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Those rules, along with the other elevating standards Hesburgh has pounded into Notre Dame, leave other college presidents somewhat in awe. Says Jesuit Father Timothy Healy, president of Georgetown University: "If you ask American college presidents who is the most successful president they know, they'll say, 'Ted Hesburgh.' " Harvard's reticent Derek Bok will venture from Cambridge, Mass., to South Bend, Ind., this Sunday to deliver a rare extramural commencement speech in tribute to his old friend.
Hesburgh, who attended Notre Dame's Holy Cross seminary and later taught theology at the university, has gone at his prodigious works with unwavering energy and focus -- plus a regal self-assurance. A globe-trotter who covers as many as 150,000 miles a year proselytizing for Notre Dame, he has said Mass at the South Pole and at the Faculty House of the University of Moscow. (The difference between God and Hesburgh, goes an old campus joke, is that God is everywhere and Hesburgh everywhere but Notre Dame.) With this spiritual nourishment fed into a healthy ego, he retains a natural sense of command. "The very essence of leadership is you have to have a vision," he says. "It's got to be a vision you articulate clearly and forcefully on every occasion. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet." During student unrest in the '60s, he told the university community that protesters would be given 15 minutes to decide whether to desist or be suspended. Despite some grumbling from students, the ultimatum resulted in a calm few other campuses experienced.
The Hesburgh vision and trumpet have reached far beyond South Bend. He has always insisted that "my purpose is to produce educated Christians. I don't want to be Harvard, I want to be the greatest Catholic university in the world." Nevertheless, last fall he acted as point man for 111 Catholic college presidents who rebutted a Vatican schema for greater control over the appointment of theology professors at Catholic schools. Their objection was that such control could infringe academic freedom. "The church proclaims the word of God loud and clear without any doubts," says Hesburgh, whereas the "university is in the business of pushing the frontiers of knowledge."
This was not Hesburgh's first exchange with the Vatican. He declined a Cardinal's red hat from his friend Pope Paul VI. His commanding presence also elicited an offer from Lyndon Johnson to run the space program, which Hesburgh declined, commenting that a priest with poverty vows should not be running a $6 billion agency. He also rejected a Nixon proposal to head up the poverty program. "I never wanted to be a sort of Cardinal Richelieu," he commented of these Government offers. However, he has sat as chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation and as a board member of the Chase Manhattan Bank. And his deep feelings against racism led him to serve as chairman of Nixon's Civil Rights Commission until his political independence led Nixon to demand his resignation in 1972. "They'll probably appoint some rabbit in my place," growled Hesburgh.