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A year after becoming head of the religion department, Hesburgh at 32 was made executive vice president of the university. Among his first acts: replacing Clarence Manion, the far-right dean of the law school, with Joseph O'Meara, a Cincinnati lawyer active in the American Civil Liberties Union. Hesburgh also took charge of the university's rapidly expanding building program, got it moving even faster. President John Cavanaugh knew a brilliant successor when he saw one: "You would have had to be blind not to spot his talents." At 35, Hesburgh became Notre Dame's 16th president.
Ready for Take-Off. What Hesburgh inherited was a university ready for takeoff. Father Cavanaugh, a onetime Studebaker salesman who dreamed of a grown-up university, had sold the necessity of change not only to his conservative congregation but also to the standpat alumni. Money began to flow, buildings to rise. Though 80% of Notre Dame's 30,000 alumni have graduated since 1940, and few are rich, they have chipped in at the rate of $700,000 a year, may hit $1,000,000 this year—a considerable feat considering what they also give to parochial schools.
Under Hesburgh, Notre Dame has put up twelve new buildings worth $12.6 million, started another $13.5 million construction program, increased faculty salaries by 90%, tripled endowment to $25 million. The school's operating budget is up threefold, its science spending tenfold. On completion, the new $8,000,000 library will house 2,000,000 books, five times more than the present library. All this is part of a ten-year (deadline: 1968) $66 million "Program for Excellence."
While raising bricks* and mortar, Hesburgh drastically revamped the curriculum, tossed out vocational courses by the score. He held down undergraduate enrollment, let graduate enrollment (now 795) grow. To get better students, he raised admission standards; the average IQ of entering freshmen has gone from 118 to 127. Since 1954, average College Board scores have risen 78 points to 536 on the verbal aptitude test, and 77 points to 579 on the math aptitude test (out of 800).
This is well below the 650-750 range on secular "prestige" campuses, but significantly rising. The Ford Foundation in 1960 gave Notre Dame the honor, as one of five rapidly improving universities (none other Catholic), of receiving $6,000,000 in no-strings grants.
Hesburgh is aware that overobedience and lack of initiative are among the chief criticisms brought against Catholic collegians. For 50 years, Notre Dame cut off lights and even the electricity in student rooms at 11 p.m. Three mornings a week, students had to sign in with prefects outside hall chapels, a way of encouraging attendance. This year Hesburgh dropped both restrictions (chapel attendance has not slipped). Hesburgh also cut eleven pages of student rules to two quick pages that, among other restrictions, prohibit students from having cars, from cheating or from "overdrinking." If it took Hesburgh nine years to make those changes, his hesitation is understandable. On the record, the old tight rein produced remarkably stable men. Not long ago, a visiting Harvard psychiatrist was astounded to find not a single undergraduate suicide in Notre Dame's history.