Word: hesburgh
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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While raising bricks* and mortar, Hesburgh drastically revamped the curriculum, tossed out vocational courses by the score. He held down undergraduate enrollment, let graduate enrollment (now 795) grow. To get better students, he raised admission standards; the average IQ of entering freshmen has gone from 118 to 127. Since 1954, average College Board scores have risen 78 points to 536 on the verbal aptitude test, and 77 points to 579 on the math aptitude test...
...Hesburgh is aware that overobedience and lack of initiative are among the chief criticisms brought against Catholic collegians. For 50 years, Notre Dame cut off lights and even the electricity in student rooms at 11 p.m. Three mornings a week, students had to sign in with prefects outside hall chapels, a way of encouraging attendance. This year Hesburgh dropped both restrictions (chapel attendance has not slipped). Hesburgh also cut eleven pages of student rules to two quick pages that, among other restrictions, prohibit students from having cars, from cheating or from "overdrinking." If it took Hesburgh nine years to make...
...Natural Doubt." One result of better students is a more intellectual Catholicism, an increase in the "natural doubt" that sometimes hits parochial school graduates in college and even produces some apostates. According to Hesburgh, "practically all" of his students believe in God. But "you run a hazard working with kids," he says. Real belief comes from experience, perhaps from "darkness, not light." With a 19-year-old, "you can't just saw off the top of his head and pour it in. All you can do is give him a basis of order that will prepare him to under...
...students and most faculty members as the worst department on campus. Staffed entirely by 24 priests, it offers no major-for fear nobody will seek it. But Notre Dame is working toward improvement: some 25 young C.S.C. priests are studying for their S.T.D.s at foreign universities, and Hesburgh hopes to snap up 10 or 15 of them. "We've got our Jacques Maritains coming up," he says...
...Aaron Abell, a Catholic, "the Christian ethic is not stressed at all." A political science course, on the other hand, devotes half its reading to Augustine and Aquinas. Papal encyclicals on social justice show up in economics. Biology and the dogma of virgin birth do not conflict because, in Hesburgh's view, "biology does not study miracles." Historian Matthew Fitzsimons hopes that "a Christian view of man makes sense out of sacrifice and suffering...