APPENDIX

TRANSCRIPTS OF HESBURGH’S FUND-RAISING SPEECHES

June 1958 Address to Gentlemen Alumni

September 7, 1960 Fund raising for New library

1961 Ford Foundation Challenge Grant

June 8, 1974 Alumni Reunion Banquet

April 15, 1977 Fund-Raising Address

1977 Ford Foundation Grant Presentation

April 18, 1979 Opening Campaign Century Center

June 6, 1983 Alumni reunion Talk

March 1984 Edward Fredrick Sorin Society

1986 Alumni Reunion

Address to Gentlemen Alumni

June 1958

Thank you very much, Mike. I am delighted to see so many of you here, and I know what a wonderful weekend it must be for all of you. And I suppose as you come back and walk around this campus, you wonder, as sometimes all of us wonder, what is really happening here. I only go back ‘til ’45, which is the year I came back to teach after finishing my studies; and I recall since that day, which is not very long past, a matter of 13 years, you have the following things have been added to the campus: the Morrison, the new Lewis Bus Shelter, the Oshauncy Liberal and Fine Arts building, the sculpture studio, the new science building, the new student center, this washing hall has been completely redone, and we have old demarcates underneath the panel there, he is the ghost to the place. The steam plant has been completely reconditioned. We make all our own power now. We have a half million gallons of water in the tower back there. We have a new television station. We have Vet ville, a new Lobond laboratory, a new warehouse—just ready to break ground for that out past the heat power lab; a new warehouse and maintenance shop. Coming ‘round the other way, we have the Fisher and Peng Boren residence halls by the Wright Memorial, where that big hall used to be. Back down in this corner, we have the new dining hall and the Peng Boren and Stanford Halls. I probably missed a few things, but, oh yes, the bookstore-—the Harris Bookstore, where bed and Bad and Bug used to be, and Bad and Bug has now turned from baseball to basketball. If you’ve seen the new outdoor basketball courts there, which, incidentally are very popular. When you look at all of these things, I think you can come to only one really certain conclusion, that our Blessed Mother is certainly looking after this place, and she has for it some kind of a design, some kind of a scheme for greatness.

As one of our trustees said, the place just seems to have a rendezvous with destiny. And even those of us who work here, intimately connected with the work at times cannot fathom the depth of what might yet be of this place. I have started by mentioning the buildings because I think they are the least important of all. They are what the lawyers call a sine qua none condition of the kind of work we are doing here. And without these facilities you can’t begin to do the job right. And yet you could have all these facilities here, the very best I think that you could imagine, and still not have what you might call a great university. Because a great university is a complex that is compounded of human factors, not material factors of brick and mortar and money. You can’t begin to work without brick and mortar and money, but these things must be used wisely; and they must be used with great intent and purpose. And they must somehow be used in such a way that they get inside the minds and hearts of young men. And that is the fundamental reason why this place exists, and why it is growing. I have, in the past 6 years, visited a great number of universities in this country, in Europe, in South America. And next month I hope to visit all the new universities in Africa. And after looking at what is probably more than 100 to 150 universities, I can honestly say that I can’t see a single one that I would exchange for this one. Not that there aren’t some of them that have features that we don’t have, but I think we have features that are lacking in each one of them--features that in the long run are much more important. And what they have that we now lack we can certainly gain. And I think they would be hard put to gain what we have. That’s why the important thing that one must talk about when he talks about the State of the University is not necessarily the things you can see—the buildings, the grounds, the budgets, the material things that are obvious and visible to the eye; but I think one must look deeper at the human realities and the deep purposes of the place and the kind of intangibles that have always made Notre Dame great.

I am sure that as you come back and walk around and marvel at how beautiful the place is and the wonderful spirit of peace and serenity that seems to reign here, even when it is full of returned alumni. I am sure that as you walk around these grounds you have a sense that there is something here that is special. That this place in a very real sense is like no other place on earth. And that what happened to you in your time here was not simply being in certain buildings, being in Northern Indiana; but something happened inside of you, something happened to your mind, something happened to your will. And through those two faculties something happened to your soul. And what happened to you had a kind of internal impact; so that perhaps the greatest reunion that all universities will have (and there won’t be no statistics published in the educational journal on this one) will be the reunion that we all hope to have in heaven some day. And I trust that there will be a great return from Notre Dame when that reunion is held. And if there is a great return from Notre Dame that day in heaven, when the whole mass of Notre Dame men get together, it would seem to me that perhaps that it will be because of what happened, largely because of what happened during the years that all of us spent here. Because here in this place you have a kind of special blessing, a kind of benediction that I think that comes directly from the hand of the mother of God—something that is almost unexplainable in human terms. And I think that the main purpose of each one of us in our association with Notre Dame as alumni or living here and working here, must be that somehow we too become instrumentations of that blessing, that somehow we hope to spread it out, to get into more lives, that somehow we hope to make it work more smoothly and more effectively, somehow it becomes an ever greater reality that we are not satisfied, we don’t pin our little dreams down to the things that were; but we let our minds run ahead with our Lady’s mind to the things that might yet be. And that’s where the state of the university I think really lies at the present day, in the kinds of things that are happening here in the minds and hearts of the students and the faculty.

We have been doing a lot of talking lately, some may think too much, about educational standards. And there has been a lot of talk throughout the country about educational standards. And there has been some criticisms and some people have agreed and disagreed with. But I think the fundamental thing is that if you take any set of statistics that are available to us, and these statistics, of course, don’t get into the soul of people, they don’t get into the goodness of their lives but get into the confidence that they have shown in their performance. On balance, one has to be disappointed in the performance of Catholic higher education generally. I looked at two such lists in my office just last night. One was the returns on a national fellowship program for the whole United States called the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program. It is a 25 million-dollar program and I know quite a bit about it because I am on the board of directors. And this program was set up by the Ford Foundation to make available to students graduating from 1800 colleges and universities in this country this year, the possibility of going to graduate school and preparing themselves if possible to go into college teaching. Now as you can do a little simple arithmetic you can see that with 1000 fellowships available for the whole country, and this runs to about $4,000.00 a piece, $2,000.00 for the boy and $2,000.00 to his university, you can see that it is less than one half scholarship per school. And the thing is strictly competitive on academic standards and the fellowships are awarded after interviews with the faculty groups assembled by regions throughout the United States.

But looking down on this list I had a very pleasant surprise, because the number one school in the country on this list was Columbia University in New York with, I believe, 27 of these fellowships won, that was the top of the country. Next on the list came Harvard and Princeton, which were tied for second place with 23. Next came Connell with 22 and after that came Notre Dame with 19. The next closest school to us was California Berkeley the first top state school on the list with 15. And when you think of this list and what it means, it means simply this, that on this national competition on academic grounds for our graduates this year, we not only beat every state school in the country, and most of them have more money than we have; but we beat all but four of the private schools and all of the Ivy League except Harvard and Princeton. And we beat such outstanding schools not just by a few points but by as many as doubling their performance; such schools as Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Michigan, North Western, Stanford, Dartmouth, you can go down the whole long list of what is considered the best schools in the country and we not only beat them, but beat them badly. Now that is just one scale and certainly does not mean, I don’t say that it means everything, but it really means that our graduates this year can stand up against the graduates of any school in the country and out of 1800 could beat all but 4 of them. And I think that in the years to come we are going to be on top of that list too.

The other list I looked at was another competitive scholarship arrangement for the whole United States, another scholarship arrangement that gives out 72 Danforth Fellowships which carries a young man right on through the Ph.D. and pays for him and his wife if he gets married and supports his children if they have children. They gave a seven-year performance on this scholarship program, and on the seven-year program including all the schools in the United States; Notre Dame was tied for second place. The first place on this one happens to be Duke. And we were tied for second place with Harvard and some other school. This again is a straw in the wind. I don’t say that this is the most significant thing that has happened around here all year. There are much more intangible, spiritual significant things that have happened. But I think these are two straws in the wind that you can’t blink at. Because it means that when the people that I run into throughout the country that sneer a little bit at Notre Dame and say we aren’t much of a school, I think we can pull out these lists and say “find your school on there please.” And I think they are going too hard put to talk their way out of this one.

Now I mentioned earlier that Catholic schools generally aren’t performing too well in this area. On the first list I mentioned, where we were fifth on the Woodrow Wilson list with 19 fellowships, the nearest Catholic school to us on the list was a school with 2 fellowships. And on the Danforth Fellowships where we had second place, the nearest Catholic school was about 60 or 70 schools down almost. And most of the Catholic schools weren’t even on the list. I think that as a religious group in this country that is committed to principles that are age-old and true, it seems to me that no matter what we do, we must perform in the best possible way. What I mean is that all of us have taken pride over the years of being first in football; and I like to hope that we can keep being first in that particular area. But I don’t want to stop there. I want to think that Notre Dame has to have the quality of being first across the board. And I would like to think that all of the sons of Notre Dame and all of the youngsters that come here to school can be tops in their order. Now it doesn’t mean that to be tops in their order they all have to be geniuses. Because I think that all of you who have been out and working away from here will agree with me when I say that being tops doesn’t mean having a lot of talent. Because a lot of talent by itself isn’t useful, as a matter of fact it is dangerous if it isn’t joined to motivation, to a good system of values, to purposefulness in life, and to a high degree of human aspiration and effort. And I think what we can do here is to take boys, as we have in many cases, of normal talent and some boys of very high talent and push them to the limit of their performance; to give them the kind of spirit that has always comprised this school that we are competitive; that we don’t take any second place to anyone, and we try to keep the first things in life first our spiritual performance, our character, and our status as Catholic gentlemen, and after that we don’t hide behind this performance in the spiritual order. We are living in a very real world, in a very competitive world; and we want every one of our young men as they come in here to know that this place is the place where they come to life, this is the place where they are really going to be stretched.

This is the place where they are going to learn things about leadership through the 200 clubs we have on this campus. This is a place where they are going to learn some thing about politics through our whole student senate arrangement, which has come along very well and which is a very strong organization on this campus today. And they are going to learn something about the art of living with other people, that all of you learned, I’m sure, through the dormitory system here at Notre Dame. They are going to learn something about the value of prayer, the value of sacrifice, the value of getting down on your knees when you are in difficulty and need help. I hope they are going to learn something about humility when they kneel down on these boxes around here, where all of you have knelt at times and told how you failed and how you want to do better. I think they will also learn something of a compassion for the other human beings in this world, something of a compassion for the suffering, which is very close, I think, to the heart of being a true Christian today--because we can’t live and be satisfied with all the things we have and a good life, when we stop to think that half of the children in this world has never seen milk or medicine.

When we stop to think that one third of the people in the world go to bed hungry every night, you can’t be a true gentleman in the Christian sense and just close your eyes to that. And we think that even youngsters should begin to think about these things, and think about these great anguishes in human life today and what they can do about them. Well all course all of these inspirational vibes, this education, this pressing for excellence and quality, I think these are things that get back to your faculty, that get back to all the complexes of all of the people that work here. That somehow there has to be within our very souls—all of us who work here and associate with the place and all of you who are our constituency, who must be our very best foot forward outside of Notre Dame, it seems to me that all of us must somehow must get into our souls the thought that we are dedicated to a great purpose. We are dedicated really and associated with a very high endeavor and that the sky is the limit for us; and that we don’t want to take a back seat to anyone. That when they call off the leaders in this country we are among them, and when they get the people together to decide them we are among them too; and when they are looking for ideas we are among the people who have ideas; and when they are looking for dedication and sacrifice in any good cause in this country, our Notre Dame men are stepping forward to take their places.

This I think has been the great pride of the Notre Dame alumni. And I know that no matter where I go and who I talk to, I constantly hear this the Parish priests tell me that the Notre Dame men are the best men in their parish. The bishops tell me that every cause they have the Notre Dame men are out in the leading. And I have many associations in New York and Washington, in Chicago, and in the Coast where I deal with people that aren’t Catholic. And they always seem glad to see you to talk to you and to say that “I‘ve never been to Notre Dame, but I know two or three Notre Dame men and they are all wonderful fellows. And I think that this is a kind of pride, which is a legitimate pride, which we all should have. And I think as an ideal it should hold up to something that we want to see grow in influence and in the impression it has in this country at large. And this is why we have tried to assemble in this place an ever-growing excellent faculty, and I think we have some wonderful people on this faculty today, and I know that there will be many more wonderful people coming in the years ahead. And I want to have this wonderful faculty, and I’m sure you do, because when you stop to think of what the work of education is, when you think of taking the potential of young men with open minds and a lot of ability, and starting to open them up to what they can do—to give them the sense of excellence, and give the sense of performance, to give them the habit of working hard and competing, to give them the habit of never quitting on a job but getting ahead ‘til they finish it well. When you give them the sense that all this can be done in the service of God too, because certainly we don’t offer God mediocre service or slipshod performance. And when you get into the very core of these young men the very sense of what it is to be a Notre Dame man, and you see this thing growing over four years’ time, then I think you can be real proud of what is going on here.

We at times get somewhat discouraged because it‘s a tremendously costly project. I hate to talk about money, that’s why I joined the religious community and took the vow of poverty; because I have often felt that this is one of the tragedies of my life that I wanted to get away from money so now I am worried about a $16 million budget next year. In any case, be that as it may, I think that one of the most remarkable things that has happened over the past 10 or 12 years is what has happened to the alumni support of this university. I can’t put the exact figure on it, I am sure you have all seen it in our latest booklet. But the amazing thing is that this alumni support has just expanded 10-15 times more than it was, say 10 years ago. And to me that represents a tremendous swelling chorus of approval for the will that this place be on top. And you know that I think that the difficulty that so many Catholic institutions are having being on top is because they can’t for example get the best people because they can’t afford to pay them what is the going rate. A good man as you know in your own business costs twice as much as the man that is just ordinary. And unless you have in this whole complex is the very best kind of people—the very best kind of people who are the laymen here, the very best kind of people who are the priests here, the very best kind of people in every possible slot in this university, well then we are not going to get the kind of performance we need. But the fact is that this whole sense of excellence gets into a man’s soul and makes him even better than he is. I think one of the great things about Notre Dame is that it not only can stretch people to their performance but it can push them far beyond their normal performance. And certainly if there is one thing that all of us remember as we look back over numerous football seasons in the years past is the fact that many Saturdays we went into the stadium against a team that we had no right to be in the same stadium with, and we licked them.

There was no rhyme of reason to it, sports writers get all mixed up trying to analyze it afterwards, but time and time again we’ve gone up against opposition that should have really murdered us and we have beaten them. Well let’s say that this spirit, if it is the kind of wonderful thing you and I think it is, let’s suppose it gets into a young man’s life, what does it mean to him. It means that he has that spirit of never say die. It means that whether it’s a matter of practicing virtue and being a good man, whether it means becoming confident for what he wants to do in life, or whether it means being the kind of husband that is a real joy in this world, whether it means being a father that is tremendously interested in his youngsters in bringing them up with personal interest, whether it means being the kind of neighbor you would like to have or the kind of civic personality you would like to have or the public servant we need, if this young man gets this kind of spirit in his life in no matter what he does-spiritual, material, temporal, eternal, he is going to do the very best that he has in him. I suspect that he will end up by doing much better than he has in him. He will out perform himself. And I think we have not only seen this here in athletics, but I think we are beginning to see it also in the academic order where youngsters are out performing themselves, because they have that spirit of excellence and quality and good performance and hard work and never say die.

And I can’t tell you gentlemen how much your support has meant in this whole process. I have often said, in speaking to alumni groups around the country, that the important thing for the alumni is not the amount they give. Now it is certainly important that some alumni who are capable of giving a lot do give a lot and they do. But I would think that so many of our alumni are young, when you stop to think that over 50 percent of our alumni are out in the last 10 or 15 years. You begin to see that many of these young men have many problems and many things to contribute to beside Notre Dame, and we don't want to beat them on the head. But if every alumnus would really say this to himself each year, “I’m going to send something out there, it may only be a dollar.” That’s about the bottom I would think that you can put in an envelope to send, although there is no absolute limit to that. But if a man would just say I’m going to send something, just to say I am a part of this. This is a pretty small initiation fee, but at least I want to be a part of it. I had this experience in the past couple of years that I wanted to get a room and bed in the new seminary for Father Bernie Ferstus, who is our rector in Baden Hall. We had a wonderful group of fellas in Baden Hall, I’m rather prejudice about it, because since after the war we lived together for three years without changing. And I wrote all over the country to about 450 of these young fellas who were out for a few years. And I told them we wanted to do something for Father Bernie, and I was not beating them on the head, do what they could. If they couldn’t do anything, don’t be embarrassed about it. Well almost all of them wrote back. But I was surprised by the number of them that sent in $2.00.

And I suspect that when you stop to think about getting married, getting a house, having youngsters, getting a car, joining the few things you have to join in your own local community, and I can understand that. But I hope they keep on sending that $2.00. Because many of these young men will get way beyond that $2.00 class in the years to come. But the important thing is they all belong, that this place is close to their hearts and they are behind it and they are working with it, and they are trying to promote it. This is the most important thing of all. We do have some spectacular things happen at times with alumni. I was coming in here on the stage here this morning and I was told that George Curry of the class of ’28 was going to give $100,000.00 for the class of ’28, in honor of the class of ’28. And that is really a spectacular kind of gift from George Curry of Miami, Florida. And personally I think that is the kind of thrilling gift that keeps us going, because you never get discouraged when you see a great group of people behind you pushing. Because you know no matter what your own personal deficiencies might be, no matter what the local problems might be, and they are multitudinous, that somehow this many people can’t fail if they are united in a good cause and if we got the blessings of God and his mother upon us.

And I want personally to thank all of you who have been in this cause and who have helped. Because while you don’t think that a dollar or two dollars may not mean a lot, let me tell you that when you walk into those foundations offices, like I have to do next Monday in New York, when you go in to see the President of Carnegie or Rockefeller and you asked them for a hundred or a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, almost invariably the first thing they want to know is, well we don’t have connections with Notre Dame, and we are not a Catholic Foundation, and the people who earn this money for this foundation and are giving it out weren’t Catholic. Now, do you have something worth supporting? And we say, we think we do have something very much worth supporting, and we have evidence for it. And they say, “how about your own people, how do your own people support you?” And if we can tell them that our alumni percentage wise are contributing around 52 percent or 53 percent, or I would hope eventually around 60, 70 or 80 percent. Then we should be able to tell them in this department too, the same, as we like to tell them in everything else, more of a percentage of Notre Dame alumni contribute to Notre Dame more than any other university in the country. Now we are probably in the top ten right now, but this top ten business I’d like to keep pushing up towards the top one, because I think that’s where we belong. And I think that if you are joined to so great an inspired a thing as an association inspired and led by the mother of God, then I think you don’t offer in her name anything less than the very best. So I want really to give you my deep thanks for what you have done to get behind this cause. And while I rambled a bit here about the kind of things that are happening, perhaps I can tie it down to a few specific things that I think you’d be interested in hearing.

First of all, the word gets around now and then and I hear many alumni say, “it’s a good thing I’m finished, I’d never get in any more.” I don’t think this is true. I don’t think you can take the circumstances that faced my class in 1934, and somehow 1934 beginning and 1938 finishing and push them ahead to 1958. Because, the youngsters of today are brought up in an entirely different world. In some ways I think they don’t work as hard, but in other ways they are in an opportunity of learning things much easier. Now, how many gentlemen in your day saw President of the United States and heard him giving talks and so forth. And yet any youngster today can flip on the switch and see President Eisenhower giving a talk or Vice President Nixon getting off a plane from South America or any number of current events and things that are happening right here in your living room. How many youngsters in your day could talk about space travel or the latest kind of jet airplanes or all of the things that youngsters talk about today. I was telling a few of the fellas of the class of ’38 last night about a famous little conversation out in the recess yard of a kindergarten. These kids were out in recess and they were watching airplanes go over and arguing whether it was an F100 or F101. And as the automobiles drove by they were calling off the makes, the year, and model. And finally the bell rang for the end of recess, and one kid said to the other, he said, “I guess we may as well go back in now and count some more of those damn beads.” Well this I think, better than a lot of philosophy, will tell you how things have changed. Because I suspect the days that we went to kindergarten counting beads were pretty much standard procedure and we took it for granted and may have even found it somewhat interesting. But counting beads is not very interesting if you have been watching F100 s flying through the skies.

What I think you have to understand is, and this is really the opportunity for Notre Dame alumni that youngsters today are going into a very competitive world; now you know this better than I do, and the time I think to give them that competitive spirit is when they are young. I can remember even as a youngster, my dad used to send me downstairs to get logs for the fireplace. And like all youngsters if I can get through on one trip I never try to take two. I take one trip and I wind up dropping one nice big one right on the linoleum floor and denting it, well when I go up I practically knocked the stove over. And I can remember my dad lining me up and saying, “listen Ted, if you are going to do something, do it right if you don’t want to do it right just forget about it, I will go down and get the logs myself. But whatever you’re doing in life, for the love of Mike do it right, and give it a 100 percent, and don’t try to squeeze through with a sloppy performance like this. You try to save time and you loused up the linoleum and you ruin the stove and a lot of other things.” And little lessons like that stick. And I think if we could get these things across to all our Notre Dame youngsters from the time they start school, and if we could somehow put it up to them that getting into Notre Dame today is not a question of riding through on your dad’s name.

And really no youngster wants to ride into anything on his dad’s name. This is no way to grow up and no way to develop any kind of character. I think every Notre Dame father ought to tell his kids, you got to make your own decision to go to Notre Dame. Not like one father said, “you can go to any school in the country as long as it’s Notre Dame.” But I think you ought to tell them that this is a privilege, it is not something that happens automatically. And if you get into Notre Dame, it means that you are one youngster picked out for tremendous opportunity to learn things you are not going to learn in any other school in the country. And to be for four years part of an atmosphere that will change you for life. And it will give an impress and a direction to your life that will carry you all the way to heaven. And this is a wonderful advantage, but you don’t get it easily, anymore than you get into the Marine Corps through basic training easily, anymore than you get on the Notre Dame football team easily, or anymore than you get on to the New York Yankees easily. But if you want to be with the best, you have got to get there competitively. And the time to start competing is when you start thinking and when you first start going to school. And I should think that with most of our Notre Dame youngsters and with their fathers being interested as they are and knowing what is here to be learned from their own lives, this should be one of the greatest motivations in the world to get those youngsters working.

I know of a youngster last year who got in because I said he could get in. The Dean turned him down, the Director of Admissions turned him down, and everybody turned him down. And he should have been turned down, because he had taken terrible subjects in high school and done terribly in all of them. And he hadn’t worked and he was just put in here, and his father made such a nuisance of this case, that I simply, to get the man off of everybody else’s back, in desperation towards the end of the year we are all tired, and I said “for the love of Mike, let him in,” and I will write his father. And I wrote his father and I said, “look, I am letting this boy in, but I want to tell you something, that this boy is simply not prepared to come to Notre Dame. He hasn’t taken anywhere the proper number of serious subjects in high school, he hasn’t worked at all at the subjects he has taken even, he ranks way down the bottom of his class, he is very non-competitive. I suspect he is not very interested in coming to school anyway, that his interest in coming here is really your interest. And I think you are doing him a great injustice by sending him in, the same, as you would be doing a youngster that weighed 98 pounds a big injustice if you put him out there to compete against Leon Hart.” But the father said I want him to come, and I know he will make it. And I said, his making it does not depend upon your desiring him to make it, he has to perform himself. He has to learn to stand on his own two feet. Well the youngster came and he did miserably. His record here was worse than his record in high school, but in the same order. First semester he flunked five out of six and he got 70 in the sixth, which was religion. It shows that the priests are at least compassionate.

But the thing that bothered me was when after this performance he didn’t want to go home, because he said his father won’t possibly understand this. And we said, “Well, Sonny, if your dad isn’t going to understand you, who is going to. You better go home and talk to him.” Well, he said, “I didn’t want to come in the first place.” And that’s what we suspected all along. Now I guarantee you gentlemen that you can take that same boy, because he was not stupid--by a long shot, if that boy had the interest of his father from the very time he had started going to school, and if he had looked into the subjects he had taken, and if he had looked into how much time he was putting into his books, and if he taught him to perform well on a lot of things outside his books, because there are many more things more important than books in life, but if he had followed that youngster along, and kept working with him and kept helping him and encouraging him, that boy would be here in school today, and he would be doing fine. I think that one of the greatest tragedies in our day and age is this, that we take people of high talent and we just debase them by allowing them to fritter away time and poor performance and things that are not worth performing at all. And that is a great tragedy. Because this country of ours has just led the world, and we’ve ridden high, and now we are letting a country that has none of our spiritual ideals, that has none of our philosophy, that has none of our motivation out perform us. And don’t kid yourselves, gentlemen; we are being outperformed on a very neutral area called science. And it is high time that across the country we give some leadership in this nest, and that is what we are trying to do at Notre Dame.

To say that we can take boys, no matter what the talent, as long as they got the average intelligence, that is the floor, which is the basic for university work. And as long as they’ve shown they have worked during high school and have performed to the limit of their ability, and if we can take these boys and really stretch them and really motivate them, and really get them to the right kind of habits of work, the right kind of spiritual habits, the right kind of physical habits, we feel that this is the greatest single contribution the country can have from any human institution outside of the church. And this, of course, is closely allied because something of what the church does happens here too. Well, I just want to lay to rest that one thing that none of you would get here, because I think that you gentlemen have performed very well too. And I think the fact that you performed well in a wide variety of things across this nation has brought great pride on Notre Dame. And I think that if you put yourself ahead 20 years you would perform the same way and better. Because, one of the great things about human beings is that we can vary with the times, we can adapt ourselves to new circumstances, and we can use imagination. We can always try harder.

The things for the future, you’ve all read on this new booklet on a 66 million dollar, 666 million 600 thousand that’s a great figure. Everybody asks us if we just pulled it out the air, well we really didn’t. We started out with a much lower figure, and the more we thought about it the more we realized that we simply couldn’t do what should be done here with anything less than that. And we have come to the conclusion, gentlemen that this figure is a minimal figure, and we want to pull out all the stops. And we not only want to go out there and raise this 666 million 600 thousand but more. And I like just to point out one thing that looks to the future. If you go down through the breakdown on the 666 million dollar fund, you would notice that the great proportion of that money is going into people not into buildings. It is going into better salaries for our faculty. It is going into better salaries and other arrangements for our lay administrative staff around the university, who have been extremely devoted for many, many years, and have been at the heart of our growth. It is going into more help for poor boys, who have the motivation and have the talent and simply can’t get into school because they don’t have the money. And we think that Notre Dame should be in the position in the years to come to take the best boys we can get, and to help them if they need help. Just to give you an idea of how important this is, we had about 105 valedictorians of their class applying to enter Notre Dame last year—top boys from their class from all over the country. We lost just half of them.

Now, these weren’t boys who were just bright, because we turned down some valedictorians that were screwballs. But these were boys, who were not only valedictorians, they were student leaders, they were all round good youngsters with personality and with character and with leadership ability. We lost one half of those boys, because some other school had money to help them and we didn’t. And that’s why in this large sum there is a pretty big sum for student aid. And our philosophy on this in the years to come is that we would like on this student-aid program to put it more on a basis of borrowing--to let a youngster have enough confidence in himself and in his ability and his energy to borrow against his future; and also to put some of it into work programs. I checked out our work programs recently and I find that we are already spending this past year a little bit over 600 thousand dollars in aid to students on this campus. Which means everyone here; a good number of these boys are getting help through the work program. But this is very expensive. As you can see, it would easily go to a million dollars before long.

This year we had about 140 valedictorians applying to Notre Dame, and again, we got about half of them, and lost the other half because we couldn’t help him come to school here. And I think it is a difficult thing when you got a youngster who has taken every thing God has given him, and he has competed well and risen to the top, and he thinks in his heart that this is the place that he can keep on going to the top with a Notre Dame education; and he wants to come here but he can’t come because he just can’t make it. And some other boy who’s no where near as good as he is, who hasn’t tried as hard, or maybe doesn’t have the talent he has or hasn’t worked as hard in his leadership ability, can come because it just happens his father has some money. Now I’ve got nothing against money naturally talking about 666 million dollars. But I’d like to see some of it put to the dispose of these youngsters who really need the help, and who would be bright and shining lights for Notre Dame if we could give them a little assistance. That’s why part of this sum is for that. There’s another sum in there for buildings, but I have already spoken so much about buildings, I don’t want to get into that now. I just want to mention our great need is probably a new library. Our library is very out of date, very inadequate and it really needs to be completely rebuilt. The new library on this campus will be a tremendous asset to this whole process.

The last thing I want to tell you, gentlemen, is just a story I heard just recently, which I think sums up how I feel about Notre Dame men and the kind of performance that I think goes beyond all that I have been talking about; the kind of performance that carries on excellence to the end, and things being in order in life to the end. And I think reflects the kind of things that reflect what you and I hold dear at Notre Dame and the kind of things, that no matter what else goes on here, makes Notre Dame the greatest place on earth.

I had a call from a gentleman in Detroit a few weeks ago. And he said, “I just called you up,” He said, “you may not remember me. I met you out in Phoenix, Arizona once, “ and I told him, yes, I remembered him. He said, “I just wanted to call you up to tell you about a Notre Dame alumnus whose death I witnessed the other night.” He was talking about Jim Cleary of Detroit, whom I’m sure many of you know. Well, he said I’m just an ordinary guy in Detroit. I happen to have a business up here and somehow or other through this young president’s organization I got associated with Jim Cleary. And he said Jim had a terrific effect on my life. He said I am Catholic, but I did not have much Catholic education and I haven’t really worked at it very well. But he said once I got to know Jim, next thing I know he called me up on a Saturday night once and he said, “Say, he said, next, tomorrow morning is the Holy Name Sunday at our parish why don’t you come over to confession.” Well, he said, man I haven’t been to confession in a long time. But he said Jim was such a nice guy and I didn’t want to offend him so I said, “Okay, Jim,” and I went to confession with him. He said, then he kept it up every Saturday before Holy Name Sunday, and before I know it I was going to confession every month and then more often. Then he said the whole attitude of this fellow toward life was just so darn wholesome, clean, good, and aggressive even; and he was doing such a tremendous job in his business, and such a tremendous job in everything else and I thought, boy, here is really a champ. And I could begin to see his influence coming into my life even imperceptibly I was becoming a better guy because I was associating with Jim Cleary.

Now, he said, I want to tell you the end of Jim Cleary’s life because it sounds unreal, at least it did to me. But I could understand it being this way. He told me that Jim woke up about twelve o’clock that night and he shook his wife and he said, “Honey I want you to make a couple phone calls.” She said, “Are you out of your mind?” He said, “No, I don’t want to alarm you, but I am quite sick. And I think I’m going to need a doctor and I want you to call a priest too. But don’t get excited, just go over there, there are three numbers written on the inside of the telephone directory. The first one is the rectory, so get father over here. So she rang the first number, it did ring. Father said he will be over here in a couple of seconds with the blessed sacrament. So, he said, “Ring the next one, that’s the doctor.” So she rang the next one. The doctor answered. He said, “Tell him I think I’m having a heart attack.” So she told him she thinks he was having a heart attack. The first she knew of this. He said, “Now, ring the third one. That’s the police station and ask them to bring out the oxygen. So she rang the police station and asked them to bring out the oxygen. And now, he said, to give you something to do look up the number of our friends down the street here if you don’t know it, and have him come up because it would be good to have Joe and his wife, or whoever it was, that lived a few doors down. So in a matter of five minutes people started converging on his house.

This gentleman that was telling me this from Detroit said he was about four doors away, but he said the priest beat him from the church. And as he got there, Jim was going into confession and received the Holy Communion. Just then the doctor steps up, came up the stairs and gave him an injection, but it just was a little bit too late because his veins had collapsed and the police never did get there in time, but it didn’t matter because Jim was dead by the time they did get there. But he said, Father, he said, I just can’t tell you what this has meant and what it would mean the rest of my life. Here’s a guy that is eminently successful in his business, if you are just looking at it from a business point of view, this guy was a world leader, he was the head of his company and a very young man. I think he was around 42 or 43. He said he was a wonderful guy around the club and any place else you would meet him. I could remember meeting Jim once at a Whitefield meeting at Hollywood Beach, Florida. They had this meeting with Young President’s organization, and Jim trailed me out the morning and went running to the same mass and he went communion with his wife. And he said, anywhere you see the guy, he is always on top, he is always doing a great job. And he said at the end of his life just like old Jim, everything in order, Priest, doctor, …and he said, when he died he just died with a smile on his face. He just smiled at us all and died. He said it is a scene that I will remember for the rest of my life.

I think it is a scene that gives all of us a lot of heart, because the things that we really carry away from Notre Dame are timeless. There are things that I think, when you stop to think as you come back here that many Notre Dame men have gone on ahead, that the things we learn here are things that can change our life on earth, and more importantly make them good for eternity. And I like to feel that as each of you come back here, you can draw away from this place an inspiration that you are associated with something that is alive and growing and out front. And somehow this gets into your own life and that you’ll never will just stand back and just be defeated or hurt morally, spiritually, materially or any way else; but you will always have the drive to keep on going and not to give up. Somehow as you walk around this place there come back to you the aspirations of your youth, if you will. Like a man who came back to see me one day and he said, “I’ve been just walking around this campus for six hours.” It was wintertime. And he said I was on the train all last night. And he said, “I just want to sit down and tell you my little story and get absolution and leave.” But he said, before I do that I want to tell you one other thing that I have really loused up my life the last two years very badly. There’s no excuse for it. I know I was wrong and I knew what I had to do but I did not have the nerve to do it. But he said, with Christmas coming on, I decided that if there’s anything on earth would move me to straighten out my life it was to get back at Notre Dame. And he said I came back here and I went to my Adler Hall chapel, where I had been down for mass communion every morning. I went down at the Grotto and I probably said about 6 rosaries down in the Grotto in the cold. He said over here in the big church just kneeling there and down in the basement underneath. And he said during the rest of time I have been walking around just soaking up the atmosphere. And he said, Father, believe me; I’m just ready to go. He said, I’m not ashamed to sit here and tell you just exactly what my problem is, and get your advice. I would like to do it man to man, and when it is all over I wish you would give me absolution, because I’m sorry, and I’m going to do better. And he said that this place has really saved my life in a broader sense than in time.

Well, I think all of us can get this from Notre Dame. We’ve all had holy thoughts here, we’ve all had good thoughts here, and we’ve all had many happy times here. And I hope that your being back on the campus, your walking around and drinking up some of the peace of the atmosphere, your dropping in to the hall chapels that you knew of old, I think your just meeting your old friends and talking, I think it all gives us a surge of joy and pride and confidence. And my prayer for all of you is that you’re all with us all the way. And that you have confidence in all of us that live here and work here that we are not trying to denature Notre Dame, we are not trying to break it down and rebuild it. We are trying to take every strong thing we have here and make it stronger yet if possible. We want to take anything here that might be weak and to strengthen it. And we hope we can take your sons, and we hope that they come here with the same wonderful desire that you came with. And we hope that they leave here with, not only as good as you are, but better. Because the greatest thing that any father wishes for his son and we wish for your sons is that they are all better than their fathers. I think every father wants his father to have the father he didn’t have and to get the advantages he didn’t have, and the greatest pride in your lives to see what your youngsters do. And I hope you can have this pride in us at least—that you can give us your sons with the full knowledge that they are going to get everything you’ve got and more. And if I tell you that during Lent last year there were 100,000 boys and more at Holy Communion here on the campus, I know you would understand that things aren’t really going very badly. I think that when you look at our athletic record and find out that this past year was the greatest year in our history for overall performance in all the sports, I think you will realize that things are not going to the dogs. I think when you look at a few of the things I mentioned to you today and the other things I might have said, and realize that things are, that we are as competitive as we have ever been in history, I think this will give you pride and should give you pride.

Finally, I think that all you have to do is to walk around and use your eyes and your ears. And I hope that from this experience of this weekend, you would leave here with the really deep conviction that this is the great place it always has been. It is getting better all the time, that your association with it is a wonderfully wholesome and growing thing, and that we are indeed proud of you and proud that you think so much of this place to come back for the weekend. And I ask you in all sincerity to keep us in your prayers, and to be sure that you are in ours every day. Because every single day there is mass perpetually offered for all of you and your families, and this will tie all of you and us together. And I hope that in conclusion I can really read to you something that you have heard many, many times before; but which says so much better than I can the kind of thoughts that will be going through your head this weekend. It’s the old poem from Father Charles O’Donnell, never old never new.

TO OUR LADY

We have colored your cloak with gold, and crowned you with every star

And the silvery ship of the moon we have moored where your white feet are.

As you look on this world of ours, campus, lakes and towers,

You are good to us, O, great Queen, good as our mothers are.

And you know each one by name, our heavenly registrar.

Enter our names in the book, into which you dear Son will look.

For we know that a time will come, the graduation year

When thousands and thousands of us who have dreamed on your beauty here

Will gather before your face to talk and dream of this place.

Then when your Son comes by, you will tell Him as of old:

These are the boys we knew, I and my cloak of gold;

You at the breaking of bread, these are the troops we fed.

And a shout shall split the skies, as the ranks send up your name

And a golden hour in heaven, when your sons, Oh, Notre Dame,

Kneel to their leader down there by the helm of your gown.

God bless you all.

I can’t help but feel that this is the highlight of the reunion weekend, and that the many thoughts that Father Hesburgh has expressed today will be repeated by you many, many times, and since we are from all over, I think that it was certainly a fine thing that Father could give of his valuable time to be here. I do have an announcement and then we are dismissed.

Fund Raising for New Library

September 7, 1960

Father O’Brien has a very bad opinion of my life, because he said all you have to do is get him in here and stand him up and turn him on. And today, I think, I’m not in the best type of mood to be stood up and turned on; possibly because I am in some different part of the world. A couple days ago I was in Bogota and Panama. The Sunday before that I was in Brazil. The Sunday before that I was in Buenos Aires. The Sunday before that in Managua, Nicaragua. The Sunday before that in Mexico City, and the next Sunday I must be in Rome. I think all we can draw from that is join the wagon and see the world.

I am deeply grateful to all of you for being here. I know it is not a good time of year, with the youngsters getting back to school, and so much excitement with the fall season to beginning, finding time for family, and business and everything else. To think you’ll take time today to listen to our story about what we hope will be our greatest endeavors in the history of Notre Dame. It is something that warms our hearts, and I am deeply grateful to each one of you individually—if I can say this as individually as I could, and also to Peter Grace, who has taken on the brunt of this activity. Peter was in Europe, I think, last week, and has to be there again this week. There is no one in the country I know busier than he is, and I think it is typical of his support to Notre Dame. When I called him and asked him “Can you do this?” He said, “I’ll do anything for Notre Dame, you know that.” And I don’t know where I would find a willing spirit than that. Otherwise than what Bishop Hershey said about our beloved Father O’Hara, he said that he is a consecrated bishop, who will fit the task. He said, “How can I get in touch with Bishop O’Hara?” And the bishop said, “You have him.” What can I do for you? He said, this is typical of his whole life. Anyone who knew him had him. And his only question is “What can I do for you?” I suppose that there are in this room a lot who think of him as Father John O’Hara. I did not know him terribly well. I only knew that to know him was to love him. The only chance I had to meet him as a student was while walking down the halls or in passing him in front of the buildings one day as a freshman. It made no difference to him who you were when you are in need of a bit of a lift. When you met him you loved him because he gave you all he had. I don't think this place will ever be the same since he came and did what he did. I think he did a tremendous job and made a dent in all of our lives. We will miss that part of our lives as time goes on. I hope that some day and in some way we can have a suitable memorial on the campus of something that will somehow symbolize all of the things that he was and did at Notre Dame.

Other than that, it was typical of him that he never really left the place. I never met with him, but at his last will and testament I sensed that he wanted his body and remains to be with the place he loved. I think that it is wonderful in one sense that eight years ago today he lost his life and his memory of Notre Dame ends. Not that we won’t remember him for years to come, but today he has touched so many lives. I think he typifies for all of Notre Dame our richest endowment, which is to work where your heart is. We refer a lot to the past when we talk about him, but we are not living in the past; but we are talking about the same subject—the University of Notre Dame. It is not so much how much it is worth, but it is something moderate today. What we are really talking about is, though, all that Notre Dame might yet be. I think many things have happened. We look back to the beginning of the past. We had something like 2000 students, today we have over 6000. At that time we were in very bad shape for endowment. We still are, but at least it is still much better today than it was then and more. We have evident on this campus more buildings with buying value since that time than in the whole hundred years of this university’s existence back in 1943. For the past years the growth has been nothing short of fantastic, no matter how you look at it. If you look at the growth in the student body, both quality and quantity; if you look at the growth in our faculty in the last ten years there have been over 112 faculty members added to this university. And at the same time, over 116 Ph.Ds and upgraded at a net growth in that, it is our net growth in faculty alone—faculty salaries were 150 percent in the last years. If you look at the budgetary figures, during the past ten years our budget was $8 million. Today it is $18 million plus and probably $19 million next year. These are material things, they are not big thing. There are some things, which are going on in our world, which are harder to accept. I think all of us have been a part of it, at least in yearning and our desire to make something come true that is really unique in all the world. I think any Notre Dame man, no matter what year he’s been here, no matter what year he graduated, what years he spent here in school, is willing to admit that this college and the time he has spent here is something unique in all the world. That’s why we are back here today. That’s why I’m here, that’s why we are all here. Somehow this place has a drive in our lives, it has a claim on our feelings, and our devotion. We are dedicated. And I think that the important thing that I would like to say is that we all have a part in a corporation, and as a corporation gets started our task gets started. Each one of us has a part in the forward start of Notre Dame. And as Notre Dame grows and becomes more significant in the State of Michigan, we also grow and become more significant.

If we look around at Notre Dame today, at the original plot and layout of the buildings, you would find that there is not a single open space left on this campus where we can put a building tomorrow if we wanted a building tomorrow. And as we study the past ten years and look forward to the next ten years, we find that somehow Notre Dame; this part of Notre Dame is now completed. Every single plot is filled from the center of the campus leading to the main building. The other path leads to the subsidiary campus, the academic building and sports—leading up to the stadium. If we want to start thinking of what Notre Dame might be in the years to come, we need to start thinking about what might be called “a move to the East.” And here we have a plot of land that is almost 400 yards across and over one half mile long, which leads from the stadium property up to the toll road. And we decided that perhaps our first task is to decide what we needed most and make this the next magnificent building we have next to the Dome. Then to put it right in the middle and center of this part of Notre Dame. And you will be hearing more of this in meetings to come. But, I think what we are talking about here today is something that is really focal, a focal point for all our hopes and yearnings for the years to come. And I think that it is very significant that this place and this room are the places to read this script in front all of our alumni and hear about this—a place to really think of the interface of what the new Notre Dame might be.

I would like to say, first of all, that a university is a kind of unique institution in all the world. It has been said many times that the church is the mother of universities and indeed it is. The church has begun many universities such as the University of Cambridge in England, University of Paris in France, University of Bologna in Italy, and other great universities throughout the world. In countries universities are the consolidation of culture and cultures, which are number one. From earliest times to our day, even in the earliest and still are today, in this time. Cultural change has happened. I don’t need to bother you with the details but the fact is that the church out west all had universities—Bologna, Serbia, Rome, Paris and all the others. Today in at least six countries the church is making somewhat of a comeback. I have just come from a meeting with all the directors of Catholic universities around the world. One of our concerns is that our universities have been lost on the mainland, and it is time to rebuild one. There is a new university in the Philippines. And from there we can move on across to Europe and fine new light fulfilling there like St. Joseph in Beirut, which is now struggling to become a university. Or we can look down the streets of Africa where we see one property per person. Two thousand miles South of that is Brazil, in the end of nowhere is 180 students. Then we come across the Atlantic to the New World, and if you look past Texas we find in Mexico City today, new and a Catholic university under way. And they have a plot of land, and a stack of buildings, and they are trying to get something started. Then we go down to the countries of Central America, like where I went a few weeks ago. There isn’t a single Catholic University in the whole of Central America---all the way from Mexico to Panama. Then we go to across to visit the southern universities like Andre Sol in Caracas, on the West Coast you see universities with great names like San Antoine, San Rafael, in Lima, but the church no longer has it. The church is now trying to start a university in the South—universities of the world. Then we have on in Bogota and another in Medellin. Then you look up to Colombia; there are two universities, which are really trying to get off the ground. But these are small and hardly compare to the great universities of this world. They are small in comparison to the great universities in this world. Santiago, Chile and another started in Brazil, Argentina, one in Uruguay. The fact is none of these universities has full-time student bodies. They are completely communistic. This is the kind of composition these southern states have. To the north of us, you find universities in Canada—Montreal Catholic—yet these universities, again, are not big and one must say that honestly.

Then you come to our country, where we have 260 Catholic colleges and universities. As you start putting down the criteria for a really great university, that have had graduate faculty, that have full-time students body, and full-time faculty, that somehow are committed to educate to academic excellence, that somehow uses not only physical sciences or social sciences, there is something extraordinary about them all. There is discovery, there is life and vitality and through the course of a day you will find perhaps in the whole complex of 260 Catholic colleges and universities, perhaps only 4 or 5 that give some comment on the student enrolment of the universities. And I grant you, gentlemen, this is some type of negative portrayal. Some great universities do not say they are. We will always have some that are Catholic and are different—their philosophy, their theology, and some on the dynamic presence of God and the loving practice of work for God on our campuses. But the fact is, that all universities and all those who are committed to that university, and I think ours is, and I hope always will be, that somehow our guiding light and goodness, that somehow our leadership in the ways of mankind in this life, and followers of new knowledge, that are transfuses of the treasures of knowledge in the past to which we have followed. And this too shall be the tradition and the reality of this great university here at Notre Dame.

Today I have a chance to tell you something that I must tell you in utter confidence. I am telling you something that can be, and can be just now, but is not yet. But I think that we’re like family here today, and I think I must tell you this to give you some idea of the depth of our aspiration and the possibility of receiving them. We were visited last January by two representatives of the Ford Foundation, and they said they decided that they were going to do something completely different than anything they had ever done before. In the past they had reached out and received applications from various divisions and departments for science, economic projects, sociological science, teacher education projects, and they had all types of divisions coming for these various projects. They usually give about 100 million dollars a year from the income of their endowment to pay for institutions. And they decided for once that they would like to look at the possibilities of reversing the terms. Instead of waiting for these universities to come to them with all these special projects, they will pick a handful of universities, possibly five from the whole country. One in the East, one far West, one in the Midwest, one in the South, and one in the Rocky Mountain State.

They will probably pick out universities that show promise in leadership and vitality and a commitment to excellence and a chance to become among the greatest universities in this realm. And they said that they made this list of all the universities that exist. They said in their own judgment and they were looking or further consideration on this, but they decided that the university they were willing to bet on, if you want to put it that way, in the Midwest is Notre Dame. They said to see if they were right in making this assumption, they would like us to make them an assessment of the last ten years of the university, and of those things we look forward to the next ten years. We are having a board meeting this month to consider this. They said that our job during the past ten years was really magnificent. They said that in every sense we were about a 30-35 percent up the curve in everything pertaining to the university. “What are you doing that is different, why should we pick you from all the other universities in the Midwest? What are you all doing differently from other universities in the Midwest?” We said we have something here that we think is very special. We cannot only be in the main stream of university life in this country, but we can also swim with the best of them in the main stream. We said, just look around in the country today and see the problems that we have mentioned in a philosophical and theological point of view.

First of all, take the whole wide world. Throughout the world today, you have problems in every direction and the whole theme of democracy has changed, so that today instead of Americans solving all the problems of the world—to their various needs and possessions, the other 80 million people now speak for themselves. All the other countries, China, Indonesia, speak very loud and clear for themselves. Millions of people are now speaking for themselves, even in Pakistan. We have almost 200 million people speaking for themselves today in Africa. And you have, of course, some 225 million Russians now speaking for themselves in Russia. You have American countries even standing on their own feet and saying you need to be more concerned right out in the open. And this is the world where it is no longer a world where Western culture is allowed to speak on behalf of other cultures. This is a world where there is no basic moral understanding, where the state has lost its authority. We are involved in these problems, and it takes a place like Notre Dame to formulate some basic moral understanding, some basic moral concepts. We are called in this troubled world to do a work of mediation and diplomacy and healing, and hope this moral world lasts. We are to get some meaning to words like “rights” and “human dignity” and “honor” and “justice,” “independence,” and all the rest—what they really mean.

To pick another aspect of the world today that needs tremendous leadership, there is a whole different culture between that which is technological and that which is scientific and that, which is humane and literary. So that today, in this world, you don’t really see beside the three cultures, and these cultures are getting further and further apart. So that the pastors and theologians don’t talk anymore because they don’t understand their language, and the pontiff and theologians and scientists can hardly talk to each other. There, too, a work of mediation needs to be done. We need today a great university where somehow we can bring together the voices of scientists and the voices of economists, and somehow get them into a chorus. It needs direction and understanding. These things may not be accomplished in time unless there is some philosophy from theology. Theology must get involved in these questions. It must get to the bottom of the significance of these problems. That’s the good old sound values. What can we do to get Protestants, and Jews, Muslims, and Catholics and the rest of religions to somehow have a little better understanding, a little better tolerance for each other?

Then you take the whole field of the United States, and the problems we face today. What is wrong about the America experience that we can bring to light? I think Notre Dame is in a particularly good position today to do this unique work, because we have always had contact with the other great universities of the States, Protestant background to sit down and mentor our various associates on various boards. Notre Dame, I think, is closer to other universities in this country today, perhaps than any other Catholic university ever had. We are close to many people who are not of our faith. And I think we are in a unique position to do something significant about bringing into the situation some kind of understanding, some kind of betterment. We can blame the many great problems we have to the whole economic problem in our country today, and what does it mean, this experiment of the economic revolution. So that in our time and in our day, there has been a tremendous revolution in our country. And the lessons that come from all of the barriers in the past that has somehow had done all the things the Russian Revolution promised to do and never did. One hundred and forty-five dollars today got into being in Middle class, and this Middle class made things possible that never would have been possible. And the lessons that come from these, are something that needs deep study. This is not understood outside the continent of the United States. We are much better at doing things economically than talking about them or articulating them or philosophizing about them. So here is an area that testifies to our lives at the moment. We have economics, political science, and sociology that somehow a great modern university could be interested. Somehow a great modern university can get involved in doing some theological study. And I think we in a great modern Catholic University could be giving some moral, some spiritual, some deeper dimension to all of these studies.

Now take another great study that a lot of people do not like to talk about, but I think we here need to talk about it, because it is a promise and that is equal opportunity for all Americans no matter what their race, religion, color or origin. This is a problem that won’t be settled by demography, it won’t be settled by misunderstanding. It would only be settled by getting people of goodwill to really study what is happening and what we are going to do about it. We don’t have to wait for a tornado to blow us off the ground, because somehow God owns the destiny of this whole cosmic. What is the meaning of our constitution? What is the meaning of equal opportunity that we talk so much about in America? How can this be served to all Americans? A difficult study, but one which the Catholic universities cannot afford to pass by today. It needs vision, it needs talents, it needs training, it needs understanding, and these things could come from the Catholic universities. They should come also with caring. Too long the people with good ideas have taken care of themselves and the people with bad ideas have been taken care of everyone else. We need unity, we need power, we need strength, and we need understanding. I can go on with a long list of problems, but all these things I have mentioned is a kind of burning problems that need to be met. They are kinds of burning problems that people from the Ford Foundation are eager to meet. We are the ones who know deep down that the concentrated studies on many of these problems are of a world mature, or of a national nature or even a Western world nature. We thought that these are things we could bring to modern life, and modern culture. We thought that these are new dimensions of understanding that can go forth from this university. This is what it means to really get meaning, as far as I know.

After studying our proposition and thinking of the whole thing, the Ford Foundation seems to be in agreement that the five universities that they picked off are really thinking universities, and we are one of those five. This is how they propose to do that. Firstly, they are impressed that our budget for example, is to do the things we have to do and not to do the things we want to do. First of all we’ve got a library that is bursting at the seams. One fifth of the books we have have been acquired in the last five years, and there is going to be a similar load as we move on to the next ten years. They looked at our graduate school, we need better security for our faculty, better student security for our graduate students and residents, and for our personnel in the library facility. As we look at the university, you could not imagine what we need to do all the things we want to do. They said, let us put it this way: “we are willing to help you if you are willing to help yourselves.” We would like to work out a kind of formula here. For every $2 you raise, we will give you a dollar. And for the first three years, let’s say this amount would be something like $6 million. If you raise twelve, we will give you six. You can use the six for anything you want it for. You can use it to upgrade your library. You can use it to pay professor salaries. You can put in a pension plan for your non-academic employees. You can do anything you want, if you feel it is important for the growth of Notre Dame towards that academic excellence. And if we get our board to buy this, this will be the first time in our history to put on, what we call, institutional grants. And we will have a formula for each of the five universities, and it will do the same for all of them. The amount might be different. They said that we feel that somehow Notre Dame has perhaps dramatized for the whole Catholic world in the United States and perhaps beyond the United States. The amount might be different for other universities. We will have a salary for each one of the five universities, and we will do the same for all of them, the amounts might be different. The fact that it is, what is in our judgment, to have a non-profit, a really good great Catholic university? We think you can do this in the tradition of Oxford, Cambridge, and Bologna; and revitalize something that is authentic and lost in the States. We think you can have an institution where people in the State of Michigan can say, “I am really proud of that.” We are interested in culture and wisdom, willing to grapple with modern science like the time of the Middle Ages. I think we have wisdom from the Middle Ages, but I think the wisdom must be known, understood, and applied to the problems we face in this world today. And if we don’t solve these problems we face today, they’ll be around for the next generation. The time is getting short and late, and we must work while we can.

And that is what we are facing today, as we look toward the future of Notre Dame—one of the greatest visions that any gentleman should have a part of, and each of you gentlemen, should have a part of this vision. When we look at the new library, we are not looking at a building. We are looking at the center of something that can symbolize for all American Catholics and non-Catholics and Jews and everyone else. The fact that here in this university we have an institution that is not only in the main stream of American life and real life, but is willing to make a contribution, that is live right, and just, and honest, and is of service to this main stream of life today. When we look at a building like this, this represents a spirit, a spirit that is going upward, a spirit of optimism, a spirit that is aggressive. So, we are not going to be quiet until every hall in this auditorium has been filled. We are looking forward to this university, not to what has been done in the past, but to what we can do starting up from here. And I will not be surprised, gentlemen, that if we can to the Ford Foundation as we go to the Board Meeting next month, that we can raise, not only the $12 million, to get the six million, and this can be done on an annual basis depending on how much we raise, but we want to do this, not in three years, but earlier than three year’s time. I know someone will get up and say, “What will we do with the extra year?” We can make it now. This is the time to move. This is like getting 50 percent interest for your money every thing you need every day in the year for the next ten years. This, I think gives us a position, a quality, and an outside judgment, because we didn’t go to them, they came to us. I don’t think this task is the hardest kind of hope because obviously, I wouldn’t be telling you about it. But I think it will pass the Board of Directors’ meeting this month. I think we need to get up, focus on the library, but not only on the library, we are to focus on all the things this university is going to be and do in the years to come.

I’ll like to feel that there is not a man in this country who can’t come here and be inspired, that can’t come here and feel he’s alive in a sense that he has not been alive before. To feel a kind of inspiration for his Catholic life and time he spent in this place, to feel a kind of inspiration for his personal sense of devotion, for sharpening his mind, for being all that he can be in his day and his time. You can’t help being excited in a place where things are happening, a place where times are being looked at honestly and seriously.

Then let’s look ahead. I will not be surprised if ten years from now that a budget that is now $18 million will be $35 million, or $36 million or $40 million. I would not be surprised that if ten years from now we, not only have this library built and functioning for 7 years, and going through the first set of books already, but we will also have more undergraduate facilities to fill our campus; but we’ll have a new science library. We have been approved for a new three-quarter of a million dollars in Atomic Energy budget for next year to make our basic plans for putting up a new radiation lab. It will be the greatest thing ever in any university in this country. And this comes directly from the Atomic Energy Commission, because of the kind of work we are doing here. We need to have a great lab for the study of biology. We need to have a great lab for the study of norms—for the kind of things I have been talking about today. What is happening to the norms in our society? What is happening to our culture? What is happening to our moral conscience? What is happening to our world situation? What is happening to our dignity? We can nearly say that anything that is important for man is important to God. Anything that contributes to the dignity of man is the fulfillment of man. That somehow because we are alive and in this place and in this university, a great Catholic University, the greatest minds of our time can come here and study here and have a part of this place. And I think that our dreams and our ambitions can be as wide as our world.

And I know I can tell you, gentlemen, that the only reason I joined the Holy Cross congregation, of all the fine reasons is not because I knew a lot about it, but because I knew if I joined it I wouldn’t have to worry about money the rest of my life. I can honestly say that things do have a dollar sign on them. And the dollar sign, believe me, gentlemen, is to the extent that you want to do an excellent job, to that extent the dollar sign will figure. This is a study of the picture of the library that was much more ambitious. This would double our present capacity for books. You can say that we can keep all the books in the present library and make one as large again, and it would last for quite a few years. And I think this would be looking backwards again instead of forward. And instead of that you say, let’s build a library four times as big as the one we have or five times as big. And let us plan to get some tremendous use out of it for faculty and students. But let’s look ahead and let’s dream big, the way that men who came years ago dreamed big. And we wouldn’t have this campus we have here if the men 40, 50, 60, indeed 118 years ago didn’t dream large enough to keep buying land and give us to move and expand.

And with all this expanse you see around this university, gentlemen, we still haven’t used half the land that Father Sorin bought and left as a legacy to this university. And I’m sure that Father Sorin is hovering somewhere in the wings today and he is saying, Give them hell, or something, but keep the thing moving.” And I am sure he dreamed large enough, because if a man can come to a place like this and find some frozen ground and snow, and a couple of lakes, and a lot of problems and thought “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac,” now, this takes a lot of faith. And this is what is has become. Because of the blood, sweat, and tears, I must say, and the vast human heart and energy of an amazing number of people; he has brought to this place the human talents, the human heart and devotion, the energy that has literally filled the lives as Father Cavanaugh did, as so many of the men going back, as Father Sorin did, as a very great number of men did. And we have had a tremendous number of devoted, loyal, wonderful laymen, both Catholic and non-Catholic at this university.

I would like to think of, and if I might get personal for just a moment, I see men sitting down there—Professor John…., a member of the class of 1934, ‘35. It was a wonderful class. I could remember how bright it was and how much I loved to like to go there to listen to them. Professor Frederick, there is not a prophet; there is not a devoted men in the whole world to Notre Dame’s Professor Frederick. These were persons who had their hearts in the place, not only their heads. I am sure there are people in parts of the world today who can speak about them more eloquently than I could. I have come to the conclusion that probably I should forget everything else and just sit here and do the work that ought to be done here. But again, I rationalize and I may be I’m rationalizing, and not thinking honestly, but one of the things I enjoy is being involved and involving Notre Dame in the world at large. But I like to think whether I am in Bogota working on the Atomic Energy, because we had some real problems there last weekend in Colombia; the fact is that all of these are things that the university in this day and this age aspire and about which I must think.

And I cannot distinguish myself from Notre Dame. These are large dreams, I admit it, they are very optimistic and powerful dreams and I admit that too. But, I admit a third thing, that these dreams will not come true just because I dream about them or Father Jerry Wilson down there or Father Moore or the trustees. This dream can only come true if all of us get together and say we are going to make this, as a Catholic university, one of the best in the tradition of what the church did in the Middle ages.

We are going to make this place one of the most exciting places on earth. We are going to make this place the kind of place where the young men come to and leave four years later, not only strengthened internally in mind and body and soul, but with a sense of dedication that he is going to make his life something to brighten up this world. We are going to make this place a kind of oasis in a world that is full of prejudice and ignorance and stupidity at times. And we are going to try to make this place a living bee hive, if you will, where a lot of the things that make man really high in his dignity. And I think we can do this, gentlemen. I don’t you will have to be a great man to live your lives with growth. You don’t have to tremendous people to realize this new library as the center of this growth. I don’t think we have to be heroes of an extraordinary type to say we are going to get out and do the things that are necessary to get people excited about this dream. I think the hardest part is that the Ford Foundation just came out of the blue without our seeking it. And I think it is thanks to hundreds of people over the years who have put Notre Dame in the position that we would be picked out of the blue. That we would be matched with some of the finest universities in this country, to be given a very special kind of help, and I think we have to move. I think we have to latch on to this, and I think if they gave us three years to raise six million, I think we aught to do it in two and a half.

I think we have been sharing with people for years what Notre Dame can do in football; we’ve shown them what we can do in devotion. Now I think it is time to show them what we can do with this university. I leave this right in your laps, gentlemen, and I know we can do it together. I am depending on you 100 percent. Thank you very much.

Ford Foundation Challenge Grant

1961

Dear men of Notre Dame and dear members of our wide spread Notre Dame family; I am taking this opportunity to speak to you for a few minutes about the past, present, and future of Notre Dame. One cannot speak of the present or future without bowing one’s head in reverence and gratitude to the past. Because all of us, all human beings and all human institutions are indebted to their past. I would like to salute, to begin with, the hundreds of men and women who have given dedicated lives to this university: who have given the very best of their hearts, minds, and souls to make it what it is today. We have inherited the total reality of Notre Dame today, for which we should all be indeed grateful. And now to tell you something about our present and our future- I believe that Notre Dame is facing so many open doors of opportunity. So many chances to become in all reality one of the greatest university of all times, want to share with you the greatness of this opportunity; because it is your opportunity as well as ours.

As you all know, last September this university was included with four other universities throughout the United States in a magnificent program of the Ford Foundation. The Ford Foundation scouted throughout the whole country, studied a vast number of universities and from this study chose five – on the West Coast Stanford University, in the Rocky Mountains Denver, in the south Vanderbilt University, in the East Johns Hopkins, and here in the Midwest in the Heartland of America they picked Notre Dame. And they told each of these universities that they wanted them to become in the next ten years that which it might normally take them 30 years to become – great, outstanding bastions of education, dedicated to excellence on every front. And to this end they said they will match us and the next three years by 50 percent of every gift obtained by the university, barring gifts from the government and the Ford Foundation itself. This means that from now until July 1963, if someone gives us a million dollars they will give us $500,000.00, if someone gives us $10,000.00 they will five us $5,000.00, if someone gives us $1,000.00 they will give us $500.00, if someone gives us $100.00 they will give us $50.00. To do this, we must double the free money that has come into the university over the past years. This means that when we double our income and gifts, they will match it by 50 percent and effectively we have tripled the total financial resources brought to bear upon the betterment of this university in the years immediately ahead. And the whole business-if we are successful between now and 1963, we will raise the money required of us. It will be matched by $6,000,000.00 by the Ford Foundation and then we can look forward to a suitable arrangement continuing on and on, possibly for about ten years. And this is indeed what I want to talk to you about tonight.

But, first of all I would like to say something to you about why the Ford Foundation picked Notre Dame. They did this after a long study as I have already indicated; and this study was made in a very intricate and very wide fashion. First of all, they looked at our student body, because this, after all, is what a university exists for, students. There was never a great university without a great student body. First of all, they found that our students come mostly from out of state, in fact, 86 percent of which student come from out of State of Indiana, which makes us by their own figuring the most national university in the United States. They also found that great students through out the United States, graduating from high school come to Notre Dame in great numbers. For example, we had as many as 1,800 high schools represented on our student body. One of the things they found out is that married scholars, who are among the thousand young men and women chosen as graduates from high schools to come to the university, who can go to any university of their choice throughout the whole of the United States that we were in the top ten of men’s universities to which most of these students come. They also wanted to know what our students did after the four years. And in this we turned up, what was even to ourselves a rather startling record. We found, for example, in the greatest of all graduate fellowship foundation awarded competitively though out in the United States to graduating seniors, the Danford Fellowship, which carried the student all the way to his Ph.D. and even far beyond with all expenses paid, we had at the time of the study, more students studying under this fellowship from the Danford Foundation than any other university in the United States.

On the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, which is giving out 1,000 scholarships a year on a competitive basis to some 2,000 colleges and universities senior graduates, we find that in the past 8 years we had over 81 of the scholarships. And in the 3 years of the expanded Woodrow Wilson Fellowship program, we were tied for 5^th place in the country. In all of the universities, only 3 schools had more than we do during the 3-year period. Harvard, Princeton and Cornell beat us. We had been beaten by Yale-two years and we beat them one year. Columbia beat us one year and we beat them two years. For example, in the Rhodes Scholarship, to take another endeavor, we found that in a five-year period we had won 3 Rhodes Foundation Scholarships, and this is quite an achievement, because there have not been traditionally too many of these won by Catholic university students. We found also for example, that in the National Science Foundation Fellowship, which is indeed another wide spread Fellowship appealing to all graduating seniors in the United States; that this very year we were tied for 11^th place in the whole country. And these schools we tied with were California-Berkeley, Yale University and Cornell.

On the Engineering Scholarship and the National Science Foundation Scholarship, we were tied for 3^rd place. And just to give you one more figure, because this may sound dull doing them all in a row like this - I would like to tell you that a scholarship granted out by the Rotary International, there were only 38 granted out in the whole country this year, this year, Notre Dame students won 3 out of the 38.

I think you will agree, as the Ford Foundation agrees, this is indeed a spectacular record, and Notre Dame is right up there in the very top ranks of schools, whose students are competing with the best in the land and coming out in the top 5 or 10. And I know you are proud of this record. I know we are. And I know that we are going to hear more of all these students in the years to come, because their competition doesn’t stop the day they graduate from Notre Dame.

To give you an interesting sideline of what happens to these young man, just the other day I approved 14 new professors for the university, and when we looked over the records for final approval, it turned out that 8 of the 14 were Notre Dame graduates—men who had graduated at the top of their class, men who have competed for scholarships and won them, men what had gone to some of the finest graduate schools all over the world and were coming back to Notre Dame to give the rest of their lives to this university, as members of a distinguished faculty.

And I think this is the kind of tradition we would like to see continuing. We want to see these young men spreading out all over the world in top professional jobs, in business, in public service to their country here and abroad. We know that all of you are going to be proud to know these young men and will follow their careers for years to come.

The second thing the Ford Foundation looked at was faculty. In the matter of faculty, we have progressed a great deal, I think in these past 10 years. For example, in the past 10 years there have been 112 additions to the faculty, and during that same period 116 members were added who had PhD’s, as differentiated from a master of baccalaureate degree. This is a great rise in faculty members with a doctor’s degree in a 10-year period – 116 net rise increase. Also during the past 10 years, they found that our faculty salaries have increased by 150 percent. The other night I tried to figure out what that means in dollars and cents over the past 7 years. And I found that the net increase and the amount of money paid for faculty over what was being paid over 7 years ago; the net cumulative increase for the past 7 years was over 7.5 million dollars. You may ask “Why all this expenditure for faculty?” I like to tell you that the reason is very simple – there has never been a great university that has not had a great and distinguished faculty. Moreover, there are a finite number of great faculty members throughout the United States today. And one must compete for these faculty members because they are being bid for by the best universities in this land who are facing the same problem we are in building up a strong and distinguished faculty. We want to feel that we are competing with the best, for the best, and to do that we have to increase this remuneration for faculty, which in pitifully small. And we are a competitive school and are going to stay in this competition for the years to come, I hope.

We have as you know - we have been building up this part of our endowment, a pool fund for our distinguished faculty and for leading all our young men to distinction, who return here with great promise.

Another thing that the Ford Foundation wanted to know about was the facilities at Notre Dame. And I think that all of you would agree that the additional sum of $20,000,000.00 worth of buildings since the end of the war has greatly increased our facilities at Notre Dame. But at the same time we told them that the one great lack we had in going ahead and in giving us all of these things increase that we so badly need available - a great new library. And I hope you will come with me for a moment, because I would like to tell you something about this great new library.

You see a picture of it here on the platform, and I would like to give you a quick run down about what exactly this is all about. This library is really a dual-purpose library. First of all, the first two floors, which have a floor area of more than 4 acres, are large enough to take care of all our student body. Exactly one half of our student body can be in this building and studying at one period of time. Also in this first two floors is 200,000 books that are going to be an open stack shelving right with the student. In other words, the books are going to be where the students are. If a student wants a book, there is no delay in making out a card and sending it in and waiting for something to come back. The student and the books, and study area and quiet area, and the spirit of study will be in the first two floors, open day and night to access to our student body. In the basement of this building underneath these two magnificent two floors, there is going to be a great series of offices for our faculty.

As you know, Notre Dame has been trying to build a full time faculty as well as full time student body. Many universities in this country only have one half of their faculty full time and the other half part time. Over 95 percent of our faculty are on full time. And to give full time service to this university, what they really need is a place where they can study, where they can meet with the students, where they can counsel and where they can be found on this great campus of the university. And in this we are very happy because our faculty can now have a place where the students get together with them and where they can counsel students from their office space.

On the eleventh floor, rising above the first two floors, we have room for some 1,800,000 books and enough space for great research in the humanities. You may say, “Why make a university library this large?” This will be the largest university library of all times. And I would like to tell you why. At the heart of a university you have books, which are the resources – the greatest resource of learning together with intelligent people. And at this university, since the end of World War II, all of our book holdings have doubled. And of the more than 600,000 books we now have, more than 100,000 have been purchased and put into library use in the past 5 years. And so part of this library as I look into the future, we don’t want this to be a stingy look, we want it to be a magnificent look.

There is one more thing I can say about this library, you may wonder where it is going to be; and I would like to show you that where it is going to be, it is going to symbolize and be a living, working memorial of all that Notre Dame is striving to be in the years to come. If you would look over here for a moment, you will notice a plan of Notre Dame as it is today and of Notre Dame we hope it to become in the years immediately ahead. On this plan, everything between myself, and this line is presently on the university. What goes beyond this line, the square of new buildings with the library at the center, this is the future development of the university. If you would like to picture that area, perhaps its easier to it on this chart. Here is the present liberal arts building, the science building, here are the freshmen residence halls, new dining hall, the steam plant, our warehousing, our heat power plants, and so forth out this way. We have a large area of land, that is almost 400 yards across and almost a half a mile long from here up to the toll road, and this is going to be the area of the new academic development area of Notre Dame. We hope to have in this area such things as the new radiation lab, which the Atomic Energy Commissioner is putting up on our campus beginning next September at the cost of 2.25 million dollars. While I am talking about the building, I might just add another fact the Ford Foundation turned up in the last ten years. All that is our research at the university has grown in ten years time, from some 300,000 dollars ten years ago to over $10 million dollars awarded in research grants during the past years. We hope that along side of this, there will be a new laboratory for materials research, the possibility of astronomy, the possibility of a computer center because we hope to build here one of the great computer centers, which is center to all research at a great university.

On the other side of the building, we hope to have another two graduate residence halls probably for nuns, who would like to come here to receive their doctor’s degree and another for laymen. We hope to have also undergraduate halls, because while we are not increasing our undergraduate body, it is rather crowded at present. There are too many off campus at present – several hundreds. We hope in time to expand our dining hall facilities and to have other residence hall facility for these undergraduates. We have back there a building known as the Dome Building, which we hope will replace the Drill Hall, which had to be taken down when they new library began to be constructed. And here we have a field house for the future and a new cat field alongside of it. This whole area, out through here, becomes a great new Notre Dame focus on this great new library.

I think I need not tell all of you that Notre Dame as it stands today magnificent in its splendor, and as we project it for tomorrow, magnificent in its hope, and promise for the future its something that will always be under the dome. I put the dome in the middle of this picture to symbolize as it does for all of you, I know, she to whom we owe our protection in this place, our hope for the future. And I would like to think that even with the new library, this is still the highest spot on our campus. And it is still our testimony and our hope for what we have become in years to come.

Coming over here again, I would like to tell you a few more things about Notre Dame and what we are going to do here in these buildings. One other thing the Ford Foundation asked us about was “What about your alumni?” “Why should we support your university if your alumni do not support your university?” We said to them, “You might ask that at some universities but not of this one. Because it so happens, and this came out in their study, that during the past ten years we have consistently in all the alumni studies that have been made, have consistently been in the top 10 in all three categories as the percentage of alumni who have given to the university each year and this has always been around 50 percent, the average amount of each gift, and the total amount given to this university. If you want to see what a tremendous effort of enthusiasm and generosity this has been, our total alumni gifts given to the university from 1922 to 1947 gift to the university is $700,000, almost a total of all these years. But now we really want to get behind this Ford grant. We really want to show what we can do symbolized in this great new library. And we are going to ask all of our alumni in the days immediately ahead, to be sacrificial about their gifts to the university; to somehow get the swell of feeling as to what the university is doing today, what doors are opening, to have a pride in what is going to happen here.

And in this, let me say a few words again about the students and about some of the things they are going to be exposed to in the years to come. First of all, the student of today I am sure is again someone not completely like the student of other days; and yet, he is to me a magnificent young person. You hear many bad things said about students in our day. I would like to tell you some good things about the students I met here during the past few years. First of all, I find that these students are very serious. They are serious about their education, and they are serious about their future. Their interests range far and wide, all around the world and into outer space, which has just been altered. Their interests lie in what they can do for their country and their family in years to come, for the world. We find them concerned about the wide range of things that are being done, for example, the Peace Corps. You might be interested in knowing that the first Peace Corps project given to a university was a grant given to the University of Notre Dame, in which we have trained young people who will be spending the next 2 years in Santiago de Chile, in the south, in the research region rather, in the earthquake region of Chile. They will be there helping the world’s poor earth’s population to overcome the hopeless days that have faced them for so long. Because we think that one of the great things a university must do is work in ideas and work in people. And in that area of ideas we want our young men of today to be strong in heart and pure in spirit, dedicated and devoted and intelligent confident, but they have to have areas in which they can work and confidence has to be aimed at doing something.

Let me tell you some of the areas that are going to be in this library as research centers. One might describe the whole effort by saying we are inaugurating a number of projects that will have to do with the problems of man in contemporary society. You see, we center these problems about man because he is the one that has the problem today; and we center them in contemporary society because this is the day in which we live and these are our problems. And we think that one great function of Catholic universities, as professing the wisdom of the ages and its philosophy and theology is to bring some answers to bear upon these great agonizing problems that men face in our day and age and in our country and our world. We would like to believe that here at Notre Dame we have the center for this, a tradition that is amenable for doing this job; and the kinds of students and the kind of faculty that are willing to really spend themselves in doing jobs here and about the world after graduation.

What are these jobs? Well, look at our own county and its tensions and you will begin to see some of them. How can we make real for our times that wonderful motto “Out of many different factions, one reality as a nation.” How can we get different religious groups to understand each other and to live together in peace and harmony in our country instead of in dissatisfaction and bickering? How can we get all racial groups to have some sense of equal opportunity in our time? How can we talk to their hopes to make their democracy come true for all Americans all over the country as well as give our efforts all over the world? How can we, for example, study the American Economic Revolution, which gives us everything that the Russian Revolution promised but never delivered on? How can we understand it, articulate it, and make it real to people who don’t understand it here and abroad? What can we do to study the problem of our blooded cities, urban redevelopment community development? What can we do about things like juvenile delinquency? What can we do about the whole world and its problems and many different cultures living together? So they live together in peace, harmony, with freedom, and peace and justice and honor and not with a constant threat of war be it hot or cold? How can we take the great reality of science and technology in our age, and make it a science and technology that brings hope to mankind, instead of a foreboding of a nuclear attack and the destruction of all man has created in the 10,000 years of recorded history on earth? How can we study great problems like populations? How can we study other great populations as religious sociology, anthropology? Certainly we will have the space to do this, we will have the people to do it. And I am sure we all can get the support to do it if we have the will to do it. It seems to me that the function of a great Catholic University in our time is to bring light where there is darkness to bring understanding, where there is lack of understanding, to bring hope where the situation has long been hopeless. I think we can do this because we have the right ideas. I think we have the right kind of people and I think we have the tradition of dedication that will make it come true. Now, how can this come to pass?

The Ford Foundation looked at the finances of the university, as they well might, they found that while our endowment had grown in the past 12 years from some $6 to $30 million dollars in market value, they found that our endowment was only 5 to 20 percent the size rather 1/5 to 1/20 of the size of endowment of the great universities that we are in competition with for all these prizes I mentioned early. They also found that while we had by far the largest endowment of all Catholic universities, we still had a long way to go if we were going to face our competitors. They found that while our alumni was solidly behind us, we even had to increase this so that we were granted a greater open door to the future to do all these things that need doing so badly and they believe we could do and they were willing to help us do.

I would like to tell all of you good folks that there is the story about a man named Midas who it was said everything he touched turned into gold. I don’t want anyone ever to think that we at Notre Dame that we are interested in gold except the gold on the dome, and the gold that come here in the way of people’s heartfelt contributions and whose fruitful ideas are turned into people; and into fruitful ideas that will help people overcome the things that have worried them around the world for so long. To give them some new hope that they don’t have to live in ignorance. That they don’t have to live in hunger and when it is cold they don’t have to be cold, they can live in houses; and that the hopelessness of things like war and hatred don’t have to go on forever. And if there is any institution the whole world can bring to bear upon these problems the kind of ageless wisdom and kind of total dedication this place can bring, then everyone should be interested helping it bring light into the darkness. I would like to say to all of you that as members of our Notre Dame family, and as friends of Notre Dame, and alumni, we are very proud of you because you really represent Notre Dame all across the country and all around the world. We are proud of the purity of your hearts and the integrity of your lives and wonderful wives and families and we are proud of your confidence, your business and professional lives. We want you to be proud of what goes on here, too, and if we tell you that we are willing to spend ourselves, we are willing to bleed and that we are willing to give all that we have to make things come true for a greater Notre Dame. So, that all the things we want for Notre Dame to become, can come true, and will come true in our time with our total efforts. Then I think you will begin to understand why I want all of you to have great pride in this place, a great pride in what through the providence of God it is destined to become; and a great hope that we too can bring the world that hope that it so badly needs.

I want to invite all of you, members of our family, to be proud of what is happening here at your Notre Dame. And I want to assure all of you that we will give you all we can to make these things come true. I have spoken about the help we need. I have confidence that all of you are capable and willing and anxious to give this help. I want to tell you that when you come back now and in the future, and when your sons and the friends of your sons come here for some of the most delightful and fruitful four years of their lives, when you see young hearts get stronger and you see young minds get brighter, more confident, and you see the vistas of all the world – Asia, Africa and its problems, Latin America opening up to all of them and you will see their hearts swell with the kind of generosity that one hopes to engender in a great university like this, generosity and purposefulness in life. Then I think, you are going to be proud, as we are proud. And all of us together must be proud of the proud heritage of this great place. No one of us can create this, no one of us can create what it is yet to become. But all of us together must join our pride to our hopes, we must join our sacrifice to our dreams of days yet to come and all of us together must give our best to make the golden reality of Notre Dame be real and true and promising for all of America and for all the world.

Thank you for listening. Thank you for joining your lives to ours. Thank you for sharing this great hope and this great pride. And thank you for helping to make this come true, what all the world awaits. May God bless and keep all of you and may our Lady smile upon you.

Alumni Reunion Banquet

June 1974

Thank you, all of you. This is the 23^rd time I stood here to welcome you home. And I don’t know anything at Notre Dame that is more precious to its reality than the presence of so many of you who make Notre Dame a reality where you live—in your family life, in your professional life. Notre Dame is a place that when all of your lives are put together it is just an enormous history of all that is best in our country and in our university. You have all had a long day, and you have had a long night: and I would just like to thank first of all, your outgoing president, Fred McDowell for a marvelous work here at the university. But I have to say that after 31 years, when Jim Armstrong presided over the alumni of the university with great class and great imagination and honest work, everyone said that it would be impossible to follow Jim Armstrong. But for some years, Jim has followed and led, and has created a bond between all of you at this university, which I hope will continue and grow. He has left us on a high plateau. And to Jim and Annie, who visit together, many, many thanks.

I really only have one thing to say to you tonight, and that is after a year and a half of studying our Priority Study, they came up with the conclusion that the most important priority for the whole future of this university was to teach and to reach in its toughest character. I happen to believe that was exactly the right decision to come to, and there are many days when institutions like this are living their open faith or living their traditions, that somehow we could be striving for them. This university is standing firm in its beliefs, committed to the Gospel of our Lord and yet open to all those who are seeking truth. Open to study all the difficult questions of our time, and to study them with an atmosphere of faith. Deeply committed to the fact that whatever else one does in the educated prospects to hone the mind to a higher level and greater competence, that over and above that our aim is striving for values, for meaning, and significance to life, for meaning of hope in the time of despair. And I have to tell you that the greatest pride that this university takes today is that the one student who lived and studied here is being imbued with this spirit. I know it is easy for me to say this, and some of you may wonder if it is really true. I would like somehow to bring it to life for you. I would like to read you just a couple of passages of letters I received from the parents of students who have just graduated.

The first letter is from Pennsylvania, and it says: “As parents we want you to know the deep personal feeling we both share now that my son is graduating from Notre Dame. Our emotions are particularly moved, because of the fine education we know Mark has received. But, finally, it’s the other aspect of Notre Dame that he has been exposed to that warms our hearts. Faith in God, concern for others and a task to search for truth are those that come to mind…” And then there is a letter from another parent in Jefferson City, Missouri: “When my son entered Notre Dame, he was a fine young man, and a son we could be proud of. The four years he spent at Notre Dame added so much more that it was almost unbelievable to us. He developed into a great Christian, with a great compassion for others. Every good quality he had was increased to a maximum. I don’t know how we will ever be able to thank you.”

This note is from Oyster Bay, New York. “Our son, Nicholas, Jr., graduated from Notre Dame in ’65, and Peter is in the graduating class this year. My husband and I are both so happy with their intellectual and emotional growth and development. During the years at Notre Dame, so many good things have happened to them that I thought you should hear it. I believe that a priest’s work and an educator’s efforts are often so long range and so subtle, that you often wonder if enough is accomplished to make it worthwhile. In our own personal experience as parents, I can tell you that at Notre Dame, Nick and Pete were influenced to the greatest degree, and what has happened to them has influenced our whole family.”

A final letter from a friend of mine who was a mother in Lakesville, and I suspect that I know the young man; she is writing about her son. She says, “There is a Notre Dame man like his dad and brother Bill, looks for the basic goodness in his fellowmen. He is willing and most importantly equipped to make a commitment and to become involved in the welfare and good of others. In these days when parents are so concerned about the spiritual and moral attitude of the younger generations, we have found through many discussions with our son and with their friends and classmates at Notre Dame, that the basic tools that they have found at Notre Dame have remained the same through these changing times. Terminology and methods may differ, but the message remains the same.”

Finally, in a time when Americans are so discouraged, I believe about their government, discouraged about many institutions, discouraged about the lowering of the quality of life in America; this university, which for 130 years was schooled in excellence, admitted some young ladies to the university about two years ago. I am sure that many of you were wondering if this was a good thing. And I think that barring the many words of mine, I will share with you the thoughts of a mother of one of these young ladies. She came here last September as a freshman and was still on her way home last month. I am not going to read you all that the mother said, because some of it is personal. But I will read you a couple of paragraphs and then something that I think will touch your soul as it touched mine. And somehow I think that it will reveal to you the mystery and the splendor that is this university, even in this present generation. The mother writes a day or two after the funeral of her daughter: “the things I had from you after Bonnie’s death as well as the letters we received on the day we returned home from her funeral, meant a great deal to us then and to me. (Bonnie was buried in Little Rock, Arkansas). We both realized how much this would have meant to Bonnie in life, as one part of her personality was chosen to be remembered. We remembered how delighted and thrilled she was at Christmas time as she thought of you attending a party at her house. I love Notre Dame. Each letter we received from her, each phone call attested to this fact. Why she was even there was something of a miracle. My husband and my generation have always been Methodists as far as our records show. She was somehow destined to go to Notre Dame, and this wonderful school and its whole family fulfilled her personally so that she reached completeness and a fulfillment that she has never experienced before. We were extremely proud of her and we knew how happy she was. This all meant a great deal to us then, and it means even more now. And we shall forever love your wonderful school, because of the prayers and the sympathy. We have felt the prayers offered by you and the others at Notre Dame. Before the power of prayer was just a word to us, but now it has tremendous meaning because we know it is completely not our doing. It is because of the prayers of all of you at Notre Dame and our own love of God, which has been strong through this experience.”

Towards the end she says: “Bonnie was completely caught up in the atmosphere of Notre Dame. She had a great love for the school. She came home and was running half miles and doing all kinds of exercises so she could make the school team. As unathletic as she was, she was filled with dedication to just be a part of the team of Notre Dame. A copy of the letter I am enclosing says it better that I ever could, about what your school meant to her. And I would like to read you just a couple of paragraphs from Bonnie’s letter – the last letter she wrote to her parents. I think against the background of so many young people who are alienated today, some of the people who feel unattached to their family or to the school; this letter has a great blessing to our hearts and this university. Here it is:

“Mom and Dad, my year at Notre Dame is ended – no more papers, books or hard work for 3 whole months. Sure it’s been hard, but it’s been worth it ‘cause it made me grow. It went by too fast, I guess because there had been so many moments that I wanted to last forever – the football games, the school races, the people I’ve met, just being around this beautiful campus. All this has come together to make this a world I have always dreamed of all my life. I guess that since this is my last day here for a whole year (Bonnie was planning to go to our input program in Austria this summer and to stay for one year). I guess I am letting all my sentimental emotions get carried away. Today, like so many days before, I walked across the campus with my happy tears rolling down my face. It seems amazing to me that I could love a place so much. Never once have I wondered or questioned the fact that I decided to be a part of the Irish. Many people tell me that I am the most animated roommate they have ever met and I must agree. But when they ask if I like it so much how could I go away to Austria next year, I tell them that coming back here would be perfectly wonderful. Notre Dame would still be my home while I am away, and it will be my home when I come back. But I must admit that it will be hard to say goodbye. People like Me, Ted and Jip are closer to me than I ever imagined a friend could be. For a year now they have played the part of my family as well as my friends.

I guess the main reason I am happy here, is because I have made these friends by being completely and totally trusting. Here, there is just no need for the proud front, or the put on personality, that I did not realize until recently that so many people I knew in high school were made up. There is no pressure on appearance and dress. There is no pressure on the social life that seemed so important to me in the past. People see you here at Notre Dame without having to look through many mirrors, and because of this you seem to get to know many more people and love them so much. You see most of what I’ve learned at Notre Dame has not been found at the library or in my class. Most of what I gained this year has been through association with a certain something that makes this place what it uniquely is. If anyone should define the undefinable Notre Dame spirit, they would create a best seller. Much of what I’ve learned cannot be classified as a science or math and cannot be found or read about in a book. As I look back on the year the three things that have made me feel an enormous sense of accomplishment is the old Gibson’s Guitar that I learned to play, a pair of autographs, and a sobering attitude. This attitude is the one that got me here in the first place to become somebody. Mom and Dad, thank you so much for your help as I continue to go forward towards this goal. Love, Bonnie.

I don’t think I can add to that expression of what Notre Dame meant in 1974. What it meant through all the external vicissitudes of those years described to us by Jan Sweeney. I thank God and all of you and all those who work and live here that Notre Dame is still that kind of place to a young Methodist girl, who came here from Little Rock, Arkansas, and spent only one year on this campus. She left here loving God, loving her fellow students, loving her mother and father, and loving Notre Dame. I think she still loves us in eternity, and we love her too.

May God bless and keep all of you.

Fund-Raising Address

April 15, 1977

Let’s begin to fly up in the heavens. I am beginning to understand the concepts—nevertheless, to get back to my game. I have been thinking about this game. I want to say something about what the Board of Trustees has done for this drive. First of all, they have given it their spirit, their encouragement, their enthusiasm, their involvement. And in addition to that, at this moment in the history of Notre Dame, the Board of Trustees has pledged to give more than 15 million dollars. What interests me is that I have a check here for $15 million dollars.

I asked Father Ned and Father Ted to experience my deliberations. These remarkable men came to the university at the same time. And I thought that at this wonderful anniversary we should commemorate the contributions they made. I know that they would not want anything spectacular. But when the subject came up at the board, I thought that there is no way I can let them go out like that. There may not be celebrations but there will be resolutions commemorating their good services at the university. And at the end of each resolution, we determined that at some appropriate moment in the future, we predetermined that at a convocation ceremony we will give the appropriate gifts. We all know that Father Ted and Father Ned had a great part to play in the growth of this university. Then we got to the final part where wisdom and enthusiasm prevailed and we passed another resolution including all kinds of prayers that the new library at the university becomes a reality. How can anyone do justice to these extraordinary careers and accomplishments, both in here and around the world?

What I want to talk to you about tonight is something that is within my mind. You know individuals are under terrible stress. So many seemingly uncontrollable forces…. So what I have to say is be electrified, be vivified and hope someone comes along who by his own life proves what a disciplined life can do—health, courage, ceaseless devotion, honest compassion for each person that comes into his life, liberality, being kind and compassionate, a sweet person. Father Ted is indeed many things.

Thank you Reverend…

I can only say to all of you that if you happen to be in this spot surrounded by so many wonderful people you would look awfully good no matter how poor you are, and I am quite poor myself. Ed (?) priesthood, you may not know it, but tonight you have been celebrating that fact, the life of our bishop. This is the 38^th anniversary of his priesthood, and I am so happy that these bishops, men who have spent most of their lives working for Catholic education and now Bishop McManus is with us and he is celebrating with us tonight. And I just want him to know that we are celebrating his priesthood.

I have a very difficult task tonight. It is the end of a long day in which the subject matter is in two words, Notre Dame. We have had a lot of brilliant speakers, and we have had a great deal of rhetoric; most of it very good, because it came from the heart. Somehow I have in a few moments to try to bring together for you as we conclude this day, and as we start our journey, some sense of what we are doing and what we are about.

It’s been said often enough that we live our lives in the present, but we can’t really understand our lives today in the present unless we somehow understand our roots in the past. That’s the price of understanding our institution and ourselves. And we can’t understand our dreams unless we can look forward to our future. So, for just the few moments I have I would like to say a few words about Notre Dame’s past, its present, and its future. It is a kind of flowing stream in which in this wonderful moment of history, all of us together in this room of one heart and one mind dedicated to something really great.

For the past, I only want to draw you one picture. I would try to draw that picture of what it really means to have what we have here today. And that picture is of a priest only 28 years old, who had a dream of building a school, who traveled 11 days through a wintry Indiana by ox cart with some companions, who arrived in a little village only 19 years old called South Bend—a train village founded by a fellow country man. Instead of resting, when he arrived here, he had to get off to see this place, which was to be the seat of his dreams for the future. And he arrived at that log cabin, which we all know, and love so well. He arrived on the Feast of St. Andrew, the latter part of November. There had just been a newly fallen foot of snow, and as all of us who live here know, that on a good day in November at 4:00 you have the slanting rays of the sun. When the sun come out everything starts to sparkle. He looked out on the frozen lake with a kind of enthusiasm born of faith and a vision. He called the spot “Universite de Notre Dame,”—University of the Lady of the Lake. Well he might call it a university in his dreams, because he came from a land that saw the first great university—the University of Paris. It was like all great universities that began proudly in Paris, Catholic in its origin. We speak of Bologna and Lisbon, the great Oxford in Cambridge, England; universities in Spain, *****, Portugal, and so many others. All of them the first universities, and all of them Catholic. For a while that dream of a university that would be Catholic had a bright white light and the glow carried throughout the world at that time. It did something special for the culture and civilization of those times. But even before that university began, there was a great building in Paris, which was called Notre Dame. And somehow, with all of his faith and all of his vision, he was able to go with that great dream for the future, “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac”—University of our Lady of the Lake.

I think one can honestly say, without depreciating Father Sorin, that during the first 100 years it was not really a university. It was growing, and while it came to age at 28 and was burnt out at 65, as you hear so often today, he said it was only an invitation to build something greater, and he rebuilt it as soon as the bricks were cooled. No plans, no money, nothing but iron will and the continuation of that original vision; and a deep faith that this place has to be brought up from ashes, Phoenix-like, into a new and greater Notre Dame. The great golden dome on top, and on top of that the statue of Notre Dame our Lady. So, that all could look there and see why this place was and has been seen so often today as something special.

I think that the year I would like to speak about in the past, when somehow this great place began to take on the lineaments of a really great university, really came into fruition at the great time in our country, 1945, following World War II. I can speak of that very year because I lived through it. Not that I take any great credit for it, because if any credit is to be given it would have to be given to thousands and thousands of people. If you take the growth of the university, the plant, the buildings, the grounds, whether you take the endowment, which was about $1 million dollars in 1945; whether you take the budget, which was $4 million in 1945; whether you take the research, which was almost nonexistent: whether you take the scholarships, which were $20 thousand in 1945; whether you take degrees granted or levels of growing somehow under the leadership of a man called John Cavanaugh, the place began to rise, to grow and become what it is today. I think what we are being challenged today, is to do not to stop, or wait for another fire, because we cannot stop here. But, somehow, we have great promise for a future from whatever we are in the present and whatever we have been in the past.

Somehow when one looks ahead from this moment forward, we got to say that there are two things we can be absolutely sure of, that we are going to be facing unprecedented changes as a nation and as a world. And that each of these changes will bring to each one of us, not just the challenge of survival, but the challenge of somehow to create a world that will move on in peace and not some fiery holocaust. If somehow we could project ourselves somewhat backward to the year 1900, who could have foreseen enormous growth of oil and petroleum in the world, which was practically nonexistent. Who could have foreseen the speed that man could travel, going from 15 miles per hour to 18 – 25, 000 miles per hour. Who could have thought of radio, of television, or telephones? Who could have thought of atomic energy? Who could have thought of flying the piston planes, rockets and travels to the moon and back. These kind of changes have brought to our times enormous power, and enormous human challenges for human survival. I keep remembering what a great Pulitzer Nobel Prize winner said when he went to San Antonio to receive his prize. He said, “man must just not survive, he must prevail.” I say to you that while universities are places where much of great expansion and explosion of knowledge occurs, they are also places that prepare people to live with these types of changes. Somehow we must see that our physical ability to create power does not go beyond our moral ability to control it for the good of mankind and not for its destruction.

I think that Notre Dame has a promise as unique in all this world. We must go back to the faith, the vision of those who began universities of the 15^th century. Somehow find that you could live with knowledge and faith together, the one infusing the other. Somehow knowledge is incomplete unless we involve all knowledge—knowledge from reason, knowledge from science, knowledge from the arts, and knowledge from revelation from God. That somehow we have to have an institution that is willing to create change and live with change. Somehow educate people how to live with change and how to get them in a vastly shifting, wildly moving world. There are a few anchors, anchors to rocks, which are called dogmas and principles.

I think that this university can be such a place to create it in its fullness so that it can be as great a university as any university in the world, and still a university founded on faith committed to values and principles. Somehow it will call forth the greatest efforts that is in us, not just the efforts to create the resources to do this, but also the wisdom to know how to use those resources to do it valiantly, intelligently and with faith. I think this university is prepared at this point in its history to take a quantum leap forward, to somehow learn to live with this expanding role of knowledge and with it expanding role of faith; to somehow learn to live with monumental changes by joining monumental faith to vision. To somehow renew within ourselves some sense of the dignity of human beings and the dignity of human life. To somehow join to the great advance of the science and technology, that great inner intuition that comes from the arts and music and the humanities and theology. I think somehow we have to create in this place an institution that will give young men and women the highest degree of competence, while still enthusing them with a great depth of compassion and with the great commitment to use their competence to make a better world to serve mankind everywhere for the betterment of human life, for the advancement of human beings. To somehow learn the means of creating beauty in the midst of all the surrounding ugliness that faces us today. To somehow recreate within them a sense of love and fidelity, a sense of compassion for those who suffer, a sense of creating a world of which we are capable of creating—a world without hunger, without homeless people, without people in rags, without people who have no hope for the future, because it is obscure to have such a world with the great means of knowledge and faith at our fingertips.

I think this university can be such a place. Most of the early Catholic universities went out of existence or were secularized as the word goes. In the last century and this century they began to revive again. Somehow as they revived, they became again the gem of great Catholic universities, because most of them had begun to slide away. There is a great Catholic university in Africa, the only one, named Ohani. It is now a completely nationalized and secularized university. There were two great universities in Canada, Catholic universities, today they are completely secularized. I think this is one university that can make it. We can make it because we have a great board that is filled with knowledge and wisdom. We have a great alumni that believe in the place and will give to make it come up to their hopes and dreams for the future. We have a great faculty that are willing to spend themselves in spite of their miserable salaries sometimes, who will give themselves to recreate within young people the curiosity, the hunger for truth, the commitment to justice, and the yearning to make a better world of truth and justice. I think we have better facilities, interestingly everywhere we went today, we could not have gone ten years ago, because they are all new. I think we have great students from every state in the Union, from 66 foreign countries, Protestants, Catholics, Blacks and Whites, men and women—thank God! We have a student body that is so good as well as so bright that it just thrills me to walk around and talk to them and be with them. They are a constant source of joy, because of the inspiration of their young lives and the vitality of their hopes and yearning for knowledge and their willingness to spend themselves for others. The one thing we don’t have is an endowment. Now I’m not going to be a crybaby.

When I came back here to teach in ‘45, we had an endowment of one million dollars. I would like to read to you, just for the sake of a small exercise, those universities on the standard list (I think I’m missing a few, but I believe I have most of them), who have endowments greater than this university. I begin with Harvard in ’75, 1 billion 300 million dollars; Yale with 517 million dollars, and Colombia with 435; and Princeton with 398, and Stanford with 363, and ***** with 356 million dollars and Northwestern with 242 and Rice with 172 and Washington with 161 and Pennsylvania with 144, and Johns Hopkins with 130, and Vanderbilt with 121 and Delaware with 118, and then comes Notre Dame. I am not critical of those other schools; I may be envious at times. I must say that they are all great universities in the best sense of the word. But I think for us to be a great university and then in addition to bring into this formula all the important difficult tasks of being a great Catholic university, is something over and above normal.

And I would say that we have been talking about the monumental task of raising 130 million dollars and I will like to say to all of you that 130 million dollars is the very least we can do to match our hopes. And I would be very disappointed if we don’t make much more than 130 million dollars, and I think we can.

Because I think people are yearning today for the kind of ideal that this university can represent. Parents are yearning for a place where their youngsters can get, not only knowledge, but compassion and commitment and a sense of values that will give meaning and depth to their lives. I think today that we can create here, whatever the difficulties, and they are monumental, we can create here something that really has not existed since that building in Paris in the year 1205. Some kind of dream that responds to the faith of that young French priest of 28, who could stand on snowy ground on a wintry November day alongside his total holdings—some land and a log cabin with a few companions and colleagues—who did not have what we would consider a high school education today, and called this place “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac.” That is a great act of faith, and we are here to imitate that act of faith. This great vision and faith of the past must pull into the present and carry to the future. Nothing less than that is worthy of bringing us together and keeping us together here in this center. It has been said that all of us need something in our lives to give us a new gush. We all have somehow to belong to something greater than ourselves as Father John said earlier. I would touch on those roots by quoting one of Father O’Donnell’s poems. And I would like to read you the whole poem here tonight, because I think it speaks to the yearning of each one of our hearts. All of us belong to this place and this place belongs to us. It is our home ground. It is as Reverend Cross said, “it is a place that when you come they have to let you in.” It is your place and our yearning for it can’t be less than great. And it won’t be great unless we make it great and ever greater. This little poem is very short; one that Father O’Donnell calls “Notre Dame.” He says, so well I love these woods, I have believed there is an intimate fellowship we share.

So well I love these woods I half believe

There is an intimate fellowship we share;

So many years we breathed the same brave air,

Kept spring in common, and were on one to grieve

Summer’s undoing., saw the fall bereave

Us both of beauty, together learned to bear

The weight of winter: --when I go otherwhere—

An unreturning journey—I would leave

Some whisper of a song in these old oaks,

A football lingering till some distant summer

Another singer down these paths may stray—

And he may love them, too, this graced newcomer,

And may remember that I passed this way.

I don’t know but that I am sure of one thing, if we really share this faith and this vision, if we really believe in this dream, Notre Dame will always have a golden future. And those who somehow are touched deep within their lives by this golden future would have all of you to thank. And I thank all of you. God bless you! Good night!

Ford Foundation Grant Presentation

1977

Without any further delay, I would like very much to go on to our professional speaker. To try and introduce Father Hesburgh is virtually impossible. So, I’m going to cut it short and say he is our administrative leader, he is our spiritual leader, he is our team leader. Call him by the title he loves best among all the titles, I give you Father Ed Hesburgh.

Hesburgh. Thank you John, and I have to second with all the fervor of my soul that model statement you gave us here tonight. I would like to thank the forthcoming president, Bob, and I would like to thank Vick for all that he did over the past two years. This is my second alumni meeting this week. In fact, five weeks ago I knew about this, and Frank, we had a big deal in Pittsburgh. I gave a bicentennial talk on Religious Freedom last Thursday. And after the talk, I was whisked over to luncheon and we had, at least as many as we have here today or probably more… the alumni. In the meeting…one of our younger alumni, Rick Redworth, would be ordained a Rabbi next month. I thought that was a switch. I was tempted to ask him to give me his vocation. But Rick’ s a real gung ho Notre Dame alumnus, and I thought we had a fine meeting with a lot of fun, because he prepared question and answers so well.

There’s something I’d like to do next, but I’m so nervous because I know there’s something coming up that I’d like to share and I don’t want to get in the way of it. I just want to say to all of you as board members and senators, how much we depend on you and how much you do back in the hosting. How much you do to keep Notre Dame alive, and it is important to keep it alive. There is not much I can possibly say to thank you because the good Lord and His mother have to do that for me. A lot of times I talk to associates and my colleagues in higher education and some of them give the impression, I think, that the alumni are a pain; or that you don’t have any judgment, or that they are just gung ho about immaterial things. And always I tell them we don’t have that problem. Our alumni are the strong feet and bones that keep this place together, and that our alumni nearly get to the point of fanaticism. They’ll do anything for you almost any time.
When I look back over the years that I have been president here, I can’t think of a time when there have been hassles with alumni. Sure, there have been times when we have had disagreements of one kind or another, but we sat down and talked about them, and that was that. There never seemed to be any lack of understanding. They certainly are people with an abundance of devotion. I think fundamentally we are moved by the same things. I think fundamentally we share a faith that binds us together and that is terribly important to this place. We have been having, and I’m sure the alumni have been participating quite a bit here on the board frequently.

We have been having a lot of discussion about whether or not higher education is going to survive. And I have to tell you honestly that a lot of private higher education are not going to survive; but except an increasing number of schools that are up at the precipice and all they need is a quick draft to push them over. I’ll just give you the figures. When we went to school following World War II, half of the students in higher education were in private schools. Today, only 20 percent are in private schools, 80 percent are in public schools, and that percentage is diminishing this year. Will we make it? I don’t have any doubt that we’re going to make it. Not only because of all of you and your dedication to this place, I know you are not going to let it go out of existence. And if I have to give my life for it, I wouldn’t let it go out of existence. It’s too important, not just to us and to our families, but to the world, and to the church and to all the things that we hold dear. And I think the price of not going out of existence is to be ourselves, not somebody else. This is a very special place. And your commitment to it makes it a very special place. It can now be, as it is for me, the biggest thing in your life. A kind of central anchor that keeps you stable when other things in life turn over.

I was just terribly touched lately when they ran a survey and found out that over 93 percent of our alumni are still married to the girls they married, which is something I think is a fantastic figure. When you look at the national figure, over one million divorced last year, and with only 2 million marriages. That means 50 percent of them are not making it. I know a lot of that isn’t easy. What you say about marriages are made in heaven, you have to make them each day. You know better than I. And it takes faith and dedication and love, and lots of strength and memorialities to make them each day. It takes, I think, particularly a kind of stability, and a kind of devotion and a kind of commitment to values that are lasting, as you and I have learned and have pumped in our life’s blood. I say that’s why a lot of private schools are going under, but I want to tell you that this one’s getting better. I have heard a lot of myths, and a lot of rumors, and a lot of sad stories, about what I have to say honestly-and I am not saying it to please you, or to try to take credit for it because I can’t. It is the work of many, many people.

The university is a better place today than when I arrived here in 1934, which is quite a few years ago. It is a better place, not just materially, though only God knows there is a lot more to it than there was in 1934. But I think of standing spirits. And I think there are plenty of things going on today that I would remind you of when we were all going over to see a football game, which is great because we get to that once in a while, a lot of our students on their way to town to put on picnics – of course, they’ve not been to a picnic in their whole life; because they don’t have a family, or they don’t have any money or a lot of other reasons for it. I can tell you, just the other day I asked the man in charge of boundary service how many groups he has, over 30. These are just the official groups; I can’t begin to tell you how much goes on unofficially. I could have only signed up the year with you for 2 or 3 hours a week voluntary service, instead of 1700. That’s just the ones who have signed up. But I know large numbers have just patrolled without signing up. These kinds of thing that we will always cherish and celebrate, people like Vince and Frank Dewey as I told you this morning.

This is becoming a real vital part of the total education here, and this is a very good thing, because this country is glued together by voluntary effort. It is not glued together by the government – not by a long shot. And I’m always frightened when I hear so much about kids not having religion today that I went up the other night to the Alumni Hall to say mass. I try to say mass at least once a week in one of the halls. If there was a bed request, I don’t force myself in. And it was about 11:30 at night, a Sunday night; there were a lot of things going on with the end of a weekend. I expected about 25 people might show up or something, but it never is that way; because I walked in there and the chapel was full. And it not only was full by****time?), but people were still coming in.

By the time I got around to singing the homily, they were standing in the back of the church and out into the hall. As you know, the Alumni Hall has a pretty big chapel. And that was 11:30 a Sunday night, and that was****and everybody was there, not because they couldn’t go to town the next morning. So they didn’t show up or not because anything was going to happen if they did, or didn’t do it; but they were there because they wanted to be there. And they weren’t there because of me, because if someone else did the same it still would have been a packed chapel. They were there because they wanted to be there, because it is meaningful to them. And I like to see that. It is much, much harder to get people, especially the young people, to do things because they want to do them than to expect them to do them because you’ve got a club over their heads. Now, I especially want to say there are times when you need a club, but in the matter of religion, I think it’s going to last a lot longer if youngsters do it because they have an internal need for it, and they have that desire to learn more about God and his message, and his good news.

I just think you need great heart. I get great heart in the fact that there are certain number of younger men around here who have decided to be priests, something that seemed to have died off for a while—but as many as 25 in the last couple of years. And not just priests here, priests in the mission, priests in the service home, priests all over. I am looking forward to the day when our guys would start thinking again, and some have started thinking about giving their lives to God and religion. Because that, as you know, died out a great deal in recent years. I get heart when I think what this place is doing to give leadership, not only to the church, as it is doing in many ways through having our Liturgical Center here. We are trying to revive church music and make it splendor and not just drab and precise. We try to somehow say something for priests that are out there lonely. We have a whole spiritual audience to pray about that, to do something about people that are working on the fringes of social justice and social equality out in the guts of the cities, out in the ghettos, among the abandoned and the poor, and the hopeless, and the oppressed.

I think we are all those things, but over and above that, we are doing a lot of other things. Las summer, as I mentioned to one or two of you privately perhaps in another conversation, I was out west in Colorado in a seminar on International Education. There were two or three seminars going on at the same time. Professor Black from Cornell came over and talked at the seminar about humanities and values. There were 10 young professors, twelve times, a total of 160 from all over the country were here all summer looking at humanities and values. And I decided to go up there. So, I went up there that afternoon with a Notre Dame alumnus…. who was in charge of all the 160 odd universities and colleges in New York State. We sat there at the seminar and I looked around the table, and 3 percent of the key people were Notre Dame people. One was the Dean of Law in Oklahoma, one was a professor in Mississauga, and one was a professor here, Jack. And I felt proud, of course, to see three Notre Dame people picked selectively from the whole country. All professors or deans, and all highly educated. Second thing is, when we got down to the seminar part, Professor Black, who was a kind of nice, yet fussy old guy, said, “I will put you three presidents on the spot. We had a great moral crisis last year, when the crops failed around the world and there was a fuel crisis, which cut off all ….to the point where they had to bring water on the field to try to make fertilizers.” I just wanted to say, “How did your students feel about it. What instant reaction did they have to this great moral crisis that affected hundreds of millions of people?” I said, “Look, I can tell you, and it’s going to take about half an hour, but I’ll try to be brief about it. And I tried to do it in about 20 minutes, but our students have done so much and I haven’t even heard about it, except in the alumnus magazine. I got to telling all those things we have done here and the awesome campaign, and the drawing out of the things themselves. After I was through telling all those things, he was a very nice guy and very sensitive to the problem of values in higher education, because we talked about it. Then he said, “Ernie, what did you do in New York University?” Then Ernie looked at him and kind of sadly, while he was wagging he head and said, “Not a damn thing.” And I could see the 3 Notre Dame guys grinning. It was, I think, symptomatic of the kinds of concerns that exist here today, and that as I see as our reason for survival. I am not concerned with survival; I am concerned about our being something that never existed during the last couple centuries—that is a great Catholic university. It is as good a university as any university in the land. It turns out as good or better in lawyers, doctors, and all the rest as all the universities in the land and that is good. But, better is to turn people who have a sense of values beside, who have some commitment to the problems the world faces beside, who are not living in a past age, but they are living with today’s problems and tomorrow’s problems and are willing to think about them and do something about them.

I think that we’re become more and more that kind of place. I think this has always been that kind of place in a kind of low-keyed way. We didn’t know quite why we were. We perhaps didn’t work at it as distinctively as we are trying to work at it today, but I don’t want to settle for anything else, either as a university or as Catholic, and with that, don’t worry about survival, you won’t be able to settle for it anyway. Thank you all very much.

Opening Campaign Century Center

4/18/79

Notre Dame Alumni and Friends! It has been a wonderful evening and it’s great to be home again because the last three weeks, in addition to being in Washington six times, and in New York three in Boston and a few other places, we have been launching this campaign in Brooklyn, New York, San Francisco, Miami Beach, Pittsburgh, Long Island, Los Angeles and Tampa. We still have Detroit and Chicago to go to. But that is only my part, there are other teams that are going, and people are working always in other parts of the country.

This is a marvelous group here tonight, and every group we have had so far is a marvelous group. Some a bit smaller that this, some a bit larger, and all of them averaging out several hundred people each night. And I know that meetings like this just don’t happen. There are men involved and all those parishioners working to make this possible tonight. I just want to say to them many, many thanks. Everyone has to be involved to make it happen. We are doing two things tonight. We are launching the campaign for Notre Dame and also launching the University of Notre Dame Night. And I am always delighted in every community to see so many Notre Dame people, who are; we might call the soul of the community--people who are always ready to serve when something needs to be done. People whom at the splendor of their personal and family, and professional and business lives somehow give a tone to the community. People have shown concern through the years like that, because I remember in 1948 when I was a freshman, I guess my age is showing, and later challenged me because he found me…Thank you for the wonderful professional performance.

You know Notre Dame Night is supposed to be something where all over the land and all around the world we celebrate this place. And here we are in this place. I have to tell you that what we are celebrating is not a group of buildings or a piece of land, nor the city of South Bend. It is really the quality of your lives--Notre Dame men and women and children, who somehow, by the quality of their lives make Notre Dame a reality; not just here, but all across this land, all across this world. And that’s why we are really celebrating Notre Dame tonight.

We are also launching the campaign for Notre Dame’s Third Phase. The First Phase was bringing people into this community and this university, and it was enormously successful. And it took us up to over a period of about a year and a quarter, just about every other week. Now we are into Phase Two with lunches and dinners in large cities across Atlanta, and there were 140 of those. Believe me, after 140 dinners and lunches you really start feeling full and slightly bloated and a little tired. And last we launched Phase Three. The amazing thing is this community and the national campaign are neck and neck at the moment. We are about 90 percent home on the whole national goal and we are about 90 percent home here in South Bend, which has one of the largest poling, I might say—to my knowledge, outdone only by the poles in New York and Chicago. Of course, we have the second largest group of alumni in the world in this locality.

I want to say first that I am deeply grateful for your generosity, as the whole university is for my director and her husband. We are deeply grateful to the Rosenthals. They have been very generous in a delightful way. What the words of God have put together let no one put asunder. He says only Notre Dame can put asunder. But we are deeply grateful to the leadership you have given in so many places. I recognize that you’ve put so many across this planet. Sometimes we have some questions about whether Bob was grateful or I was grateful. He got around by saying I was like a big brother. I am also deeply grateful to Rosenthals for all this. They have been very generous and they have been recognized by all of you by their presence here tonight.

Let me be mulish for a moment. I was a bit garish when this campaign began. It just seemed like so much money. It still seems like so much money. Then it seemed to me that we were probably reaching far beyond our grasp. And tonight I have to say that I am a part of this jogathon and moving during the past three and one half years, literally thousands of thousands of people have listened to our story, watched the film and heard these words. And I am amazed at the outpouring of enthusiasm, generosity, and dedication. And I had to say to tonight, since everything else is inflating in this land, we might as well inflate our own goals. But I think we are not only going to make 130 million dollars, but I would be greatly surprised if we don’t make 120 at the start of our goal or 150 million or more. That I think would say something to the country about our harmony as a family—Notre Dame family, family of our institution.

Let me say something about what it’s for. When I was a young man, I took a vow of poverty so I could get away from money. But let me say today that as I stand before you, money doesn’t mean a thing to me as money. It only means something to me as the ability to get something done. And I would like to say something about what we want to do with this money. Something about the past, the present, and the future of this institution, which we are trying to build to a whole new level of accomplishment through this drive. Because that is what you are being asked to join, not just your passing an amount of money, but you are doing this to help build an institution.

As far as the past of Notre Dame goes, I will be very brief. It is a marvelous thing you can say the past of Notre Dame in two words: one is faith, the other is vision. First of all I think this is exemplified when a young priest, 28 years old, with $300 in his pocket, sets off with what would have been the equivalent of a high school education today. He took 11 days to come from Vincent, Indiana to here in South Bend, met the founder of the city and worked with him and his nephew out there, stood there looking at a drafty log cabin surrounded by these great resources of 6 non-high school graduates, $300 each—and a chance of gaining several hundred acres of land to throw a school there. He had the gall to call it, not a school or a college, but “Universite de Notre Dame du Lac. And he called it the highest form of higher education “Universite” or university. And he did this on feeling because the first university that was founded was founded in his country in Paris. And it was founded in 1204, a Catholic University, as all the others were founded during the first century— Bologna, Oxford, Cambridge, Prague none of them are Catholic universities today, but they are still great universities. He also called it quite naturally, after a name that comes quite naturally to all Parisians, the name of their great cathedral in Paris; the cathedral they call Notre Dame. It was a marvelous, providential day that he put those two things together—Universite de Notre Dame. I think that took a lot of faith, an enormous amount of faith. I think it took an enormous amount of vision to look beyond that wilderness spot in which they were all going to live. By then it was peopled by less than 100 people. There were trading posts less than 21 years old.

The second great evidence of that vision and faith came exactly 100 years next week. It was the end of April in the year 1879 when Norstrome, he was 65 years old and in the age of retirement. He was on his way to Paris, he was doing what I am doing here tonight, raising money. This was about his 50^th trip across the form to get the French to put some money in this little spot in Indiana to build a “great university.” He got word that the whole of his life’s worth was burned to the ground except the church. He got word in Montreal while he was waiting for a boat to go to France. He turned and came back here. We’re told that he got his whole community, small, tremulous, and discouraged church to say goodbye to the church, which was only about 7 years old or something, and he said, “you know this fire was really my fault.” I came here as a young man. I had a great dream and I built this university named after Our Lady. You know she really had to burn to the ground to prove to me that my faith was too shallow and my vision was too restricted. He said, “We are going out tomorrow. We are going to scrape them off and we are going to get more bricks and build this place bigger and better than ever.” And that’s what they did. And I would like to say to all of you that without the help of South Bend, Indiana, the citizens, the Catholic priests and brothers, it would never have been done. Because they were wiped out—they had no food, they had no money, no books, no bed, they had nothing, except this indomitable faith and vision to build a great institution on that spot. And the local community was out there laying bricks along with the priest and brothers and they were bringing food and mattresses, and all the things that were needed after they were wiped off. And that is the kind of faith and vision that gave birth to this place, not only once, but twice. And that is the kind of faith and vision that we need today. What I want to say about Notre Dame today, I guess to put it in some perspective, I hate to use figures but I don’t know of any other way to do it quickly.

Let’s look at the university in the modern context—say, dating from the time the Norstrome experience in the wars to the present day. In 1945 the University of Notre Dame was 103 years old. Now we gave out more masters and doctorate degrees last year than we gave out graduate degrees in 1945. Our budget is 20 times what it was in 1925, about 4 million to 8 million dollars. Nineteen hundred and forty-five we had 250, 000 books in the library. The library was not very good. Today we have 1,353,000 books in the library, and they are still coming. The library can hold 3 million and would be filled before long, believe me. We had in 1945 one renowned scholarship for the whole university. In 1945 we were doing $10,000.00 worth of research for the year. For the last 10 years we were doing close to $10 million dollars worth of research a year. In 1945 we had $3,000 scholarships, and last year over 50 percent of our students got $10 million worth of scholarships. Graduates got even more. I would like to say so many things have happened since 1945, and I don’t take any personal credit for it because many hundreds of people, including many who are here, were part of this enormous program since the war. We needed about $150 million worth of new buildings, and most of the buildings are paid for. Today these buildings are worth at least a half of a billion dollars.

There are so many other things that happened. We had 20,000 alumni in 1945. We have over 60,000 alumni today. But one thing perhaps is even more important than all these other figures. In 1945 we used up quite a bit of reserve for our financial base on which the university could grow this endowment. I would have to say to you that we had to define Notre Dame as the worst endowed educational institution, of course, that would be true of most other church-related colleges at the time. There were two Ivy-league schools that had some money—Duke University College founded by the Wright brothers, and there were Stanford and Vanderbilt. But by and large we were at the bottom of that list out of that 250 thousand colleges and universities with almost zero endowment. And today, despite all these other things happening, the University of Notre Dame is 23^rd from the top. You might say that’s spectacular feat, and in a way it is, because we have more endowment today than Yale University had at the end of World War II.

By the end of this drive we will have more endowment than Harvard, the number one in this country as at the end of World War II. But the amazing thing is that Notre Dame people don’t enjoy being 23^rdanything. And I will tell you that at the end of this drive, we will be somewhere between or close to the 15^th highest endowed university in the west. And that will not be perfection but we will be on the way. We would have gone by many, many schools too, we would be very surprised to find out if we have not passed…..

Again, what is this for? What is accomplished by piling up these endowments? Except some sort of financial security. First don’t knock financial security, because many universities and colleges went under, closed their doors because they did not have financial security. So, don’t knock it, it is important. But what I’m saying is it is not overly important. What is overly important is faith and vision. And what we are trying to build is not just another great university, but we are trying to somehow recapture that medieval dream when universities began, including great Catholic universities. And what does that mean? I think it means that in addition to giving what every great university could give of intellectual confidence—turning out young people whether they are doctors or business people, lawyers, priests, rabbi, teachers or whatever—and in addition to that, intellectual competence, they have something that has happened to their hearts as well as their minds.

A great university president said not too long ago that he was not concerned with what happened in the lives of the students, he was only interested in what happened in their minds. I will have to say that that is not our philosophy at Notre Dame. We are currently interested in not what just happens in the minds of our students, but as well as in their lives and their hearts. We are here to consider somehow the sense of what is the value of life that God has given them to live. That somehow they have some sense of the difference between things that are great and true and things that are shoddily false. Somehow there is a great difference between that which is profound and that which is superficial, that which is beautiful and that which is ugly. Somehow there is a great necessity in knowing in our day what is morally good and that, which is evil. Because both these realities do exist in people’s lives , and one ought to know the difference in order to be committed to one and not to the other.

What we are saying is that we would like to educate our people not just for the past but for the future. If there is anything I can say for the future is that, it is going to be full of confusion. It will be categorized by enormous technological and scientific changes. You can see that already. Man has gone from being able to walk 50 – 60 miles per hour to being able to reenter space from the moon at 25,000 miles per hour. He is able to go beyond being able to speak as far as his voice will be able to carry to being able to speak and be heard and seen from the moon to the earth. He has talked about energy not just in the small heat he uses but one speaks about coal and oil, enormous energy, but the prices as well as the gases you would put in your car. And he has gathered from the far ends to destroy the whole world. The problems of the future perhaps might be more biological than physical—the problems of clothing, the problems of biological engineering, the big problem of extraterrestrial intelligence and who knows what else. But what we have to do at this institution is to prepare our people not only to create the change that makes a new future surprisingly new and exciting future, but be able to cope with that change, direct that change, understand that change, and somehow see underneath the power of defenses of that change and see that it is used for good and not for evil. I guess what I’m saying is that we want people to understand the world, not just as it is, but as it is becoming in our day; to be able to look beyond the change to a better world that can be created also by science and technology. A world where there is much less hunger than it is today, and much better housing and physical chance to coexist with other people, where there is somehow a hope for the future, for education, which just does not exist for a special people. That somehow we motivate young people to have more compassion for that kind of world, but a kind of commitment to make a better world. There is a deep commitment in their lives and their lives will be given in service to make a better world, a just world, an honest world, a more productive and even a more secure world than it is today.

I would like to say that it is a wonderful plot that this is the first time in the history of the world, since the Middle Ages, we have a chance to do just that. I don’t want to be exclusive about it and say that Notre Dame is the only university in the world that also has these goals and values. It is not the only place in the world that people understands what prayer and divine grace are about. But I don’t see many other universities in the world that care about that or have the remotest possibility of acquiring the means of doing it. And if this campaign is successful today, we are actually ahead of schedule it seems to me, because we are saying what we profess, what our vision is, what our faith is, and people are saying “I’ll get behind that.” That’s something I can have faith in, that’s a vision I can share.

And I’ll like to say to all of you that I have great confidence that we are gong to see that vision come to be in our day. I may not see it, and some of you who are my age may not see it, but those who are younger are going to see it. They are going to see it happen more each day, more each month, more each year. They are going to see all kinds of people attracted to this community from all over the world, because they make it happen, because they believe in that, in fact people are the most important thing of all. And I will like to say the same to all of you at this campaign for Notre Dame, which we launched here tonight, it is not that we want to drag all of you to line up and head simply because Notre Dame has great spirit. When we want something we do it from the ground up. That’s true, but that’s not the reason for doing this. We wanted to give you an opportunity to be part of something really great, something that would be here long after you are gone, something that would be affecting the lives of young people—your sons and daughters and their friends—for many, many years after you are gone; something that will change the face of the earth. Because the dynamism of doing that is not only seen by … but also by the quest for…

Someone said of Notre Dame that there is no place on the face of the earth where there is such a high concentration of intelligent, good, dedicated people. And I guess that I should say to you, in conclusion, that the invitation is given to you tonight to be a part of this enormous adventure of the great quest. Perhaps this sums it up in the words of one of our faculty members, many of you studied under him in the Faculty of English, what he said about Notre Dame when someone said, “Why is this a great institution, why is it different, why is it special?” He said, “I guess it has a lot of special people working and living here.” And the person who asked the question said, “Well, there are a lot of special people in the Marine Corps.” And he said, “that’s true. But,” he said, “these are special, these are people of high intelligence, and deep dedication who believe so completely about the vision of this place that it needs faith for it to happen, that they are willing to bleed for it. And believe me, he said, those are the kinds of people that fill this place, have their blood on the bricks.” And I guess what we are inviting you to do tonight is to get some of your blood on the bricks.”

Thank you very much!

Alumni Reunion Talk,

1983

Thank you very much, Tom. Dear Notre Dame men and women. I think that this has to be one of the greatest weekends of the year at Notre Dame, because if we exist for anything, we exist for those that we produce. It seems to me that when all of you at 5-year intervals that have been gone from this university have come back, it is a matter of enormous pride to all of us to have had even the slightest part in producing you. Because what we are celebrating at this university this week is not so much a lot of buildings, although they are important, if you want to have a university; not so much the championships we have had and the other things we have been able to accomplish. But I think we are celebrating, as Luz Fischer indicated earlier here on this platform, is the quality of life of so many people who’ve spent four years here.

What I am celebrating tonight is your personal lives, your married lives, your children, your business and professional lives, the kind of ideals you attained here in one way or another. I am celebrating the kind of spirit and faith you left here with the high enthusiasm, and all that has been accomplished since then. And if we added up all your lives, it comes up to hundreds of thousands of years of service. I think what happens to you this weekend is that somehow you are back at the source. Somehow you can renew yourselves as you walk across the campus, the lakes, the tower, the dome, the bells, the Grotto, the church. Somehow all the good inspirations that we all had when we were younger get reborn. Somehow all the great ideals that you developed while you were here come to life again. Somehow hope is revived. Somehow spirits are quickened. Somehow just being with each other brings back the warmth of those four years that you spent here. There are, of course, thwarted hopes. There are always the thoughts of what we might have done. And I can join you in this. None of us ever quite accomplishes all that we wish. But there is in this place a kind of inner inspiration that when you come here for a weekend you are somehow revived. You are somehow renewed. You are somehow brought back to the level of where you were during the four years you spent here. Somehow, as Tom Dewey said, you go down to the Grotto and your heart sinks and you pray better than you have prayed in years. Somehow in the Sacred Heart Church the prayers come easier. And somehow it is just a marvelous family reunion of so many friendships, so many people you haven’t seen for a long time. So many hopes that get renewed, and inspirations then get revivified. I think it is a marvelous thing to go through. I have to say that this happens because this is a very special kind of place. And if there is any group in the world I don’t have to describe this to, it is this group; because you know it is a very special kind of place or else you won’t be here.

Let me just give you one little example-small and perhaps inconsequential-but a little example that said something to me about this place. A few years ago, I was coming out of the Morris Inn and I was met by an alumnus of a number of years ago. I leave it vague on purpose, and he said to me, “I have been doing a very good job of making a mess of my life.” And I said, “How’s that?” And he said, “Well, I got into the sauce, and I became an alcoholic.” And he said, “I ruined my business, and I practically ruined my marriage, and I alienated most of my children. And I just about came to the end of my life.” He said, “About five days ago, I decided I would just take off for the Southland and (it was winter time) I would go to Florida and I would get myself gloriously sauced for about a week or two. And he said, “I got as far as Columbus or Cincinnati, I don’t recall exactly, but it was in that general area. And it suddenly dawned upon me what a fool I was.” And he said, “I just pulled around on the side of the road and stopped for a few moments.” Then he said, “I decided that there is probably only one place on earth where I thought I could probably redeem myself.” Then he said, “I literally turned around, made a u-turn on that highway and came here. And I arrived two nights ago.” He said, “the last two days I’ve been renewing myself.” He said, “I spent a lot of time in the halls where I lived, in the chapel where I prayed, in the Sacred Heart Church where I went to confession, and attended mass. I walked the Grotto. I visited the lakes. I gave a large hello to two bright-eyed students, who passed me on the paths. And then he said, “I went over to Corby Hall and got in touch with one of my former rectors, and I knelt down and made a good confession of my whole life.” And he said, “I just want you to know that I am whole again. I am over that, and I am no longer a drunk, an alcoholic, a lost soul.” He said, “I promise you, before God, that I would never take another drink for the rest of my life. And I know that Our Lady worked this miracle in my life, because three days ago I was lost and now I am found again. And as soon as I recover from this new state, I am going back to my home, and I am going to reconcile myself to my poor, long-suffering wife. And I am going to greet my children and ask them to forgive me for the lousy example I have given them. And I am going to be all right. I’ll revive my business and I will make it back home.”

The point of the story is perhaps the point that touches all of our lives. That this is a special place. One of our alumni, also a trustee, Frank Sullivan, he used to be Frank Lady’s secretary, once said that he didn’t know any place on earth that there was such a high concentration of goodness, such a high spirit of prayer and grace. And I think this one story, this one encounter, illustrated for me (and I have many other, but I just mentioned this one) the fact that it is a place that not just touches our minds, but touches our hearts. It doesn’t just produce people who are intellectually highly competent, but people who are in their hearts compassionate and committed. It is not just a place that is good for the old “ra-ra” that in the old days when I was a kid we used to associate with raccoon coats and waving flags. It’s a place that really gets us where we are, how we stand with God, how we stand with those closest to us-be it wife, children, family, relatives, business associates. And I think in that sense, if I had to go out and look for the money to pay for it, I would love to bring all of you and all of your classmates on a regular basis.

Fortunately, you come on your own. But even so, I think it would be worth all the tea in China or all the money in the world to make sure that what happens here during the four years that you were here gets revived periodically as it does during these reunions. No one has to give you a speech; no one has to commercialize you. All we have to do is drop you in this place, let you meet the people that you knew and lived with and loved over four years. Let you somehow walk the same paths, under the shade of the same trees. Somehow, let you experience the place and let it soak in into your inner being. Let it somehow revive all that is good in you, all that is inspirational, all that is high and beautiful. And somehow depress all those things that tend to destroy us because they are unworthy of us. That’s really what a weekend like this is about. It is nothing that I can control or nothing that Chuck Lennon can orchestrate. And there can be a lot of activities; there can be a lot of encounters with friends. But somehow, it’s the place. It is the kind of shrine of the Mother of God that gets to you. And I think that getting to you is terribly important, because somehow you will leave here tomorrow a better person than when you arrived. Not a different person, because you are what you are. But when you came here you were something, and there has been enormous input. It is like taking a tired old battery and pouring energy into it and recharging it, and believe me we all in this busy work-a-day world need recharging. We need to have our ideals refurbished; we need to have our values sharpened. We need to have that kind of encounter with others so we can compare what we have done and what we wished we had done, and what we yet can do.

When I look at these classes out here, and I must say maybe it is a sign of getting older like our chairman Tom Carney, I rejoiced at the enormous enthusiasm of the five-year class, and the 10-year class. Enthusiasm is an important part of this university. You know two years ago we had a U.S. Ambassador to England come to visit us. It was kind of unexpected. He just dropped in on us. As I walked him out of Gate 14 of the stadium, because he was flying out to California. He said to me: “I will only say to you that I have been to institutions all my life and this is the only institution that I’ve been to in modern times that is full of enthusiasm. And next week I am sending you quarter million dollars because I want to put my money where enthusiasm is. I think that that is not important because he gave quarter million dollars. But it is important because he recognized something about this place. And he’s been a good friend since, and he’s helped us since. The important thing about this place is not just to be good, but, to be enthusiastically good, to be competently good, to be ideally good, and to not be discouraged. And I think that is the most troublesome thing that faces us as we grow up: that those bright ideals of youth seem to get tarnished and fade away. They seem to be unrealistic and perhaps unattainable. And that is not true.

This world would not be saved by high intelligence. This world would not be saved by enthusiasm without competence. This world would not be saved by piety alone. This world will be saved if we can put trained intelligence, and competence, and piety and commitment together and to really know where we are going. Then add to that the enthusiasm to keep trying even though we get older and may get discouraged. Let me take for my example, if you will, the older class here tonight. I have said something about the youngest; let me say something about the oldest. To me, that is an extraordinary thing that class of 1933 and the 100 anniversary of the highest award of the Retired Medal, has awarded the medal to a member of the 50-year class and his wife. And in the whole 100-year history of the Retired Medal, only 3 couples have been given this medal, and 2 of them are members of the class of 1953, our 50-year class. Pat of Happy Memory and Patty Crawley of the Christian Family Movement and Ed &Nellie Stefan, our former chairman of the board. I think if Pat is here, and I think she is, and Ed and Abby, would they stand and take a hand as people we admire.

You know 31 years ago, when Father Ned Joyce and Jim Frick and I, and Father Jerry Wilson, whom I don’t think is with us tonight, and Father Philmore, whose grave I visited in the cemetery this afternoon, and a number of others who were young and foolish, perhaps, and idealistic, and not knowing all that much about what this place could be. I think almost without our knowing it, we stumbled upon a formula. The formula was tripartite and rather simple. In fact, if I were back there then knowing what I know now, I probably would have walked out of the place. You know that for a major university in America, our academic and our total university budget was ridiculously low. It was, I believe at that time, 10 million dollars. We knew that it had to increase. I think I would have died if I had known it had to increase 13 ½ times. Because this year it is 136 million dollars, which means that every day of the year we spend around here about ½ million dollars. But I’d have to say that you cannot increase a budget 13 ½ times over that short space of time and not make a better institution because you attract better people. In fact, you attract the best. You are able to do things that we never had money to do before like get seriously interested in Latin America. You can attract people who are in the best institutions of the world and yet you attract them here because you have something else. You can give the very thing they have there and something else besides.

And in addition to that, there was a second thing we had to do. Because we needed, roughly about 200 million dollars worth of facilities. You know we needed a library, we needed a liberal arts building, we needed a science building, we needed a new chemistry building, we needed more buildings relating to engineering, and business education and law. We needed about 10 more dormitories. We needed just about everything you can think of to the tune of about 200 million dollars, and we were broke. We had no building funds. We had almost nothing. And yet, the miracle of Our Lady and the dedication of people like Jim Frick and Ned Joyce and others who had given their hearts to this place, whose blood is really on the bricks; thanks to them today these buildings are built and not only built, but they are paid for. And this university today has facilities, which I think are unmatched in most universities on this earth.

But there was a third thing that was needed, and this thing is kind of intangible. It is not like putting up a building and putting your name on it. It is something like a buffer against the future. It is something that says that for all time there is going to be help for people coming here and to bring the best people here, be they students or faculty. And that thing is called endowment. And you have heard me speak about it, and perhaps it’s vague as I speak about it. And yet I can say this to you with all honesty tonight, that the 10 best universities by everybody’s judgment in America, not necessarily ours because we tend to be prejudiced; but in general the 10 best universities are the universities with the highest endowment. And at this point I am speaking of 30 years ago. Our endowment was about 200^th on the list of endowed universities, and there were about 200 of them. And somehow, while the other two tasks were being done, the increase of the annual budget and the building of the facilities that were needed, slowly but imperceptibly, and then very accelerated fashion lately, we’ve been adding to this endowment. And I have to tell you tonight that starting from the bottom of the list, we are now 17 schools from the top of the list, and we haven’t begun to fight. Let me tell you, not the ones that are ahead of us, because I think there are 4 of them I think which we have already passed; although we don’t have the latest accounting on this. But let me tell you of the schools that we have passed in the last three or four years, and I’ll just tick off 10 or 20 of them as a matter of example. We’ve gone by the California Institute of Technology (CALTECH), Vanderbilt, founded on ancient American fortune; Southern Cal (thank God we are beating them at something); Duke University, built on another American fortune; McGill University in Canada, Case Western Reserve, Wesleyan, Smith, Carnegie, Mellon, built on 2 American fortunes; Wesleyan and Brown, Southern Methodist (I don’t take great joy in that because I am an ecumenical fellow); Baylor, Vassar, Pittsburgh, Oberlin, Amhearst, *****, Wake Forest, Brandeis, Lehigh. I will have to say to you that these are schools, which for many, many decades were far better endowed than we are. And we have just not passed them, but we are still on the upward swing.

If you want the names of the next four, we are going to pass; they are University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Dartmouth, and Rockefeller University. We are creeping up on them, and we may have already passed them, but I just wanted to give you advanced warning. Now having said that, and I said it because, as Tom Carney said, “When we come back here you see a lot of things, you see a lot of changed.” You see things that have been added and they are material things that you can count. You can number endowments in hundred of millions of dollars. You can number buildings by just looking around at them. But I want to tell you that while these things are essential to what this university is becoming, they don’t begin to explain what it is; what it was when you were here and what it is today – I hope even more so. Because the things that this university is, is not of the material order. It can’t be measured in buildings, endowments or in budgets. It has to do with the spirit. And I’d have to tell you that the spirit of this place is something that is intangible. It’s non-reproducible. I would hate to have to build it or find it somewhere else. It has something to do with the fact that this is like a shrine to Our Lady and has a special blessing of the Mother of God. And she keeps us out of all kinds of trouble. It has to do with the spirit of faith. It has to do with the belief that our intellectual tradition is the oldest tradition in the west, which is our culture and our tradition for over 2000 years, and that has somehow been lost along the way. That somehow all those first universities, that were Catholic, are no longer Catholic; they are all secular except the University of Leuwen in Belgium. And that somehow “Smart Alec” people in very well known and well endowed universities say that a Catholic university is a contradiction in terms. We don’t believe that, and we are going to prove that it is not a contradiction in terms; but it is going to be created right here in this place – the greatest university and the greatest Catholic university that the world has ever seen.

I don’t know many universities where the president, and I don’t say it because I have any credit in being a priest, it just happens to be the greatest grace I have ever received in my life. And I am unworthy of it. But anyway, in the past year I have been to just about every hall on campus on Sunday nights. I go when I am invited, and I get invited to most of the halls. And I have been doing this for many years. And that to me is a kind of litmus test. It’s kind of pulse of the campus. And in all the halls that I’ve been this year, practically all of them there might have been one that was not overflowing. But all of the others were not only overflowing wall to wall, but students were out into the corridor. And I had to begin mass by saying: “I love to see the togetherness here tonight; so many people in a narrow spot, but we have to scrunch in together and let those guys and gals out in the hall get in here. And everybody gets a little closer together, which they like to do, because they are men and women and they all come into the hall; and we are literally cheek and jowl, hip to hip for the mass. And they always come into the sacristy before the mass begins and say this is our music program. They’ve got it all figured out. And they always come to me and say, “Is it okay?” And I say, “Of course it’s okay. It’s wonderful.” And it is wonderful because they practice, as many as 6 different instruments playing for their music during mass. And they are all enthusiastic singing. You can tell they are praying, and when I preach to them, I look at their faces and I can tell those eager young faces are really soaking up what you have to say- if you are really saying something. And if you really get to them, they come around afterwards, which never really happened much around here before. They say “You really cut close to the bone tonight, Padre.” And it is a wonderful thing that they are so fresh and honest. If you do badly they’ll tell you that too, and they ought to. But I’d have to say to you that this does not happen often in many universities.

And then I go down to the Grotto on my way home from work, which is generally in the early morning, because I am a night owl. I am there at 2:00, 2:30,3:00 and sometimes later. I’m there when it’s raining. I’m there when it’s snowing. I’m there when it is cold. I’m there when it’s hot. But I am almost never there alone, because when I come down those steps, and come out into that aura of light coming from the statute of Our Lady Bernadette, there is almost always 1,2,3,5, 10 students there. Sometimes on a very cold night I will see a student sitting on a bench, just sitting there bundled up and looking toward the Grotto. And I will say, “Hey, you aren’t going to get pneumonia, are you?” And they’ll always say, “No, I’m all right.” And I’d pass on. They are there when I come, and they are there when I leave. I think they pray more than I do, perhaps. But, you know universities in this country or in the world that have places where people pray; and where they pray out of the inner spirits of their hearts. And where somehow when they come back, like you are coming back 10, 20, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50 years later, you still wander down there, almost by instinct and you pray again. And somehow you are a better person for having done it.

One other thing, we dedicated a lot of interesting buildings over the past 30 years. But this year we dedicated a building that was second hand. It used to be the television station, and some of you I’m sure must have seen it. It is called the Center for Social Concern. It was put together by the President of the 25-year class, Father Don McNeil. And thank you Don for the Corpus Christi sermon this afternoon at the mass. But it’s a place that, again, I think is unusual when you look at higher education in America. This is a place where some 22 different student clubs have their headquarters, their hangouts. There are pictures on the wall showing the kinds of things they are doing. Every one of those clubs is organized to help someone less fortunate, as we heard of the monogram winner tonight helping people less fortunate. They are helping mongoloid children. They are helping minority kids who are ready to drop out of school. They are helping old people who are dying with no one to visit them. They are helping old people who need their screens put up. They are helping poor people who can’t make out income tax. In fact, they saved $250,000 of poor people’s income tax this year by showing them where they can add new deductions. And I think we all kind of cheer that, especially if you pay income tax. But they are doing the things they are doing because they need to be done to keep our world glued together. They are doing the things that demonstrate the only way we can love God is to love Him and our afflicted neighbor-the least brethren. And they are doing them with graciousness; they are doing them with joy. And then they come back and have a mass when the work is over and kind of offer it all up. They have retreats. Right now they are fanning out all over the country and the world to do things in places you never heard of like Cochebamba or places in Latin America. And it seems to me that, well, there are many things we do here in science, the arts, in humanities, in business, in law, in pre-medicine and the rest. There is something that we are doing here that is not done in many universities and that is we are teaching people how to care. We are teaching people at an early age that what little confidence they have means a whole lot to people who have no confidence, who are poor and powerless. And it seems to me once that gets into your blood, once you begin to do something like this, you are going to be doing it for the rest of your life; because you need it the same way you need air to breathe, and food to eat, and hours to sleep. Those are things, which I think begin to touch what I spoke on as the spirit.

After our graduation this year, which was only a couple of weeks ago, I went into the Robin Room, where we were getting our academic gowns off after the ceremony. And I just happened to pass two people on the corridor, who had just received honorary degrees from this institution. They happened to be both from Harvard. One was Archibald Cox, who was solicitor of the United States and prosecutor during the Watergate trials. The other was a marvelous Australian woman pediatrician named Helen Caldecott, who is the executive director for the Physicians for Social Responsibility, which is that anti-nuclear group. In any event, I just happened to be walking by them and they were commenting to each other about the graduation ceremony we just had. And I didn’t help but overhear, although I didn’t go like this to listen. I just heard it as I walked by, and she to him, “Isn’t this graduation ceremony unlike any you have ever seen?” And he said, “I’ve been to more graduations than I’d like to remember, but this university has something which is altogether unique. It was full of spiritual reality. It was full of faith. It was full of value. It was full of commitment to go out and make a better world. And it was full of enthusiasm as well, which is something that gets pretty jaded in today’s world.” And they were saying, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could reproduce this at Harvard?” Well, I don’t think I can reproduce it anywhere. I think it is here, not because of me or Tom Carney, or Ned Joyce, or Ed Stefan or Chuck Lennon or anyone of us who work here, not Jim Frick even, although he can reproduce almost anything. I think it’s here because this is, as I began to say, a special place.

This is a place that somehow lives under the blessing of the Mother of God. It is a place that has touched profoundly, I think I can speak for myself, the inner being that we all possess. It has somehow brought out from each of us something better than we really are. It is a kind of place that is fraternity and sorority at its very best. Community and comradeship, love and friendship at its very best, idealism and values and enthusiasm and all of these things at its very best. I think it’s a kind of place I think that is going to provide leadership for this country and this world in ways we can’t even imagine. I think in a very special way tonight we all should give thanks to God that we have individually been touched by this place; and that somehow this place has incorporated us into a large family of which we all belong. I would like to wrap this up by reading you something I often read on these occasions. It is just a poem by one of our former presidents, Father Charles O’Donnell, who is a poet. It is simple and it is perhaps in the minds of modern people simplistic; and yet I think it will speak to you as it speaks to me. It has somehow tried to touch as only poetry can, the reality of this place, the reality of this weekend, the reality of your lives and mine and the reality of God’s grace. He says this poem is dedicated to Our Lady. And he said:

TO OUR LADY

We have colored your cloak with gold, and crowned you with every star

And the silvery ship of the moon we have moored where your white feet are.

As you look on this world of ours, campus, lakes and towers,

You are good to us, O, great Queen, good as our mothers are.

And you know each one by name, our heavenly registrar.

Enter our names in the book, into which you dear Son will look.

For we know that a time will come, the graduation year

When thousands and thousands of us who have dreamed on your beauty here

Will gather before your face to talk and dream of this place.

Then when your Son comes by, you will tell Him as of old:

These are the boys we knew, I and my cloak of gold;

You at the breaking of bread, these are the troops we fed.

And a shout shall split the skies, as the ranks send up your name

And a golden hour in heaven, when your sons, Oh, Notre Dame,

Kneel to their leader down there by the helm of your gown.

God bless and keep you all!

Edward Frederick Sorin Society

23 March 1984

I think, before I begin Bill, I should ask Father Ned if he’s got the latest score. Where are we in the game? Wherever we were in the game we were 51/50. Who is 51? That’s close enough anyway.

I was thinking of Father Sorin himself that if he were welcoming all of you here tonight, and he had just gotten himself started, he would have probably welcomed you with so much confidence in his own language and tell you who is (Sentence in French), which means, “You are totally and completely and from the heart welcomed in this house, in this University of Notre Dame, dedicated to the Blessed Virgin Mary.” I think it’s fair to tell you that you have got a very busy day ahead of you here tomorrow. We are delighted that you have been able to make it. We can promise you a very unique experience. One thing you will learn tomorrow is that Notre Dame is many things, and the many great things that go back to the many people who make it that way. There is an enormous dedication to the place by the people who work here, people who give their lives, or as Frank O’Malley says so well and we like to quote, “People who left their blood on the bricks.” Well, you are going to meet a lot of people here, who have their blood on the bricks here, people who have given mightily of themselves to make the place what it is.

My advice to you is that you get some sleep tonight; because you will need all the energy you have got tomorrow. We are going to full blast all the way until the end of our dinner tomorrow night. It is going to be a French dinner, so you would have earned it by the time you arrive. We would have a full panoply of experience-the academic side of the university and some views of what goes on; the financial side of the university, the tradition, a look at the life of the founder by a man who is writing his biography, Tom Flair. A film “The University” sometime to wander around the university a little bit, not much. A mass at the Sacred Heart Church, a sermon by Father Tom Blance. Then, I hope, a marvelous French dinner tomorrow night. All that, I think, will exhilarate you. But I hope more than anything else, it makes you feel a part of this place. You have all come and we are grateful to you for the effort it involved. Some come from afar, and some came from as close as South Bend. But even so, I think that wherever you come from, you are at home here. And you will feel more at home after tomorrow night when you have understood better all the historical factors that have gone into the making of this place.

I can only say that we are welcoming you to a good day’s work tomorrow and we hope tomorrow night. Thank you for enduring it. I think that by tomorrow night, you will feel somewhat like the brothers who came with Father Sorin must have felt, that they were at the verge of a great adventure because adventure doesn’t stop with the passing of decades or the passing of even centuries. I think the story of Notre Dame is yet to be written. And all of you will have some say in what is written in this place. And that is indeed a marvelous experience, because as one of my dear friends, Father, Mr. Frank Colson, who used to be president of RCA, used to say, “Everyone has to belong to something.” If you belong to something that is rich and marvelous and deep in its meaning in America, then you are rich indeed. You can only be rich that way by belonging. And I think that by tomorrow night you will understand better that to which you already belong and that to which you belong even more so having learnt more about it.

I think I am now beginning to get vibes from Bill Saxson, who said I should say a very few words. And I think I have used up my quota. Let me; before I sit down ask Father Donnell if he has any further word. (He will sit down and Father Scotty Hicks will come back in).

Alumni Reunion

1986

Thank you very much, Andy. Those are very kind words, and every time I hear them I am reminded of Winston Churchill saying of incumbent Fatherly, who dethroned him after World War II, someone said, “He is a modest man.” And Winston Churchill said, “He has a lot to be modest about.” And I assure all of you, I have a lot to be modest about.

But what I’ll like to do tonight is to be a little nostalgic. I guess we can be forgiven that, after all these years, and I’ll like to speak of “we” rather than “I.” Now, “we” a lot of people on this campus, many of whom are in this audience tonight. It certainly involves all of our alumni around the world, who are a spectacular group. But more than anyone else, it represents a wonderful person, Father Ned Joyce. Because that wonderful applause you just gave me, I assumed goes for him too.

You know, things were very relaxed back in 1952. In fact, the first decision I made, I think was the widest one I ever made, and I never regretted it. Because I was asked by the then Provincial, and the then president, Father John Cavanaugh, whether I’d like to be president, and I said, “not particularly.” And he said, “well, if you are going to be president, and that’s the way they ran the audit; if you are going to be president, whom would you pick for your number two man, your executive vice president? And without any hesitation I said, “Ned Joyce.” And in a way, it might have seemed like a funny choice, because I’m obviously a Yankee, and he’s obviously from South Carolina, a rebel. I am, well, will always have one there. He was an accountant, and I could hardly add four figures in a column. He, I think it’s safe to say, has been on the conservative side, and I have always been condemned by being pretty liberal. He, let me say, was enormously capable in areas where I was a little more than a Cretan – that means an idiot –namely, how to balance budgets, how to build buildings, how to keep them athletic organization honest, with a deep sense of integrity.

On the other hand, we had some things in common. One, I think, we respected each other and we let each other do what we could best do. And while we disagreed maybe half the time, because of our different approach to problems, I would have to say that half the time he was right, and I was smart enough to give in to him. And that kept me out of a lot of trouble. He has seen this university going from a budget of about 4 or 5 million dollars to a current budget 200 million dollars that reflects an expenditure of three quarters of a million dollars every day of the year. He has done that for 34 years as the Chief Budget Officer of this university. And he has done this with only one deficit year of a couple of hundred thousand dollars. I have to say that knowing his creative mind in the area of budgeting and accounting, that probably he could have saved us that one embarrassment in 34 years, but I had a hunch he was trying to tell us something---we better be a little more careful on the expenditure side. Anyway, the thing that is important, I think, is that we have in many senses, done this thing together for 34 years, plus the help of enormously talented other vice-presidents and deans, and provost, you name it. And I think we’ve done it, because we had in common also, the fact that we knew we could count on what we call in large simplification, the Notre Dame family. We knew that as long as we kept the ideal high, and always striving higher and never slipping back, that all of you would have been on our side. And that is not unusual, because you have a degree in this university, in as much the same way as you would have a share or stock in a corporation. And the corporation gets better, your stock is worth more, and as the university gets better, your diploma’s worth more. And I think, that looking back since World War II, I think the value of Notre Dame degree has become more and more, and that’s the way it should be. But the amazing thing is that coming at life in university and operations from different points of views, he’s great with numbers, and I like to have fun with words, he is always making sure we don’t go broke, and I am a mad man at spending money. He has always kept things at an even keel, when I tend to shake up now and then. But the fact is that I can honestly say that in 34 years we haven’t had a single fight. We haven’t even raised our voices once, to my knowledge, at each other. We had admired each other, and I don’t know if he admires me all that much, but I admire him so much, that I can’t even explain how much. Endlessly, is the only adjective or adverb I can think of at the moment.

But I would like to say, if we are going to get nostalgic, it’s got to be a “we” nostalgia. That “we” being Ned and myself and then numerous other people, who have given their very life’s blood to this place. We used to say during the campaigns that all those dedicated to Notre Dame have their blood on the bricks. And that was a phrase out of Frank O’Malley’s lecture. He used to love to say that. But you can bet numbers are important, because, at least, they illustrate things that are important. A budget that went from a few million to almost 200 million, an endowment that went from 5 or 6 million to almost 400 million. A number of buildings that have doubled and the space more than doubled. And, again, every time you say that you have to be careful of who gets the credit, because the building was built, the building we are in tonight, and where else could we have so large a group, the largest group we’ve ever had for an alumni reunion, every state in the Union except Florida. Now, we wouldn’t have had this building if it weren’t for Ned Joyce and Bruce Crouse. Because I could remember, my contribution was not very positive. First, I said, “You’ve got to keep the cost down, because I don’t want it to cost more than the library. Secondly, if you want the building, you guys would have to get the money for it. And he and Ed Crouse did. And when it looked like the cost was getting a little close to the library, I said, “We’d better cut out the swimming pool.” Now, fortunately, last year we got the swimming pool, finally. But it probably cost 10 times more than it would have if he’d built it when he wanted to. But he put up with that, and me and I think in the long run we made a point. But you know, the numbers don’t really tell a story.

Oh, of course you can say that we started with about 12,000 alumni, and I think we may have gone by 80,000 this past graduation. Because, I think it was the largest graduating class, over 2500 that we ever had. I remember in the old days they would say, “give us a list of your outstanding, nationally famous, well-known alumni, and we had to strain a little bit. But today, I think we would be very hard pressed to decide who are the 100 most famous and nation-wide alumni. I would have to say we did almost no research in those days, which universities are supposed to do, that’s how they get their prestige. And last year, thanks to Bob Gordon and his cohorts, we did over 20 million. I’d have to say that we had no scholarship funds in those days. We had one scholarship fund, you’ve heard me speak of it, the Innocent Fund of 100,000 dollars in government bonds at 3 percent. So we had 3000 a year. And it had to be given to a scholar from (?) in Wisconsin, which doesn’t give you a lot of play. This past year, 68 percent of our students had scholarship help, to the average of 5,000 dollars. And our minority students had help, 89 percent of them, to the average of 8 thousand and practically all of our graduate students had help. And we’ve been building an endowment, so that we can do this every year and that endowment has now grown by 50 million, and Ned and I have agreed that it’s going to grow by 100 percent before we get finished next May.

We had no endowed professorships, and I don’t mind telling you that when I became president, I looked up Frank O’Malley’s salary. I thought he was probably the best-known faculty member we had at that time, at least the most beloved. And his salary was 5,200 dollars a year, and that is including teaching summer school. And we have today 80 professors who make more than a football coach, if you can imagine that. On top of that, from being at the absolute bottom of the pile on salaries in universities in the United States, the 150 research and teaching universities. And we are going to go up higher before we are finished. I have to tell you that while the numbers are important in a sense, because they give you some sense of forward progress, and while balanced budgets are nice, because they are nicer than going broke or bankrupt, when you get down to the core of the place, it’s simply transcends numbers, because numbers don’t tell the story. It is something to be proud about, it is something to brag a little about and I think the bragging is over for tonight. But I would have to tell you that the real story of Notre Dame is people. It is each one of you who are the product of Notre Dame and your life and the splendor of that life. It is the kind of marriages you make, the kind of family life you have, the children you produce, and the quality of the children that are sent here to school and other great schools as well. Somehow the splendor of your professional and business, and other types of things that characterize each one of you, some of you are business people, some are doctors, some are lawyers, some are artists.

There is hardly a kind of activity today that Notre Dame people don’t rise to the top. We had so many federal judges that Bobby Kennedy, when he was Attorney General, he used to say, “You guys ought to bring your own cheer leaders every time we had a national meeting of federal judges.” We are sixth in the nation in the production of CEOs for corporations large and small. We have just emerged as one of the top universities mentioned most often in “Who’s Who.” In a recent study made on “The People and Who’s Who,” we’ve got dozens of bishops and archbishops and a couple of cardinals. We’ve literally thousands of priests throughout the land, including Father Jim Carrington, who also celebrates his 60^th anniversary of priesthood this year, and we are all proud of that. We have over 3,000 Notre Dame alumni who are in higher education. Hardly a week goes by that one of them isn’t made president of a college or university. We have over 30 college and university presidents. We have over; we have thousands and thousands of university professors. We have an Astronaut; we have generals, and admirals. We have a president of a country. We have always a dozen or so people in the congress. No matter where you look—medical doctors, the man who was responsible for the organization that got the Nobel Prize in the medicine this year, Joe Miller, received his undergraduate degree from this university. He even learned Russian here. And I have heard him speak in Russian on Russian television. When you look at the people, of course, that makes the difference.

I have so many friends that are university presidents, and many of them have a terrible time with their alumni. There’s a very strong alumni opposition party now that even ran opposition candidates for the Board of Trustees at Dartmouth University. Well, they call it Dartmouth College, but it is a university. Yale has had its problem with its alumni. But I have to say that in all the years that Ned and I have been sitting in these seats, we have never looked upon you as anything but a plus. An enormous heartfelt support for everything that this university wants to do to be good, and to be great, and to progress toward greater excellence. You have given in a way that’s unprecedented, 86 percent in the fundraising campaigns we have, and we seem to have one about every five years. Ned and I have been in six of them, and the one that we are in on now, we are supposed to get together somehow before we get out of here, 75 percent of 3 million dollars. And I’m going to tell you something, we are going to do it, because of the kind of support we have across this land. I am sure that Ned would join me in saying that we haven’t had 5 minutes of trouble from our alumni in the last 34 years. And we’ve had the kind of support that is unprecedented in any university in this land. And I think the reason for it is, one that we are indeed a family and we have pride. And we have people who are geared toward excellence in whatever they do. We have people who don’t just match what is done in the Ivy Leagues, or the Stanfords, the Chicagos, or the Vanderbilts or the world, and the Dukes. We have people who are fantastic Christians as well.

This is a Catholic University, and I think it’s a place where people, not only learn mathematics, science, and literature, and art, and history, and engineering and business, but they learn something that is rather unusual in today’s world. They learn the value of prayer. They learn the importance of having a passion for justice, which is the pride of peace in our times. If there is injustice in our world, there will be terrorism and there’ll be no peace. But our people have a passion for justice. We have great authors. I am reading a book, this year, this week, which is on the bestseller, Barry Lopez, about the Arctic. It’s on the Best Seller list. Barry, this is his second best seller, and he is just a normal, garden variety, everyday Notre Dame alumnus. It’s an amazing thing that when you look at universities and what they produce, Notre Dame alumni is an absolute, unique category. I recall a friend of mine that I used to go hunting and fishing with years ago. He is now quite ill and getting old. His name is ***** Smith, who was president of American Airlines. He said, the most insufferable people in the world for enthusiasm are Notre Dame alumni. But there’s worse. And I said, “What’s worse?” Then he said, “A Notre Dame alumnus who has been in the marines.” And I said, what could be worse than a University of Notre Dame alumnus, who has been in the marines?” And he said, “A University of Notre Dame marine who was born in Texas.” He said, “they are the worst, absolutely.” I remember one day that a very famous world leader just called and said, “I want to stop by.” And he said, “I want to go to your Art Gallery. I want to go to football fame on Saturday, then, “I’m leaving.” I’d never met this gentleman before. I knew his name, and you would know his name if I mention it, but I won’t. He had to leave at the 4^th quarter, and I walked out to gate 14 with him, where his car was waiting. And he said, “You know, this place has something that is almost extinct in most American institutions. And I said, “What’s that?” And he said, “Enthusiasm.” “you people really believe in what you are doing and you make it real.” And he said, “I’ve never set foot on this campus before, and I’ve only been here 24 hours, but the fist thing I want to do when I get home is to write you a check for a quarter of a million dollars, to build up that enthusiasm some more.” How many universities affect a person that way?

Last week, on retreat up in the North woods, I was reading a book about Albert Schweitzer. I was reading the manuscript; it hadn’t been in print yet. It mentioned in the book that Albert Schweitzer had an enormous enthusiasm for another young doctor, who happened to be a Notre Dame graduate, who did what he did--- dropped all of the wonderful opportunities in life to be a great theologian, a concert organist, a great doctor and buried himself in service to the poorest of the poor on a turgid Yellow River in Gabon, of all places, in French Equatorial Africa. And spent 40 years of his life there, serving the poor, to give evidence of his reverence for life. And he had a great administration who was a Notre Dame man, Dr. Dooley. And if you, you may have been down by the Grotto, you’d see that we’d just put up a statute, put up by the St. Louis Club in honor of Dr. Dooley and his sacrificial life of 34 years. He died after his 34^th birthday. And I was wondering, as we talked about that statue and that memorial, where are the Dr. Dooleys of today? And you know, the woods are full of them. Just a few weeks ago, I got a letter from a Notre Dame alumnus of 2 years ago. His name is Dame, I dropped his last name. And he wrote me from Ecuador where he was working in an enormous orphanage of 4 thousand shoeshine kids in Ecuador, in Quito. And he said, “I’m an accountant, and I came down here. You helped me get this job; and I have worked for nothing for 2 years. And I’ve come to know the people, and I spend every weekend with a family of one of our kids in the orphanage.” And he said, they have an enormous lack of medicine. They don’t see a doctor from the day they are born to the day they die, and they are poor.” And he said, “I’m so struck by this, that he said, “I’m going to have to take math and science 2 solid years of that.” And then I’m going to get in my state medical school, he happens to come from Wisconsin, and I am going to become a doctor and then I’m coming back here and spend the rest of my life serving the poor of South America. Dooley, all over again—the contagion of good example.

The fact that over 60 of our graduates this year just said “we’ll give a year or two of our lives anywhere in the world to help the poor.” The fact that 2,000 of the students in our undergraduate body, give anywhere from 4-5 to 20 hours a week to help the poor around this area tutoring, big brother/big sister, care for the old, sit with the dying, put up screens for the people who can’t put them up for themselves, helping Mongoloid children in the nearby hospital, which we literally run with student-volunteer help, looking out for minority students who are about to drop out of school and giving them the lessons they need to stay in school, and the motivation. That kind of spirit, to me, is what makes this place different.

Last week I had a very distinguished clergyman from Europe on the campus. His name is Jean-Marie Cardinal Lustiger, the Archbishop from Paris. And he was intrigued by the fact that in America there was a school called Notre Dame, which was the name of his cathedral. He’s an interesting fellow. He is Polish by birth; he was a refugee to France during the war. His father and mother were killed in concentration camps. He was Jewish, became a Catholic, became a priest, and now he is the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris, and he was born in Poland. I just walked him around the campus, because most Europeans have no idea of what goes on in an American university. And most of their universities, you can put them all together and they can fit in a stadium. But anyway, I just walked him around, and in the course of walking him around, we winded through the church, because I wanted to show Mr. Vinci’s famous statue. And there we found a bunch of kids praying before the Blessed Sacrament. It happened to be First Friday. I walked him down on the Grotto at 3 in the afternoon, on a Wednesday. Here was a bunch of kids drifting by, stopping to pray at the Grotto.

One of our co-eds came steaming in. She’d been running six miles around the lake twice. She was sweat from head to foot. She was not all that attractive, I must say; no sweating person is. But, in any event, I grabbed her and I said, “Come on over here, I want you to meet the Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. And I introduced her to the rather staid, European Cardinal. And I said, “Tell him what you came here for.” He and I were taking in French and I put it in English to her. And she said, what else do you come here for? You come here to pray.” And all he could say is “Mon Dieu.” “My God,” because he’d never seen anything like that in France, at least, not along the Seine. Well, we went to the library, and he met some students there. We then went over to our Alumni Board and Senate meeting. And it was five in the afternoon on a Wednesday evening, and they were all set up for a mass in the auditorium of the CCE. And again, it knocked his eye out that here as these alumni presidents from hundred and almost 200 clubs across the land from all ages, all classes, like here this afternoon, and here they are celebrating mass together and he just couldn’t get over it.

So, I asked him if he would say a few words to the senate. I told him he could say it in French and I would translate it for him, which he did. And he said, I have just seen your university. And he said, I don’t want to say that the building impresses me, although they are spectacular, and almost unbelievable. But he said, I’m impressed by something you don’t see in Europe—young people who are fervent; young people who are full of idealism. And he said, “That impresses me so much, I just don’t know what to say about it. I just find it “equitable,” unbelievable. Well, to, that’s the heart of the university. If all the other things had been done—in other words, if the budget had multiplied 20 times, and the endowment X times, and the scholarship help immeasurably, and the endowed professorship and research, and all the other things; and if we had a bunch of brains on stilts around here, which is the only way I can describe some students at some other great universities—brains on stilts. People who aren’t really compassionate and loving, people who don’t give of their lives to something non-academic, as well as give very well to things academic. If we had, as we had this year, one of four schools in the country which had more than one Rhodes scholar, the other three being Harvard, who got theirs on a Radcliff; and Princeton and Stanford and Notre Dame. But if you want to get some sense of what that means, let me tell you that the whole big ten, which represents several hundred thousand students against our less than 10 thousand had one; and we could very well had four. I think that’s something to brag about. But let me say that everything else that happened during the past years since the war, beginning with the really great leadership of John Cavanaugh, who was probably the biggest influence in Ned’s life and mine too. But if everything else had happened and this had become, as indeed it has, one of the 20 universities in the land and moving upward, not stopping there, and if we had gotten the resources together, so this can continue to grow and prosper and become and even greater university; if we are turning out persons who are outstanding as Harvard, and Yale and Princeton, and Yale graduates are also outstanding, and Stanford.

If we had done all these things that universities are supposed to do and yet we didn’t turn out good fathers and mothers, good husbands and wives, good people who did not give their lives for those who are needy and desperately need the help of people who care; if we didn’t turn out people who are generous like yourselves, and generous to a fault in this good work, which we call Notre Dame; if we didn’t turn out people who don’t heckle each other, but love each other and laugh at each other’s corny jokes; if we turn out people who are loving, and people who care for this place, and people who come back, as Father George said this afternoon in the homily, to meet themselves as what they were many years ago, and to hope that their idealism could be re-kindled, and we could still all be better than we are. If we didn’t turn out the kind of marvelous fraternity or community that is in this room tonight, and you can multiply it almost 50 times across this land and across this world, if we didn’t do that, then I think that Ned and I would not be as proud as we are of this place, and all of you. Because we have done all the things that a university must do, especially a Catholic university, which has practically not existed since the year 1205, when the University of Paris was founded in France.

If we had done something and are doing something that’s literally unprecedented in this history of the Christian world, and we are doing it in the unlikely place of South Bend, Indiana, and we are doing it with the help of a lot of people, you know, many of them, the first of their family to ever go to college; and if we are going up and up and up, not just in our own judgment, but in the judgment of people who judge universities in this land; but if we did all that and did not somehow keep the human touch, if somehow we didn’t produce people who are loving as well as striving, people who are honest as well as ambitious, people who are just as well as demanding. If we didn’t turn out people who care about all people who know how to give themselves to their spouses, and to be faithful, if we didn’t run out people who turn out children that is just a joy to receive when they come here and when you find that someone is a son or daughter of an alumnus, you almost breathe a such of relief and say, “they’re going to make it, because this is their home.”

If we did all the other things and lost what is the most important thing in this place, which is the love of God, and loving of our fellowman, then I think it would be dust and ashes. Oh, it’s something you can write about in Time or Newsweek. It is something you might brag about when you are with your fellow educators. But the things I am most happy about, even though I don’t want to brag about them too much, is the quality of the person that comes here, then grows here, that graduate from here, and continues to grow. And I think we have a room full of such people. And you’ve come on your own to be again, even fleetingly, for a weekend, to be a part of this place. You, somehow, find your spirits reviving and somehow as you walk down the paths, as you think of what happened here and what happened there. And of the wonderful good urges you nurtured in your youthful souls, even though you may be celebrating your 50^th anniversary this year. I think all of that is what makes this place very special. And if we ever lose that, you can take the endowment and everything else, for as far as I am concerned, it is useless.

But I believe that this place is people. As Frank Sullivan, one of our trustees often said, “the highest concentration of good people he has ever seen in his life, good faculty, good administrators, good students, good alumni, good staff people, people who’d give their lives for this place. It’s that spirit which we call the spirit of Notre Dame. It’s that kind of eternal Al and upward that would not be second best in anything, but especially not in life. It’s that realization that one can have all the competitive that important in intellectual and professional affairs as we try to do in law and medicine and everything else, and still remember that we are all children of God. And it’s important that we follow His will above all. And it’s important that we love others, and that’s the best way of loving Him, especially if those others are poor. That we are willing to get down on our knees down there at the Grotto, or at the Sacred Heart Church, or in the hall chapels and pray because we all need prayer to keep moving and not to go stale. To have the faith brightly and to have it shine in the lives of so many of you, to see sacrifice at work, as so many mothers and fathers among you have sacrificed. To have that fundamental integrity of life, which is really at the heart of being a good human being. And to see that happening in the lives of literally 10 thousand young people here every year. To see them as Athena go out, and to see you as you come back, this to me is the greatest joy. At least, I think I can speak for Ned and myself that we have had in these 34 years. If nothing else happens, if we go out and get killed in an automobile accident the day after we leave, it would be worthwhile. That’s not important. The important thing is that we have had the grace, the grace of associating with all of you in what perhaps is the most exciting, uplifting endeavor in all the world, to be around young people as they are growing up, and to help them grow towards goodness.

Thank you all very much!

©Please note: Peggie Ncube owns the copyright for the dissertation below. You may download and print one copy for educational purposes only. These pages may not be duplicated, distributed, redistributed or republished in any manner without express permission from the author.

APPENDIX 1

RUBRIC FOR RHETORICAL ANALYSIS OF SPEECHES

APPENDIX 2

TRANSCRIPTS OF HESBURGH’S FUND-RAISING SPEECHES

REFERENCE LIST

VITA