TECHNOS

July 20, 2008

TECHNOS QUARTERLY Summer 1999 Vol. 8 No. 2

Interview with Reverend Theodore M. Hesburgh, C.S.C.

with Carole Novak

Father Ted Hesburgh is president emeritus of the University of Notre Dame. He retired from active service as the 15th president of the university in 1987. During his 35-year tenure, he oversaw incredible growth, the transfer of governance of the private, catholic university from its founding religious order to a mostly lay board of trustees, and the admission of women to the undergraduate program. Hesburgh's many interests include civil rights and international peace initiatives. He was a charter member of the u.s. commission on civil rights (1957), which he chaired from 1969-72, and as a member of the U.S. Institute of Peace board is presently working to find solutions for Middle East tensions as well as those in Eastern Europe. Hesburgh is recipient of numerous awards, among them the Medal of Freedom, this country's highest civilian honor. In 1979, he was appointed ambassador to the United Nations Conference on Science and Technology for Development, the first time a priest had served in a formal diplomatic role for the U.S. Government. Twenty-five years ago, he wrote of the potential of technology to educate the people of the world in his book, The Humane Imperative: A Challenge for the Year 2000 (Yale University Press, 1974). TECHNOS spoke to Father Hesburgh in april 1999, as events in Kosovo were raging.

I hear you don't use a computer.

No, I don't. Except for when I had to get in touch with Moscow—it took me about six weeks without a computer and about 15 minutes with one. I decided that I will continue to go against the flow, but for the kids nowadays, I think computers have gotten much more positive than negative.

That's one of my questions, specifically in terms of what's happening on the Notre Dame campus…

We spent a great deal of money. First, we wired every building on campus, and we have four or five large computers to take care of finance and the programming of classes and all the scientific research. We have demonstration rooms where students go to learn how to use computers and software programs, and we have e-mail for everybody on campus.

I assume you've been keeping track of the events in Kosovo, maybe through the Institutes for International Studies and Peace Studies, or through your friends…

I'm also on the U.S. Institute of Peace board in Washington, D.C. That's the only government agency that spends its whole time working for peace. One of these days, we're going to erect a building—the last building on the Mall. It would be nice to have a building for peace right in the middle of all the war memorials. But we've been watching the Kosovo situation for several years. There are no simple solutions to this. But what you hear in every discussion is mostly, “Are you pro bombing?” Well, bombing's not an answer. You can't solve anything by bombing. It may work toward a solution, but the thing is much more complicated than that. You've got to establish justice in that region, which they really haven't had since about 1300. So it's a complicated business.

How can you establish an idea of justice in such a place that's been so long without it?

I think that if you could think of one simple thing to slow down wars, it would be to increase education of the next generation, to promote literacy and get into a whole lot of modern information about how life could be better.

Can technology play a role in doing this?

People often ask me: “What could you do technically to bring more justice and human development into the world?” And education, of course, reaches the heart of that. I think there is so much positive and good about the technical revolution, and I'm all for it. It can make the teaching of mathematics, for example, much more rich than a guy standing at a blackboard occasionally putting something on it. And I think it's possible through this whole process to look forward to a university of the world.

But there are a lot of places in the world that don't have access to all the material that's available on the Web.

You could do on the air what Peace Corps kids do—go all over the world to teach personally in villages. There would have to be some of that personal contact, too, of course, and the village would have to have at least one educated person who could set up the transmission. But just think: You could have all of the things from basic literacy to nuclear physics in one place. All the person would have to do at any hour of the day or night is arrange the transmission. You'd have entertainment, you'd have education, you'd have a kind of rehabilitation from the point of view of health and the physical reality of life— you don't need a library, you don't need a classroom, you don't need a professional teacher. You could get the best teacher in the world to teach everybody in the world! All you've got to do is draw it up. We've now got synchronous satellites, which allows access to information all over the world: out in the middle of the Amazon jungle or in Burma or the highlands of the Himalayas, wherever you are—even if you're in an isolated little village— you can get educated. All you need is something like a catalog where you can punch certain numbers and you can get certain programs. You only need one guy in the village who can read it. You only need one machine, one screen.

So you think that bringing modern telecommunications to every village in the world might be a key to education, and also to better human conditions with peace and justice?

Telecommunications would help, but, if I were given one wish, if I could do one thing, it would be very simple: I'd educate women. Because, about half the women in the world aren't educated, can't read and write, have no access to education—and they're the ones who bring up the children. They're the ones who pass on ideas and dreams to the next generation. In too many cases, they don't even know about their own personal hygiene, or anything about how to get food for their kids, about boiling water, and a whole range of things that women ought to know. But even beyond that, they ought to know something about the world and its plight, especially where they're living, and they ought to know what men should be doing that they aren't doing about their problems. They ought to be able to think out problems and come up with answers themselves. And if they got together, all the problems of health and nutrition and population could be handled. But the fact is, they're set in their little villages, they get abused and used but not used in any real, sensible, intelligent human way.

Do you think if those women were educated, they would then want to be in positions of leadership?

Of course. They would wind up running things.

Do you suppose things would be any better?

Well, sure! You had a woman running Israel, a woman running Norway, you have a woman running India—a country of 800 million people. The problem is, if anyone gets a lousy deal in the world today, it's women; especially in the underdeveloped world. They're doing much better in the developed world.

Years ago, I was chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights; it was formed to study the problem and come up with solutions for human discrimination by reason of race, religion, color, and national origin. And I added the word “sex” because there is also a lot of discrimination by reason of being a woman or man. Later, the Commission added another word, “age,” which also is very important.

A computer doesn't know if I'm a man or a woman, black, white or disabled—so it's an equalizer in some cases, in terms of educational opportunity.

But it hasn't been made use of, in the full sense.

And in some cases, it's been misused. For instance, all the access to the wonderful educational materials is counterbalanced by some of the ugliness out there—pornography that's available, for instance. Do you think that the use of the Internet in schools should be monitored by teachers or librarians?

Well, I think if the backyard's got a few rattlesnakes in it, you'd better monitor how the kids walk through it.

And if you're a parent…

You have to have some controls during the formative years of what kids are exposed to. It's not fair, really, to expose them to smut on the Internet, any more than you would expose them to germ-laden food. I think it's just common sense in parenting, and I think the parents have to do the yelling about this, because they're their kids.

What about in the schools? Is it the librarians' job? They're having a tough time with this issue.

I think it's everybody's job, depending on what they do. But obviously people like librarians are closer to the issue. Again, you've got the other problem that all of this can be overdone. You can't totally control what a kid sees. And part of it's educational, and part of it's horrible, given the age and sensitivity of the kids we're talking about. It's the old story: “You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.” You can't expose kids at that age without corrupting them in some way or other.

An interesting thing was that the Lord didn't speak too much about punishment in the gospels, but he said one thing: “Anybody who corrupts one of the least of us”—the children—“is better yet a millstone put around his neck and thrown into the sea.”

That's a strong statement.

It is. And it was specifically made about people who corrupt children.

There's a lot of talk these days about teaching ethics in the schools, and even spirituality.

Well, why not? Of course, this is a matter of belief, rather than just simple reason or philosophy. But, if you really believe that there is a side of humankind that is spiritual, that there is something called a soul, that there is a destiny called eternal—if these are beliefs that are enormously helpful to everybody—then why say, “We'll teach everything but this”? Because it's a foundation for honesty, for truth, for doing what's right, even if no one sees what you're doing. It's conscience, if you will.

Do you think the students of today are any different from those in the 1950s, 60s, or 70s?

Well, 85 percent of our students here are dedicated to some kind of service during the school year. Last night I had 25 kids in my office for an hour and a half because they said they wanted to sit down and talk to me. They're all in a service project around town, taking care of kids in a housing project, getting them off dead center; and they had all kinds of cute ways of doing it: by forming basketball teams and getting them uniforms and working with the housing authority and getting them delivered from school right to the hall where they could do all these things, and give them a decent meal at the end of all this, and give them some class work and some sport work, and even getting the money to do it all. Now, they're all graduating, so I asked them, “What are you going to do next year?” Almost every youngster in that crowd is going to do something that has a service component to it.

Is that right? Is there a service requirement for graduation at Notre Dame?

No. But the fact is, it's better not to require it for graduation. If you require it, they fulfill it and then they drop it. If it's something they do because they think it's the right thing to do, they'll get the bug and do it the rest of their lives. We have 95 alumni clubs around the country that are helping them do these kinds of things by supporting them over vacation periods so they can be tutoring kids who aren't doing well in the local school districts. We have a program that the students are lining up to get into. For two years after graduation they teach in schools in areas that can't get people to teach certain subjects. Then, we have those young teachers come back to campus every summer. Those kids are going to be doing something like that for the rest of their lives.

You're talking about students at Notre Dame—that's probably a special population.

It is. But on the other hand, they come from every state in the Union and 80 foreign countries. For the program where we put 60 people in schools at risk, mostly in the South and Southwest, we have three times as many students applying as can be accepted into the program. The interesting thing is, by the time our kids graduate, they can start out at salaries of $40, $50, $60,000 a year, with another bonus for signing on and doing something they want to do and for which they're trained to do well. And they're passing that up for a year or two to get this service component in their lives. They get geared to do that because of what they're doing while they're undergrads.

It seems to me that someone must've gotten to those kids very early in their lives. So that's another question: When we send them off to school, if they don't go to a Catholic or private parochial school, what happens to them? Do they get moral or spiritual education in the public schools, where they can't even say a morning prayer?

I think they should be able to pray. I think a lot of the arguments you get, it's probably two or three percent of the population trying to run everybody else around, pull them around by the nose. I just think parents have to say, “These are our kids; we know what they need; and we're doing what we can at home”—which is where I think it has to begin—“but we have no problem at all, as they start the day, that they say a prayer,” as some of the parents say a prayer before they start their work each day. And then, “We don't think any kid should be forced into this, but it ought to be there for any kid that wants to do it.” I think the general experience around the country is if the kids get together themselves, say in the high school, a few minutes early, those who want to do it, will do it; and those who don't want to, don't have to. I can't see anybody having a problem with that. It's the youngsters' decision, of course, but their parents will get involved in it. And I don't see it as a way of proselytizing either.

We have kids from all religions here at Notre Dame and we tell them, if you're a Muslim, here's where the nearest mosque is; if you're Jewish, here's where the synagogues are in town; if you're whatever Christian denomination, here are the times of the services at those churches. Our students are welcome at all of these places, even if they're from out of town. And if there's a problem, we can arrange something here on campus. There was no mosque in town for a while, so I let them use one of the upper rooms in the Center for Social Concerns. They're not forced to go to any of those services—it's opportunity, really, and they appreciate that. I think that's where you start with everybody. You don't go around whacking people over the head with religion.

A few years back, I think it's the National Council of Catholic Schools issued a study on the success rate, mostly based on test scores, of its K–12 students. They showed how much better the Catholic schools were educating their students, compared to public schools. Do you have any comments or theories on why that might have been and what the public schools could learn from the Catholic schools?

Well, part of it is just the sheer dedication of the teachers. I was taught for 12 years by nuns from an order down in Scranton, Pennsylvania, who were working up in Syracuse, New York—those poor gals were getting $30 a month for everything: food, clothing, travel, medical; and they all had to have master's degrees within five years of teaching. Now they probably don't have any more than 80 or so thousand of the nuns left, and most of them are what they call “superadults” now: in their 70s, 80s or 90s. What they did was good when it happened because it was an age of great immigration. You had hordes of Italian and French and Irish and other kids coming in, and they had to start out learning English. If you're taught in a language and have to hear it for four, five or six hours a day, and all the kids around you are using it, those kids can learn a language in about two or three months. It's almost cruel not to give them that chance, if they're going to live in a country where that language is going to be spoken.

Now there are so many Hispanics, whose first language isn't English, coming into the population, and the argument has been made in places like Texas and California, Florida and New York City for making Spanish the second language and teaching classes in Spanish in the public schools.

I'd give them one hour of Spanish a day, just so they're literate in the language they hear at home, and they'll probably wind up speaking it better than their parents. But I'd say, get them into English right away, because if they speak it well, they won't be sent out with a disadvantage and they won't be speaking English with an accent if they learn it when they're three, four, five or six years old. But the other thing that I think is terribly important: they'll miss all the discrimination. If someone is a reasonably attractive human being and speaks good English, he'll have no problem, but if he speaks broken English, immediately he'll go down a notch or two in the other person's eyes. And that's bad if he's looking for a job.

We ran an article in the Spring 1999 issue of TECHNOS, “Calling the NCAA's Heavy Hand,” by Joe Nathan, that criticizes the NCAA Clearinghouse for what he says is the setting of standards. You're familiar with what they do: They look over high school transcripts for student-athletes and accept or decline the credits for college admission. Whether or not the university has accepted these courses, if the NCAA Clearinghouse doesn't accept them, the student-athlete is rejected. Some of these kids have lost scholarships and playing time because of it or had to delay their schooling.

But they haven't gotten educated either. I spent four or five years on the Knight Commission, which proposed a whole program, the result of which was that 95 percent of it was adopted by the presidents of all the universities in the NCAA. It was a very simple program. We said the president's in charge; it's his university, and it goes up and down academically as he gives leadership or doesn't, so he has to make sure that nobody gets in who can't make it. At Notre Dame, we graduate 93 to 94 percent of all of our university athletes, and if they don't take tough classes like everybody else and if they don't pass them, they don't play. You just have to say you're going to do it. You can say that at the University of North Carolina; you could certainly say it of Stanford; you could say it of all the Ivies (but they don't play at the same level, many of them). The thing is that we have academic standards for what kids have to do in high school, and believe me, if a kid knows he's got to take 14 of these courses to get into college—and, if he never gets into college, he's never going to be anything in the professional world—it's not a big deal. But the important thing is they're getting educated. I heard our former basketball coach, Digger Phelps say, “In the course of my time at Notre Dame, I had 56 varsity athletes on scholarship, and how many graduated? 56.”

Well, they should, right?

I just think you've got to have at least minimal standards that make sense, and you have to impose them, and not say, “They're there, but we're going to find 15 ways of getting around them.” The Commission also said, “Not only does the president have to uphold the academic standard; on top of that, he's got to uphold the financial standard. No money is given to the athletic department or used in the athletic department that he doesn't countersign the order.” This is part of the way we run things here. And finally, we said the system has to be honest enough that every five years, the university president asks the NCAA to send a professional team in, which has access to him, to the coaches, to the players, to all the academic records, the disciplinary records, anything; and they can spend a whole month there, if they want to…

Kind of an audit?

Exactly: it's an intellectual, academic, and financial audit. And if they don't certify the university, it's out of the NCAA. The university is on probation. I think those things are possible. That report was very tough, and the presidents themselves had to vote on it, and they adopted about 95 percent of what we recommended be done. I don't give up hope. I worry about people who make a fetish out of sports and who don't give a hoot about the kid getting educated, they just want to win everything. It's also very profitable, I might add.

It certainly has been profitable for Notre Dame!

We don't cut any corners on the academic side.

You're quite a role model for young people, and I wonder: Who are your role models or heroes?

One of the greatest people to have existed on this globe in my lifetime is Mother Theresa. In fact I have a statue of her in my office. Of course, Dr. Tom Dooley was a great role model for a lot of youngsters, especially the Peace Corps types. But you can see I'm kind of service oriented, and they gave their whole lives very generously. There was criticism of both of them, but I don't take that seriously. I take the big impact of their lives, which was service to others who were poor and needed it. When you add it all up, we've had some very special kinds of people, like President Franklin Roosevelt during WW II and the Depression; he gave a lot of people hope. We've had other kinds of national heroes, like the space people— I was always kind of a space nut, so I admire the John Glenns of this world. In fact, I tried to get a flight myself.

You really wanted to be an astronaut?

They were looking for an older person, and three of us came down to the wire: the writer James Michener, the TV reporter Walter Cronkite, and me. The first shuttle flight was going to be a schoolteacher, then the next was going to be an older guy who was fairly well recognizable. I was in line, but then when the Challenger blew up, I thought, “That's the end of amateur hour.”

What's your next project?

Well, in a few minutes, I'm going to counsel a couple of Notre Dame graduates who are getting married. They came all the way from Singapore—how about that?

That's more important than this interview! Thank you for your time.

Thank you. And God bless you.

Portrait of Father Hesburgh by Pat West of the Indianapolis Star.