Word: hesburgh
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...student government condemned Hesburgh; the American Association of University Professors, which had been considering him for its annual academic freedom award, dropped him from the competition. Though his board stoutly backed him, he recalls, "I had the feeling the students were slipping away. I'm not sure they understood me or I understood them." When Hesburgh walked across the campus, some students sullenly refused to shake his outstretched hand...
...Hesburgh was clearly a victim of both academic and youthful intolerance. But he showed greater understanding than his detractors. After brooding about the draft, for example, he concluded that "the only kind of patriotism the Government was talking about was going overseas and killing people. The thing keeps gnawing at you." Last spring's Cambodian incursion and student deaths at Kent State and Jackson State brought fresh indignation. When the Notre Dame campus boiled up, the main speaker at a massive protest rally was not the local S.D.S. head but Hesburgh. In a sermon a week later, he told...
...Hesburgh has changed his mind on other things as well. In 1967 he vowed that "Notre Dame will not have its undergraduates making policy decisions"; today undergraduates sit on virtually every university committee, usually with voting power. In 1968, Hesburgh proclaimed that he would expel 1,000 students before permitting girls to visit in the dorms; a year later, he accepted a student-faculty committee recommendation to allow limited visits. Paradoxically, he pleased old grads by letting the football team play in postseason bowl games -but chiefly because the $200,000 income could be used to finance scholarships for blacks...
Necrology List. TIME Correspondent Robert Anson (Notre Dame, '67) often interviewed Hesburgh as an undergraduate journalist; recently he revisited Hesburgh's study and found "an almost existential change in the man. The conversation is easier, more reflective, more open to other points of view. He seems genuinely at peace with himself. The students no longer talk about getting rid of Hesburgh but about whether anyone will be good enough to replace...
...measure of Hesburgh's success is that he retains his 15-minute rule for violent protesters-and is respected for it. At a time when the average tenure of college presidents has slipped to 44 years, Hesburgh keeps a "necrology list" of the leading casualties as a reminder of how they fell, for lack of either strength or understanding. Now 53 and in his 19th year in charge of Notre Dame, he may well have discovered how to avoid their errors...