we hope to spread it
out, to get into more lives, that somehow we hope to make it work more smoothly
and more effectively, somehow it becomes an ever greater reality that we are
not satisfied, we don’t pin our little dreams down to the things that were; but
we let our minds run ahead with our Lady’s mind to the things that might yet
be. And that’s where the state of the
university I think really lies at the present day, in the kinds of things that
are happening here in the minds and hearts of the students and the
faculty.
We have been doing a lot of talking lately, some may
think too much, about educational standards.
And there has been a lot of talk throughout the country about
educational standards. And there has
been some criticisms and some people have agreed and disagreed with. But I think the fundamental thing is that if you take any set of statistics
that are available to us, and these statistics, of course, don’t get into the
soul of people, they don’t get into the goodness of their lives but get into
the confidence that they have shown in their performance. On balance, one has to be disappointed in
the performance of Catholic higher education generally. I looked at two such lists in my office just
last night. One was the returns on a
national fellowship program for the whole United States called the Woodrow
Wilson Fellowship Program. It is a 25
million-dollar program and I know quite a bit about it because I am on the
board of directors. And this program
was set up by the Ford Foundation to make available to students graduating from
1800 colleges and universities in this country this year, the possibility of
going to graduate school and preparing themselves if possible to go into
college teaching. Now as you can do a
little simple arithmetic you can see that with 1000 fellowships available for
the whole country, and this runs to about $4,000.00 a piece, $2,000.00 for the
boy and $2,000.00 to his university, you can see that it is less than one half scholarship
per school. And the thing is strictly
competitive on academic standards and the fellowships are awarded after
interviews with the faculty groups assembled by regions throughout the United
States.
But looking down on this
list I had a very pleasant surprise, because the number one school in the
country on this list was Columbia University in New York with, I believe, 27 of
these fellowships won, that was the top of the country. Next on the list came Harvard and Princeton,
which were tied for second place with 23.
Next came Connell with 22 and after that came Notre Dame with 19. The next closest school to us was California
Berkeley the first top state school on the list with 15. And when you think of this list and what it
means, it means simply this, that on this national competition on academic
grounds for our graduates this year, we not only beat every state school in the
country, and most of them have more money than we have; but we beat all but
four of the private schools and all of the Ivy League except Harvard and
Princeton. And we beat such outstanding
schools not just by a few points but by as many as doubling their performance;
such schools as Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Michigan, North Western, Stanford,
Dartmouth, you can go down the whole long list of what is considered the best
schools in the country and we not only beat them, but beat them badly. Now that is just one scale and certainly
does not mean, I don’t say that it means everything, but it really means that
our graduates this year can stand up against the graduates of any school in the
country and out of 1800 could beat all but 4 of them. And I think that in the years to come we are going to be on top
of that list too.
The other list I looked at was another competitive
scholarship arrangement for the whole United States, another scholarship
arrangement that gives out 72 Danforth Fellowships which carries a young man
right on through the Ph.D. and pays for him and his wife if he gets married and
supports his children if they have children.
They gave a seven-year performance on this scholarship program, and on
the seven-year program including all the schools in the United States; Notre
Dame was tied for second place. The
first place on this one happens to be Duke.
And we were tied for second place with Harvard and some other
school. This again is a straw in the
wind. I don’t say that this is the most
significant thing that has happened around here all year. There are much more intangible, spiritual
significant things that have happened.
But I think these are two straws in the wind that you can’t blink
at. Because it means that when the
people that I run into throughout the country that sneer a little bit at Notre
Dame and say we aren’t much of a school, I think we can pull out these lists
and say “find your school on there
please.” And I think they are going too
hard put to talk their way out of this one.
Now I mentioned earlier that Catholic schools generally aren’t
performing too well in this area. On
the first list I mentioned, where we were fifth on the Woodrow Wilson list with
19 fellowships, the nearest Catholic school to us on the list was a school with
2 fellowships. And on the Danforth
Fellowships where we had second place, the nearest Catholic school was about 60
or 70 schools down almost. And most of
the Catholic schools weren’t even on the list.
I think that as a religious group in this country that is committed to
principles that are age-old and true, it seems to me that no matter what we do,
we must perform in the best possible way.
What I mean is that all of us have taken pride over the years of being
first in football; and I like to hope that we can keep being first in that
particular area. But I don’t want to
stop there. I want to think that Notre
Dame has to have the quality of being first across the board. And I would like to think that all of the
sons of Notre Dame and all of the youngsters that come here to school can be
tops in their order. Now it doesn’t
mean that to be tops in their order they all have to be geniuses. Because I think that all of you who have
been out and working away from here will agree with me when I say that being
tops doesn’t mean having a lot of talent.
Because a lot of talent by itself isn’t useful, as a matter of fact it
is dangerous if it isn’t joined to motivation, to a good system of values, to
purposefulness in life, and to a high degree of human aspiration and
effort. And I think what we can do here
is to take boys, as we have in many cases, of normal talent and some boys of
very high talent and push them to the limit of their performance; to give them
the kind of spirit that has always comprised this school that we are
competitive; that we don’t take any
second place to anyone, and we try to keep the first things in life first our
spiritual performance, our character, and our status as Catholic gentlemen, and
after that we don’t hide behind this performance in the spiritual order. We
are living in a very real world, in a very competitive world; and we want every
one of our young men as they come in here to know that this place is the place
where they come to life, this is the place where they are really going to be
stretched.
This is the place where they
are going to learn things about leadership through the 200 clubs we have on
this campus. This is a place where they
are going to learn some thing about politics through our whole student senate
arrangement, which has come along very well and which is a very strong organization
on this campus today. And they are
going to learn something about the art of living with other people, that all of
you learned, I’m sure, through the dormitory system here at Notre Dame. They are going to learn something about the
value of prayer, the value of sacrifice, the value of getting down on your
knees when you are in difficulty and need help. I hope they are going to learn something about humility when they
kneel down on these boxes around here, where all of you have knelt at times and
told how you failed and how you want to do better. I think they will also learn something of a compassion for the
other human beings in this world, something of a compassion for the suffering,
which is very close, I think, to the heart of being a true Christian
today--because we can’t live and be satisfied with all the things we have and a
good life, when we stop to think that half of the children in this world has
never seen milk or medicine.
When we stop to think that
one third of the people in the world go to bed hungry every night, you can’t be
a true gentleman in the Christian sense and just close your eyes to that. And we think that even youngsters should
begin to think about these things, and think about these great anguishes in
human life today and what they can do about them. Well all course all of these inspirational vibes, this
education, this pressing for excellence and quality, I think these are things
that get back to your faculty, that get back to all the complexes of all of the
people that work here. That somehow
there has to be within our very souls—all of us who work here and associate
with the place and all of you who are our constituency, who must be our very
best foot forward outside of Notre Dame, it seems to me that all of us must
somehow must get into our souls the thought that we are dedicated to a great
purpose. We are dedicated really and
associated with a very high endeavor and that the sky is the limit for us; and
that we don’t want to take a back seat to anyone. That when they call off the leaders in this country we are among
them, and when they get the people together to decide them we are among them
too; and when they are looking for ideas we are among the people who have
ideas; and when they are looking for dedication and sacrifice in any good cause
in this country, our Notre Dame men are stepping forward to take their
places.
This I think has been the
great pride of the Notre Dame alumni.
And I know that no matter where I go and who I talk to, I constantly
hear this the Parish priests tell me that the Notre Dame men are the best men
in their parish. The bishops tell me
that every cause they have the Notre Dame men are out in the leading. And I have many associations in New York and
Washington, in Chicago, and in the Coast where I deal with people that aren’t
Catholic. And they always seem glad to
see you to talk to you and to say that “I‘ve never been to Notre Dame, but I
know two or three Notre Dame men and they are all wonderful fellows. And I think that this is a kind of pride,
which is a legitimate pride, which we all should have. And I think as an ideal it should hold up to
something that we want to see grow in influence and in the impression it has in
this country at large. And this is why
we have tried to assemble in this place an ever-growing excellent faculty, and
I think we have some wonderful people on this faculty today, and I know that
there will be many more wonderful people coming in the years ahead. And I want to have this wonderful faculty,
and I’m sure you do, because when you stop to think of what the work of
education is, when you think of taking the potential of young men with open
minds and a lot of ability, and starting to open them up to what they can do—to
give them the sense of excellence, and give the sense of performance, to give
them the habit of working hard and competing, to give them the habit of never
quitting on a job but getting ahead ‘til they finish it well. When you give them the sense that all this
can be done in the service of God too, because certainly we don’t offer God
mediocre service or slipshod performance.
And when you get into the very core of these young men the very sense of
what it is to be a Notre Dame man, and you see this thing growing over four
years’ time, then I think you can be real proud of what is going on here.
We at times get somewhat discouraged because it‘s a
tremendously costly project. I hate to
talk about money, that’s why I joined the religious community and took the vow
of poverty; because I have often felt that this is one of the tragedies of my
life that I wanted to get away from money so now I am worried about a $16
million budget next year. In any case,
be that as it may, I think that one of the most remarkable things that has
happened over the past 10 or 12 years is what has happened to the alumni
support of this university. I can’t put
the exact figure on it, I am sure you have all seen it in our latest
booklet. But the amazing thing is that
this alumni support has just expanded 10-15 times more than it was, say 10
years ago. And to me that represents a
tremendous swelling chorus of approval for the will that this place be on
top. And you know that I think that the
difficulty that so many Catholic institutions are having being on top is because
they can’t for example get the best people because they can’t afford to pay
them what is the going rate. A good man
as you know in your own business costs twice as much as the man that is just
ordinary. And unless you have in this
whole complex is the very best kind of people—the very best kind of people who
are the laymen here, the very best kind of people who are the priests here, the
very best kind of people in every possible slot in this university, well then
we are not going to get the kind of performance we need. But the fact is that this whole sense of
excellence gets into a man’s soul and makes him even better than he is. I think one of the great things about Notre
Dame is that it not only can stretch people to their performance but it can
push them far beyond their normal performance.
And certainly if there is one thing that all of us remember as we look
back over numerous football seasons in the years past is the fact that many
Saturdays we went into the stadium against a team that we had no right to be in
the same stadium with, and we licked them.
There was no rhyme of reason
to it, sports writers get all mixed up trying to analyze it afterwards, but
time and time again we’ve gone up against opposition that should have really
murdered us and we have beaten them.
Well let’s say that this spirit, if it is the kind of wonderful thing
you and I think it is, let’s suppose it gets into a young man’s life, what does
it mean to him. It means that he has
that spirit of never say die. It means
that whether it’s a matter of practicing virtue and being a good man, whether
it means becoming confident for what he wants to do in life, or whether it
means being the kind of husband that is a real joy in this world, whether it
means being a father that is tremendously interested in his youngsters in
bringing them up with personal interest, whether it means being the kind of
neighbor you would like to have or the kind of civic personality you would like
to have or the public servant we need, if this young man gets this kind of
spirit in his life in no matter what he does-spiritual, material, temporal,
eternal, he is going to do the very best that he has in him. I suspect that he will end up by doing much
better than he has in him. He will out
perform himself. And I think we have
not only seen this here in athletics, but I think we are beginning to see it
also in the academic order where youngsters are out performing themselves,
because they have that spirit of excellence and quality and good performance
and hard work and never say die.
And I can’t tell you
gentlemen how much your support has meant in this whole process. I have often said, in speaking to alumni
groups around the country, that the important thing for the alumni is not the
amount they give. Now it is certainly
important that some alumni who are capable of giving a lot do give a lot and
they do. But I would think that so many
of our alumni are young, when you stop to think that over 50 percent of our
alumni are out in the last 10 or 15 years.
You begin to see that many of these young men have many problems and
many things to contribute to beside Notre Dame, and we don't want to beat them
on the head. But if every alumnus would
really say this to himself each year, “I’m going to send something out there,
it may only be a dollar.” That’s about
the bottom I would think that you can put in an envelope to send, although
there is no absolute limit to that. But
if a man would just say I’m going to send something, just to say I am a part of
this. This is a pretty small initiation
fee, but at least I want to be a part of it.
I had this experience in the past couple of years that I wanted to get a
room and bed in the new seminary for Father Bernie Ferstus, who is our rector
in Baden Hall. We had a wonderful group
of fellas in Baden Hall, I’m rather prejudice about it, because since after the
war we lived together for three years without changing. And I wrote all over the country to about
450 of these young fellas who were out for a few years. And I told them we wanted to do something
for Father Bernie, and I was not beating them on the head, do what they
could. If they couldn’t do anything,
don’t be embarrassed about it. Well
almost all of them wrote back. But I
was surprised by the number of them that sent in $2.00.
And I suspect that when you
stop to think about getting married, getting a house, having youngsters,
getting a car, joining the few things you have to join in your own local
community, and I can understand that.
But I hope they keep on sending that $2.00. Because many of these young men will get way beyond that $2.00
class in the years to come. But the
important thing is they all belong, that this place is close to their hearts
and they are behind it and they are working with it, and they are trying to
promote it. This is the most important
thing of all. We do have some
spectacular things happen at times with alumni. I was coming in here on the stage here this morning and I was
told that George Curry of the class of ’28 was going to give $100,000.00 for
the class of ’28, in honor of the class of ’28. And that is really a spectacular kind of gift from George Curry
of Miami, Florida. And personally I
think that is the kind of thrilling gift that keeps us going, because you never
get discouraged when you see a great group of people behind you pushing. Because you know no matter what your own
personal deficiencies might be, no matter what the local problems might be, and
they are multitudinous, that somehow this many people can’t fail if they are
united in a good cause and if we got the blessings of God and his mother upon
us.
And I want personally to
thank all of you who have been in this cause and who have helped. Because while you don’t think that a dollar
or two dollars may not mean a lot, let me tell you that when you walk into
those foundations offices, like I have to do next Monday in New York, when you
go in to see the President of Carnegie or Rockefeller and you asked them for a
hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, almost invariably the first
thing they want to know is, well we don’t have connections with Notre Dame, and
we are not a Catholic Foundation, and the people who earn this money for this
foundation and are giving it out weren’t Catholic. Now, do you have something
worth supporting? And we say, we think
we do have something very much worth supporting, and we have evidence for
it. And they say, “how about your own
people, how do your own people support you?”
And if we can tell them that our alumni percentage wise are contributing
around 52 percent or 53 percent, or I would hope eventually around 60, 70 or 80
percent. Then we should be able to tell
them in this department too, the same, as we like to tell them in everything
else, more of a percentage of Notre Dame alumni contribute to Notre Dame more
than any other university in the country.
Now we are probably in the top ten right now, but this top ten business
I’d like to keep pushing up towards the top one, because I think that’s where
we belong. And I think that if you are
joined to so great an inspired a thing as an association inspired and led by
the mother of God, then I think you don’t offer in her name anything less than
the very best. So I want really to give
you my deep thanks for what you have done to get behind this cause. And while I rambled a bit here about the
kind of things that are happening, perhaps I can tie it down to a few specific
things that I think you’d be interested in hearing.
First of all, the word gets around now and then and I
hear many alumni say, “it’s a good thing I’m finished, I’d never get in any
more.” I don’t think this is true. I don’t think you can take the circumstances
that faced my class in 1934, and somehow 1934 beginning and 1938 finishing and
push them ahead to 1958. Because, the
youngsters of today are brought up in an entirely different world. In some ways I think they don’t work as
hard, but in other ways they are in an opportunity of learning things much
easier. Now, how many gentlemen in your
day saw President of the United States and heard him giving talks and so
forth. And yet any youngster today can
flip on the switch and see President Eisenhower giving a talk or Vice President
Nixon getting off a plane from South America or any number of current events
and things that are happening right here in your living room. How many youngsters in your day could talk
about space travel or the latest kind of jet airplanes or all of the things
that youngsters talk about today. I was
telling a few of the fellas of the class of ’38 last night about a famous
little conversation out in the recess yard of a kindergarten. These kids were out in recess and they were
watching airplanes go over and arguing whether it was an F100 or F101. And as the automobiles drove by they were
calling off the makes, the year, and model.
And finally the bell rang for the end of recess, and one kid said to the
other, he said, “I guess we may as well
go back in now and count some more of those damn beads.” Well this I think, better than a lot of
philosophy, will tell you how things have changed. Because I suspect the days that we went to kindergarten counting
beads were pretty much standard procedure and we took it for granted and may
have even found it somewhat interesting.
But counting beads is not very interesting if you have been watching
F100 s flying through the skies.
What I think you have to
understand is, and this is really the opportunity for Notre Dame alumni that
youngsters today are going into a very competitive world; now you know this
better than I do, and the time I think to give them that competitive spirit is
when they are young. I can remember
even as a youngster, my dad used to send me downstairs to get logs for the
fireplace. And like all youngsters if I
can get through on one trip I never try to take two. I take one trip and I wind up dropping one nice big one right on
the linoleum floor and denting it, well when I go up I practically knocked the
stove over. And I can remember my dad
lining me up and saying, “listen Ted, if you are going to do something, do it
right if you don’t want to do it right just forget about it, I will go down and
get the logs myself. But whatever
you’re doing in life, for the love of Mike do it right, and give it a 100
percent, and don’t try to squeeze through with a sloppy performance like
this. You try to save time and you
loused up the linoleum and you ruin the stove and a lot of other things.” And little lessons like that stick. And I think if we could get these things
across to all our Notre Dame youngsters from the time they start school, and if
we could somehow put it up to them that getting into Notre Dame today is not a
question of riding through on your dad’s name.
And really no youngster
wants to ride into anything on his dad’s name.
This is no way to grow up and no way to develop any kind of
character. I think every Notre Dame
father ought to tell his kids, you got to make your own decision to go to Notre
Dame. Not like one father said, “you
can go to any school in the country as long as it’s Notre Dame.” But I think you ought to tell them that this
is a privilege, it is not something that happens automatically. And if you get into Notre Dame, it means
that you are one youngster picked out for tremendous opportunity to learn
things you are not going to learn in any other school in the country. And to be for four years part of an
atmosphere that will change you for life.
And it will give an impress and a direction to your life that will carry
you all the way to heaven. And this is
a wonderful advantage, but you don’t get it easily, anymore than you get into
the Marine Corps through basic training easily, anymore than you get on the
Notre Dame football team easily, or anymore than you get on to the New York
Yankees easily. But if you want to be
with the best, you have got to get there competitively. And the time to start competing is when you
start thinking and when you first start going to school. And I should think that with most of our
Notre Dame youngsters and with their fathers being interested as they are and
knowing what is here to be learned from their own lives, this should be one of
the greatest motivations in the world to get those youngsters working.
I know of a youngster last
year who got in because I said he could get in. The Dean turned him down, the Director of Admissions turned him
down, and everybody turned him down.
And he should have been turned down, because he had taken terrible
subjects in high school and done terribly in all of them. And he hadn’t worked and he was just put in
here, and his father made such a nuisance of this case, that I simply, to get
the man off of everybody else’s back, in desperation towards the end of the
year we are all tired, and I said “for the love of Mike, let him in,” and I
will write his father. And I wrote his
father and I said, “look, I am letting this boy in, but I want to tell you
something, that this boy is simply not prepared to come to Notre Dame. He hasn’t taken anywhere the proper number
of serious subjects in high school, he hasn’t worked at all at the subjects he
has taken even, he ranks way down the bottom of his class, he is very
non-competitive. I suspect he is not
very interested in coming to school anyway, that his interest in coming here is
really your interest. And I think you
are doing him a great injustice by sending him in, the same, as you would be
doing a youngster that weighed 98 pounds a big injustice if you put him out
there to compete against Leon Hart.”
But the father said I want him to come, and I know he will make it. And I said, his making it does not depend
upon your desiring him to make it, he has to perform himself. He has to learn to stand on his own two
feet. Well the youngster came and he
did miserably. His record here was
worse than his record in high school, but in the same order. First semester he flunked five out of six
and he got 70 in the sixth, which was religion. It shows that the priests are at least compassionate.
But the thing that bothered
me was when after this performance he didn’t want to go home, because he said
his father won’t possibly understand this.
And we said, “Well, Sonny, if your dad isn’t going to understand you,
who is going to. You better go home and
talk to him.” Well, he said, “I didn’t
want to come in the first place.” And
that’s what we suspected all along. Now
I guarantee you gentlemen that you can take that same boy, because he was not
stupid--by a long shot, if that boy had the interest of his father from the
very time he had started going to school, and if he had looked into the
subjects he had taken, and if he had looked into how much time he was putting
into his books, and if he taught him to perform well on a lot of things outside
his books, because there are many more things more important than books in
life, but if he had followed that youngster along, and kept working with him
and kept helping him and encouraging him,
that boy would be here in school today, and he would be doing fine. I think that one of the greatest tragedies
in our day and age is this, that we take people of high talent and we just
debase them by allowing them to fritter away time and poor performance and
things that are not worth performing at all.
And that is a great tragedy.
Because this country of ours has just led the world, and we’ve ridden
high, and now we are letting a country that has none of our spiritual ideals,
that has none of our philosophy, that has none of our motivation out perform
us. And don’t kid yourselves, gentlemen;
we are being outperformed on a very neutral area called science. And it is high time that across the country
we give some leadership in this nest, and that is what we are trying to do at
Notre Dame.
To say that we can take
boys, no matter what the talent, as long as they got the average intelligence,
that is the floor, which is the basic for university work. And as long as they’ve shown they have
worked during high school and have performed to the limit of their ability, and
if we can take these boys and really stretch them and really motivate them, and
really get them to the right kind of habits of work, the right kind of
spiritual habits, the right kind of physical habits, we feel that this is the
greatest single contribution the country can have from any human institution
outside of the church. And this, of
course, is closely allied because something of what the church does happens
here too. Well, I just want to lay to
rest that one thing that none of you would get here, because I think that you
gentlemen have performed very well too.
And I think the fact that you performed well in a wide variety of things
across this nation has brought great pride on Notre Dame. And I think that if you put yourself ahead
20 years you would perform the same way and better. Because, one of the great things about human beings is that we
can vary with the times, we can adapt ourselves to new circumstances, and we
can use imagination. We can always try
harder.
The things for the future, you’ve all read on this new
booklet on a 66 million dollar, 666 million 600 thousand that’s a great
figure. Everybody asks us if we just
pulled it out the air, well we really didn’t.
We started out with a much lower figure, and the more we thought about
it the more we realized that we simply couldn’t do what should be done here
with anything less than that. And we
have come to the conclusion, gentlemen that this figure is a minimal figure,
and we want to pull out all the stops.
And we not only want to go out there and raise this 666 million 600
thousand but more. And I like just to
point out one thing that looks to the future.
If you go down through the breakdown on the 666 million dollar fund, you
would notice that the great proportion of that money is going into people not
into buildings. It is going into better
salaries for our faculty. It is going
into better salaries and other arrangements for our lay administrative staff
around the university, who have been extremely devoted for many, many years,
and have been at the heart of our growth.
It is going into more help for poor boys, who have the motivation and
have the talent and simply can’t get into school because they don’t have the
money. And we think that Notre Dame
should be in the position in the years to come to take the best boys we can
get, and to help them if they need help.
Just to give you an idea of how important this is, we had about 105
valedictorians of their class applying to enter Notre Dame last year—top boys
from their class from all over the country.
We lost just half of them.
Now, these weren’t boys who
were just bright, because we turned down some valedictorians that were
screwballs. But these were boys, who
were not only valedictorians, they were student leaders, they were all round
good youngsters with personality and with character and with leadership
ability. We lost one half of those
boys, because some other school had money to help them and we didn’t. And that’s why in this large sum there is a
pretty big sum for student aid. And our
philosophy on this in the years to come is that we would like on this
student-aid program to put it more on a basis of borrowing--to let a youngster
have enough confidence in himself and in his ability and his energy to borrow
against his future; and also to put some of it into work programs. I checked out our work programs recently and
I find that we are already spending this past year a little bit over 600
thousand dollars in aid to students on this campus. Which means everyone here; a good number of these boys are
getting help through the work program.
But this is very expensive. As
you can see, it would easily go to a million dollars before long.
This year we had about 140
valedictorians applying to Notre Dame, and again, we got about half of them,
and lost the other half because we couldn’t help him come to school here. And I think it is a difficult thing when you
got a youngster who has taken every thing God has given him, and he has
competed well and risen to the top, and he thinks in his heart that this is the
place that he can keep on going to the top with a Notre Dame education; and he
wants to come here but he can’t come because he just can’t make it. And some other boy who’s no where near as
good as he is, who hasn’t tried as hard, or maybe doesn’t have the talent he
has or hasn’t worked as hard in his leadership ability, can come because it
just happens his father has some money.
Now I’ve got nothing against money naturally talking about 666 million
dollars. But I’d like to see some of it
put to the dispose of these youngsters who really need the help, and who would
be bright and shining lights for Notre Dame if we could give them a little
assistance. That’s why part of this sum
is for that. There’s another sum in
there for buildings, but I have already spoken so much about buildings, I don’t
want to get into that now. I just want
to mention our great need is probably a new library. Our library is very out of date, very inadequate and it really
needs to be completely rebuilt. The new
library on this campus will be a tremendous asset to this whole process.
The last thing I want to tell you, gentlemen, is just a
story I heard just recently, which I think sums up how I feel about Notre Dame
men and the kind of performance that I think goes beyond all that I have been
talking about; the kind of performance that carries on excellence to the end,
and things being in order in life to the end.
And I think reflects the kind of things that reflect what you and I hold
dear at Notre Dame and the kind of things, that no matter what else goes on
here, makes Notre Dame the greatest place on earth.
I had a call from a gentleman in Detroit a few weeks
ago. And he said, “I just called you
up,” He said, “you may not remember me.
I met you out in Phoenix, Arizona once, “ and I told him, yes, I
remembered him. He said, “I just wanted
to call you up to tell you about a Notre Dame alumnus whose death I witnessed
the other night.” He was talking about
Jim Cleary of Detroit, whom I’m sure many of you know. Well, he said I’m just an ordinary guy in
Detroit. I happen to have a business up
here and somehow or other through this young president’s organization I got
associated with Jim Cleary. And he said
Jim had a terrific effect on my life.
He said I am Catholic, but I did not have much Catholic education and I
haven’t really worked at it very well.
But he said once I got to know Jim, next thing I know he called me up on
a Saturday night once and he said, “Say, he said, next, tomorrow morning is the
Holy Name Sunday at our parish why don’t you come over to confession.” Well, he said, man I haven’t been to
confession in a long time. But he said
Jim was such a nice guy and I didn’t want to offend him so I said, “Okay, Jim,” and I went to confession with
him. He said, then he kept it up every
Saturday before Holy Name Sunday, and before I know it I was going to
confession every month and then more often.
Then he said the whole attitude of this fellow toward life was just so
darn wholesome, clean, good, and aggressive even; and he was doing such a
tremendous job in his business, and such a tremendous job in everything else
and I thought, boy, here is really a champ.
And I could begin to see his influence coming into my life even
imperceptibly I was becoming a better guy because I was associating with Jim
Cleary.
Now, he said, I want to tell you the end of Jim Cleary’s
life because it sounds unreal, at least it did to me. But I could understand it being this way. He told me that Jim woke up about twelve
o’clock that night and he shook his wife and he said, “Honey I want you to make
a couple phone calls.” She said, “Are
you out of your mind?” He said, “No, I
don’t want to alarm you, but I am quite sick.
And I think I’m going to need a doctor and I want you to call a priest
too. But don’t get excited, just go
over there, there are three numbers written on the inside of the telephone
directory. The first one is the
rectory, so get father over here. So
she rang the first number, it did ring.
Father said he will be over here in a couple of seconds with the blessed
sacrament. So, he said, “Ring the next one, that’s the doctor.” So she rang the next one. The doctor answered. He said, “Tell him I think I’m having a
heart attack.” So she told him she
thinks he was having a heart attack. The
first she knew of this. He said, “Now,
ring the third one. That’s the police
station and ask them to bring out the oxygen.
So she rang the police station and asked them to bring out the
oxygen. And now, he said, to give you
something to do look up the number of our friends down the street here if you
don’t know it, and have him come up because it would be good to have Joe and
his wife, or whoever it was, that lived a few doors down. So in a matter of five minutes people
started converging on his house.
This gentleman that was
telling me this from Detroit said he was about four doors away, but he said the
priest beat him from the church. And as
he got there, Jim was going into confession and received the Holy Communion. Just then the doctor steps up, came up the
stairs and gave him an injection, but it just was a little bit too late because
his veins had collapsed and the police never did get there in time, but it
didn’t matter because Jim was dead by the time they did get there. But he said, Father, he said, I just can’t
tell you what this has meant and what it would mean the rest of my life. Here’s a guy that is eminently successful in
his business, if you are just looking at it from a business point of view, this
guy was a world leader, he was the head of his company and a very young
man. I think he was around 42 or
43. He said he was a wonderful guy
around the club and any place else you would meet him. I could remember meeting Jim once at a
Whitefield meeting at Hollywood Beach, Florida. They had this meeting with Young President’s organization, and
Jim trailed me out the morning and went running to the same mass and he went
communion with his wife. And he said,
anywhere you see the guy, he is always on top, he is always doing a great job. And he said at the end of his life just like
old Jim, everything in order, Priest, doctor, …and he said, when he died he
just died with a smile on his face. He
just smiled at us all and died. He said
it is a scene that I will remember for the rest of my life.
I think it is a scene that gives all of us a lot of
heart, because the things that we really carry away from Notre Dame are
timeless. There are things that I
think, when you stop to think as you come back here that many Notre Dame men
have gone on ahead, that the things we learn here are things that can change
our life on earth, and more importantly make them good for eternity. And I like to feel that as each of you come
back here, you can draw away from this place an inspiration that you are associated
with something that is alive and growing and out front. And somehow this gets into your own life and
that you’ll never will just stand back and just be defeated or hurt morally,
spiritually, materially or any way else; but you will always have the drive to
keep on going and not to give up.
Somehow as you walk around this place there come back to you the
aspirations of your youth, if you will.
Like a man who came back to see me one day and he said, “I’ve been just
walking around this campus for six hours.”
It was wintertime. And he said I
was on the train all last night. And he
said, “I just want to sit down and tell you my little story and get absolution
and leave.” But he said, before I do
that I want to tell you one other thing that I have really loused up my life
the last two years very badly. There’s
no excuse for it. I know I was wrong
and I knew what I had to do but I did not have the nerve to do it. But he said, with Christmas coming on, I
decided that if there’s anything on earth would move me to straighten out my
life it was to get back at Notre Dame.
And he said I came back here and I went to my Adler Hall chapel, where I
had been down for mass communion every morning. I went down at the Grotto and I probably said about 6 rosaries
down in the Grotto in the cold. He said
over here in the big church just kneeling there and down in the basement
underneath. And he said during the rest
of time I have been walking around just soaking up the atmosphere. And he said, Father, believe me; I’m just
ready to go. He said, I’m not ashamed
to sit here and tell you just exactly what my problem is, and get your
advice. I would like to do it man to
man, and when it is all over I wish you would give me absolution, because I’m
sorry, and I’m going to do better. And
he said that this place has really saved my life in a broader sense than in
time.
Well, I think all of us can
get this from Notre Dame. We’ve all had
holy thoughts here, we’ve all had good thoughts here, and we’ve all had many
happy times here. And I hope that your
being back on the campus, your walking around and drinking up some of the peace
of the atmosphere, your dropping in to the hall chapels that you knew of old, I
think your just meeting your old friends and talking, I think it all gives us a
surge of joy and pride and confidence.
And my prayer for all of you is that you’re all with us all the
way. And that you have confidence in
all of us that live here and work here that we are not trying to denature Notre
Dame, we are not trying to break it down and rebuild it. We are trying to take every strong thing we
have here and make it stronger yet if possible. We want to take anything here that might be weak and to
strengthen it. And we hope we can take
your sons, and we hope that they come here with the same wonderful desire that
you came with. And we hope that they
leave here with, not only as good as you are, but better. Because the greatest thing that any father
wishes for his son and we wish for your sons is that they are all better than
their fathers. I think every father
wants his father to have the father he didn’t have and to get the advantages he
didn’t have, and the greatest pride in your lives to see what your youngsters
do. And I hope you can have this pride
in us at least—that you can give us your sons with the full knowledge that they
are going to get everything you’ve got and more. And if I tell you that during Lent last year there were 100,000
boys and more at Holy Communion here on the campus, I know you would understand
that things aren’t really going very badly.
I think that when you look at our athletic record and find out that this
past year was the greatest year in our history for overall performance in all
the sports, I think you will realize that things are not going to the
dogs. I think when you look at a few of
the things I mentioned to you today and the other things I might have said, and
realize that things are, that we are as competitive as we have ever been in
history, I think this will give you pride and should give you pride.
Finally, I think that all you have to do is to walk
around and use your eyes and your ears.
And I hope that from this experience of this weekend, you would leave
here with the really deep conviction that this is the great place it always has
been. It is getting better all the
time, that your association with it is a wonderfully wholesome and growing
thing, and that we are indeed proud of you and proud that you think so much of
this place to come back for the weekend.
And I ask you in all sincerity to keep us in your prayers, and to be
sure that you are in ours every day.
Because every single day there is mass perpetually offered for all of
you and your families, and this will tie all of you and us together. And I hope that in conclusion I can really
read to you something that you have heard many, many times before; but which
says so much better than I can the kind of thoughts that will be going through
your head this weekend. It’s the old
poem from Father Charles O’Donnell, never old never new.
We have colored your cloak with gold, and crowned you with every star
And the silvery ship of the moon we have moored where your white feet
are.
As you look on this world of ours, campus, lakes and towers,
You are good to us, O, great Queen, good as our mothers are.
And you know each one by name, our heavenly registrar.
Enter our names in the book, into which you dear Son will look.
For we know that a time will come, the graduation year
When thousands and thousands of us who have dreamed on your beauty here
Will gather before your face to talk and dream of this place.
Then when your Son comes by, you will tell Him as of old:
These are the boys we knew, I and my cloak of gold;
You at the breaking of bread, these are the troops we fed.
And a shout shall split the skies, as the ranks send up your name
And a golden hour in heaven, when your sons, Oh, Notre Dame,
Kneel to their leader down there by the helm of your gown.
God bless you all.
I can’t help but feel that
this is the highlight of the reunion weekend, and that the many thoughts that
Father Hesburgh has expressed today will be repeated by you many, many times,
and since we are from all over, I think that it was certainly a fine thing that
Father could give of his valuable time to be here. I do have an announcement and then we are dismissed.
Father O’Brien has a very
bad opinion of my life, because he said all you have to do is get him in here
and stand him up and turn him on. And
today, I think, I’m not in the best type of mood to be stood up and turned on;
possibly because I am in some different part of the world. A couple days ago I was in Bogota and
Panama. The Sunday before that I was in
Brazil. The Sunday before that I was in
Buenos Aires. The Sunday before that in
Managua, Nicaragua. The Sunday before
that in Mexico City, and the next Sunday I must be in Rome. I think all we can draw from that is join
the wagon and see the world.
I am deeply grateful to all
of you for being here. I know it is not
a good time of year, with the youngsters getting back to school, and so much
excitement with the fall season to beginning, finding time for family, and
business and everything else. To think
you’ll take time today to listen to our story about what we hope will be our
greatest endeavors in the history of Notre Dame. It is something that warms our hearts, and I am deeply grateful
to each one of you individually—if I can say this as individually as I could,
and also to Peter Grace, who has taken on the brunt of this activity. Peter was in Europe, I think, last week, and
has to be there again this week. There
is no one in the country I know busier than he is, and I think it is typical of
his support to Notre Dame. When I
called him and asked him “Can you do this?”
He said, “I’ll do anything for Notre Dame, you know that.” And I don’t know where I would find a
willing spirit than that. Otherwise
than what Bishop Hershey said about our beloved Father O’Hara, he said that he
is a consecrated bishop, who will fit the task. He said, “How can I get in touch with Bishop O’Hara?” And the bishop said, “You have him.” What can I do for you? He said, this is typical of his whole
life. Anyone who knew him had him. And his only question is “What can I do for
you?” I suppose that there are in this
room a lot who think of him as Father John O’Hara. I did not know him terribly well. I only knew that to know him was to love him. The only chance I had to meet him as a
student was while walking down the halls or in passing him in front of the
buildings one day as a freshman. It
made no difference to him who you were when you are in need of a bit of a lift. When you met him you loved him because he
gave you all he had. I don't think this
place will ever be the same since he came and did what he did. I think he did a tremendous job and made a
dent in all of our lives. We will miss
that part of our lives as time goes on.
I hope that some day and in some way we can have a suitable memorial on
the campus of something that will somehow symbolize all of the things that he
was and did at Notre Dame.
Other than that, it was
typical of him that he never really left the place. I never met with him, but at his last will and testament I sensed
that he wanted his body and remains to be with the place he loved. I think that
it is wonderful in one sense that eight years ago today he lost his life and
his memory of Notre Dame ends. Not that
we won’t remember him for years to come, but today he has touched so many
lives. I think he typifies for all of
Notre Dame our richest endowment, which is to work where your heart is. We refer a lot to the past when we talk
about him, but we are not living in the past; but we are talking about the same
subject—the University of Notre Dame.
It is not so much how much it is worth, but it is something moderate
today. What we are really talking about
is, though, all that Notre Dame might yet be.
I think many things have happened.
We look back to the beginning of the past. We had something like 2000 students, today we have over
6000. At that time we were in very bad
shape for endowment. We still are, but
at least it is still much better today than it was then and more. We have evident on this campus more
buildings with buying value since that time than in the whole hundred years of
this university’s existence back in 1943.
For the past years the growth has been nothing short of fantastic, no
matter how you look at it. If you look
at the growth in the student body, both quality and quantity; if you look at
the growth in our faculty in the last ten years there have been over 112
faculty members added to this university.
And at the same time, over 116 Ph.Ds and upgraded at a net growth in that,
it is our net growth in faculty alone—faculty salaries were 150 percent in the
last years. If you look at the
budgetary figures, during the past ten years our budget was $8 million. Today it is $18 million plus and probably
$19 million next year. These are
material things, they are not big thing.
There are some things, which are going on in our world, which are harder
to accept. I think all of us have been
a part of it, at least in yearning and our desire to make something come true
that is really unique in all the world.
I think any Notre Dame man, no matter what year he’s been here, no
matter what year he graduated, what years he spent here in school, is willing
to admit that this college and the time he has spent here is something unique
in all the world. That’s why we are
back here today. That’s why I’m here,
that’s why we are all here. Somehow
this place has a drive in our lives, it has a claim on our feelings, and our
devotion. We are dedicated. And I think that the important thing that I
would like to say is that we all have a part in a corporation, and as a
corporation gets started our task gets started. Each one of us has a part in the forward start of Notre Dame. And as Notre Dame grows and becomes more
significant in the State of Michigan, we also grow and become more
significant.
If we look around at Notre
Dame today, at the original plot and layout of the buildings, you would find
that there is not a single open space left on this campus where we can put a
building tomorrow if we wanted a building tomorrow. And as we study the past ten years and look forward to the next
ten years, we find that somehow Notre Dame; this part of Notre Dame is now
completed. Every single plot is filled
from the center of the campus leading to the main building. The other path leads to the subsidiary
campus, the academic building and sports—leading up to the stadium. If we want to start thinking of what Notre
Dame might be in the years to come, we need to start thinking about what might
be called “a move to the East.” And
here we have a plot of land that is almost 400 yards across and over one half
mile long, which leads from the stadium property up to the toll road. And we decided that perhaps our first task
is to decide what we needed most and make this the next magnificent building we
have next to the Dome. Then to put it
right in the middle and center of this part of Notre Dame. And you will be hearing more of this in
meetings to come. But, I think what we
are talking about here today is something that is really focal, a focal point
for all our hopes and yearnings for the years to come. And I think that it is very significant that
this place and this room are the places to read this script in front all of our
alumni and hear about this—a place to really think of the interface of what the
new Notre Dame might be.
I would like to say, first
of all, that a university is a kind of unique institution in all the
world. It has been said many times that
the church is the mother of universities and indeed it is. The church has begun many universities such
as the University of Cambridge in England, University of Paris in France,
University of Bologna in Italy, and other great universities throughout the
world. In countries universities are
the consolidation of culture and cultures, which are number one. From earliest times to our day, even in the
earliest and still are today, in this time.
Cultural change has happened. I
don’t need to bother you with the details but the fact is that the church out west
all had universities—Bologna, Serbia, Rome, Paris and all the others. Today in at least six countries the church
is making somewhat of a comeback. I
have just come from a meeting with all the directors of Catholic universities
around the world. One of our concerns
is that our universities have been lost on the mainland, and it is time to
rebuild one. There is a new university
in the Philippines. And from there we
can move on across to Europe and fine new light fulfilling there like St.
Joseph in Beirut, which is now struggling to become a university. Or we can look down the streets of Africa
where we see one property per person.
Two thousand miles South of that is Brazil, in the end of nowhere is 180
students. Then we come across the
Atlantic to the New World, and if you look past Texas we find in Mexico City
today, new and a Catholic university under way. And they have a plot of land, and a stack of buildings, and they
are trying to get something started.
Then we go down to the countries of Central America, like where I went a
few weeks ago. There isn’t a single
Catholic University in the whole of Central America---all the way from Mexico
to Panama. Then we go to across to visit the southern universities like Andre
Sol in Caracas, on the West Coast you see universities with great names like
San Antoine, San Rafael, in Lima, but the church no longer has it. The church is now trying to start a
university in the South—universities of the world. Then we have on in Bogota and another in Medellin. Then you look up to Colombia; there are two
universities, which are really trying to get off the ground. But these are small and hardly compare to
the great universities of this world.
They are small in comparison to the great universities in this world. Santiago, Chile and another started in
Brazil, Argentina, one in Uruguay. The
fact is none of these universities has full-time student bodies. They are completely communistic. This is the kind of composition these
southern states have. To the north of
us, you find universities in Canada—Montreal Catholic—yet these universities,
again, are not big and one must say that honestly.
Then you come to our
country, where we have 260 Catholic colleges and universities. As you start putting down the criteria for a
really great university, that have had graduate faculty, that have full-time
students body, and full-time faculty, that somehow are committed to educate to
academic excellence, that somehow uses not only physical sciences or social
sciences, there is something extraordinary about them all. There is discovery, there is life and
vitality and through the course of a day you will find perhaps in the whole
complex of 260 Catholic colleges and universities, perhaps only 4 or 5 that
give some comment on the student enrolment of the universities. And I grant you, gentlemen, this is some
type of negative portrayal. Some great universities do not say they are. We will always have some that are Catholic
and are different—their philosophy, their theology, and some on the dynamic
presence of God and the loving practice of work for God on our campuses. But the fact is, that all universities and
all those who are committed to that university, and I think ours is, and I hope
always will be, that somehow our guiding light and goodness, that somehow our
leadership in the ways of mankind in this life, and followers of new knowledge,
that are transfuses of the treasures of knowledge in the past to which we have
followed. And this too shall be the
tradition and the reality of this great university here at Notre Dame.
Today I have a chance to
tell you something that I must tell you in utter confidence. I am telling you something that can be, and
can be just now, but is not yet. But I
think that we’re like family here today, and I think I must tell you this to
give you some idea of the depth of our aspiration and the possibility of
receiving them. We were visited last
January by two representatives of the Ford Foundation, and they said they
decided that they were going to do something completely different than anything
they had ever done before. In the past
they had reached out and received applications from various divisions and
departments for science, economic projects, sociological science, teacher
education projects, and they had all types of divisions coming for these
various projects. They usually give
about 100 million dollars a year from the income of their endowment to pay for
institutions. And they decided for once
that they would like to look at the possibilities of reversing the terms. Instead of waiting for these universities to
come to them with all these special projects, they will pick a handful of
universities, possibly five from the whole country. One in the East, one far West, one in the Midwest, one in the
South, and one in the Rocky Mountain State.
They will probably pick out
universities that show promise in leadership and vitality and a commitment to
excellence and a chance to become among the greatest universities in this
realm. And they said that they made
this list of all the universities that exist.
They said in their own judgment and they were looking or further
consideration on this, but they decided that the university they were willing
to bet on, if you want to put it that way, in the Midwest is Notre Dame. They said to see if they were right in
making this assumption, they would like us to make them an assessment of the
last ten years of the university, and of those things we look forward to the
next ten years. We are having a board
meeting this month to consider this.
They said that our job during the past ten years was really
magnificent. They said that in every
sense we were about a 30-35 percent up the curve in everything pertaining to
the university. “What are you doing that
is different, why should we pick you from all the other universities in the
Midwest? What are you all doing
differently from other universities in the Midwest?” We said we have something here that we think is very
special. We cannot only be in the main
stream of university life in this country, but we can also swim with the best
of them in the main stream. We said,
just look around in the country today and see the problems that we have
mentioned in a philosophical and theological point of view.
First of all, take the whole
wide world. Throughout the world today,
you have problems in every direction and the whole theme of democracy has
changed, so that today instead of Americans solving all the problems of the
world—to their various needs and possessions, the other 80 million people now
speak for themselves. All the other
countries, China, Indonesia, speak very loud and clear for themselves. Millions of people are now speaking for
themselves, even in Pakistan. We have
almost 200 million people speaking for themselves today in Africa. And you have, of course, some 225 million
Russians now speaking for themselves in Russia. You have American countries even standing on their own feet and
saying you need to be more concerned right out in the open. And this is the world where it is no longer
a world where Western culture is allowed to speak on behalf of other
cultures. This is a world where there
is no basic moral understanding, where the state has lost its authority. We are involved in these problems, and it
takes a place like Notre Dame to formulate some basic moral understanding, some
basic moral concepts. We are called in
this troubled world to do a work of mediation and diplomacy and healing, and
hope this moral world lasts. We are to
get some meaning to words like “rights” and “human dignity” and “honor” and
“justice,” “independence,” and all the rest—what they really mean.
To pick
another aspect of the world today that needs tremendous leadership, there is a
whole different culture between that which is technological and that which is
scientific and that, which is humane and literary. So that today, in this world, you don’t really see beside the
three cultures, and these cultures are getting further and further apart. So that the pastors and theologians don’t
talk anymore because they don’t understand their language, and the pontiff and
theologians and scientists can hardly talk to each other. There, too, a work of mediation needs to be
done. We need today a great university
where somehow we can bring together the voices of scientists and the voices of
economists, and somehow get them into a chorus. It needs direction and understanding. These things may not be accomplished in time unless there is some
philosophy from theology. Theology must
get involved in these questions. It
must get to the bottom of the significance of these problems. That’s the good old sound values. What can we do to get Protestants, and Jews,
Muslims, and Catholics and the rest of religions to somehow have a little
better understanding, a little better tolerance for each other?
Then you take the whole
field of the United States, and the problems we face today. What is wrong about the America experience
that we can bring to light? I think
Notre Dame is in a particularly good position today to do this unique work,
because we have always had contact with the other great universities of the
States, Protestant background to sit down and mentor our various associates on
various boards. Notre Dame, I think, is
closer to other universities in this country today, perhaps than any other
Catholic university ever had. We are
close to many people who are not of our faith.
And I think we are in a unique position to do something significant
about bringing into the situation some kind of understanding, some kind of
betterment. We can blame the many great
problems we have to the whole economic problem in our country today, and what
does it mean, this experiment of the economic revolution. So that in our time and in our day, there
has been a tremendous revolution in our country. And the lessons that come from all of the barriers in the past
that has somehow had done all the things the Russian Revolution promised to do
and never did. One hundred and
forty-five dollars today got into being in Middle class, and this Middle class
made things possible that never would have been possible. And the lessons that come from these, are
something that needs deep study. This
is not understood outside the continent of the United States. We are much better at doing things
economically than talking about them or articulating them or philosophizing
about them. So here is an area that
testifies to our lives at the moment.
We have economics, political science, and sociology that somehow a great
modern university could be interested.
Somehow a great modern university can get involved in doing some
theological study. And I think we in a
great modern Catholic University could be giving some moral, some spiritual,
some deeper dimension to all of these studies.
Now take another great study
that a lot of people do not like to talk about, but I think we here need to
talk about it, because it is a promise and that is equal opportunity for all
Americans no matter what their race, religion, color or origin. This is a problem that won’t be settled by
demography, it won’t be settled by misunderstanding. It would only be settled by getting people of goodwill to really
study what is happening and what we are going to do about it. We don’t have to wait for a tornado to blow
us off the ground, because somehow God owns the destiny of this whole
cosmic. What is the meaning of our
constitution? What is the meaning of
equal opportunity that we talk so much about in America? How can this be served to all Americans? A difficult study, but one which the
Catholic universities cannot afford to pass by today. It needs vision, it needs talents, it needs training, it needs
understanding, and these things could come from the Catholic universities. They should come also with caring. Too long the people with good ideas have
taken care of themselves and the people with bad ideas have been taken care of
everyone else. We need unity, we need
power, we need strength, and we need understanding. I can go on with a long list of problems, but all these things I
have mentioned is a kind of burning problems that need to be met. They are kinds of burning problems that
people from the Ford Foundation are eager to meet. We are the ones who know deep down that the concentrated studies
on many of these problems are of a world mature, or of a national nature or
even a Western world nature. We
thought that these are things we could bring to modern life, and modern
culture. We thought that these are new
dimensions of understanding that can go forth from this university. This is what it means to really get meaning,
as far as I know.
After studying our
proposition and thinking of the whole thing, the Ford Foundation seems to be in
agreement that the five universities that they picked off are really thinking
universities, and we are one of those five.
This is how they propose to do that.
Firstly, they are impressed that our budget for example, is to do the
things we have to do and not to do the things we want to do. First of all we’ve got a library that is
bursting at the seams. One fifth of the
books we have have been acquired in the last five years, and there is going to
be a similar load as we move on to the next ten years. They looked at our graduate school, we need
better security for our faculty, better student security for our graduate
students and residents, and for our personnel in the library facility. As we look at the university, you could not
imagine what we need to do all the things we want to do. They said, let us put it this way: “we are willing to help you if you are
willing to help yourselves.” We would
like to work out a kind of formula here.
For every $2 you raise, we will give you a dollar. And for the first three years, let’s say
this amount would be something like $6 million. If you raise twelve, we will give you six. You can use the six for anything you want it
for. You can use it to upgrade your
library. You can use it to pay
professor salaries. You can put in a
pension plan for your non-academic employees.
You can do anything you want, if you feel it is important for the growth
of Notre Dame towards that academic excellence. And if we get our board to buy this, this will be the first time
in our history to put on, what we call, institutional grants. And we will have a formula for each of the
five universities, and it will do the same for all of them. The amount might be different. They said
that we feel that somehow Notre Dame has perhaps dramatized for the whole
Catholic world in the United States and perhaps beyond the United States. The amount might be different for other
universities. We will have a salary for
each one of the five universities, and we will do the same for all of them, the
amounts might be different. The fact
that it is, what is in our judgment, to have a non-profit, a really good great
Catholic university? We think you can
do this in the tradition of Oxford, Cambridge, and Bologna; and revitalize
something that is authentic and lost in the States. We think you can have an institution where people in the State of
Michigan can say, “I am really proud of that.”
We are interested in culture and wisdom, willing to grapple with modern
science like the time of the Middle Ages.
I think we have wisdom from the Middle Ages, but I think the wisdom must
be known, understood, and applied to the problems we face in this world
today. And if we don’t solve these
problems we face today, they’ll be around for the next generation. The time is getting short and late, and we
must work while we can.
And that is what we are
facing today, as we look toward the future of Notre Dame—one of the greatest
visions that any gentleman should have a part of, and each of you gentlemen,
should have a part of this vision. When
we look at the new library, we are not looking at a building. We are looking at the center of something
that can symbolize for all American Catholics and non-Catholics and Jews and
everyone else. The fact that here in
this university we have an institution that is not only in the main stream of
American life and real life, but is willing to make a contribution, that is
live right, and just, and honest, and is of service to this main stream of life
today. When we look at a building like
this, this represents a spirit, a spirit that is going upward, a spirit of
optimism, a spirit that is aggressive.
So, we are not going to be quiet until every hall in this auditorium has
been filled. We are looking forward to
this university, not to what has been done in the past, but to what we can do
starting up from here. And I will not
be surprised, gentlemen, that if we can to the Ford Foundation as we go to the
Board Meeting next month, that we can raise, not only the $12 million, to get
the six million, and this can be done on an annual basis depending on how much
we raise, but we want to do this, not in three years, but earlier than three
year’s time. I know someone will get up and say, “What will we do with the
extra year?” We can make it now. This is the time to move. This is like getting 50 percent interest for
your money every thing you need every day in the year for the next ten
years. This, I think gives us a
position, a quality, and an outside judgment, because we didn’t go to them, they
came to us. I don’t think this task is
the hardest kind of hope because obviously, I wouldn’t be telling you about
it. But I think it will pass the Board
of Directors’ meeting this month. I
think we need to get up, focus on the library, but not only on the
library, we are to focus on all the
things this university is going to be and do in the years to come.
I’ll like to feel that there
is not a man in this country who can’t come here and be inspired, that can’t
come here and feel he’s alive in a sense that he has not been alive
before. To feel a kind of inspiration
for his Catholic life and time he spent in this place, to feel a kind of
inspiration for his personal sense of devotion, for sharpening his mind, for
being all that he can be in his day and his time. You can’t help being excited in a place where things are
happening, a place where times are being looked at honestly and seriously.
Then let’s look ahead. I will not be surprised if ten years from
now that a budget that is now $18 million will be $35 million, or $36 million
or $40 million. I would not be
surprised that if ten years from now we, not only have this library built and
functioning for 7 years, and going through the first set of books already, but
we will also have more undergraduate facilities to fill our campus; but we’ll
have a new science library. We have
been approved for a new three-quarter of a million dollars in Atomic Energy
budget for next year to make our basic plans for putting up a new radiation
lab. It will be the greatest thing ever
in any university in this country. And
this comes directly from the Atomic Energy Commission, because of the kind of
work we are doing here. We need to have
a great lab for the study of biology.
We need to have a great lab for the study of norms—for the kind of
things I have been talking about today.
What is happening to the norms in our society? What is happening to our culture? What is happening to our moral conscience? What is happening to our world
situation? What is happening to our
dignity? We can nearly say that
anything that is important for man is important to God. Anything that contributes to the dignity of
man is the fulfillment of man. That
somehow because we are alive and in this place and in this university, a great
Catholic University, the greatest minds of our time can come here and study
here and have a part of this place. And
I think that our dreams and our ambitions can be as wide as our world.
And I know I can tell you,
gentlemen, that the only reason I joined the Holy Cross congregation, of all
the fine reasons is not because I knew a lot about it, but because I knew if I
joined it I wouldn’t have to worry about money the rest of my life. I can honestly say that things do have a
dollar sign on them. And the dollar
sign, believe me, gentlemen, is to the extent that you want to do an excellent
job, to that extent the dollar sign will figure. This is a study of the picture
of the library that was much more ambitious.
This would double our present capacity for books. You can say that we can keep all the books
in the present library and make one as large again, and it would last for quite
a few years. And I think this would be
looking backwards again instead of forward.
And instead of that you say, let’s build a library four times as big as
the one we have or five times as big.
And let us plan to get some tremendous use out of it for faculty and
students. But let’s look ahead and
let’s dream big, the way that men who came years ago dreamed big. And we wouldn’t have this campus we have
here if the men 40, 50, 60, indeed 118 years ago didn’t dream large enough to
keep buying land and give us to move and expand.
And with all this expanse
you see around this university, gentlemen, we still haven’t used half the land
that Father Sorin bought and left as a legacy to this university. And I’m sure that Father Sorin is hovering
somewhere in the wings today and he is saying, Give them hell, or something,
but keep the thing moving.” And I am
sure he dreamed large enough, because if a man can come to a place like this
and find some frozen ground and snow, and a couple of lakes, and a lot of
problems and thought “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac,” now, this takes a lot
of faith. And this is what is has
become. Because of the blood, sweat,
and tears, I must say, and the vast
human heart and energy of an amazing number of people; he has brought to this
place the human talents, the human heart and devotion, the energy that has
literally filled the lives as Father Cavanaugh did, as so many of the men going
back, as Father Sorin did, as a very great number of men did. And we have had a
tremendous number of devoted, loyal, wonderful laymen, both Catholic and
non-Catholic at this university.
I would like to think of,
and if I might get personal for just a moment, I see men sitting down
there—Professor John…., a member of the class of 1934, ‘35. It was a wonderful class. I could remember how bright it was and how
much I loved to like to go there to listen to them. Professor Frederick, there is not a prophet; there is not a
devoted men in the whole world to Notre Dame’s Professor Frederick. These were persons who had their hearts in
the place, not only their heads. I am
sure there are people in parts of the world today who can speak about them more
eloquently than I could. I have come to
the conclusion that probably I should forget everything else and just sit here
and do the work that ought to be done here.
But again, I rationalize and I may be I’m rationalizing, and not
thinking honestly, but one of the things I enjoy is being involved and
involving Notre Dame in the world at large.
But I like to think whether I am in Bogota working on the Atomic Energy,
because we had some real problems there last weekend in Colombia; the fact is
that all of these are things that the university in this day and this age
aspire and about which I must think.
And I cannot distinguish
myself from Notre Dame. These are large
dreams, I admit it, they are very optimistic and powerful dreams and I admit
that too. But, I admit a third thing,
that these dreams will not come true just because I dream about them or Father
Jerry Wilson down there or Father Moore or the trustees. This dream can only come true if all of us
get together and say we are going to make this, as a Catholic university, one
of the best in the tradition of what the church did in the Middle ages.
We are going to make this
place one of the most exciting places on earth. We are going to make this place the kind of place where the young
men come to and leave four years later, not only strengthened internally in
mind and body and soul, but with a sense of dedication that he is going to make
his life something to brighten up this world.
We are going to make this place a kind of oasis in a world that is full
of prejudice and ignorance and stupidity at times. And we are going to try to make this place a living bee hive, if
you will, where a lot of the things that make man really high in his dignity. And I think we can do this, gentlemen. I don’t you will have to be a great man to
live your lives with growth. You don’t
have to tremendous people to realize this new library as the center of this
growth. I don’t think we have to be
heroes of an extraordinary type to say we are going to get out and do the
things that are necessary to get people excited about this dream. I think the hardest part is that the Ford
Foundation just came out of the blue without our seeking it. And I think it is thanks to hundreds of
people over the years who have put Notre Dame in the position that we would be
picked out of the blue. That we would
be matched with some of the finest universities in this country, to be given a
very special kind of help, and I think we have to move. I think we have to latch on to this, and I
think if they gave us three years to raise six million, I think we aught to do
it in two and a half.
I think we have been sharing
with people for years what Notre Dame can do in football; we’ve shown them what
we can do in devotion. Now I think it
is time to show them what we can do with this university. I leave this right in your laps, gentlemen,
and I know we can do it together. I am
depending on you 100 percent. Thank you
very much.
Ford Foundation Challenge Grant
1961
Dear men of Notre Dame and dear members of our wide
spread Notre Dame family; I am taking this opportunity to speak to you for a
few minutes about the past, present, and future of Notre Dame. One cannot speak
of the present or future without bowing one’s head in reverence and gratitude to
the past. Because all of us, all human beings and all human institutions are
indebted to their past. I would like to salute, to begin with, the hundreds of
men and women who have given dedicated lives to this university: who have given
the very best of their hearts, minds, and souls to make it what it is today. We
have inherited the total reality of Notre Dame today, for which we should all
be indeed grateful. And now to tell you something about our present and our
future- I believe that Notre Dame is facing so many open doors of opportunity.
So many chances to become in all reality one of the greatest university of all
times, want to share with you the greatness of this opportunity; because it is
your opportunity as well as ours.
As you all know, last September this university was
included with four other universities throughout the United States in a
magnificent program of the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation scouted
throughout the whole country, studied a vast number of universities and from
this study chose five – on the West Coast Stanford University, in the Rocky
Mountains Denver, in the south Vanderbilt University, in the East Johns
Hopkins, and here in the Midwest in the Heartland of America they picked Notre
Dame. And they told each of these universities that they wanted them to become
in the next ten years that which it might normally take them 30 years to become
– great, outstanding bastions of education, dedicated to excellence on every
front. And to this end they said they will match us and the next three years by
50 percent of every gift obtained by the university, barring gifts from the
government and the Ford Foundation itself. This means that from now until July
1963, if someone gives us a million dollars they will give us $500,000.00, if someone
gives us $10,000.00 they will five us $5,000.00, if someone gives us $1,000.00
they will give us $500.00, if someone gives us $100.00 they will give us
$50.00. To do this, we must double the free money that has come into the
university over the past years. This means that when we double our income and
gifts, they will match it by 50 percent and effectively we have tripled the
total financial resources brought to bear upon the betterment of this
university in the years immediately ahead. And the whole business-if we are
successful between now and 1963, we will raise the money required of us. It
will be matched by $6,000,000.00 by the Ford Foundation and then we can look
forward to a suitable arrangement continuing on and on, possibly for about ten
years. And this is indeed what I want to talk to you about tonight.
But, first of all I would like to say something to you
about why the Ford Foundation picked Notre Dame. They did this after a long
study as I have already indicated; and this study was made in a very intricate
and very wide fashion. First of all, they looked at our student body, because
this, after all, is what a university exists for, students. There was never a
great university without a great student body. First of all, they found that our
students come mostly from out of state, in fact, 86 percent of which student
come from out of State of Indiana, which makes us by their own figuring the
most national university in the United States. They also found that great
students through out the United States, graduating from high school come to
Notre Dame in great numbers. For example, we had as many as 1,800 high schools
represented on our student body. One of the things they found out is that
married scholars, who are among the thousand young men and women chosen as
graduates from high schools to come to the university, who can go to any
university of their choice throughout the whole of the United States that we
were in the top ten of men’s universities to which most of these students come.
They also wanted to know what our students did after the four years. And in this we turned up, what was even to
ourselves a rather startling record. We found, for example, in the greatest of
all graduate fellowship foundation awarded competitively though out in the
United States to graduating seniors, the Danford Fellowship, which carried the
student all the way to his Ph.D. and even far beyond with all expenses paid, we
had at the time of the study, more students studying under this fellowship from
the Danford Foundation than any other university in the United States.
On the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which is giving out
1,000 scholarships a year on a competitive basis to some 2,000 colleges and
universities senior graduates, we find that in the past 8 years we had over 81
of the scholarships. And in the 3 years of the expanded Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship program, we were tied for 5th place in the country. In
all of the universities, only 3 schools had more than we do during the 3-year
period. Harvard, Princeton and Cornell beat us. We had been beaten by Yale-two
years and we beat them one year. Columbia beat us one year and we beat them two
years. For example, in the Rhodes Scholarship, to take another endeavor, we
found that in a five-year period we had won 3 Rhodes Foundation Scholarships,
and this is quite an achievement, because there have not been traditionally too
many of these won by Catholic university students. We found also for example,
that in the National Science Foundation Fellowship, which is indeed another
wide spread Fellowship appealing to all graduating seniors in the United
States; that this very year we were tied for 11th place in the whole
country. And these schools we tied with were California-Berkeley, Yale
University and Cornell.
On the Engineering Scholarship and the National Science
Foundation Scholarship, we were tied for 3rd place. And just to give
you one more figure, because this may sound dull doing them all in a row like
this - I would like to tell you that a
scholarship granted out by the Rotary International, there were only 38 granted
out in the whole country this year, this year, Notre Dame students won 3 out of
the 38.
I think you will agree, as the Ford Foundation agrees,
this is indeed a spectacular record, and Notre Dame is right up there in the
very top ranks of schools, whose students are competing with the best in the
land and coming out in the top 5 or 10. And I know you are proud of this
record. I know we are. And I know that we are going to hear more of all these
students in the years to come, because their competition doesn’t stop the day
they graduate from Notre Dame.
To give you an interesting sideline of what happens to
these young man, just the other day I approved 14 new professors for the
university, and when we looked over the records for final approval, it turned
out that 8 of the 14 were Notre Dame graduates—men who had graduated at the top
of their class, men who have competed for scholarships and won them, men what
had gone to some of the finest graduate schools all over the world and were
coming back to Notre Dame to give the rest of their lives to this university,
as members of a distinguished faculty.
And I think this is the kind of tradition we would like
to see continuing. We want to see these
young men spreading out all over the world in top professional jobs, in
business, in public service to their country here and abroad. We know that all
of you are going to be proud to know these young men and will follow their
careers for years to come.
The second thing the Ford Foundation looked at was
faculty. In the matter of faculty, we have progressed a great deal, I think in
these past 10 years. For example, in the past 10 years there have been 112
additions to the faculty, and during that same period 116 members were added
who had PhD’s, as differentiated from a master of baccalaureate degree. This is
a great rise in faculty members with a doctor’s degree in a 10-year period –
116 net rise increase. Also during the past 10 years, they found that our
faculty salaries have increased by 150 percent. The other night I tried to
figure out what that means in dollars and cents over the past 7 years. And I
found that the net increase and the amount of money paid for faculty over what
was being paid over 7 years ago; the net cumulative increase for the past 7
years was over 7.5 million dollars. You may ask “Why all this expenditure for
faculty?” I like to tell you that the reason is very simple – there has never
been a great university that has not had a great and distinguished faculty.
Moreover, there are a finite number of great faculty members throughout the
United States today. And one must compete for these faculty members because
they are being bid for by the best universities in this land who are facing the
same problem we are in building up a strong and distinguished faculty. We want
to feel that we are competing with the best, for the best, and to do that we
have to increase this remuneration for faculty, which in pitifully small. And
we are a competitive school and are going to stay in this competition for the
years to come, I hope.
We have as you know - we
have been building up this part of our endowment, a pool fund for our
distinguished faculty and for leading all our young men to distinction, who
return here with great promise.
Another thing that the Ford Foundation wanted to know
about was the facilities at Notre Dame. And I think that all of you would agree
that the additional sum of $20,000,000.00 worth of buildings since the end of
the war has greatly increased our facilities at Notre Dame. But at the same
time we told them that the one great lack we had in going ahead and in giving
us all of these things increase that we so badly need available - a great new library. And I hope you will
come with me for a moment, because I would like to tell you something about
this great new library.
You see a picture of it here on the platform, and I would
like to give you a quick run down about what exactly this is all about. This
library is really a dual-purpose library. First of all, the first two floors,
which have a floor area of more than 4 acres, are large enough to take care of
all our student body. Exactly one half of our student body can be in this
building and studying at one period of time. Also in this first two floors is
200,000 books that are going to be an open stack shelving right with the
student. In other words, the books are going to be where the students are. If a
student wants a book, there is no delay in making out a card and sending it in
and waiting for something to come back. The student and the books, and study
area and quiet area, and the spirit of study will be in the first two floors,
open day and night to access to our student body. In the basement of this
building underneath these two magnificent two floors, there is going to be a
great series of offices for our faculty.
As you know, Notre Dame has been trying to build a full
time faculty as well as full time student body. Many universities in this
country only have one half of their faculty full time and the other half part
time. Over 95 percent of our faculty are on full time. And to give full time
service to this university, what they really need is a place where they can
study, where they can meet with the students, where they can counsel and where
they can be found on this great campus of the university. And in this we are
very happy because our faculty can now have a place where the students get
together with them and where they can counsel students from their office space.
On the eleventh floor, rising above the first two floors,
we have room for some 1,800,000 books and enough space for great research in
the humanities. You may say, “Why make a university library this large?” This
will be the largest university library of all times. And I would like to tell
you why. At the heart of a university you have books, which are the resources –
the greatest resource of learning together with intelligent people. And at this
university, since the end of World War II, all of our book holdings have
doubled. And of the more than 600,000 books we now have, more than 100,000 have
been purchased and put into library use in the past 5 years. And so part of
this library as I look into the future, we don’t want this to be a stingy look,
we want it to be a magnificent look.
There is one more thing I can say about this library, you
may wonder where it is going to be; and I would like to show you that where it
is going to be, it is going to symbolize and be a living, working memorial of
all that Notre Dame is striving to be in the years to come. If you would look
over here for a moment, you will notice a plan of Notre Dame as it is today and
of Notre Dame we hope it to become in the years immediately ahead. On this
plan, everything between myself, and this line is presently on the university.
What goes beyond this line, the square of new buildings with the library at the
center, this is the future development of the university. If you would like to
picture that area, perhaps its easier to it on this chart. Here is the present
liberal arts building, the science building, here are the freshmen residence
halls, new dining hall, the steam plant, our warehousing, our heat power
plants, and so forth out this way. We have a large area of land, that is almost
400 yards across and almost a half a mile long from here up to the toll road,
and this is going to be the area of the new academic development area of Notre
Dame. We hope to have in this area such things as the new radiation lab, which
the Atomic Energy Commissioner is putting up on our campus beginning next
September at the cost of 2.25 million dollars. While I am talking about the
building, I might just add another fact the Ford Foundation turned up in the
last ten years. All that is our research at the university has grown in ten
years time, from some 300,000 dollars ten years ago to over $10 million dollars
awarded in research grants during the past years. We hope that along side of
this, there will be a new laboratory for materials research, the possibility of
astronomy, the possibility of a computer center because we hope to build here
one of the great computer centers, which is center to all research at a great
university.
On the other side of the building, we hope to have
another two graduate residence halls probably for nuns, who would like to come
here to receive their doctor’s degree and another for laymen. We hope to have
also undergraduate halls, because while we are not increasing our undergraduate
body, it is rather crowded at present. There are too many off campus at present
– several hundreds. We hope in time to expand our dining hall facilities and to
have other residence hall facility for these undergraduates. We have back there
a building known as the Dome Building, which we hope will replace the Drill
Hall, which had to be taken down when they new library began to be constructed.
And here we have a field house for the future and a new cat field alongside of
it. This whole area, out through here, becomes a great new Notre Dame focus on
this great new library.
I think I need not tell all of you that Notre Dame as it
stands today magnificent in its splendor, and as we project it for tomorrow,
magnificent in its hope, and promise for the future its something that will
always be under the dome. I put the dome in the middle of this picture to
symbolize as it does for all of you, I know, she to whom we owe our protection
in this place, our hope for the future. And I would like to think that even
with the new library, this is still the highest spot on our campus. And it is
still our testimony and our hope for what we have become in years to come.
Coming over here again, I would like to tell you a few
more things about Notre Dame and what we are going to do here in these
buildings. One other thing the Ford Foundation asked us about was “What about
your alumni?” “Why should we support your university if your alumni do not
support your university?” We said to them, “You might ask that at some
universities but not of this one. Because it so happens, and this came out in
their study, that during the past ten years we have consistently in all the
alumni studies that have been made, have consistently been in the top 10 in all
three categories as the percentage of alumni who have given to the university
each year and this has always been around 50 percent, the average amount of
each gift, and the total amount given to this university. If you want to see
what a tremendous effort of enthusiasm and generosity this has been, our total
alumni gifts given to the university from 1922 to 1947 gift to the university
is $700,000, almost a total of all these years. But now we really want to get
behind this Ford grant. We really want to show what we can do symbolized in
this great new library. And we are going to ask all of our alumni in the days
immediately ahead, to be sacrificial about their gifts to the university; to
somehow get the swell of feeling as to what the university is doing today, what
doors are opening, to have a pride in what is going to happen here.
And in this, let me say a few words again about the
students and about some of the things they are going to be exposed to in the
years to come. First of all, the student of today I am sure is again someone
not completely like the student of other days; and yet, he is to me a
magnificent young person. You hear many bad things said about students in our
day. I would like to tell you some good things about the students I met here
during the past few years. First of all, I find that these students are very
serious. They are serious about their education, and they are serious about
their future. Their interests range far and wide, all around the world and into
outer space, which has just been altered. Their interests lie in what they can
do for their country and their family in years to come, for the world. We find
them concerned about the wide range of things that are being done, for example,
the Peace Corps. You might be interested in knowing that the first Peace Corps
project given to a university was a grant given to the University of Notre
Dame, in which we have trained young people who will be spending the next 2
years in Santiago de Chile, in the south, in the research region rather, in the
earthquake region of Chile. They will be there helping the world’s poor earth’s
population to overcome the hopeless days that have faced them for so long.
Because we think that one of the great things a university must do is work in
ideas and work in people. And in that area of ideas we want our young men of
today to be strong in heart and pure in spirit, dedicated and devoted and
intelligent confident, but they have to have areas in which they can work and
confidence has to be aimed at doing something.
Let me tell you some of the areas that are going to be in
this library as research centers. One might describe the whole effort by saying
we are inaugurating a number of projects that will have to do with the problems
of man in contemporary society. You see, we center these problems about man
because he is the one that has the problem today; and we center them in
contemporary society because this is the day in which we live and these are our
problems. And we think that one great function of Catholic universities, as
professing the wisdom of the ages and its philosophy and theology is to bring
some answers to bear upon these great agonizing problems that men face in our
day and age and in our country and our world. We would like to believe that
here at Notre Dame we have the center for this, a tradition that is amenable
for doing this job; and the kinds of students and the kind of faculty that are
willing to really spend themselves in doing jobs here and about the world after
graduation.
What are these jobs? Well, look at our own county and its
tensions and you will begin to see some of them. How can we make real for our
times that wonderful motto “Out of many different factions, one reality as a
nation.” How can we get different religious groups to understand each other and
to live together in peace and harmony in our country instead of in
dissatisfaction and bickering? How can we get all racial groups to have some
sense of equal opportunity in our time? How can we talk to their hopes to make
their democracy come true for all Americans all over the country as well as
give our efforts all over the world?
How can we, for example, study the American Economic Revolution, which
gives us everything that the Russian Revolution promised but never delivered
on? How can we understand it, articulate it, and make it real to people who
don’t understand it here and abroad? What can we do to study the problem of our
blooded cities, urban redevelopment community development? What can we do about
things like juvenile delinquency? What can we do about the whole world and its
problems and many different cultures living together? So they live together in
peace, harmony, with freedom, and peace and justice and honor and not with a
constant threat of war be it hot or cold? How can we take the great reality of
science and technology in our age, and make it a science and technology that
brings hope to mankind, instead of a foreboding of a nuclear attack and the
destruction of all man has created in the 10,000 years of recorded history on
earth? How can we study great problems like populations? How can we study other
great populations as religious sociology, anthropology? Certainly we will have
the space to do this, we will have the people to do it. And I am sure we all
can get the support to do it if we have the will to do it. It seems to me that
the function of a great Catholic University in our time is to bring light where
there is darkness to bring understanding, where there is lack of understanding,
to bring hope where the situation has long been hopeless. I think we can do
this because we have the right ideas. I think we have the right kind of people
and I think we have the tradition of dedication that will make it come true.
Now, how can this come to pass?
The Ford Foundation looked at the finances of the
university, as they well might, they found that while our endowment had grown
in the past 12 years from some $6 to $30 million dollars in market value, they
found that our endowment was only 5 to 20 percent the size rather 1/5 to 1/20
of the size of endowment of the great universities that we are in competition with
for all these prizes I mentioned early. They also found that while we had by
far the largest endowment of all Catholic universities, we still had a long way
to go if we were going to face our competitors. They found that while our
alumni was solidly behind us, we even had to increase this so that we were
granted a greater open door to the future to do all these things that need
doing so badly and they believe we could do and they were willing to help us
do.
I would like to tell all of you good folks that there is
the story about a man named Midas who it was said everything he touched turned
into gold. I don’t want anyone ever to think that we at Notre Dame that we are
interested in gold except the gold on the dome, and the gold that come here in
the way of people’s heartfelt contributions and whose fruitful ideas are turned
into people; and into fruitful ideas that will help people overcome the things
that have worried them around the world for so long. To give them some new hope
that they don’t have to live in ignorance. That they don’t have to live in
hunger and when it is cold they don’t have to be cold, they can live in houses;
and that the hopelessness of things like war and hatred don’t have to go on
forever. And if there is any institution the whole world can bring to bear upon
these problems the kind of ageless wisdom and kind of total dedication this
place can bring, then everyone should be interested helping it bring light into
the darkness. I would like to say to all of you that as members of our Notre
Dame family, and as friends of Notre Dame, and alumni, we are very proud of you
because you really represent Notre Dame all across the country and all around
the world. We are proud of the purity of your hearts and the integrity of your
lives and wonderful wives and families and we are proud of your confidence,
your business and professional lives. We want you to be proud of what goes on
here, too, and if we tell you that we are willing to spend ourselves, we are
willing to bleed and that we are willing to give all that we have to make
things come true for a greater Notre Dame. So, that all the things we want for
Notre Dame to become, can come true, and will come true in our time with our
total efforts. Then I think you will begin to understand why I want all of you
to have great pride in this place, a great pride in what through the providence
of God it is destined to become; and a great hope that we too can bring the
world that hope that it so badly needs.
I want to invite all of you, members of our family, to be
proud of what is happening here at your Notre Dame. And I want to assure all of
you that we will give you all we can to make these things come true. I have
spoken about the help we need. I have confidence that all of you are capable
and willing and anxious to give this help. I want to tell you that when you
come back now and in the future, and when your sons and the friends of your
sons come here for some of the most delightful and fruitful four years of their
lives, when you see young hearts get stronger and you see young minds get
brighter, more confident, and you see the vistas of all the world – Asia,
Africa and its problems, Latin America opening up to all of them and you will
see their hearts swell with the kind of generosity that one hopes to engender
in a great university like this, generosity and purposefulness in life. Then I
think, you are going to be proud, as we are proud. And all of us together must
be proud of the proud heritage of this great place. No one of us can create this,
no one of us can create what it is yet to become. But all of us together must
join our pride to our hopes, we must join our sacrifice to our dreams of days
yet to come and all of us together must give our best to make the golden
reality of Notre Dame be real and true and promising for all of America and for
all the world.
Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining your lives
to ours. Thank you for sharing this great hope and this great pride. And thank
you for helping to make this come true, what all the world awaits. May God
bless and keep all of you and may our Lady smile upon you.
Alumni Reunion Banquet
June 1974
Thank you, all of you.
This is the 23rd time I stood here to welcome you home. And I don’t know anything at Notre Dame that
is more precious to its reality than the presence of so many of you who make
Notre Dame a reality where you live—in your family life, in your professional
life. Notre Dame is a place that when
all of your lives are put together it is just an enormous history of all that
is best in our country and in our university.
You have all had a long day, and you have had a long night: and I would just like to thank first of all,
your outgoing president, Fred McDowell for a marvelous work here at the
university. But I have to say that
after 31 years, when Jim Armstrong presided over the alumni of the university
with great class and great imagination and honest work, everyone said that it
would be impossible to follow Jim Armstrong.
But for some years, Jim has followed and led, and has created a bond
between all of you at this university, which I hope will continue and
grow. He has left us on a high
plateau. And to Jim and Annie, who
visit together, many, many thanks.
I really only have one thing to say to you tonight, and
that is after a year and a half of studying our Priority Study, they came up
with the conclusion that the most important priority for the whole future of
this university was to teach and to reach in its toughest character. I happen to believe that was exactly the
right decision to come to, and there are many days when institutions like this
are living their open faith or living their traditions, that somehow we could
be striving for them. This university
is standing firm in its beliefs, committed to the Gospel of our Lord and yet
open to all those who are seeking truth.
Open to study all the difficult questions of our time, and to study them
with an atmosphere of faith. Deeply
committed to the fact that whatever else one does in the educated prospects to
hone the mind to a higher level and greater competence, that over and above
that our aim is striving for values, for meaning, and significance to life, for
meaning of hope in the time of despair.
And I have to tell you that the greatest pride that this university
takes today is that the one student who lived and studied here is being imbued
with this spirit. I know it is easy for
me to say this, and some of you may wonder if it is really true. I would like somehow to bring it to life for
you. I would like to read you just a
couple of passages of letters I received from the parents of students who have
just graduated.
The first letter is from
Pennsylvania, and it says: “As parents we want you to know the deep personal
feeling we both share now that my son is graduating from Notre Dame. Our emotions are particularly moved, because
of the fine education we know Mark has received. But, finally, it’s the other aspect of Notre Dame that he has
been exposed to that warms our hearts.
Faith in God, concern for others and a task to search for truth are
those that come to mind…” And then
there is a letter from another parent in Jefferson City, Missouri: “When my son
entered Notre Dame, he was a fine young man, and a son we could be proud
of. The four years he spent at Notre
Dame added so much more that it was almost unbelievable to us. He developed into a great Christian, with a
great compassion for others. Every good
quality he had was increased to a maximum.
I don’t know how we will ever be able to thank you.”
This note is from Oyster Bay, New York. “Our son, Nicholas, Jr., graduated from
Notre Dame in ’65, and Peter is in the graduating class this year. My husband and I are both so happy with
their intellectual and emotional growth and development. During the years at Notre Dame, so many good
things have happened to them that I thought you should hear it. I believe that a priest’s work and an
educator’s efforts are often so long range and so subtle, that you often wonder
if enough is accomplished to make it worthwhile. In our own personal experience as parents, I can tell you that at
Notre Dame, Nick and Pete were influenced to the greatest degree, and what has
happened to them has influenced our whole family.”
A final letter from a friend of mine who was a mother in
Lakesville, and I suspect that I know the young man; she is writing about her
son. She says, “There is a Notre Dame
man like his dad and brother Bill, looks for the basic goodness in his fellowmen. He is willing and most importantly equipped
to make a commitment and to become involved in the welfare and good of
others. In these days when parents are
so concerned about the spiritual and moral attitude of the younger generations,
we have found through many discussions with our son and with their friends and
classmates at Notre Dame, that the basic tools that they have found at Notre
Dame have remained the same through these changing times. Terminology and methods may differ, but the
message remains the same.”
Finally, in a time when Americans are so discouraged, I
believe about their government, discouraged about many institutions,
discouraged about the lowering of the quality of life in America; this
university, which for 130 years was schooled in excellence, admitted some young
ladies to the university about two years ago.
I am sure that many of you were wondering if this was a good thing. And I think that barring the many words of
mine, I will share with you the thoughts of a mother of one of these young
ladies. She came here last September as
a freshman and was still on her way home last month. I am not going to read you all that the mother said, because some
of it is personal. But I will read you
a couple of paragraphs and then something that I think will touch your soul as
it touched mine. And somehow I think
that it will reveal to you the mystery and the splendor that is this
university, even in this present generation.
The mother writes a day or two after the funeral of her daughter: “the
things I had from you after Bonnie’s death as well as the letters we received
on the day we returned home from her funeral, meant a great deal to us then and
to me. (Bonnie was buried in Little
Rock, Arkansas). We both realized how
much this would have meant to Bonnie in life, as one part of her personality
was chosen to be remembered. We
remembered how delighted and thrilled she was at Christmas time as she thought
of you attending a party at her house.
I love Notre Dame. Each letter
we received from her, each phone call attested to this fact. Why she was even there was something of a
miracle. My husband and my generation
have always been Methodists as far as our records show. She was somehow destined to go to Notre
Dame, and this wonderful school and its whole family fulfilled her personally
so that she reached completeness and a fulfillment that she has never
experienced before. We were extremely
proud of her and we knew how happy she was.
This all meant a great deal to us then, and it means even more now. And we shall forever love your wonderful
school, because of the prayers and the sympathy. We have felt the prayers offered by you and the others at Notre
Dame. Before the power of prayer was
just a word to us, but now it has tremendous meaning because we know it is
completely not our doing. It is because
of the prayers of all of you at Notre Dame and our own love of God, which has
been strong through this experience.”
Towards the end she says: “Bonnie was completely caught
up in the atmosphere of Notre Dame. She
had a great love for the school. She
came home and was running half miles and doing all kinds of exercises so she
could make the school team. As
unathletic as she was, she was filled with dedication to just be a part of the
team of Notre Dame. A copy of the
letter I am enclosing says it better that I ever could, about what your school
meant to her. And I would like to read
you just a couple of paragraphs from Bonnie’s letter – the last letter she
wrote to her parents. I think against
the background of so many young people who are alienated today, some of the
people who feel unattached to their family or to the school; this letter has a
great blessing to our hearts and this university. Here it is:
“Mom and Dad, my year at Notre Dame is ended – no more
papers, books or hard work for 3 whole months.
Sure it’s been hard, but it’s been worth it ‘cause it made me grow. It went by too fast, I guess because there
had been so many moments that I wanted to last forever – the football games,
the school races, the people I’ve met, just being around this beautiful campus.
All this has come together to make this a world I have always dreamed of all my
life. I guess that since this is my last day here for a whole year (Bonnie was
planning to go to our input program in Austria this summer and to stay for one
year). I guess I am letting all my sentimental emotions get carried away.
Today, like so many days before, I walked across the campus with my happy tears
rolling down my face. It seems amazing to me that I could love a place so much.
Never once have I wondered or questioned the fact that I decided to be a part
of the Irish. Many people tell me that I am the most animated roommate they
have ever met and I must agree. But when they ask if I like it so much how
could I go away to Austria next year, I tell them that coming back here would
be perfectly wonderful. Notre Dame would still be my home while I am away, and
it will be my home when I come back. But I must admit that it will be hard to
say goodbye. People like Me, Ted and Jip are closer to me than I ever imagined
a friend could be. For a year now they have played the part of my family as
well as my friends.
I guess the main reason I am
happy here, is because I have made these friends by being completely and
totally trusting. Here, there is just no need for the proud front, or the put
on personality, that I did not realize until recently that so many people I
knew in high school were made up. There is no pressure on appearance and dress.
There is no pressure on the social life that seemed so important to me in the
past. People see you here at Notre Dame without having to look through many
mirrors, and because of this you seem to get to know many more people and love
them so much. You see most of what I’ve learned at Notre Dame has not been
found at the library or in my class. Most of what I gained this year has been
through association with a certain something that makes this place what it
uniquely is. If anyone should define the undefinable Notre Dame spirit, they
would create a best seller. Much of what I’ve learned cannot be classified as a
science or math and cannot be found or read about in a book. As I look back on
the year the three things that have made me feel an enormous sense of
accomplishment is the old Gibson’s Guitar that I learned to play, a pair of
autographs, and a sobering attitude. This attitude is the one that got me here
in the first place to become somebody. Mom and Dad, thank you so much for your
help as I continue to go forward towards this goal. Love, Bonnie.
I don’t think I can add to that expression of what Notre
Dame meant in 1974. What it meant through all the external vicissitudes of
those years described to us by Jan Sweeney. I thank God and all of you and all
those who work and live here that Notre Dame is still that kind of place to a
young Methodist girl, who came here from Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent only
one year on this campus. She left here loving God, loving her fellow students,
loving her mother and father, and loving Notre Dame. I think she still loves us
in eternity, and we love her too.
May God bless and keep all of you.
Let’s begin to fly up in the heavens. I am beginning to understand the
concepts—nevertheless, to get back to my game.
I have been thinking about this game.
I want to say something about what the Board of Trustees has done for
this drive. First of all, they have
given it their spirit, their encouragement, their enthusiasm, their
involvement. And in addition to that,
at this moment in the history of Notre Dame, the Board of Trustees has pledged
to give more than 15 million dollars.
What interests me is that I have a check here for $15 million dollars.
I asked Father Ned and Father Ted to experience my
deliberations. These remarkable men
came to the university at the same time.
And I thought that at this wonderful anniversary we should commemorate
the contributions they made. I know
that they would not want anything spectacular.
But when the subject came up at the board, I thought that there is no
way I can let them go out like that.
There may not be celebrations but there will be resolutions
commemorating their good services at the university. And at the end of each resolution, we determined that at some
appropriate moment in the future, we predetermined that at a convocation
ceremony we will give the appropriate gifts.
We all know that Father Ted and Father Ned had a great part to play in
the growth of this university. Then we
got to the final part where wisdom and enthusiasm prevailed and we passed
another resolution including all kinds of prayers that the new library at the
university becomes a reality. How can
anyone do justice to these extraordinary careers and accomplishments, both in
here and around the world?
What I want to talk to you about tonight is something
that is within my mind. You know
individuals are under terrible stress.
So many seemingly uncontrollable forces…. So what I have to say is be electrified, be vivified and hope
someone comes along who by his own life proves what a disciplined life can
do—health, courage, ceaseless devotion, honest compassion for each person that
comes into his life, liberality, being kind and compassionate, a sweet
person. Father Ted is indeed many
things.
Thank you Reverend…
I can only say to all of you that if you happen to be in
this spot surrounded by so many wonderful people you would look awfully good no
matter how poor you are, and I am quite poor myself. Ed (?) priesthood, you may not know it, but tonight you have been
celebrating that fact, the life of our bishop.
This is the 38th anniversary of his priesthood, and I am so
happy that these bishops, men who have spent most of their lives working for
Catholic education and now Bishop McManus is with us and he is celebrating with
us tonight. And I just want him to know
that we are celebrating his priesthood.
I have a very difficult task tonight. It is the end of a long day in which the
subject matter is in two words, Notre Dame.
We have had a lot of brilliant speakers, and we have had a great deal of
rhetoric; most of it very good, because it came from the heart. Somehow I have in a few moments to try to
bring together for you as we conclude this day, and as we start our journey,
some sense of what we are doing and what we are about.
It’s been said often enough that we live our lives in the
present, but we can’t really understand our lives today in the present unless
we somehow understand our roots in the past.
That’s the price of understanding our institution and ourselves. And we can’t understand our dreams unless we
can look forward to our future. So, for
just the few moments I have I would like to say a few words about Notre Dame’s
past, its present, and its future. It
is a kind of flowing stream in which in this wonderful moment of history, all
of us together in this room of one heart and one mind dedicated to something
really great.
For the past, I only want to draw you one picture. I would try to draw that picture of what it
really means to have what we have here today.
And that picture is of a priest only 28 years old, who had a dream of
building a school, who traveled 11 days through a wintry Indiana by ox cart
with some companions, who arrived in a little village only 19 years old called
South Bend—a train village founded by a fellow country man. Instead of resting, when he arrived here, he
had to get off to see this place, which was to be the seat of his dreams for
the future. And he arrived at that log
cabin, which we all know, and love so well.
He arrived on the Feast of St. Andrew, the latter part of November. There had just been a newly fallen foot of
snow, and as all of us who live here know, that on a good day in November at
4:00 you have the slanting rays of the sun.
When the sun come out everything starts to sparkle. He looked out on the frozen lake with a kind
of enthusiasm born of faith and a vision.
He called the spot “Universite de Notre Dame,”—University of the Lady of
the Lake. Well he might call it a
university in his dreams, because he came from a land that saw the first great
university—the University of Paris. It
was like all great universities that began proudly in Paris, Catholic in its
origin. We speak of Bologna and Lisbon,
the great Oxford in Cambridge, England; universities in Spain, *****, Portugal,
and so many others. All of them the
first universities, and all of them Catholic.
For a while that dream of a university that would be Catholic had a
bright white light and the glow carried throughout the world at that time. It did something special for the culture and
civilization of those times. But even
before that university began, there was a great building in Paris, which was
called Notre Dame. And somehow, with
all of his faith and all of his vision, he was able to go with that great dream
for the future, “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac”—University of our Lady of the
Lake.
I think one can honestly say, without depreciating Father
Sorin, that during the first 100 years it was not really a university. It was growing, and while it came to age at
28 and was burnt out at 65, as you hear so often today, he said it was only an
invitation to build something greater, and he rebuilt it as soon as the bricks
were cooled. No plans, no money,
nothing but iron will and the continuation of that original vision; and a deep
faith that this place has to be brought up from ashes, Phoenix-like, into a new
and greater Notre Dame. The great
golden dome on top, and on top of that the statue of Notre Dame our Lady. So, that all could look there and see why
this place was and has been seen so often today as something special.
I think that the year I would like to speak about in the
past, when somehow this great place began to take on the lineaments of a really
great university, really came into fruition at the great time in our country,
1945, following World War II. I can
speak of that very year because I lived through it. Not that I take any great credit for it, because if any credit is
to be given it would have to be given to thousands and thousands of
people. If you take the growth of the
university, the plant, the buildings, the grounds, whether you take the
endowment, which was about $1 million dollars in 1945; whether you take the budget,
which was $4 million in 1945; whether you take the research, which was almost
nonexistent: whether you take the scholarships, which were $20 thousand in
1945; whether you take degrees granted or levels of growing somehow under the
leadership of a man called John Cavanaugh, the place began to rise, to grow and
become what it is today. I think what
we are being challenged today, is to do not to stop, or wait for another fire,
because we cannot stop here. But, somehow,
we have great promise for a future from whatever we are in the present and
whatever we have been in the past.
Somehow when one looks ahead
from this moment forward, we got to say that there are two things we can be
absolutely sure of, that we are going to be facing unprecedented changes as a
nation and as a world. And that each of
these changes will bring to each one of us, not just the challenge of survival,
but the challenge of somehow to create a world that will move on in peace and
not some fiery holocaust. If somehow we
could project ourselves somewhat backward to the year 1900, who could have
foreseen enormous growth of oil and petroleum in the world, which was
practically nonexistent. Who could have
foreseen the speed that man could travel, going from 15 miles per hour to 18 –
25, 000 miles per hour. Who could have
thought of radio, of television, or telephones? Who could have thought of atomic energy? Who could have thought of flying the piston
planes, rockets and travels to the moon and back. These kind of changes have brought to our times enormous power,
and enormous human challenges for human survival. I keep remembering what a great Pulitzer Nobel Prize winner said
when he went to San Antonio to receive his prize. He said, “man must just not survive, he must prevail.” I say to you that while universities are places
where much of great expansion and explosion of knowledge occurs, they are also
places that prepare people to live with these types of changes. Somehow we must see that our physical
ability to create power does not go beyond our moral ability to control it for
the good of mankind and not for its destruction.
I think that Notre Dame has
a promise as unique in all this world.
We must go back to the faith, the vision of those who began universities
of the 15th century. Somehow
find that you could live with knowledge and faith together, the one infusing
the other. Somehow knowledge is
incomplete unless we involve all knowledge—knowledge from reason, knowledge
from science, knowledge from the arts, and knowledge from revelation from
God. That somehow we have to have an
institution that is willing to create change and live with change. Somehow educate people how to live with
change and how to get them in a vastly shifting, wildly moving world. There are a few anchors, anchors to rocks,
which are called dogmas and principles.
I think that this university
can be such a place to create it in its fullness so that it can be as great a
university as any university in the world, and still a university founded on
faith committed to values and principles.
Somehow it will call forth the greatest efforts that is in us, not just
the efforts to create the resources to do this, but also the wisdom to know how
to use those resources to do it valiantly, intelligently and with faith. I think this university is prepared at this
point in its history to take a quantum leap forward, to somehow learn to live
with this expanding role of knowledge and with it expanding role of faith; to
somehow learn to live with monumental changes by joining monumental faith to
vision. To somehow renew within
ourselves some sense of the dignity of human beings and the dignity of human
life. To somehow join to the great
advance of the science and technology, that great inner intuition that comes from
the arts and music and the humanities and theology. I think somehow we have to create in this place an institution
that will give young men and women the highest degree of competence, while
still enthusing them with a great depth of compassion and with the great
commitment to use their competence to make a better world to serve mankind
everywhere for the betterment of human life, for the advancement of human
beings. To somehow learn the means of
creating beauty in the midst of all the surrounding ugliness that faces us
today. To somehow recreate within them
a sense of love and fidelity, a sense of compassion for those who suffer, a
sense of creating a world of which we are capable of creating—a world without
hunger, without homeless people, without people in rags, without people who
have no hope for the future, because it is obscure to have such a world with
the great means of knowledge and faith at our fingertips.
I think this university can be such a place. Most of the early Catholic universities went
out of existence or were secularized as the word goes. In the last century and this century they
began to revive again. Somehow as they
revived, they became again the gem of great Catholic universities, because most
of them had begun to slide away. There
is a great Catholic university in Africa, the only one, named Ohani. It is now a completely nationalized and
secularized university. There were two
great universities in Canada, Catholic universities, today they are completely
secularized. I think this is one
university that can make it. We can
make it because we have a great board that is filled with knowledge and
wisdom. We have a great alumni that
believe in the place and will give to make it come up to their hopes and dreams
for the future. We have a great faculty
that are willing to spend themselves in spite of their miserable salaries
sometimes, who will give themselves to recreate within young people the
curiosity, the hunger for truth, the commitment to justice, and the yearning to
make a better world of truth and justice.
I think we have better facilities, interestingly everywhere we went
today, we could not have gone ten years ago, because they are all new. I think we have great students from every
state in the Union, from 66 foreign countries, Protestants, Catholics, Blacks and
Whites, men and women—thank God! We
have a student body that is so good as well as so bright that it just thrills
me to walk around and talk to them and be with them. They are a constant source of joy, because of the inspiration of
their young lives and the vitality of their hopes and yearning for knowledge
and their willingness to spend themselves for others. The one thing we don’t have is an endowment. Now I’m not going to be a crybaby.
When I came back here to teach in ‘45, we had an endowment of one
million dollars. I would like to read
to you, just for the sake of a small exercise, those universities on the
standard list (I think I’m missing a few, but I believe I have most of them),
who have endowments greater than this university. I begin with Harvard in ’75, 1 billion 300 million dollars; Yale
with 517 million dollars, and Colombia with 435; and Princeton with 398, and
Stanford with 363, and ***** with 356 million dollars and Northwestern with 242
and Rice with 172 and Washington with 161 and Pennsylvania with 144, and Johns
Hopkins with 130, and Vanderbilt with 121 and Delaware with 118, and then comes
Notre Dame. I am not critical of those
other schools; I may be envious at times.
I must say that they are all great universities in the best sense of the
word. But I think for us to be a great
university and then in addition to bring into this formula all the important
difficult tasks of being a great Catholic university, is something over and
above normal.
And I would say that we have been talking about the monumental task of
raising 130 million dollars and I will like to say to all of you that 130
million dollars is the very least we can do to match our hopes. And I would be very disappointed if we don’t
make much more than 130 million dollars, and I think we can.
Because I think people are yearning today for the kind of ideal that
this university can represent. Parents
are yearning for a place where their youngsters can get, not only knowledge,
but compassion and commitment and a sense of values that will give meaning and
depth to their lives. I think today
that we can create here, whatever the difficulties, and they are monumental, we
can create here something that really has not existed since that building in
Paris in the year 1205. Some kind of
dream that responds to the faith of that young French priest of 28, who could
stand on snowy ground on a wintry November day alongside his total
holdings—some land and a log cabin with a few companions and colleagues—who did
not have what we would consider a high school education today, and called this
place “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac.”
That is a great act of faith, and we are here to imitate that act of
faith. This great vision and faith of
the past must pull into the present and carry to the future. Nothing less than that is worthy of bringing
us together and keeping us together here in this center. It has been said that all of us need
something in our lives to give us a new gush.
We all have somehow to belong to something greater than ourselves as
Father John said earlier. I would touch
on those roots by quoting one of Father O’Donnell’s poems. And I would like to read you the whole poem
here tonight, because I think it speaks to the yearning of each one of our
hearts. All of us belong to this place
and this place belongs to us. It is our
home ground. It is as Reverend Cross
said, “it is a place that when you come they have to let you in.” It is your place and our yearning for it
can’t be less than great. And it won’t
be great unless we make it great and ever greater. This little poem is very short; one that Father O’Donnell calls
“Notre Dame.” He says, so well I love
these woods, I have believed there is an intimate fellowship we share.
So well I love these woods I half believe
There is an intimate
fellowship we share;
So many years we breathed
the same brave air,
Kept spring in common, and
were on one to grieve
Summer’s undoing., saw the
fall bereave
Us both of beauty, together
learned to bear
The weight of winter: --when
I go otherwhere—
An unreturning journey—I
would leave
Some whisper of a song in
these old oaks,
A football lingering till
some distant summer
Another singer down these
paths may stray—
And he may love them, too,
this graced newcomer,
And may remember that I
passed this way.
I don’t know but that I am
sure of one thing, if we really share this faith and this vision, if we really
believe in this dream, Notre Dame will always have a golden future. And those who somehow are touched deep within
their lives by this golden future would have all of you to thank. And I thank all of you. God bless you! Good night!
Ford
Foundation Grant Presentation
1977
Without
any further delay, I would like very much to go on to our professional
speaker. To try and introduce Father
Hesburgh is virtually impossible. So,
I’m going to cut it short and say he is our administrative leader, he is our
spiritual leader, he is our team leader.
Call him by the title he loves best among all the titles, I give you
Father Ed Hesburgh.
Hesburgh.
Thank you John, and I have to second with all the fervor of my soul that
model statement you gave us here tonight.
I would like to thank the forthcoming president, Bob, and I would like
to thank Vick for all that he did over the past two years. This is my second alumni meeting this
week. In fact, five weeks ago I knew
about this, and Frank, we had a big deal in Pittsburgh. I gave a bicentennial talk on Religious
Freedom last Thursday. And after the
talk, I was whisked over to luncheon and we had, at least as many as we have
here today or probably more… the alumni.
In the meeting…one of our younger alumni, Rick Redworth, would be
ordained a Rabbi next month. I thought
that was a switch. I was tempted to ask
him to give me his vocation. But Rick’
s a real gung ho Notre Dame alumnus, and I thought we had a fine meeting with a
lot of fun, because he prepared question and answers so well.
There’s something I’d like
to do next, but I’m so nervous because I know there’s something coming up that
I’d like to share and I don’t want to get in the way of it. I just want to say to all of you as board
members and senators, how much we depend on you and how much you do back in the
hosting. How much you do to keep Notre
Dame alive, and it is important to keep it alive. There is not much I can possibly say to thank you because the
good Lord and His mother have to do that for me. A lot of times I talk to associates and my colleagues in higher
education and some of them give the impression, I think, that the alumni are a
pain; or that you don’t have any judgment, or that they are just gung ho about
immaterial things. And always I tell
them we don’t have that problem. Our
alumni are the strong feet and bones that keep this place together, and that our
alumni nearly get to the point of fanaticism.
They’ll do anything for you almost any time.
When
I look back over the years that I have been president here, I can’t think of a
time when there have been hassles with alumni.
Sure, there have been times when we have had disagreements of one kind
or another, but we sat down and talked about them, and that was that. There never seemed to be any lack of
understanding. They certainly are
people with an abundance of devotion. I
think fundamentally we are moved by the same things. I think fundamentally we share a faith that binds us together and
that is terribly important to this place.
We have been having, and I’m sure the alumni have been participating
quite a bit here on the board frequently.
We have been having a lot of
discussion about whether or not higher education is going to survive. And I have to tell you honestly that a lot
of private higher education are not going to survive; but except an increasing number
of schools that are up at the precipice and all they need is a quick draft to
push them over. I’ll just give you the
figures. When we went to school
following World War II, half of the students in higher education were in
private schools. Today, only 20 percent
are in private schools, 80 percent are in public schools, and that percentage
is diminishing this year. Will we make
it? I don’t have any doubt that we’re
going to make it. Not only because of
all of you and your dedication to this place, I know you are not going to let
it go out of existence. And if I have
to give my life for it, I wouldn’t let it go out of existence. It’s too important, not just to us and to
our families, but to the world, and to the church and to all the things that we
hold dear. And I think the price of not
going out of existence is to be ourselves, not somebody else. This is a very special place. And your commitment to it makes it a very
special place. It can now be, as it is
for me, the biggest thing in your life.
A kind of central anchor that keeps you stable when other things in life
turn over.
I was just terribly touched lately when they ran a survey and found out that over 93 percent of our alumni are still married to the girls they married, which is something I think is a fantastic figure. When you look at the national figure, over one million divorced last year, and with only 2 million marriages. That means 50 percent of them are not making it. I know a lot of that isn’t easy. What you say about marriages are made in heaven, you have to make them each day. You know better than I. And it takes faith and dedication and love, and lots of strength and memorialities to make them each day. It takes, I think, particularly a kind of stability, and a kind of devotion and a kind of commitment to values that are lasting, as you and I have learned and have pumped in our life’s blood. I say that’s why a lot of private schools are going under, but I want to tell you that this one’s getting better. I have heard a lot of myths, and a lot of rumors, and a lot of sad stories, about what I have to say honestly-and I am not saying it to please you, or to try to take credit for it because I can’t. It is the work of many, many people.
The university is a better place today than when I arrived here in 1934, which is quite a few years ago. It is a better place, not just materially, though only God knows there is a lot more to it than there was in 1934. But I think of standing spirits. And I think there are plenty of things going on today that I would remind you of when we were all going over to see a football game, which is great because we get to that once in a while, a lot of our students on their way to town to put on picnics – of course, they’ve not been to a picnic in their whole life; because they don’t have a family, or they don’t have any money or a lot of other reasons for it. I can tell you, just the other day I asked the man in charge of boundary service how many groups he has, over 30. These are just the official groups; I can’t begin to tell you how much goes on unofficially. I could have only signed up the year with you for 2 or 3 hours a week voluntary service, instead of 1700. That’s just the ones who have signed up. But I know large numbers have just patrolled without signing up. These kinds of thing that we will always cherish and celebrate, people like Vince and Frank Dewey as I told you this morning.
This is becoming a real vital part of the total education here, and this is a very good thing, because this country is glued together by voluntary effort. It is not glued together by the government – not by a long shot. And I’m always frightened when I hear so much about kids not having religion today that I went up the other night to the Alumni Hall to say mass. I try to say mass at least once a week in one of the halls. If there was a bed request, I don’t force myself in. And it was about 11:30 at night, a Sunday night; there were a lot of things going on with the end of a weekend. I expected about 25 people might show up or something, but it never is that way; because I walked in there and the chapel was full. And it not only was full by****time?), but people were still coming in.
By the time I got around to singing the homily, they were standing in the back of the church and out into the hall. As you know, the Alumni Hall has a pretty big chapel. And that was 11:30 a Sunday night, and that was****and everybody was there, not because they couldn’t go to town the next morning. So they didn’t show up or not because anything was going to happen if they did, or didn’t do it; but they were there because they wanted to be there. And they weren’t there because of me, because if someone else did the same it still would have been a packed chapel. They were there because they wanted to be there, because it is meaningful to them. And I like to see that. It is much, much harder to get people, especially the young people, to do things because they want to do them than to expect them to do them because you’ve got a club over their heads. Now, I especially want to say there are times when you need a club, but in the matter of religion, I think it’s going to last a lot longer if youngsters do it because they have an internal need for it, and they have that desire to learn more about God and his message, and his good news.
I just think you need great heart. I get great heart in the fact that there are certain number of younger men around here who have decided to be priests, something that seemed to have died off for a while—but as many as 25 in the last couple of years. And not just priests here, priests in the mission, priests in the service home, priests all over. I am looking forward to the day when our guys would start thinking again, and some have started thinking about giving their lives to God and religion. Because that, as you know, died out a great deal in recent years. I get heart when I think what this place is doing to give leadership, not only to the church, as it is doing in many ways through having our Liturgical Center here. We are trying to revive church music and make it splendor and not just drab and precise. We try to somehow say something for priests that are out there lonely. We have a whole spiritual audience to pray about that, to do something about people that are working on the fringes of social justice and social equality out in the guts of the cities, out in the ghettos, among the abandoned and the poor, and the hopeless, and the oppressed.
I think we are all those things, but over and above that,
we are doing a lot of other things. Las
summer, as I mentioned to one or two of you privately perhaps in another
conversation, I was out west in Colorado in a seminar on International
Education. There were two or three
seminars going on at the same time.
Professor Black from Cornell came over and talked at the seminar about
humanities and values. There were 10
young professors, twelve times, a total of 160 from all over the country were
here all summer looking at humanities and values. And I decided to go up there.
So, I went up there that afternoon with a Notre Dame alumnus…. who was
in charge of all the 160 odd universities and colleges in New York State. We sat there at the seminar and I looked
around the table, and 3 percent of the key people were Notre Dame people. One was the Dean of Law in Oklahoma, one was
a professor in Mississauga, and one was a professor here, Jack. And I felt proud, of course, to see three
Notre Dame people picked selectively from the whole country. All professors or deans, and all highly
educated. Second thing is, when we got
down to the seminar part, Professor Black, who was a kind of nice, yet fussy
old guy, said, “I will put you three presidents on the spot. We had a great moral crisis last year, when
the crops failed around the world and there was a fuel crisis, which cut off
all ….to the point where they had to bring water on the field to try to make
fertilizers.” I just wanted to say,
“How did your students feel about it.
What instant reaction did they have to this great moral crisis that
affected hundreds of millions of people?” I said, “Look, I can tell you, and
it’s going to take about half an hour, but I’ll try to be brief about it. And I tried to do it in about 20 minutes,
but our students have done so much and I haven’t even heard about it, except in
the alumnus magazine. I got to telling
all those things we have done here and the awesome campaign, and the drawing
out of the things themselves. After I
was through telling all those things, he was a very nice guy and very sensitive
to the problem of values in higher education, because we talked about it. Then he said, “Ernie, what did you do in New
York University?” Then Ernie looked at
him and kind of sadly, while he was wagging he head and said, “Not a damn
thing.” And I could see the 3 Notre
Dame guys grinning. It was, I think,
symptomatic of the kinds of concerns that exist here today, and that as I see
as our reason for survival. I am not
concerned with survival; I am concerned about our being something that never
existed during the last couple centuries—that is a great Catholic
university. It is as good a university
as any university in the land. It turns
out as good or better in lawyers, doctors, and all the rest as all the
universities in the land and that is good.
But, better is to turn people who have a sense of values beside, who
have some commitment to the problems the world faces beside, who are not living
in a past age, but they are living with today’s problems and tomorrow’s
problems and are willing to think about them and do something about them.
I think that we’re become more and more that kind of
place. I think this has always been
that kind of place in a kind of low-keyed way.
We didn’t know quite why we were.
We perhaps didn’t work at it as distinctively as we are trying to work
at it today, but I don’t want to settle for anything else, either as a
university or as Catholic, and with that, don’t worry about survival, you won’t
be able to settle for it anyway. Thank
you all very much.
Opening Campaign Century Center
4/18/79
Notre Dame Alumni and Friends! It has been a wonderful evening and it’s
great to be home again because the last three weeks, in addition to being in
Washington six times, and in New York three in Boston and a few other places,
we have been launching this campaign in Brooklyn, New York, San Francisco,
Miami Beach, Pittsburgh, Long Island, Los Angeles and Tampa. We still have Detroit and Chicago to go to. But that is only my part, there are other
teams that are going, and people are working always in other parts of the
country.
This is a marvelous group here tonight, and every group we have had so
far is a marvelous group. Some a bit
smaller that this, some a bit larger, and all of them averaging out several
hundred people each night. And I know
that meetings like this just don’t happen.
There are men involved and all those parishioners working to make this
possible tonight. I just want to say to
them many, many thanks. Everyone has to
be involved to make it happen. We are
doing two things tonight. We are
launching the campaign for Notre Dame and also launching the University of
Notre Dame Night. And I am always
delighted in every community to see so many Notre Dame people, who are; we
might call the soul of the community--people who are always ready to serve when
something needs to be done. People whom
at the splendor of their personal and family, and professional and business
lives somehow give a tone to the community.
People have shown concern through the years like that, because I
remember in 1948 when I was a freshman, I guess my age is showing, and later
challenged me because he found me…Thank you for the wonderful professional
performance.
You know Notre Dame Night is supposed to be something where all over
the land and all around the world we celebrate this place. And here we are in this place. I have to tell you that what we are
celebrating is not a group of buildings or a piece of land, nor the city of
South Bend. It is really the quality of
your lives--Notre Dame men and women and children, who somehow, by the quality
of their lives make Notre Dame a reality; not just here, but all across this
land, all across this world. And that’s
why we are really celebrating Notre Dame tonight.
We are also launching the campaign for Notre Dame’s Third Phase. The First Phase was bringing people into
this community and this university, and it was enormously successful. And it took us up to over a period of about
a year and a quarter, just about every other week. Now we are into Phase Two with lunches and dinners in large
cities across Atlanta, and there were 140 of those. Believe me, after 140 dinners and lunches you really start feeling
full and slightly bloated and a little tired.
And last we launched Phase Three.
The amazing thing is this community and the national campaign are neck
and neck at the moment. We are about 90
percent home on the whole national goal and we are about 90 percent home here
in South Bend, which has one of the largest poling, I might say—to my
knowledge, outdone only by the poles in New York and Chicago. Of course, we have the second largest group
of alumni in the world in this locality.
I want to say first that I
am deeply grateful for your generosity, as the whole university is for my
director and her husband. We are deeply
grateful to the Rosenthals. They have
been very generous in a delightful way.
What the words of God have put together let no one put asunder. He says only Notre Dame can put
asunder. But we are deeply grateful to
the leadership you have given in so many places. I recognize that you’ve put so many across this planet. Sometimes we have some questions about
whether Bob was grateful or I was grateful.
He got around by saying I was like a big brother. I am also deeply grateful to Rosenthals for
all this. They have been very generous
and they have been recognized by all of you by their presence here
tonight.
Let me be mulish for a
moment. I was a bit garish when this
campaign began. It just seemed like so much
money. It still seems like so much
money. Then it seemed to me that we
were probably reaching far beyond our grasp.
And tonight I have to say that I am a part of this jogathon and moving
during the past three and one half years,
literally thousands of thousands of people have listened to our story,
watched the film and heard these words.
And I am amazed at the outpouring of enthusiasm, generosity, and
dedication. And I had to say to
tonight, since everything else is inflating in this land, we might as well
inflate our own goals. But I think we
are not only going to make 130 million dollars, but I would be greatly
surprised if we don’t make 120 at the start of our goal or 150 million or more. That I think would say something to the
country about our harmony as a family—Notre Dame family, family of our
institution.
Let me say something about
what it’s for. When I was a young man,
I took a vow of poverty so I could get away from money. But let me say today that as I stand before
you, money doesn’t mean a thing to me as money. It only means something to me as the ability to get something
done. And I would like to say something
about what we want to do with this money.
Something about the past, the present, and the future of this
institution, which we are trying to build to a whole new level of
accomplishment through this drive.
Because that is what you are being asked to join, not just your passing
an amount of money, but you are doing this to help build an institution.
As far as the past of Notre
Dame goes, I will be very brief. It is
a marvelous thing you can say the past of Notre Dame in two words: one is
faith, the other is vision. First of
all I think this is exemplified when a young priest, 28 years old, with $300 in
his pocket, sets off with what would have been the equivalent of a high school
education today. He took 11 days to
come from Vincent, Indiana to here in South Bend, met the founder of the city
and worked with him and his nephew out there, stood there looking at a drafty
log cabin surrounded by these great resources of 6 non-high school graduates,
$300 each—and a chance of gaining several hundred acres of land to throw a
school there. He had the gall to call
it, not a school or a college, but “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac. And he called it the highest form of higher
education “Universite” or university.
And he did this on feeling because the first university that was founded
was founded in his country in Paris.
And it was founded in 1204, a Catholic University, as all the others
were founded during the first century— Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Prague none
of them are Catholic universities today, but they are still great
universities. He also called it quite
naturally, after a name that comes quite naturally to all Parisians, the name
of their great cathedral in Paris; the
cathedral they call Notre Dame. It was
a marvelous, providential day that he put those two things together—Universite
de Notre Dame. I think that took a lot
of faith, an enormous amount of faith.
I think it took an enormous amount of vision to look beyond that
wilderness spot in which they were all going to live. By then it was peopled by less than 100 people. There were trading posts less than 21 years
old.
The second great evidence of
that vision and faith came exactly 100 years next week. It was the end of April in the year 1879
when Norstrome, he was 65 years old and in the age of retirement. He was on his way to Paris, he was doing
what I am doing here tonight, raising money.
This was about his 50th trip across the form to get the
French to put some money in this little spot in Indiana to build a “great
university.” He got word that the whole
of his life’s worth was burned to the ground except the church. He got word in Montreal while he was waiting
for a boat to go to France. He turned
and came back here. We’re told that he
got his whole community, small, tremulous, and discouraged church to say
goodbye to the church, which was only about 7 years old or something, and he
said, “you know this fire was really my fault.” I came here as a young
man. I had a great dream and I built
this university named after Our Lady.
You know she really had to burn to the ground to prove to me that my
faith was too shallow and my vision was too restricted. He said, “We are going out tomorrow. We are going to scrape them off and we are
going to get more bricks and build this place bigger and better than
ever.” And that’s what they did. And I would like to say to all of you that
without the help of South Bend, Indiana, the citizens, the Catholic priests and
brothers, it would never have been done.
Because they were wiped out—they had no food, they had no money, no
books, no bed, they had nothing, except this indomitable faith and vision to
build a great institution on that spot.
And the local community was out there laying bricks along with the
priest and brothers and they were bringing food and mattresses, and all the
things that were needed after they were wiped off. And that is the kind of faith and vision that gave birth to this
place, not only once, but twice. And
that is the kind of faith and vision that we need today. What I want to say about Notre Dame today,
I guess to put it in some perspective, I hate to use figures but I don’t know
of any other way to do it quickly.
Let’s look at the university
in the modern context—say, dating from the time the Norstrome experience in the
wars to the present day. In 1945 the
University of Notre Dame was 103 years old.
Now we gave out more masters and doctorate degrees last year than we
gave out graduate degrees in 1945. Our
budget is 20 times what it was in 1925, about 4 million to 8 million
dollars. Nineteen hundred and forty-five
we had 250, 000 books in the library.
The library was not very good. Today
we have 1,353,000 books in the library, and they are still coming. The library can hold 3 million and would be
filled before long, believe me. We had
in 1945 one renowned scholarship for the whole university. In 1945 we were doing $10,000.00 worth of
research for the year. For the last 10
years we were doing close to $10 million dollars worth of research a year. In 1945 we had $3,000 scholarships, and last
year over 50 percent of our students got $10 million worth of
scholarships. Graduates got even
more. I would like to say so many
things have happened since 1945, and I don’t take any personal credit for it
because many hundreds of people, including many who are here, were part of this
enormous program since the war. We
needed about $150 million worth of new buildings, and most of the buildings are
paid for. Today these buildings are
worth at least a half of a billion dollars.
There are so many other
things that happened. We had 20,000
alumni in 1945. We have over 60,000
alumni today. But one thing perhaps is
even more important than all these other figures. In 1945 we used up quite a bit of reserve for our financial base
on which the university could grow this endowment. I would have to say to you that we had to define Notre Dame as
the worst endowed educational institution, of course, that would be true of
most other church-related colleges at the time. There were two Ivy-league schools that had some money—Duke
University College founded by the Wright brothers, and there were Stanford and
Vanderbilt. But by and large we were at the bottom of that list out of that 250
thousand colleges and universities with almost zero endowment. And today, despite all these other things
happening, the University of Notre Dame is 23rd from the top. You might say that’s spectacular feat, and
in a way it is, because we have more endowment today than Yale University had
at the end of World War II.
By the end of this drive we
will have more endowment than Harvard, the number one in this country as at the
end of World War II. But the amazing
thing is that Notre Dame people don’t enjoy being 23rd anything. And I will tell you that at the end of this
drive, we will be somewhere between or close to the 15th highest
endowed university in the west. And
that will not be perfection but we will be on the way. We would have gone by many, many schools
too, we would be very surprised to find out if we have not passed…..
Again, what is this
for? What is accomplished by piling up
these endowments? Except some sort of financial
security. First don’t knock financial
security, because many universities and colleges went under, closed their doors
because they did not have financial security.
So, don’t knock it, it is important.
But what I’m saying is it is not overly important. What is overly important is faith and
vision. And what we are trying to build
is not just another great university, but we are trying to somehow recapture
that medieval dream when universities began, including great Catholic
universities. And what does that mean?
I think it means that in addition to giving what every great university
could give of intellectual confidence—turning out young people whether they are
doctors or business people, lawyers, priests, rabbi, teachers or whatever—and
in addition to that, intellectual competence, they have something that has
happened to their hearts as well as their minds.
A great university president
said not too long ago that he was not concerned with what happened in the lives
of the students, he was only interested in what happened in their minds. I will have to say that that is not our
philosophy at Notre Dame. We are
currently interested in not what just happens in the minds of our students, but
as well as in their lives and their hearts.
We are here to consider somehow the sense of what is the value of life
that God has given them to live. That
somehow they have some sense of the difference between things that are great
and true and things that are shoddily false.
Somehow there is a great difference between that which is profound and
that which is superficial, that which is beautiful and that which is ugly. Somehow there is a great necessity in
knowing in our day what is morally good and that, which is evil. Because both these realities do exist in
people’s lives , and one ought to know the difference in order to be committed
to one and not to the other.
What we are saying is that
we would like to educate our people not just for the past but for the
future. If there is anything I can say
for the future is that, it is going to be full of confusion. It will be categorized by enormous
technological and scientific changes.
You can see that already. Man
has gone from being able to walk 50 – 60 miles per hour to being able to
reenter space from the moon at 25,000 miles per hour. He is able to go beyond being able to speak as far as his voice
will be able to carry to being able to speak and be heard and seen from the
moon to the earth. He has talked about
energy not just in the small heat he uses but one speaks about coal and oil,
enormous energy, but the prices as well as the gases you would put in your
car. And he has gathered from the far
ends to destroy the whole world. The
problems of the future perhaps might be more biological than physical—the problems
of clothing, the problems of biological engineering, the big problem of
extraterrestrial intelligence and who knows what else. But what we have to do
at this institution is to prepare our people not only to create the change that
makes a new future surprisingly new and exciting future, but be able to cope
with that change, direct that change, understand that change, and somehow see
underneath the power of defenses of that change and see that it is used for
good and not for evil. I guess what I’m
saying is that we want people to understand the world, not just as it is, but
as it is becoming in our day; to be
able to look beyond the change to a better world that can be created also by
science and technology. A world where there is much less hunger than it is
today, and much better housing and physical chance to coexist with other
people, where there is somehow a hope for the future, for education, which just
does not exist for a special people. That somehow we motivate young people to
have more compassion for that kind of world, but a kind of commitment to make a
better world. There is a deep
commitment in their lives and their lives will be given in service to make a
better world, a just world, an honest world, a more productive and even a more
secure world than it is today.
I would like to say that it
is a wonderful plot that this is the first time in the history of the world,
since the Middle Ages, we have a chance to do just that. I don’t want to be exclusive about it and
say that Notre Dame is the only university in the world that also has these
goals and values. It is not the only
place in the world that people understands what prayer and divine grace are
about. But I don’t see many other
universities in the world that care about that or have the remotest possibility
of acquiring the means of doing it. And
if this campaign is successful today, we are actually ahead of schedule it
seems to me, because we are saying what we profess, what our vision is, what
our faith is, and people are saying “I’ll get behind that.” That’s something I can have faith in, that’s
a vision I can share.
And I’ll like to say to all
of you that I have great confidence that we are gong to see that vision come to
be in our day. I may not see it, and
some of you who are my age may not see it, but those who are younger are going
to see it. They are going to see it
happen more each day, more each month, more each year. They are going to see all kinds of people
attracted to this community from all over the world, because they make it
happen, because they believe in that, in fact people are the most important
thing of all. And I will like to say
the same to all of you at this campaign for Notre Dame, which we launched here
tonight, it is not that we want to drag all of you to line up and head simply
because Notre Dame has great spirit.
When we want something we do it from the ground up. That’s true, but that’s not the reason for
doing this. We wanted to give you an
opportunity to be part of something really great, something that would be here
long after you are gone, something that would be affecting the lives of young
people—your sons and daughters and their friends—for many, many years after you
are gone; something that will change the face of the earth. Because the dynamism
of doing that is not only seen by … but also by the quest for…
Someone said of Notre Dame
that there is no place on the face of the earth where there is such a high
concentration of intelligent, good, dedicated people. And I guess that I should say to you, in conclusion, that the
invitation is given to you tonight to be a part of this enormous adventure of
the great quest. Perhaps this sums it
up in the words of one of our faculty members, many of you studied under him in
the Faculty of English, what he said about Notre Dame when someone said, “Why
is this a great institution, why is it different, why is it special?” He said, “I guess it has a lot of special
people working and living here.” And
the person who asked the question said, “Well, there are a lot of special
people in the Marine Corps.” And he
said, “that’s true. But,” he said,
“these are special, these are people of high intelligence, and deep dedication
who believe so completely about the vision of this place that it needs faith
for it to happen, that they are willing to bleed for it. And believe me, he said, those are the kinds
of people that fill this place, have their blood on the bricks.” And I guess what we are inviting you to do
tonight is to get some of your blood on the bricks.”
Thank you very much!
Alumni Reunion Talk,
1983
Thank you very much, Tom. Dear Notre Dame men and women.
I think that this has to be one of the greatest weekends of the year at
Notre Dame, because if we exist for anything, we exist for those that we
produce. It seems to me that when all
of you at 5-year intervals that have been gone from this university have come
back, it is a matter of enormous pride to all of us to have had even the
slightest part in producing you.
Because what we are celebrating at this university this week is not so
much a lot of buildings, although they are important, if you want to have a
university; not so much the championships we have had and the other things we
have been able to accomplish. But I
think we are celebrating, as Luz Fischer indicated earlier here on this
platform, is the quality of life of so many people who’ve spent four years
here.
What I am celebrating tonight is
your personal lives, your married lives, your children, your business and
professional lives, the kind of ideals you attained here in one way or
another. I am celebrating the kind of
spirit and faith you left here with the high enthusiasm, and all that has been
accomplished since then. And if we
added up all your lives, it comes up to hundreds of thousands of years of
service. I think what happens to you
this weekend is that somehow you are back at the source. Somehow you can renew yourselves as you walk
across the campus, the lakes, the tower, the dome, the bells, the Grotto, the
church. Somehow all the good
inspirations that we all had when we were younger get reborn. Somehow all the great ideals that you
developed while you were here come to life again. Somehow hope is revived.
Somehow spirits are quickened.
Somehow just being with each other brings back the warmth of those four
years that you spent here. There are,
of course, thwarted hopes. There are
always the thoughts of what we might have done. And I can join you in this.
None of us ever quite accomplishes all that we wish. But there is in this place a kind of inner
inspiration that when you come here for a weekend you are somehow revived. You are somehow renewed. You are somehow brought back to the level of
where you were during the four years you spent here. Somehow, as Tom Dewey said, you go down to the Grotto and your
heart sinks and you pray better than you have prayed in years. Somehow in the Sacred Heart Church the
prayers come easier. And somehow it is
just a marvelous family reunion of so many friendships, so many people you
haven’t seen for a long time. So many
hopes that get renewed, and inspirations then get revivified. I think it is a marvelous thing to go
through. I have to say that this
happens because this is a very special kind of place. And if there is any group in the world I don’t have to describe
this to, it is this group; because you know it is a very special kind of place
or else you won’t be here.
Let me just give you one little
example-small and perhaps inconsequential-but a little example that said
something to me about this place. A few
years ago, I was coming out of the Morris Inn and I was met by an alumnus of a
number of years ago. I leave it vague
on purpose, and he said to me, “I have been doing a very good job of making a
mess of my life.” And I said, “How’s
that?” And he said, “Well, I got into
the sauce, and I became an alcoholic.”
And he said, “I ruined my business, and I practically ruined my
marriage, and I alienated most of my children.
And I just about came to the end of my life.” He said, “About five days ago, I decided I would just take off for the Southland and (it was winter time) I would go to
Florida and I would get myself gloriously sauced for about a week or two. And he said, “I got as far as Columbus or
Cincinnati, I don’t recall exactly, but it was in that general area. And it suddenly dawned upon me what a fool I
was.” And he said, “I just pulled
around on the side of the road and stopped for a few moments.” Then he said, “I decided that there is
probably only one place on earth where I thought I could probably redeem
myself.” Then he said, “I literally
turned around, made a u-turn on that highway and came here. And I arrived two nights ago.” He said, “the last two days I’ve been
renewing myself.” He said, “I spent a
lot of time in the halls where I lived, in the chapel where I prayed, in the
Sacred Heart Church where I went to confession, and attended mass. I walked the Grotto. I visited the lakes. I gave a large hello to two bright-eyed
students, who passed me on the paths.
And then he said, “I went over to Corby Hall and got in touch with one
of my former rectors, and I knelt down and made a good confession of my whole
life.” And he said, “I just want you to
know that I am whole again. I am over
that, and I am no longer a drunk, an alcoholic, a lost soul.” He said, “I promise you, before God, that I
would never take another drink for the rest of my life. And I know that Our Lady worked this miracle
in my life, because three days ago I was lost and now I am found again. And as soon as I recover from this new
state, I am going back to my home, and I am going to reconcile myself to my
poor, long-suffering wife. And I am
going to greet my children and ask them to forgive me for the lousy example I
have given them. And I am going to be
all right. I’ll revive my business and
I will make it back home.”
The point of the story is perhaps
the point that touches all of our lives.
That this is a special place.
One of our alumni, also a trustee, Frank Sullivan, he used to be Frank
Lady’s secretary, once said that he didn’t know any place on earth that there
was such a high concentration of goodness, such a high spirit of prayer and
grace. And I think this one story, this
one encounter, illustrated for me (and I have many other, but I just mentioned
this one) the fact that it is a place that not just touches our minds, but
touches our hearts. It doesn’t just
produce people who are intellectually highly competent, but people who are in
their hearts compassionate and committed.
It is not just a place that is good for the old “ra-ra” that in the old
days when I was a kid we used to associate with raccoon coats and waving
flags. It’s a place that really gets us
where we are, how we stand with God, how we stand with those closest to us-be
it wife, children, family, relatives, business associates. And I think in that sense, if I had to go
out and look for the money to pay for it, I would love to bring all of you and
all of your classmates on a regular basis.
Fortunately, you come on your own.
But even so, I think it would be worth all the tea in China or all the
money in the world to make sure that what happens here during the four years
that you were here gets revived periodically as it does during these reunions. No one has to give you a speech; no one has
to commercialize you. All we have to do
is drop you in this place, let you meet the people that you knew and lived with
and loved over four years. Let you
somehow walk the same paths, under the shade of the same trees. Somehow, let you experience the place and
let it soak in into your inner being.
Let it somehow revive all that is good in you, all that is
inspirational, all that is high and beautiful.
And somehow depress all those things that tend to destroy us because
they are unworthy of us. That’s
really what a weekend like this is about.
It is nothing that I can control or nothing that Chuck Lennon can orchestrate. And there can be a lot of activities; there
can be a lot of encounters with friends.
But somehow, it’s the place. It
is the kind of shrine of the Mother of God that gets to you. And I think that getting to you is terribly
important, because somehow you will leave here tomorrow a better person than
when you arrived. Not a different
person, because you are what you are.
But when you came here you were something, and there has been enormous
input. It is like taking a tired old
battery and pouring energy into it and recharging it, and believe me we all in
this busy work-a-day world need recharging.
We need to have our ideals refurbished; we need to have our values
sharpened. We need to have that kind of
encounter with others so we can compare what we have done and what we wished we
had done, and what we yet can do.
When I look at these classes out
here, and I must say maybe it is a sign of getting older like our chairman Tom
Carney, I rejoiced at the enormous enthusiasm of the five-year class, and the
10-year class. Enthusiasm is an
important part of this university. You
know two years ago we had a U.S. Ambassador to England come to visit us. It was kind of unexpected. He just dropped in on us. As I walked him out of Gate 14 of the
stadium, because he was flying out to California. He said to me: “I will only say to you that I have been to
institutions all my life and this is the only institution that I’ve been to in
modern times that is full of enthusiasm.
And next week I am sending you quarter million dollars because I want to
put my money where enthusiasm is. I
think that that is not important because he gave quarter million dollars. But it is important because he recognized
something about this place. And he’s
been a good friend since, and he’s helped us since. The important thing about this place is not just to be good, but,
to be enthusiastically good, to be competently good, to be ideally good, and to
not be discouraged. And I think that is
the most troublesome thing that faces us as we grow up: that those bright
ideals of youth seem to get tarnished and fade away. They seem to be unrealistic and perhaps unattainable. And that is not true.
This world would not be saved by
high intelligence. This world would not
be saved by enthusiasm without competence.
This world would not be saved by piety alone. This world will be saved if we can put trained intelligence, and
competence, and piety and commitment together and to really know where we are
going. Then add to that the enthusiasm
to keep trying even though we get older and may get discouraged. Let me take for my example, if you will, the
older class here tonight. I have said
something about the youngest; let me say something about the oldest. To me, that is an extraordinary thing that
class of 1933 and the 100 anniversary of the highest award of the Retired
Medal, has awarded the medal to a member of the 50-year class and his
wife. And in the whole 100-year history
of the Retired Medal, only 3 couples have been given this medal, and 2 of them
are members of the class of 1953, our 50-year class. Pat of Happy Memory and Patty Crawley of the Christian Family
Movement and Ed &Nellie Stefan, our former chairman of the board. I think if Pat is here, and I think she is,
and Ed and Abby, would they stand and take a hand as people we admire.
You know 31 years ago, when Father Ned Joyce and Jim Frick and I, and
Father Jerry Wilson, whom I don’t think is with us tonight, and Father
Philmore, whose grave I visited in the cemetery this afternoon, and a number of
others who were young and foolish, perhaps, and idealistic, and not knowing all
that much about what this place
could be. I think almost without our
knowing it, we stumbled upon a formula.
The formula was tripartite and rather simple. In fact, if I were back there then knowing what I know now, I
probably would have walked out of the place.
You know that for a major university in America, our academic and our
total university budget was ridiculously low.
It was, I believe at that time, 10 million dollars. We knew that it had to increase. I think I would have died if I had known it
had to increase 13 ½ times. Because this year it is 136 million dollars,
which means that every day of the year we spend around here about ½ million
dollars. But I’d have to say that you
cannot increase a budget 13 ½ times over that short space of time and not make
a better institution because you attract better people. In fact, you attract the best. You are able to do things that we never had
money to do before like get seriously interested in Latin America. You can attract people who are in the best
institutions of the world and yet you attract them here because you have
something else. You can give the very
thing they have there and something else besides.
And in addition to that, there was a
second thing we had to do. Because we
needed, roughly about 200 million dollars worth of facilities. You know we needed a library, we needed a
liberal arts building, we needed a science building, we needed a new chemistry
building, we needed more buildings relating to engineering, and business education
and law. We needed about 10 more
dormitories. We needed just about
everything you can think of to the tune of about 200 million dollars, and we
were broke. We had no building
funds. We had almost nothing. And yet, the miracle of Our Lady and the
dedication of people like Jim Frick and Ned Joyce and others who had given
their hearts to this place, whose blood is really on the bricks; thanks to them
today these buildings are built and not only built, but they are paid for. And this university today has facilities,
which I think are unmatched in most universities on this earth.
But there was a third thing that was needed, and this
thing is kind of intangible. It is not
like putting up a building and putting your name on it. It is something like a buffer against the
future. It is something that says that
for all time there is going to be help for people coming here and to bring the
best people here, be they students or faculty.
And that thing is called endowment.
And you have heard me speak about it, and perhaps it’s vague as I speak
about it. And yet I can say this to you
with all honesty tonight, that the 10 best universities by everybody’s judgment
in America, not necessarily ours because we tend to be prejudiced; but in
general the 10 best universities are the universities with the highest
endowment. And at this point I am
speaking of 30 years ago. Our endowment
was about 200th on the list of endowed universities, and there were
about 200 of them. And somehow, while
the other two tasks were being done, the increase of the annual budget and the
building of the facilities that were needed, slowly but imperceptibly, and then
very accelerated fashion lately, we’ve been adding to this endowment. And I have to tell you tonight that starting
from the bottom of the list, we are now 17 schools from the top of the list,
and we haven’t begun to fight. Let me
tell you, not the ones that are ahead of us, because I think there are 4 of
them I think which we have already passed; although we don’t have the latest
accounting on this. But let me tell you
of the schools that we have passed in the last three or four years, and I’ll
just tick off 10 or 20 of them as a matter of example. We’ve gone by the California Institute of
Technology (CALTECH), Vanderbilt, founded on ancient American fortune; Southern
Cal (thank God we are beating them at something); Duke University, built on
another American fortune; McGill University in Canada, Case Western Reserve,
Wesleyan, Smith, Carnegie, Mellon, built on 2 American fortunes; Wesleyan and
Brown, Southern Methodist (I don’t take great joy in that because I am an
ecumenical fellow); Baylor, Vassar, Pittsburgh, Oberlin, Amhearst, *****, Wake
Forest, Brandeis, Lehigh. I will have
to say to you that these are schools, which for many, many decades were far
better endowed than we are. And we have
just not passed them, but we are still on the upward swing.
If you want the names of the
next four, we are going to pass; they are University of Pennsylvania, Johns
Hopkins, Dartmouth, and Rockefeller University. We are creeping up on them, and
we may have already passed them, but I just wanted to give you advanced
warning. Now having said that, and I
said it because, as Tom Carney said, “When we come back here you see a lot of
things, you see a lot of changed.” You
see things that have been added and they are material things that you can
count. You can number endowments in
hundred of millions of dollars. You can
number buildings by just looking around at them. But I want to tell you that while these things are essential to
what this university is becoming, they don’t begin to explain what it is; what
it was when you were here and what it is today – I hope even more so. Because the things that this university is,
is not of the material order. It can’t
be measured in buildings, endowments or in budgets. It has to do with the spirit.
And I’d have to tell you that the spirit of this place is something that
is intangible. It’s
non-reproducible. I would hate to have
to build it or find it somewhere else.
It has something to do with the fact that this is like a shrine to Our
Lady and has a special blessing of the Mother of God. And she keeps us out of all kinds of trouble. It has to do with the spirit of faith. It has to do with the belief that our
intellectual tradition is the oldest tradition in the west, which is our
culture and our tradition for over 2000 years, and that has somehow been lost
along the way. That somehow all those
first universities, that were Catholic, are no longer Catholic; they are all
secular except the University of Leuwen in Belgium. And that somehow “Smart Alec” people in very well known and well
endowed universities say that a Catholic university is a contradiction in
terms. We don’t believe that, and we
are going to prove that it is not a contradiction in terms; but it is going to
be created right here in this place – the greatest university and the greatest
Catholic university that the world has ever seen.
I don’t know many universities where the president, and I don’t say it
because I have any credit in being a priest, it just happens to be the greatest
grace I have ever received in my life.
And I am unworthy of it. But
anyway, in the past year I have been to just about every hall on campus on
Sunday nights. I go when I am invited,
and I get invited to most of the halls.
And I have been doing this for many years. And that to me is a kind of litmus test. It’s kind of pulse of the campus. And in all the halls that I’ve been this
year, practically all of them there might have been one that was not
overflowing. But all of the others were
not only overflowing wall to wall, but students were out into the
corridor. And I had to begin mass by
saying: “I love to see the togetherness here tonight; so many people in a
narrow spot, but we have to scrunch in together and let those guys and gals out
in the hall get in here. And everybody
gets a little closer together, which they like to do, because they are men and
women and they all come into the hall; and we are literally cheek and jowl, hip
to hip for the mass. And they always
come into the sacristy before the mass begins and say this is our music
program. They’ve got it all figured
out. And they always come to me and
say, “Is it okay?” And I say, “Of
course it’s okay. It’s wonderful.” And it is wonderful because they practice,
as many as 6 different instruments playing for their music during mass. And they are all enthusiastic singing. You can tell they are praying, and when I
preach to them, I look at their faces and I can tell those eager young faces
are really soaking up what you have to say- if you are really saying
something. And if you really get to
them, they come around afterwards, which never really happened much around here
before. They say “You really cut close
to the bone tonight, Padre.” And it is a wonderful thing that they are so fresh
and honest. If you do badly they’ll
tell you that too, and they ought to.
But I’d have to say to you that this does not happen often in many
universities.
And then I go down to the Grotto on my way home from work, which is
generally in the early morning, because I am a night owl. I am there at 2:00, 2:30,3:00 and sometimes
later. I’m there when it’s
raining. I’m there when it’s snowing. I’m there when it is cold. I’m there when it’s hot. But I am almost never there alone, because
when I come down those steps, and come out into that aura of light coming from
the statute of Our Lady Bernadette, there is almost always 1,2,3,5, 10 students
there. Sometimes on a very cold night I
will see a student sitting on a bench, just sitting there bundled up and
looking toward the Grotto. And I will
say, “Hey, you aren’t going to get pneumonia, are you?” And they’ll always say, “No, I’m all right.”
And I’d pass on. They are there when I come, and they are
there when I leave. I think they pray
more than I do, perhaps. But, you know
universities in this country or in the world that have places where people
pray; and where they pray out of the inner spirits of their hearts. And where somehow when they come back, like
you are coming back 10, 20, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 years later, you still wander
down there, almost by instinct and you pray again. And somehow you are a better person for having done it.
One other thing, we dedicated a lot
of interesting buildings over the past 30 years. But this year we dedicated a building that was second hand. It used to be the television station, and
some of you I’m sure must have seen it.
It is called the Center for Social Concern. It was put together by the President of the 25-year class, Father
Don McNeil. And thank you Don for the
Corpus Christi sermon this afternoon at the mass. But it’s a place that, again, I think is unusual when you look at
higher education in America. This is a
place where some 22 different student clubs have their headquarters, their
hangouts. There are pictures on the
wall showing the kinds of things they are doing. Every one of those clubs is organized to help someone less
fortunate, as we heard of the monogram winner tonight helping people less
fortunate. They are helping mongoloid
children. They are helping minority
kids who are ready to drop out of school.
They are helping old people who are dying with no one to visit
them. They are helping old people who
need their screens put up. They are
helping poor people who can’t make out income tax. In fact, they saved $250,000 of poor people’s income tax this
year by showing them where they can add new deductions. And I think we all kind of cheer that,
especially if you pay income tax. But
they are doing the things they are doing because they need to be done to keep
our world glued together. They are doing
the things that demonstrate the only way we can love God is to love Him and our
afflicted neighbor-the least brethren.
And they are doing them with graciousness; they are doing them with
joy. And then they come back and have a
mass when the work is over and kind of offer it all up. They have retreats. Right now they are fanning out all over the
country and the world to do things in places you never heard of like Cochebamba
or places in Latin America. And it
seems to me that, well, there are many things we do here in science, the arts,
in humanities, in business, in law, in pre-medicine and the rest. There is something that we are doing here
that is not done in many universities and that is we are teaching people how to
care. We are teaching people at an
early age that what little confidence they have means a whole lot to people who
have no confidence, who are poor and powerless. And it seems to me once that gets into your blood, once you begin
to do something like this, you are going to be doing it for the rest of your
life; because you need it the same way you need air to breathe, and food to
eat, and hours to sleep. Those are
things, which I think begin to touch what I spoke on as the spirit.
After our graduation this year,
which was only a couple of weeks ago, I went into the Robin Room, where we were
getting our academic gowns off after the ceremony. And I just happened to pass two people on the corridor, who had
just received honorary degrees from this institution. They happened to be both from Harvard. One was Archibald Cox, who was solicitor of the United States and
prosecutor during the Watergate trials.
The other was a marvelous Australian woman pediatrician named Helen
Caldecott, who is the executive director for the Physicians for Social
Responsibility, which is that anti-nuclear group. In any event, I just happened to be walking by them and they were
commenting to each other about the graduation ceremony we just had. And I didn’t help but overhear, although I
didn’t go like this to listen. I just
heard it as I walked by, and she to him, “Isn’t this graduation ceremony unlike
any you have ever seen?” And he said,
“I’ve been to more graduations than I’d like to remember, but this university
has something which is altogether unique.
It was full of spiritual reality.
It was full of faith. It was
full of value. It was full of
commitment to go out and make a better world.
And it was full of enthusiasm as well, which is something that gets
pretty jaded in today’s world.” And
they were saying, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could reproduce this at
Harvard?” Well, I don’t think I can
reproduce it anywhere. I think it is
here, not because of me or Tom Carney, or Ned Joyce, or Ed Stefan or Chuck
Lennon or anyone of us who work here, not Jim Frick even, although he can reproduce
almost anything. I think it’s here
because this is, as I began to say, a special place.
This is a place that somehow lives under the blessing of the Mother of
God. It is a place that has touched
profoundly, I think I can speak for myself, the inner being that we all
possess. It has somehow brought out
from each of us something better than we really are. It is a kind of place that is fraternity and sorority at its very
best. Community and comradeship, love and
friendship at its very best, idealism and values and enthusiasm and all of these
things at its very best. I think it’s a
kind of place I think that is going to provide leadership for this country and
this world in ways we can’t even imagine.
I think in a very special way tonight we all should give thanks to God
that we have individually been touched by this place; and that somehow this
place has incorporated us into a large family of which we all belong. I would like to wrap this up by reading you
something I often read on these occasions.
It is just a poem by one of our former presidents, Father Charles
O’Donnell, who is a poet. It is simple
and it is perhaps in the minds of modern people simplistic; and yet I think it
will speak to you as it speaks to me.
It has somehow tried to touch as only poetry can, the reality of this place,
the reality of this weekend, the reality of your lives and mine and the reality
of God’s grace. He says this poem is
dedicated to Our Lady. And he said:
TO OUR LADY
We have colored your cloak with gold, and crowned you with every star
And the silvery ship of the moon we have moored where your white feet
are.
As you look on this world of ours, campus, lakes and towers,
You are good to us, O, great Queen, good as our mothers are.
And you know each one by name, our heavenly registrar.
Enter our names in the book, into which you dear Son will look.
For we know that a time will come, the graduation year
When thousands and thousands of us who have dreamed on your beauty here
Will gather before your face to talk and dream of this place.
Then when your Son comes by, you will tell Him as of old:
These are the boys we knew, I and my cloak of gold;
You at the breaking of bread, these are the troops we fed.
And a shout shall split the skies, as the ranks send up your name
And a golden hour in heaven, when your sons, Oh, Notre Dame,
Kneel to their leader down there by the helm of your gown.
God bless and keep you all!
Edward Frederick Sorin Society
23 March 1984
I think, before I begin Bill, I
should ask Father Ned if he’s got the latest score. Where are we in the game?
Wherever we were in the game we were 51/50. Who is 51? That’s close
enough anyway.
I was thinking of Father Sorin himself that if he were
welcoming all of you here tonight, and he had just gotten himself started, he
would have probably welcomed you with so much confidence in his own language
and tell you who is (Sentence in French), which means, “You are totally and
completely and from the heart welcomed in this house, in this University of
Notre Dame, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.” I think it’s fair to tell you that you have got a very busy day
ahead of you here tomorrow. We are
delighted that you have been able to make it.
We can promise you a very unique experience. One thing you will learn tomorrow is that Notre Dame is many
things, and the many great things that go back to the many people who make it
that way. There is an enormous
dedication to the place by the people who work here, people who give their
lives, or as Frank O’Malley says so well and we like to quote, “People who left
their blood on the bricks.” Well, you
are going to meet a lot of people here, who have their blood on the bricks
here, people who have given mightily of themselves to make the place what it
is.
My advice to you is that you get some sleep tonight;
because you will need all the energy you have got tomorrow. We are going to full blast all the way until
the end of our dinner tomorrow night.
It is going to be a French dinner, so you would have earned it by the
time you arrive. We would have a full
panoply of experience-the academic side of the university and some views of
what goes on; the financial side of the university, the tradition, a look at
the life of the founder by a man who is writing his biography, Tom Flair. A film “The University” sometime to wander
around the university a little bit, not much.
A mass at the Sacred Heart Church, a sermon by Father Tom Blance. Then, I hope, a marvelous French dinner tomorrow
night. All that, I think, will
exhilarate you. But I hope more than
anything else, it makes you feel a part of this place. You have all come and we are grateful to you
for the effort it involved. Some come
from afar, and some came from as close as South Bend. But even so, I think that wherever you come from, you are at home
here. And you will feel more at home
after tomorrow night when you have understood better all the historical factors
that have gone into the making of this place.
I can only say that we are welcoming you to a good day’s
work tomorrow and we hope tomorrow night.
Thank you for enduring it. I
think that by tomorrow night, you will feel somewhat like the brothers who came
with Father Sorin must have felt, that they were at the verge of a great
adventure because adventure doesn’t stop with the passing of decades or the
passing of even centuries. I think the
story of Notre Dame is yet to be written.
And all of you will have some say in what is written in this place. And that is indeed a marvelous experience,
because as one of my dear friends, Father, Mr. Frank Colson, who used to be
president of RCA, used to say, “Everyone has to belong to something.” If you belong to something that is rich and
marvelous and deep in its meaning in America, then you are rich indeed. You can only be rich that way by belonging. And I think that by tomorrow night you will
understand better that to which you already belong and that to which you belong
even more so having learnt more about it.
I think I am now beginning to get vibes from Bill Saxson,
who said I should say a very few words.
And I think I have used up my quota.
Let me; before I sit down ask Father Donnell if he has any further
word. (He will sit down and Father
Scotty Hicks will come back in).
Alumni Reunion
1986
Thank you very much, Andy. Those are very kind words, and every time I
hear them I am reminded of Winston Churchill saying of incumbent Fatherly, who
dethroned him after World War II, someone said, “He is a modest man.” And
Winston Churchill said, “He has a lot to be modest about.” And I assure all of
you, I have a lot to be modest about.
But what I’ll like to do tonight is
to be a little nostalgic. I guess we can be forgiven that, after all these
years, and I’ll like to speak of “we” rather than “I.” Now, “we” a lot of
people on this campus, many of whom are in this audience tonight. It certainly
involves all of our alumni around the world, who are a spectacular group. But
more than anyone else, it represents a wonderful person, Father Ned Joyce.
Because that wonderful applause you just gave me, I assumed goes for him too.
You know, things were very relaxed back in 1952. In fact, the first
decision I made, I think was the widest one I ever made, and I never regretted
it. Because I was asked by the then Provincial, and the then president, Father
John Cavanaugh, whether I’d like to be president, and I said, “not
particularly.” And he said, “well, if you are going to be president, and that’s
the way they ran the audit; if you are going to be president, whom would you
pick for your number two man, your executive vice president? And without any
hesitation I said, “Ned Joyce.” And in a way, it might have seemed like a funny
choice, because I’m obviously a Yankee, and he’s obviously from South Carolina,
a rebel. I am, well, will always have one there. He was an accountant, and I
could hardly add four figures in a column. He, I think it’s safe to say, has
been on the conservative side, and I have always been condemned by being pretty
liberal. He, let me say, was enormously capable in areas where I was a little
more than a Cretan – that means an idiot –namely, how to balance budgets, how
to build buildings, how to keep them athletic organization honest, with a deep
sense of integrity.
On the other hand, we had some things in common. One, I think, we
respected each other and we let each other do what we could best do. And while
we disagreed maybe half the time, because of our different approach to
problems, I would have to say that half the time he was right, and I was smart
enough to give in to him. And that kept me out of a lot of trouble. He has seen
this university going from a budget of about 4 or 5 million dollars to a
current budget 200 million dollars that reflects an expenditure of three
quarters of a million dollars every day of the year. He has done that for 34
years as the Chief Budget Officer of this university. And he has done this with
only one deficit year of a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I have to say
that knowing his creative mind in the area of budgeting and accounting, that
probably he could have saved us that one embarrassment in 34 years, but I had a
hunch he was trying to tell us something---we better be a little more careful
on the expenditure side. Anyway, the thing that is important, I think, is that
we have in many senses, done this thing together for 34 years, plus the help of
enormously talented other vice-presidents and deans, and provost, you name it.
And I think we’ve done it, because we had in common also, the fact that we knew
we could count on what we call in large simplification, the Notre Dame family.
We knew that as long as we kept the ideal high, and always striving higher and
never slipping back, that all of you would have been on our side. And that is
not unusual, because you have a degree in this university, in as much the same
way as you would have a share or stock in a corporation. And the corporation
gets better, your stock is worth more, and as the university gets better, your
diploma’s worth more. And I think, that looking back since World War II, I
think the value of Notre Dame degree has become more and more, and that’s the
way it should be. But the amazing thing is that coming at life in university
and operations from different points of views, he’s great with numbers, and I
like to have fun with words, he is always making sure we don’t go broke, and I
am a mad man at spending money. He has always kept things at an even keel, when
I tend to shake up now and then. But the fact is that I can honestly say that
in 34 years we haven’t had a single fight. We haven’t even raised our voices
once, to my knowledge, at each other. We had admired each other, and I don’t
know if he admires me all that much, but I admire him so much, that I can’t
even explain how much. Endlessly, is the only adjective or adverb I can think
of at the moment.
But I would like to say, if
we are going to get nostalgic, it’s got to be a “we” nostalgia. That “we” being
Ned and myself and then numerous other people, who have given their very life’s
blood to this place. We used to say during the campaigns that all those
dedicated to Notre Dame have their blood on the bricks. And that was a phrase out of Frank
O’Malley’s lecture. He used to love to say that. But you can bet numbers are
important, because, at least, they illustrate things that are important. A
budget that went from a few million to almost 200 million, an endowment that
went from 5 or 6 million to almost 400 million. A number of buildings that have
doubled and the space more than doubled. And, again, every time you say that
you have to be careful of who gets the credit, because the building was built,
the building we are in tonight, and where else could we have so large a group,
the largest group we’ve ever had for an alumni reunion, every state in the
Union except Florida. Now, we wouldn’t have had this building if it weren’t for
Ned Joyce and Bruce Crouse. Because I could remember, my contribution was not
very positive. First, I said, “You’ve got to keep the cost down, because I
don’t want it to cost more than the library. Secondly, if you want the
building, you guys would have to get the money for it. And he and Ed Crouse
did. And when it looked like the cost was getting a little close to the
library, I said, “We’d better cut out the swimming pool.” Now, fortunately,
last year we got the swimming pool, finally. But it probably cost 10 times more
than it would have if he’d built it when he wanted to. But he put up with that, and me and I think
in the long run we made a point. But you know, the numbers don’t really tell a
story.
Oh, of course you can say
that we started with about 12,000 alumni, and I think we may have gone by
80,000 this past graduation. Because, I think it was the largest graduating
class, over 2500 that we ever had. I remember in the old days they would say,
“give us a list of your outstanding, nationally famous, well-known alumni, and
we had to strain a little bit. But today, I think we would be very hard pressed
to decide who are the 100 most famous and nation-wide alumni. I would have to
say we did almost no research in those days, which universities are supposed to
do, that’s how they get their prestige. And last year, thanks to Bob Gordon and
his cohorts, we did over 20 million. I’d have to say that we had no scholarship
funds in those days. We had one scholarship fund, you’ve heard me speak of it,
the Innocent Fund of 100,000 dollars in government bonds at 3 percent. So we
had 3000 a year. And it had to be given to a scholar from (?) in Wisconsin,
which doesn’t give you a lot of play. This past year, 68 percent of our students
had scholarship help, to the average of 5,000 dollars. And our minority
students had help, 89 percent of them, to the average of 8 thousand and
practically all of our graduate students had help. And we’ve been building an
endowment, so that we can do this every year and that endowment has now grown
by 50 million, and Ned and I have agreed that it’s going to grow by 100 percent
before we get finished next May.
We had no endowed
professorships, and I don’t mind telling you that when I became president, I
looked up Frank O’Malley’s salary. I thought he was probably the best-known
faculty member we had at that time, at least the most beloved. And his salary
was 5,200 dollars a year, and that is including teaching summer school. And we
have today 80 professors who make more than a football coach, if you can
imagine that. On top of that, from being at the absolute bottom of the pile on
salaries in universities in the United States, the 150 research and teaching
universities. And we are going to go up higher before we are finished. I have
to tell you that while the numbers are important in a sense, because they give
you some sense of forward progress, and while balanced budgets are nice,
because they are nicer than going broke or bankrupt, when you get down to the
core of the place, it’s simply transcends numbers, because numbers don’t tell
the story. It is something to be proud about, it is something to brag a little
about and I think the bragging is over for tonight. But I would have to tell
you that the real story of Notre Dame is people. It is each one of you who are
the product of Notre Dame and your life and the splendor of that life. It is
the kind of marriages you make, the kind of family life you have, the children
you produce, and the quality of the children that are sent here to school and
other great schools as well. Somehow the splendor of your professional and
business, and other types of things that characterize each one of you, some of
you are business people, some are doctors, some are lawyers, some are artists.
There is hardly a kind of
activity today that Notre Dame people don’t rise to the top. We had so many
federal judges that Bobby Kennedy, when he was Attorney General, he used to
say, “You guys ought to bring your own cheer leaders every time we had a
national meeting of federal judges.” We are sixth in the nation in the
production of CEOs for corporations large and small. We have just emerged as
one of the top universities mentioned most often in “Who’s Who.” In a recent
study made on “The People and Who’s Who,” we’ve got dozens of bishops and
archbishops and a couple of cardinals. We’ve literally thousands of priests
throughout the land, including Father Jim Carrington, who also celebrates his
60th anniversary of priesthood this year, and we are all proud of
that. We have over 3,000 Notre Dame alumni who are in higher education. Hardly
a week goes by that one of them isn’t made president of a college or
university. We have over 30 college and university presidents. We have over; we
have thousands and thousands of university professors. We have an Astronaut; we
have generals, and admirals. We have a president of a country. We have always a
dozen or so people in the congress. No matter where you look—medical doctors,
the man who was responsible for the organization that got the Nobel Prize in
the medicine this year, Joe Miller, received his undergraduate degree from this
university. He even learned Russian here. And I have heard him speak in Russian
on Russian television. When you look at
the people, of course, that makes the difference.
I have so many friends that
are university presidents, and many of them have a terrible time with their
alumni. There’s a very strong alumni opposition party now that even ran
opposition candidates for the Board of Trustees at Dartmouth University. Well,
they call it Dartmouth College, but it is a university. Yale has had its
problem with its alumni. But I have to say that in all the years that Ned and I
have been sitting in these seats, we have never looked upon you as anything but
a plus. An enormous heartfelt support for everything that this university wants
to do to be good, and to be great, and to progress toward greater excellence.
You have given in a way that’s unprecedented, 86 percent in the fundraising
campaigns we have, and we seem to have one about every five years. Ned and I
have been in six of them, and the one that we are in on now, we are supposed to
get together somehow before we get out of here, 75 percent of 3 million
dollars. And I’m going to tell you something, we are going to do it, because of
the kind of support we have across this land. I am sure that Ned would join me
in saying that we haven’t had 5 minutes of trouble from our alumni in the last
34 years. And we’ve had the kind of support that is unprecedented in any
university in this land. And I think the reason for it is, one that we are
indeed a family and we have pride. And we have people who are geared toward
excellence in whatever they do. We have people who don’t just match what is done
in the Ivy Leagues, or the Stanfords, the Chicagos, or the Vanderbilts or the
world, and the Dukes. We have people who are fantastic Christians as well.
This is a Catholic
University, and I think it’s a place where people, not only learn mathematics, science,
and literature, and art, and history, and engineering and business, but they
learn something that is rather unusual in today’s world. They learn the value
of prayer. They learn the importance of having a passion for justice, which is
the pride of peace in our times. If there is injustice in our world, there will
be terrorism and there’ll be no peace. But our people have a passion for
justice. We have great authors. I am reading a book, this year, this week,
which is on the bestseller, Barry Lopez, about the Arctic. It’s on the Best
Seller list. Barry, this is his second
best seller, and he is just a normal, garden variety, everyday Notre Dame
alumnus. It’s an amazing thing that when you look at universities and what they
produce, Notre Dame alumni is an absolute, unique category. I recall a friend
of mine that I used to go hunting and fishing with years ago. He is now quite
ill and getting old. His name is ***** Smith, who was president of American
Airlines. He said, the most insufferable people in the world for enthusiasm are
Notre Dame alumni. But there’s worse. And I said, “What’s worse?” Then he said,
“A Notre Dame alumnus who has been in the marines.” And I said, what could be
worse than a University of Notre Dame alumnus, who has been in the marines?”
And he said, “A University of Notre Dame marine who was born in Texas.” He
said, “they are the worst, absolutely.” I remember one day that a very famous
world leader just called and said, “I want to stop by.” And he said, “I want to
go to your Art Gallery. I want to go to football fame on Saturday, then, “I’m
leaving.” I’d never met this gentleman before. I knew his name, and you would
know his name if I mention it, but I won’t. He had to leave at the 4th
quarter, and I walked out to gate 14 with him, where his car was waiting. And
he said, “You know, this place has something that is almost extinct in most
American institutions. And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Enthusiasm.”
“you people really believe in what you are doing and you make it real.” And he
said, “I’ve never set foot on this campus before, and I’ve only been here 24
hours, but the fist thing I want to do when I get home is to write you a check
for a quarter of a million dollars, to build up that enthusiasm some more.” How
many universities affect a person that way?
Last week, on retreat up in
the North woods, I was reading a book about Albert Schweitzer. I was reading
the manuscript; it hadn’t been in print yet. It mentioned in the book that
Albert Schweitzer had an enormous enthusiasm for another young doctor, who
happened to be a Notre Dame graduate, who did what he did--- dropped all of the
wonderful opportunities in life to be a great theologian, a concert organist, a
great doctor and buried himself in service to the poorest of the poor on a
turgid Yellow River in Gabon, of all places, in French Equatorial Africa. And
spent 40 years of his life there, serving the poor, to give evidence of his
reverence for life. And he had a great administration who was a Notre Dame man,
Dr. Dooley. And if you, you may have been down by the Grotto, you’d see that
we’d just put up a statute, put up by the St. Louis Club in honor of Dr. Dooley
and his sacrificial life of 34 years. He died after his 34th
birthday. And I was wondering, as we talked about that statue and that
memorial, where are the Dr. Dooleys of today?
And you know, the woods are full of them. Just a few weeks ago, I got a letter from a Notre Dame alumnus of
2 years ago. His name is Dame, I
dropped his last name. And he wrote me
from Ecuador where he was working in an enormous orphanage of 4 thousand
shoeshine kids in Ecuador, in Quito.
And he said, “I’m an accountant, and I came down here. You helped me get this job; and I have
worked for nothing for 2 years. And
I’ve come to know the people, and I spend every weekend with a family of one of
our kids in the orphanage.” And he
said, they have an enormous lack of medicine.
They don’t see a doctor from the day they are born to the day they die,
and they are poor.” And he said, “I’m
so struck by this, that he said, “I’m going to have to take math and science 2
solid years of that.” And then I’m
going to get in my state medical school, he happens to come from Wisconsin, and
I am going to become a doctor and then I’m coming back here and spend the rest
of my life serving the poor of South America.
Dooley, all over again—the contagion of good example.
The fact that over 60 of our
graduates this year just said “we’ll give a year or two of our lives anywhere
in the world to help the poor.” The
fact that 2,000 of the students in our undergraduate body, give anywhere from
4-5 to 20 hours a week to help the poor around this area tutoring, big
brother/big sister, care for the old, sit with the dying, put up screens for
the people who can’t put them up for themselves, helping Mongoloid children in
the nearby hospital, which we literally run with student-volunteer help,
looking out for minority students who are about to drop out of school and
giving them the lessons they need to stay in school, and the motivation. That kind of spirit, to me, is what makes
this place different.
Last week I had a very
distinguished clergyman from Europe on the campus. His name is Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop from
Paris. And he was intrigued by the fact
that in America there was a school called Notre Dame, which was the name of his
cathedral. He’s an interesting
fellow. He is Polish by birth; he was a
refugee to France during the war. His
father and mother were killed in concentration camps. He was Jewish, became a Catholic, became a priest, and now he is
the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, and he was born in Poland. I just walked him around the campus, because
most Europeans have no idea of what goes on in an American university. And most of their universities, you can put
them all together and they can fit in a stadium. But anyway, I just walked him around, and in the course of
walking him around, we winded through the church, because I wanted to show Mr.
Vinci’s famous statue. And there we
found a bunch of kids praying before the Blessed Sacrament. It happened to be First Friday. I walked him down on the Grotto at 3 in the
afternoon, on a Wednesday. Here was a
bunch of kids drifting by, stopping to pray at the Grotto.
One of our co-eds came
steaming in. She’d been running six
miles around the lake twice. She was
sweat from head to foot. She was not
all that attractive, I must say; no sweating person is. But, in any event, I grabbed her and I said,
“Come on over here, I want you to meet the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. And I introduced her to the rather staid,
European Cardinal. And I said, “Tell
him what you came here for.” He and I
were taking in French and I put it in English to her. And she said, what else do you come here for? You come here to pray.” And all he could say is “Mon Dieu.” “My God,” because he’d never seen anything
like that in France, at least, not along the Seine. Well, we went to the
library, and he met some students there.
We then went over to our Alumni Board and Senate meeting. And it was five in the afternoon on a
Wednesday evening, and they were all set up for a mass in the auditorium of the
CCE. And again, it knocked his eye out
that here as these alumni presidents from hundred and almost 200 clubs across
the land from all ages, all classes, like here this afternoon, and here they
are celebrating mass together and he just couldn’t get over it.
So, I asked him if he would
say a few words to the senate. I told
him he could say it in French and I would translate it for him, which he
did. And he said, I have just seen your
university. And he said, I don’t want
to say that the building impresses me, although they are spectacular, and
almost unbelievable. But he said, I’m
impressed by something you don’t see in Europe—young people who are fervent;
young people who are full of idealism.
And he said, “That impresses me so much, I just don’t know what to say
about it. I just find it “equitable,”
unbelievable. Well, to, that’s the
heart of the university. If all the
other things had been done—in other words, if the budget had multiplied 20
times, and the endowment X times, and the scholarship help immeasurably, and
the endowed professorship and research, and all the other things; and if we had
a bunch of brains on stilts around here, which is the only way I can describe
some students at some other great universities—brains on stilts. People who aren’t really compassionate and
loving, people who don’t give of their lives to something non-academic, as well
as give very well to things academic.
If we had, as we had this year, one of four schools in the country which
had more than one Rhodes scholar, the other three being Harvard, who got theirs
on a Radcliff; and Princeton and Stanford and Notre Dame. But if you want to get some sense of what
that means, let me tell you that the whole big ten, which represents several
hundred thousand students against our less than 10 thousand had one; and we
could very well had four. I think
that’s something to brag about. But let
me say that everything else that happened during the past years since the war,
beginning with the really great leadership of John Cavanaugh, who was probably
the biggest influence in Ned’s life and mine too. But if everything else had happened and this had become, as
indeed it has, one of the 20 universities in the land and moving upward, not
stopping there, and if we had gotten the resources together, so this can
continue to grow and prosper and become and even greater university; if we are turning
out persons who are outstanding as Harvard, and Yale and Princeton, and Yale
graduates are also outstanding, and Stanford.
If we had done all these
things that universities are supposed to do and yet we didn’t turn out good
fathers and mothers, good husbands and wives, good people who did not give
their lives for those who are needy and desperately need the help of people who
care; if we didn’t turn out people who are generous like yourselves, and
generous to a fault in this good work, which we call Notre Dame; if we didn’t
turn out people who don’t heckle each other, but love each other and laugh at
each other’s corny jokes; if we turn out people who are loving, and people who
care for this place, and people who come back, as Father George said this
afternoon in the homily, to meet themselves as what they were many years ago,
and to hope that their idealism could be re-kindled, and we could still all be
better than we are. If we didn’t turn
out the kind of marvelous fraternity or community that is in this room tonight,
and you can multiply it almost 50 times across this land and across this world,
if we didn’t do that, then I think that Ned and I would not be as proud as we
are of this place, and all of you.
Because we have done all the things that a university must do,
especially a Catholic university, which has practically not existed since the
year 1205, when the University of Paris was founded in France.
If we had done something and
are doing something that’s literally unprecedented in this history of the
Christian world, and we are doing it in the unlikely place of South Bend,
Indiana, and we are doing it with the help of a lot of people, you know, many
of them, the first of their family to ever go to college; and if we are going
up and up and up, not just in our own judgment, but in the judgment of people
who judge universities in this land; but if we did all that and did not somehow
keep the human touch, if somehow we didn’t produce people who are loving as
well as striving, people who are honest as well as ambitious, people who are
just as well as demanding. If we didn’t
turn out people who care about all people who know how to give themselves to
their spouses, and to be faithful, if we didn’t run out people who turn out
children that is just a joy to receive when they come here and when you find
that someone is a son or daughter of an alumnus, you almost breathe a such of
relief and say, “they’re going to make it, because this is their home.”
If we did all the other
things and lost what is the most important thing in this place, which is the
love of God, and loving of our fellowman, then I think it would be dust and
ashes. Oh, it’s something you can write
about in Time or Newsweek.
It is something you might brag about when you are with your fellow
educators. But the things I am most
happy about, even though I don’t want to brag about them too much, is the
quality of the person that comes here, then grows here, that graduate from
here, and continues to grow. And I
think we have a room full of such people.
And you’ve come on your own to be again, even fleetingly, for a weekend,
to be a part of this place. You,
somehow, find your spirits reviving and somehow as you walk down the paths, as
you think of what happened here and what happened there. And of the wonderful good urges you nurtured
in your youthful souls, even though you may be celebrating your 50th
anniversary this year. I think all of
that is what makes this place very special.
And if we ever lose that, you can take the endowment and everything
else, for as far as I am concerned, it is useless.
But I believe that this
place is people. As Frank Sullivan, one
of our trustees often said, “the highest concentration of good people he has
ever seen in his life, good faculty, good administrators, good students, good
alumni, good staff people, people who’d give their lives for this place. It’s that spirit which we call the spirit of
Notre Dame. It’s that kind of eternal
Al and upward that would not be second best in anything, but especially not in
life. It’s that realization that one
can have all the competitive that important in intellectual and professional
affairs as we try to do in law and medicine and everything else, and still
remember that we are all children of God.
And it’s important that we follow His will above all. And it’s important that we love others, and
that’s the best way of loving Him, especially if those others are poor. That we are willing to get down on our knees
down there at the Grotto, or at the Sacred Heart Church, or in the hall chapels
and pray because we all need prayer to keep moving and not to go stale. To have the faith brightly and to have it
shine in the lives of so many of you, to see sacrifice at work, as so many
mothers and fathers among you have sacrificed.
To have that fundamental integrity of life, which is really at the heart
of being a good human being. And to see
that happening in the lives of literally 10 thousand young people here every
year. To see them as Athena go out, and
to see you as you come back, this to me is the greatest joy. At least, I think I can speak for Ned and
myself that we have had in these 34 years.
If nothing else happens, if we go out and get killed in an automobile
accident the day after we leave, it would be worthwhile. That’s not important. The important thing is that we have had the
grace, the grace of associating with all of you in what perhaps is the most
exciting, uplifting endeavor in all the world, to be around young people as
they are growing up, and to help them grow towards goodness.
Thank you all very much!
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Name: Peggie Mathaba Ncube
EDUCATION:
2002 Ph.D. Candidate. Educational Administration and Leadership
Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI 49104
1995 Master of Science in Administration Major: Human Services Management Concentration: International Development Management
Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI 49104
1993 Honours Bachelor of Arts: Major: Organizational Communication
University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa
1988 Bachelor of Science Major: Communication
Andrews University, Berrien Springs, MI 49104
1974 T3 Diploma in Teaching Major: Home Economics
United College of Education, Bulawayo, Zimbabwe