Word: hesburgh
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...handsome hustler, Hesburgh likes to work until 2 in the morning with Bach or Brahms humming away on his office stereo set. He speaks six languages, has a passion for fishing and flying. He and Notre Dame's executive vice president, Father Edmund Joyce, once licked Bridge Expert Charles Goren. Nowadays his playtime is limited. He is the Vatican's permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and this year's president of the Association of American Colleges, where his Roman collar no longer stamps...
...What Hesburgh did to Notre Dame can be summed up in its football record-from a long winning streak when he took over, to a 2-and-8 losing season in 1960. Last fall, the Ford Foundation awarded Notre Dame something incomparably more valuable than a football championship: the honor, as one of five rapidly improving universities (none other Catholic) of receiving millions in unrestricted grants. Notre Dame's operating budget is up threefold, its science budget tenfold. Hesburgh has put up twelve new buildings, ranging from dormitories to a science center. To house an eventual...
...Birth Control. Buildings are only half the story. Hesburgh completely revised the curriculum, tossed out vocational courses. To get better students, he held down enrollment (now 6,467) and raised admission standards. This year scholastic aptitude scores were 74 points higher than in 1955. To get better professors, Hesburgh raised salaries 150%. Today Notre Dame's 483 fulltime faculty members, less than one-fifth of them priests, include men of many faiths. The head of the mathematics department, for example, is a Jew. Says Hesburgh: "Mathematics is mathematics...
...Hesburgh aims to break free of any narrow Catholic mold-yet retain the "moral dimension" of Catholic teaching. "This moral belief," says he, "is simply the dignity of man as a child of God. All branches of knowledge are seen as being of service to man." Notre Dame's business school, for example, has a separate course on business ethics. In English classes, famed Professor Frank O'Malley focuses on such themes as the nature of suffering. Hesburgh himself is particularly interested in science: "I don't sit around worrying that tomorrow science is going to come...
Academic freedom, insists Hesburgh, can and should flourish at a Catholic cam pus. Restrictions may occur, he concedes; in population studies, for example, birth control cannot be approved as a solution. But there restrictions end-or should end: "In nine years, I have never said to a single professor that any book or doctrine is out of bounds. I have no wish to be a medieval...