Notre Dame and the Popular Imagination
Speaking of Catholic higher education, I have to confess I still don’t quite get it –and I’m two steps removed from getting it. “It” is the tremendous attention that ND’s internal operations provoke from all sorts of people — not just alumns, but also people who never went here, and never even applied here. I don’t mean just whether the football team wins or loses, I mean what happens on campus otherwise (such as the Vagina Monologues). I understand that people have opinions — I just don’t understand the absolute passion.
Step 1: ND Alumni are more engaged than other alumni. I went to Princeton as an undergrad–and am tremendously appreciative of the education they gave me. I do have concerns and opinions about what’s going on there now, but nowhere near the degree of passion that campus events seem to generate in ND alums. My sense is that the intensity of undergraduate dorm life–the ND family–creates more intense bonds. But I’m not entirely sure that this is the entire story. This loyalty, this concern, seems to last an awfully long time past undergrad days. What’s the additional factor?
Step 2: People who never went here, or even applied here, or even thought of applying here, have passionate opinions about what should happen here. Why? Is it just because ND’s Catholic? Is it just because it’s prominent and Catholic ? Is it more than that? I don’t have passionate opinions about what should happen at Harvard, or Stanford, or Cal Tech. Or even the Air Force Academy, even though I’m American. I don’t have passionate opinions about what should happen at Georgetown, or Steubenville, even though I’m Catholic.
Is it Rudy? Is there some way in which ND “belongs” to everyone? What way?
Cathy, you have identified a really important point about ND. It has a symbolism for Catholic education even beyond its borders.
As a Catholic growing up among the blue collar working poor and living in a town where being Catholic was being in the minority to boot, Notre Dame was a symbol of something grand and that one dreamed of maybe attending.
It also does have something to do with football and seeing the team play a bowl game on New Years Day. It was your team because it was Catholic and your cheered for it just because of that fact, even if it was in a different country.
Even the high school I did attend, called St. Michael’s College School was associated with “the Irish” and its colors were the double blue.
A goal I can recall having as a youth was to visit the campus, one bye-the-way I have never fulfilled, and in that regard the name “South Bend, Indiana, has almost as much mystique as the university itself.
I don’t know if that helps frame your question but I do know that just writing this down has produced an emotional response that is hard to fathom….I am literally fighting back the tears.
My brother-in-law lives in Iowa. He never went beyond high school. He is an avid “subway alumnus” (???) and always wanted his 3 children to go there. One son got a full-ride scholarship to a Jesuit university and was all set to go when he was accepted to UND. It cost hims (1) the Jebbit scholarship, and (2) about $35,000 in student loans, but he eagerly went. The other 2 went elsewhere, not having the ambition or quite the grades to apply to UND.
There’s a mystique that I don’t get and never have, but it’s almost like the Mother Church of Catholic Universities. So be it.
Cathy,
I think there is a lot of outside interested generated now by special interest groups like the Cardinal Newman Society and The Catholic League because of Fr. Jenkins’ position on the VM.
Up to now, Notre Dame has always played it safe. Nothing controversial regarding Catholicism has really been going on there. Didn’t Fr. Malloy appear on stage with George Bush when he was campaigning? In fact, Notre Dame enjoyed the reputation of being solidly Catholic for a very long time. Parents who wouldn’t send a child to BC or Georgetown were comfortable in sending that child to Notre Dame. There are no coed dorms, for example, a big worry for parents. Whether they are observed, parietals are still on the books there, and there is supposed to be no “intervisitation,” as it is called elsewhere. Do they even allow men and women to recite the rosary together?
Now Fr. Jenkins has taken a stand on a controversial issue that the right does not like. The reaction is loud and constant. Georgetown has been subjected to this kind of scrutiny from right wing Catholics for some time, at least 25 years. The University even had a canonical lawsuit brought against it by some conservative Catholic students and alumni when a pro choice group was granted club status. The gay issues and women’s issues have also been a lightening rod for these groups. All sorts of people who have no formal connection with Georgetown are constantly scrunitizing what the University does in order to report to the Cardinal or even to Rome for those who have no confidence in the Cardinal. What would William Donahue do if he couldn’t turn into 400 pounds of raging roast beef on the talk shows if places like Georgetown and BC conformed to his narrow, archaic view of a Catholic University?
I appluad Fr. Jenkins’ decision. I think it was the right one. if students cannot talk about the VM at Notre Dame, where can they talk about it.? And isn’t it better for them to talk about it Nptre Dame. He could have played it safe as Malloy woud have and caved in to the right, but he chose to stand for a more inclusive idea of a Catholic Univerity. Welcome to the club!
No question Notre Dame transcends in most of us and it is Catholic though not always religious. Knute Rockne is known by most people and there is that song.
Interesting that some consider that ND always played it safe. Yet how does one explain this monumental person called Theodore Hessburgh.? He was concerned about the lack of blacks on Campus before it became fashionable. http://www.nd.edu/~equity/profiles/HesburghProfile.shtml
Obviously there were great presidents before him but Hessburgh deserves a special place when it comes to this great university. When there was the great exodus of priests and religous in the late sixties and seventies, Hessburgh provided remarkable sympathy for them. An organization named Bearings for Reestablishment was set up to help departing priests and religious adjust to secular life. The fund raising letter from Bearings was signed by Hessburgh.
Hessburgh seems to have gotten away with things that others could not. Or did he have a way with people that assured that whatever he did was the right thing? He is a remarkable piece of that lore.
With all due respect to Iprof , I think Cathy’s question goes quite beyond today’s issues.
After posting the above, it struck me, and I think Jimmy Mac’s example is further proof, Notre Dame is a working class Catholic’s concept of the American dream.
I suspect I am more typical even though I am Canadian, of the majority of American Catholic’s who were educated in America’s public school system. Certainly, it was not until I started reading Commonweal, when I was in my early 20′s that I learned there were other Catholic universities. Names like Boston College, Gonzaga, Stubenville, Dayton, Spring Hill, Fordham and so forth say nothing to those raised Catholic outside of families with parents who have a university education and/or do not live in the United States.
Notre Dame on the other hand, has that recognition factor. Part myth, part dream, part icon, part symbol, part club: put it all together and Notre Dame just has it.
Ms. Kaveny’s puzzlement over the “absolute passion” that ND can generate in alums and non-alums alike brought a smile to my face. If an ND professor is having trouble fathoming “it,” then I–a non-alum who graduated from another Catholic college–don’t feel so bad in trying to understand the ND phenomenon.
Our family was introduced to ND when my sister Jean, number 9 in a family of 10 children, attended ND. From her first visit home during Thanksgiving of her freshman year, the rest of us were convinced she had joined a cult. It was ND this and ND that, to the point of cries of “enough already about Notre Dame!” Her fervor for all things ND continued throughout her 4 years in South Bend, and now 20+ years later, her absolute passion for the school remains as strong as ever, even to the point of becoming the national alumni president and serving on ND’s board of directors a few years ago.
The youngest in the family, Susan, went elsewhere for college, at least in part to escape the ND influence (and bric-a-brac) that had saturated the family. (How many ND mugs, scarves, and sweaters can a family absorb and still remain sane?) But somehow Jean convinced Susan to go to ND for an MBA. We didn’t see Susan much during the intensive, one-year program, but when she finally returned home, another member of the cult had been born. Susan’s passion for ND over the years has continued at just a shade less absolute than Jean’s.
So something transforming is going on out there in South Bend, something that as Prof. Kaveny notes reaches even people who have had no direct connection to the school. I don’t pretend to understand “it,” but in admiring the kind of women my sisters have become, due in no small part to their education and character formation at ND, “it” is a healthy and welcome affliction.