Word: hesburgh
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Notre Dame's President Theodore M. Hesburgh has come a long way since 1969, when he blasted campus disruptions in a famous letter to his students at the nation's best-known Roman Catholic university. Anyone substituting "force for rational persuasion," wrote Father Hesburgh, would be entitled to 15 minutes of "meditation," followed by suspension. Most Americans cheered those words, but their tone caused Hesburgh much trouble. Hard-liners miscast him as their hero; many of the young reviled him. Yet now his image is quite different: he has emerged as a kind of Catholic Kingman Brewster...
...Hesburgh has not abandoned his distaste for violence. Amid the new campus calm, however, he has shifted his target from student radicalism to the Administration's war policy. The shift has transformed...
...Handshakes. Soon after his 1969 ultimatum, Hesburgh hit his Notre Dame nadir. The worst of it was the anger of liberal students and teachers who had flocked to Notre Dame because of Hesburgh's insistence that the university combine intellectual freedom with its prayers and football. Many viewed his ultimatum as an attack on academic freedom, not a defense...
They were quite wrong. But in another sense, so was he. Hesburgh had, in fact, lost touch with his campus, mainly because of his own voracious involvement with "relevant" social problems as a member of 23 off-campus boards and committees and as outspoken head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. A biting student joke asked: "What's the difference between God and Father Hesburgh? God is everywhere and Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame...
...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...