The Mellowing of a President

Notre Dame's President Theodore M. Hesburgh has come a long way since 1969, when he blasted campus disruptions in a famous letter to his students at the nation's best-known Roman Catholic university. Anyone substituting "force for rational persuasion," wrote Father Hesburgh, would be entitled to 15 minutes of "meditation," followed by suspension. Most Americans cheered those words, but their tone caused Hesburgh much trouble. Hard-liners miscast him as their hero; many of the young reviled him. Yet now his image is quite different: he has emerged as a kind of Catholic Kingman Brewster who is so popular among his students that Notre Dame may well be among the nation's most disruption-proof major campuses.

Hesburgh has not abandoned his distaste for violence. Amid the new campus calm, however, he has shifted his target from student radicalism to the Administration's war policy. The shift has transformed him.

No Handshakes. Soon after his 1969 ultimatum, Hesburgh hit his Notre Dame nadir. The worst of it was the anger of liberal students and teachers who had flocked to Notre Dame because of Hesburgh's insistence that the university combine intellectual freedom with its prayers and football. Many viewed his ultimatum as an attack on academic freedom, not a defense of it.

They were quite wrong. But in another sense, so was he. Hesburgh had, in fact, lost touch with his campus, mainly because of his own voracious involvement with "relevant" social problems as a member of 23 off-campus boards and committees and as outspoken head of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. A biting student joke asked: "What's the difference between God and Father Hesburgh? God is everywhere and Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame."

In 1969 the student government condemned Hesburgh; the American Association of University Professors, which had been considering him for its annual academic freedom award, dropped him from the competition. Though his board stoutly backed him, he recalls, "I had the feeling the students were slipping away. I'm not sure they understood me or I understood them." When Hesburgh walked across the campus, some students sullenly refused to shake his outstretched hand.

Hesburgh was clearly a victim of both academic and youthful intolerance. But he showed greater understanding than his detractors. After brooding about the draft, for example, he concluded that "the only kind of patriotism the Government was talking about was going overseas and killing people. The thing keeps gnawing at you." Last spring's Cambodian incursion and student deaths at Kent State and Jackson State brought fresh indignation. When the Notre Dame campus boiled up, the main speaker at a massive protest rally was not the local S.D.S. head but Hesburgh. In a sermon a week later, he told his campus congregation that an Administration that continued the war was composed of "mental midgets." Notre Dame students hung back from violence, circulated Hesburgh's speech to more than 80,000 townspeople and got 26,000 citizens to sign petitions endorsing it.

Hesburgh has changed his mind on other things as well. In 1967 he vowed that "Notre Dame will not have its undergraduates making policy decisions"; today undergraduates sit on virtually every university committee, usually with voting power. In 1968, Hesburgh proclaimed that he would expel 1,000 students before permitting girls to visit in the dorms; a year later, he accepted a student-faculty committee recommendation to allow limited visits. Paradoxically, he pleased old grads by letting the football team play in postseason bowl games --but chiefly because the $200,000 income could be used to finance scholarships for blacks and Spanish-speaking students. In the past six months, he has shed five of his off-campus jobs. Last year the A.A.U.P. reconsidered and gave him that academic freedom award.

Necrology List. TIME Correspondent Robert Anson (Notre Dame, '67) often interviewed Hesburgh as an undergraduate journalist; recently he revisited Hesburgh's study and found "an almost existential change in the man. The conversation is easier, more reflective, more open to other points of view. He seems genuinely at peace with himself. The students no longer talk about getting rid of Hesburgh but about whether anyone will be good enough to replace him."

One measure of Hesburgh's success is that he retains his 15-minute rule for violent protesters--and is respected for it. At a time when the average tenure of college presidents has slipped to 44 years, Hesburgh keeps a "necrology list" of the leading casualties as a reminder of how they fell, for lack of either strength or understanding. Now 53 and in his 19th year in charge of Notre Dame, he may well have discovered how to avoid their errors.

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