Word: hesburgh
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Notre Dame's incoming president was holding one of his first press conferences. Only sportswriters had shown up, one of them carrying a football, which he tossed to Father Theodore Martin Hesburgh, with a request that the priest assume the hike stance. "I'm not the coach," snapped the new leader of America's foremost collegiate football power, "I'm the president!" And he strode from the room. "That happened only once," recalls the 69-year-old Hesburgh, who is now preparing for his retirement; it will come next week, after a reign that is the longest and, by some...
...Campus buildings have increased from 48 to 88, including an imposing 14- story library, renamed for Hesburgh last week, which holds 1.6 million publications...
...more important to Hesburgh have been the changes in Notre Dame's governance and its amalgam of scholars. In 1967 he persuaded the Congregation of Holy Cross, his order of priests and the founders of Notre Dame, to cede control of the institution to a lay board of trustees, though the school would remain Catholic and its president a priest of the order. This was a radical step in Catholic education, where virtue and even legitimacy are often judged by proximity to the church hierarchy. To Hesburgh, however, ecumenical leadership was essential to turning the university's vision outward toward...
...Hesburgh is openly proud of the result. "We have trustees who are black, white, men, women, Hispanic, Protestant, Jewish," he told a campus newspaper + recently, "and they come from all over the country and beyond." He is equally pleased to have opened the doors of the formerly all-male school to women in 1972. Today about one-third of Notre Dame's students are female. To replace what he once described as "academic programs encrusted over the decades," Hesburgh insisted that students take an unusually extensive requirement of core courses (currently 39 hours out of the baccalaureate...
...university seem not significantly diminished by such academic brush fires. Notre Dame's Hesburgh attributes Harvard's continuing eminence in part to the strength of Bok's reign. "He certainly has been critical of his own institution," says Hesburgh, "which you can afford to be when you're that good." Mary Patterson McPherson, president of Bryn Mawr, deplores the 1- to-20 ratio of women on Harvard's tenured faculty after a decade of coeducation ("Just deciding to educate girls ain't coeducation in my view," she snaps). Nevertheless, she admires Bok's administrative style. "He's managed to give...