Theodore Hesburgh
Theodore Martin Hesburgh, CSC was an American Catholic priest and academic who was a member of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He was president of the University of Notre Dame for 35 years from 1952 to 1987 and served in numerous appointed positions in the US government, including as chairman of the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
In addition to his career as an educator and author, Hesburgh was a public servant and social activist involved in numerous American civic and government initiatives, commissions, international humanitarian projects, and papal assignments. Hesburgh received numerous honors and awards for his service, most notably the United States's Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal. As of 2013, he also held the world's record for the individual with the most honorary degrees with more than 150.
Hesburgh is credited with bringing Notre Dame, long known for its football program, to the forefront of American Catholic universities and its transition to a nationally respected institution of higher education. He supervised the university's dramatic growth, as well as the successful transfer of its ownership from Holy Cross priests to the Notre Dame board of trustees in 1967. During his tenure as president, the university also became a coeducational institution.
In addition to his service to Notre Dame, Hesburgh held leadership positions in numerous groups involved in civil rights, peaceful uses of atomic energy, immigration reform, and Third World development. Hesburgh was also active on the boards of numerous businesses, nonprofits, civic organizations, and Vatican missions.
Early life and education
Hesburgh was born on May 25, 1917, in Syracuse, New York, to Theodore Bernard Hesburgh, a Pittsburgh Plate Glass warehouse manager, and Anne Murphy Hesburgh. His father was of Luxembourgish ancestry; his mother's family was of Irish descent. Theodore was the second child and oldest son in a family of five children that included two boys and three girls. He attended Most Holy Rosary, a parochial school in Syracuse, and also served as an altar boy. Hesburgh claimed that he had wished to become a priest since the age of six. Thomas Duffy, a missionary priest from the Congregation of Holy Cross, which owned the University of Notre Dame, encouraged Hesburgh's interest in joining the priesthood.Hesburgh graduated from Most Holy Rosary High School in Syracuse in 1934 and enrolled in the Holy Cross Seminary at Notre Dame in the fall. In 1937, his teachers decided to send the promising young seminarian to study in Rome, Italy, where he graduated from the Pontifical Gregorian University with a bachelor of philosophy degree in 1940. When the American consul in Rome ordered all U.S. citizens to leave Italy in 1940 due to the outbreak of World War II, Hesburgh returned to the United States to continue his studies. He spent three years studying theology at the Holy Cross College in Washington, D.C. and two years studying at The Catholic University of America, where he earned a doctorate in sacred theology in 1945.
On June 24, 1943, Hesburgh was ordained a priest for the Congregation of Holy Cross at Notre Dame's Sacred Heart Church, later redesignated the Basilica of the Sacred Heart. Inspired by an inscription carved in stone above the church's door, Hesburgh dedicated his life to "God, Country, and Notre Dame." Afterwards, Hesburgh returned to Washington, D.C. to complete his studies and assist at area parishes. In addition, Hesburgh served as a chaplain at the National Training School for Boys, a juvenile detention facility, and at a military installation. He also ran a large United Service Organization club in a Knights of Columbus hall in Washington, D.C. Although Hesburgh expressed an interest in serving as a chaplain in the U.S. Navy during World War II, he returned to Notre Dame, Indiana, in 1945 after completion of his studies in Washington, D.C. to begin a teaching career at the university.
Career
Early years
Hesburgh joined the Notre Dame faculty as an instructor in the university's Department of Religion in 1945. In 1948 Hesburgh was named head of the Department of Theology, and in 1949 Notre Dame's president, John J. Cavanaugh, C.S.C., appointed Hesburgh executive vice president. Three years later,at the age of thirty-five, Hesburgh succeeded Cavanaugh as president.
President of Notre Dame
Hesburgh served as Notre Dame's president for thirty-five years, from 1952 until his retirement in 1987. At that time his was "the longest presidency in American higher education." Hesburgh immediately began efforts to transform the school, primarily known for its football program, "into a nationally respected institution of higher learning." In 1953 the university created the Distinguished Professors Program to attract top scholars to Notre Dame. By the time of Hesburgh's retirement in 1987, the school had established more than a hundred distinguished professorships.Hesburgh supervised dramatic growth at the university and expansion of its endowment, as well as its transition to a coeducational institution that occurred in 1972. During his presidency, the annual operating budget increased from $9.7 million to $176.6 million and the university's endowment increased from $9 million to $350 million. Research funding increased from $735,000 to $15 million. Student enrollment nearly doubled from 4,979 to 9,676, and its faculty more than doubled from 389 to 951. The average faculty salary rose from $5,400 to $50,800. The number of degrees conferred annually doubled from 1,212 to 2,663. While Hesburgh was president, the university also initiated forty new building projects, including the $8 million library with the famous "Word of Life" mural, better known as "Touchdown Jesus," on its façade.
Hesburgh played a key role in developing the Land O'Lakes Statement that North American representatives of the International Federation of Catholic Universities issued in 1967. The document outlined a commitment to academic freedom with independent governance and insisted that "a Catholic university properly developed can even more fully achieve the ideal of a true university." The statement created some controversy because it declared that Catholic universities should be autonomous, free from all authority, including the Catholic Church. Despite the conflicts that the statement initiated, Hesburg's commitment to excellence "transformed Notre Dame into one of the most recognizable and prestigious Catholic universities in the United States". In 1967, Hesburgh ended the university's exclusive, century-long leadership by the Congregation of Holy Cross clergy. Hesburgh and Howard Kenna worked together to establish a plan for transferring ownership of the university from the Congregation of Holy Cross priests to the University of Notre Dame Board of Trustees. The new governing board included laypersons and Holy Cross priests as trustees and fellows.
During the 1960s, when student demonstrations occurred at colleges and universities across the United States, Hesburgh and many other collegiate presidents came under attack. For Notre Dame, the climax of student unrest occurred in the 1968–69 academic year. On February 17, 1969, Hesburgh took a controversial position in dealing with anti-Vietnam War student activism on campus when he issued an eight-page letter to the student body outlining the university's stance on protests. Hesburgh's letter stated that student protesters who violated the rights of others or disrupted the school's operations would be given fifteen minutes to cease and desist before facing suspension or expulsion if they refused to disperse. Hesburgh's action provoked controversy and made national headlines. The letter was reprinted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. Although Hesburgh was criticized harshly by many Notre Dame students, some of whom demanded his resignation, responses to editorials in 250 newspapers about his "fifteen-minute rule" were nearly all favorable. In addition, President Richard Nixon sent Hesburgh a telegram praising his "tough stance" on the campus's student protests.
At President Nixon's request, Hesburgh offered advice to Vice President Spiro Agnew in a letter written on February 27, 1969 that included suggestions for potential actions that could be taken to control the violence on college campuses. Hesburgh, who generally disagreed with the Nixon administration's policy in Vietnam and favored an accelerated withdrawal of U.S. troops, advised against repressive legislation to control campus protests. Hesburgh argued that university and college administrations should be allowed to continue to decide the appropriate action to take on their respective campuses. The National Governors Conference agreed with his view; the majority of state governors opposed the proposed legislation. In October 1969, Hesburgh publicly expressed his opposition to the war by signing a letter with other college presidents calling for withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam and was present at an on-campus peace Mass with 2,500 Notre Dame students the following day.
Hesburgh, a member and later chair of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, was publicly vocal in his support for equal rights, but he did not immediately recognize or take significant action to eliminate institutional racism at Notre Dame, where the number of black students and employees "remained at token levels until the late 1960s." In 1969, after some of Notre Dame's African American student activists criticized the small number of blacks enrolled at the university, Hesburgh appointed a student-faculty committee to assess the issue. The committee's findings caused him to take immediate measures to increase minority employment and aggressively recruit minority students. Hesburgh also persuaded the university's trustees to lift their forty-year ban on participation in postseason football games and used revenue generated from Notre Dame's bowl game appearances to fund minority scholarships. The Notre Dame Fighting Irish's win over the University of Texas Longhorns in the Cotton Bowl Classic in 1970 raised $300,000 for Notre Dame's scholarship fund.
Notre Dame, as with other colleges and universities around the country, continued to experience antiwar protests as the Vietnam War escalated. In early May 1970, after learning of rumors that a group of students and antiwar activists planned to firebomb the Notre Dame campus's Reserve Officers' Training Corps building, Hesburgh responded with a public statement on May 4. In an address to a crowd of approximately 2,000 students, Hesburgh spoke against the war and objected to Nixon's decision to send troops into Cambodia. During his conciliatory remarks, Hesburgh also outlined steps that he thought the government could take to address student concerns. On May 18, Hesburgh sent a letter to President Nixon and a copy of his address, which became known as the Hesburgh Declaration. Although campus unrest caused classes to be canceled on May 6, Notre Dame's seven days of protest ended without damage, violence, or National Guard presence as happened on many other college campuses, such as Columbia University, the University of California, Berkeley, and elsewhere.
By the early 1970s, Hesburgh had become the most well-known Catholic in the United States. He continued to respond to student concerns during the 1970s and 1980s. To increase student involvement in the administration's decision-making process, Hesburgh added student representatives to university committees.
While Hesburgh had no direct involvement with athletics at Notre Dame - that job was the province of his close friend and associate, university Executive Vice President Rev. Edmund Joyce - Hesburgh did observe that:
"There is no academic virtue in playing mediocre football and no academic vice in winning a game that by all odds one should lose...There has indeed been a surrender at Notre Dame, but it is a surrender to excellence on all fronts, and in this we hope to rise above ourselves with the help of God."