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Teacher Evaluation

2012-05-17T08:30:00-04:00

Writing a column on faculty fashion is no small task. Indeed, the first thought that comes to mind is, “Faculty fashion? Isn’t that an oxymoron?”

It’s no secret that faculty members are famous for dressing poorly, outlandishly or, even at their best, in styles that lost popularity a decade or two or even more ago (the length of that time-lag is dependent primarily on the year the professor in question entered graduate school). What is it about academia that seemingly produces an inability to pay attention to dress and hair styles — styles that are a ubiquitous presence in the media and our daily encounters with normal people? Does graduate school somehow produce the superpower of resisting the conformity pressures of society? Or, as we like to say in the social sciences, perhaps this really is the result of a selection effect: Academia doesn’t produce the fashion faux pas tendency; rather, people with a stunted sense of style are somehow inordinately drawn to the profession of teaching and research.

My favorite explanation: Perhaps we just aren’t paying these people enough and so they have to continue wearing the subsistence sweatshirts from their grad school days.

Really, I don’t think it’s any of these — and particularly not because they can’t afford a trip to Hermès, Gucci or at least T.J. Maxx or the outlet mall. These people, contrary to what a casual observer might infer, are making conscious choices about what they wear, and those choices are intended to convey something. Now they might be mistaken about what message the viewer of their outfits receives, but we are all, professors included, constantly and purposely sending messages to others through the way we present ourselves.

What message might academics be trying to send when they flout the dictates of fashion and good taste, and ignore the color-clash pain they inflict on others? Well, it flows from the same reason we drive beat-up cars (rust-buckets that are still only automobiles in the academic sense) and refuse to edge our lawns. These choices are rarely driven by financial necessity, but rather because we take some kind of perverse pleasure in conspicuously displaying our disinterest in the material world. We wish to demonstrate that we just don’t care about these kinds of mundane trappings because we are so engrossed in the ethereal, all-consuming life of the mind.

Ah, it’s a lovely image, isn’t it? So taken with our own deep thoughts, we don’t even notice that our pants haven’t fit for 10 years, our belts don’t match our shoes, our collars aren’t buttoned down and maybe even that our shirts are inside-out. As long as we don’t get arrested for indecent exposure, well, then, that’s just good enough. The slobs, in fact, sometimes look down their noses at those who do dress more fashionably, as if to say that anyone who actually coordinates their shirt, pants and socks couldn’t possibly be very serious about their scholarly work.

Now that I’m spending more time doing administrative activities, I’ve encountered a different set of messages sent by clothing choices: Efficiency and formality conveyed by the suit — an industrious and hardworking demeanor reinforced when we take off the blazer and roll up our shirt sleeves, and, my favorite, the loosened-tie look that seems to say, “I had to dress up for something important today, but it wasn’t you!”

The question, though, is whether the messages sent are in fact the ones received. I’m afraid in the case of university faculty (who, it has been proven, can be pretty clueless about social interaction and norms) this often is not the case. It won’t surprise anyone to hear that students are considerably more fashion-conscious than their teachers. And believe me, they notice what you are wearing. I’ve heard many a snarky observation by students traipsing out of other people’s classes and have even had comments written on my teaching evaluations about how that student’s other professors dress! (Really, the half-page tirade I once received about some misguided soul who wore the same outfit — a red sweater and black slacks — to class every day was something to behold.)

Their reaction, by and large, is not, “Professor Doffsweater must be brilliant!” More likely it’s, “What a schmo” or “Wow, is she out-of-touch.” Or more pointed and problematic, “He doesn’t even care about himself — he clearly can’t give a second thought to me.” One thing is certain: While they are labeling the prof as a dweeb in their heads, they aren’t likely to also be thinking, “This person is just like me, I want to be just like her when I grow up!”

And let’s not leave us administrators out. When we refuse to stoop to even business casual, the message to our colleagues can often be something different than efficiency and industriousness. More likely, distance and inappropriate status display are inferred, neither of which is likely to help produce a genuine or productive interaction.

What to do to correct all of this? We’ve got a long way to go, judging from the sartorial sensibilities displayed at the most recent faculty gathering I attended. But before we call in Joan Rivers to critique what happened on the O’Shag carpet last week, ask Professor Blackwell to create a worst- and best-dressed list at the annual President’s dinner, or create a hot-or-not voting website to accompany Course Instructor Feedback evaluations, we could just start small. Spend a few moments thinking about what kind of reactions might result from the following small set of faculty fashion flops. Then go, and sin no more:

Twenty popular faculty styles **

1. I’m not an Oxford professor, but I play one at Notre Dame.

2. This outfit worked at IBM in 1957, so why not wear it every day?

3. Why tuck in my shirt? I’ll just have to do it again tomorrow.

4. Bow ties say “intellectual,” are not the slightest bit nerdy and, as a bonus, they emphasize my growing midsection.

5. Versace Monday, Armani Wednesday: I’m sure to get a red hot pepper on rateyourprofessor.com.

6. I don’t have time to iron. I was up all night changing how we understand the fundamental building blocks of the entire universe.

7. That hole burned by 18 molar hydrochloric acid isn’t that bad. Why waste a perfectly functional pair of pants?

8. If you can get it at Sears, it’s still in style.

9. Suspenders and a belt. I teach security studies after all.

10. No one will notice I’m wearing black tennis shoes with this suit.

11. I need those elbow patches. Reading is hard work!

12. Polyester is the new black.

13. My gigantic glasses from 1987 are still in perfectly good shape. I think I’ll just replace the lenses.

14. Peace and Love. It’s still the ’60s, isn’t it?

15.This leather jacket will let them know that I’m cool, man . . . I mean, dude.

16. I’m a low-level administrator, but I really, really, really want to be a high-level administrator.

17. I wanna wear jeans! But I’d better make it formal by adding a blazer.

18. It’s not that dirty. It was on the top of the laundry hamper.

19. My black pants aren’t too short. How else am I going to show off my new white socks?

20.To Tweed or not to Tweed? That is the question. And the answer is: To Tweed!!

**Fictional composites of well-known stereotypes — any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental. However, if you resemble one (or more) of these descriptions, you might want to reconsider your fashion choices.

Daniel J. Myers is vice president and associate provost for faculty affairs and a professor of sociology at Notre Dame.

Something to show for it

2012-05-09T08:45:00-04:00

It’s easy to lose sight of the fact — especially at universities where theory is a favorite pastime and ideas often remain in the abstract — that design is everywhere.

Your cherished heirloom bedstead likely began as a pencil sketch on a sawdusted workbench. The toilet down the hall took shape on computer screens. The car you drive to work represents the conceptual and practical talents of dozens, maybe hundreds, of automotive designers.

Design defines the things we wear, sure, but it’s infused into the ways we eat, sit, sleep, keep clean and keep time, too. Work and play, prayer and ritual, safety, security, shelter. All of it’s shaped for better or worse by the way our stuff’s designed.

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Fortunately, we have among us a few who know what they’re doing. We call them designers, inventors, craftspeople, creatives — men and women who have learned to conceive powerful ideas and express them less in words than in the work of their hands. They are hardworking, mystical fusions of artist, engineer and tinkering humanist whose labors give form, meaning and comfort to products — and to the lives of those who use them.

Designers see. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way,” Ruskin wrote as if wandering the cosmos. “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion — all in one.”

Back on Earth, in a Riley Hall basement office near the studio where student workbenches teem with things like ball valves, dissected kitchen appliances and the plastic prototypes of their latest visions, Professor Paul Down of Notre Dame’s industrial design program equates design with organization. “It’s just about ordering things for a particular purpose or service,” he says. “Whether you’re getting on board a jet plane or just unlocking the door to your house, it’s all about solutions that weren’t naturally growing on the trees when man arrived on the planet.”

Each year a group of Down’s industrial design students — juniors mostly — enroll in the Product Design Research Project course he teaches with the help of such colleagues as Ann-Marie Conrado and Michael Elwell and shop technician George Tisten. They learn the language of materials and mass-production manufacturing processes, identify household problems that may be most acutely experienced by children, the elderly and the disabled, and then benchmark, brainstorm, think, draw, build, test and re-test their way toward product designs that offer innovative solutions.

While their peers meet educational epiphanies in London, Rome or Uganda, product designers’ eureka moments come on field trips to places like the JMS Plastics Inc. factory, about a mile from campus, where they get their first serious exposure to processes from injection molding to profile extrusion.

Across campus, in the similarly subterranean Bond Hall workshop of Professor Robert Brandt, furniture designers have received the same sort of illumination — sometimes even personal guidance on a project — from the staff of Cole Hardwood in Logansport or Johnson’s Workbench, a South Bend lumberyard and woodworking supply store.

For Brandt, design may lie somewhat closer to Ruskin’s artisanal predilections for hand tools and the earthier glories of wood. Students taking his four-semester Furniture Design concentration in the School of Architecture start with a “simple” table. It may be their first step from the two-dimensional drawings of their studies in classical architecture toward the work of genuine understanding that is the act of building in three-dimensions. They explore precedents — the Shaker style or the neoclassical American Empire and Biedermeier styles of the early-to-mid 19th century; distinctive later movements like the Arts & Crafts, Art Nouveau and Mission; or even standout contemporary designers — but Brandt reminds his students not to bind themselves up in tradition. “We don’t make antiques in here, so it’s got to be an original design.”

Each student presents Brandt with three to five ideas, and soon they’re machining their wood and reaching for the rasps, files, saws and sanders. “Craft to me is just expressing your idea with clarity,” he says. “If you look at something that is poorly crafted, you can’t get past that. You think, well, this isn’t much. But if something is crafted well, then you’re drawn into it. You start to understand the idea, the intent, clearly.”

Process and product make for quiet drama in the days and nights of the student designer, each year germinating some of campus’ most heartfelt accomplishments. Down thinks of the grin on a former student’s face after a breakthrough led to a design for a baby stroller that could both climb a curb and support the weight of an elderly or disabled pusher. Brandt recalls one student for whom building just “didn’t come easy.” At 3 o’clock on the morning of the review, she stepped back from her first project with tears of joy streaming down her cheeks.

Down’s students emerge with process books that anchor their portfolio and, not infrequently, earn honors from the International Housewares Association’s annual Student Design Competition. Brandt’s students, most of whom pursue careers in architecture with a sharper eye for the relationship between buildings and furniture, keep their finished tables, chairs, desks, mirrors, cabinets or clocks. For fifth-year architecture student Cristina Gallo ’12, the sense of satisfaction is incomparable. “It’s great to have something you can show people and say, ‘I can do this.’”

John Nagy is an associate editor of this magazine.

The Lost Art of Dress

2012-04-30T09:00:00-04:00

A box about the size of a computer rests on the table in Linda Przybyszewski’s kitchen, filled with just a portion of her vast collection of vintage Vogue and Simplicity pattern books from the 1940s to the 1960s. Sorting through the box, she gestures and turns as the skirt of her dress swirls and swishes, a la Donna Reed in It’s a Wonderful Life.

I compliment the dress, asking about its design. That’s all it takes to get Przybyszewski gushing about the dress she’s made using a vintage 1945 Vogue pattern. The passion in her voice as she marvels at the garment’s details brings to mind Julia Child describing a perfectly cooked beef bourguignon — some of the terms may be unfamiliar, but it doesn’t matter because you know by the sounds that it must be nearly perfect:

“It’s my new favorite from 1945. I made it in navy blue polka-dot rayon faille with long sleeves gathered here at the cuffs. Look at this gored and pleated skirt — and the bodice is cleverly yoked to allow gathers over the bust. It’s the quintessential 1940s skirt from wartime. If you think of what it would look like in white with short sleeves, it would make the perfect nurse’s uniform!”

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Przybyszewski (pronounced preh-beh-SHEV-ski) is a Notre Dame associate professor of history, master dressmaker, collector of vintage pattern books and expert on the history of fashion. She owns more than 600 vintage pattern publications, fashion magazines, home economics textbooks and U.S. Department of Agriculture pamphlets. She’s written a book to be published next year whose working title is Nation of Slobs — an attempt, she says, to bring back the art of dress.

“We used to live a world where people cared about how they dressed. I am shocked how often I will be out somewhere, whether on a street or in a restaurant, and I see only a handful of people who seem dressed appropriately, and even fewer dressed beautifully,” she says.

Drawing inspiration from generations of women who taught the principles of dress in high schools and colleges — women she refers to as the “Dress Doctors,” Przybyszewski longs for the days when women in this country, well, knew how to dress appropriately.

She even teaches a class called Nation of Slobs: The Art, Ethics and Economics of Dress in Modern America, though her areas of academic specialization are actually cultural and legal history.

So how have we lapsed from a culture which so valued the art of appropriate dressing that it was included in public education curricula across the nation, to a culture that accepts (nearly expects!) to encounter grown women wearing pajama pants and slippers at the grocery store?

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, educating young women in the “art” of dress was as integral a part of their formal education as the “science” of housekeeping. High school and college textbooks with titles like The Mode in Dress and Home and Art in Home and Clothing enlightened the young female mind, assuring that garish gauntlets or passé peplums never hampered the future happiness and productivity of educated American women.

In 1923, the United States added a national Bureau of Home Economics to the USDA. By the 1930s, every public high school in the country and 36 land grant colleges had Home Economics Departments right alongside English and Science departments. Basic information like the six occasions for dress was taught to young women with the same academic rigor as algebraic equations or the periodic table of elements. (Incidentally, the six occasions for dress were: school; work/travel/city; housework; sports/spectator; evening in or out; afternoon affairs/tea.)

Simple, artful dressing (and living) was at one time so valued that home economists elevated the concept to the level of morality and honesty. Consider this, from Shelter and Clothing, a 1914 college textbook written by two women who taught at Teachers College at Columbia University:

A home based on the right principles will be simple. There will be simplicity of living, honesty in the expression of what is offered in the home. No ostentation or living beyond one’s means; simplicity in entertainment and in offering freely of what one has to friends, without apology or explanation; simple furnishings, simple, healthful food, simple, artistic clothing, all help to simplify life and give the homemakers more time for the family joys and intercourse.

So what happened?

“Blame it on the Baby Boomers!” says Przybyszewski.

“An increasing informality crept in after World War II as parents of Baby Boomers moved to the suburbs, and suddenly patios and dens became central to entertaining. People didn’t have to dress in formal attire as frequently.”

No need for evening gowns at a patio party, right?

Then women’s hairstyles began to slowly supplant the hat — a sartorial symbol of propriety.

“Poodle cuts, the sort of big hairdos, start in the late ’50s, and when you’ve inflated your hair to that degree, you don’t want to wear a hat and squish it. Sure, you’d see Jackie Kennedy wearing hats, but they really didn’t fit because of her big hairdo,” Przybyszewski says.

Then came the Youth Movement of the 1960s. In bygone eras, a teenage girl would look forward to looking like a grown-up, but when the ’60s rolled around, all the grown-ups wanted to look like teenage girls.

“If you take pattern books from the 1950s and the 1960s and you lay them side-by-side, it’s as if every model became a child. You go from this extraordinarily sophisticated look in the ’50s — sophisticated in design, sophisticated in cut, in color, so worldly, really — to just one decade later, when everyone is sporting what would have been known in another era as a toddler’s dress: a simple, A-line dress.” The gradual simplifying of design, according to Przybyszewski, eventually just becomes “stupidity of design.”

Paging wistfully through the couture section of a mid-1950s pattern book, she explains, “Dress designs of the 1950s were just more complicated, more difficult to create. So much more thought was put into them. There wasn’t even such a thing as a crew neck in dressmaking in the 1950s — this is what they did instead,” Przybyszewski says, pointing out a chic trapeze neckline.

Fast forward just one decade, to the mid-’60s: “Even the way fashion illustrators draw the models is transformed in the ’60s. These are supposed to be adults,” she says, scoffing at the models’ disproportionately oversized heads and large eyes, reminiscent of a small child. Think Twiggy.

“They don’t even bother to cut out sleeves in these dress styles. . . . They’re just sort of all one piece.”

Then came the 1970s, when home economics began to be formally dismantled, starting with a collective feminist sneer at the entire field, accompanied by congresswomen who openly criticized the federal funding of home economics on the grounds that it stereotyped people — 96 percent of people in the field were women.

“The number of people pursuing graduate degrees in home economics, specializing in costumes and textiles, drops precipitously in the 1970s,” Przybyszewski explains. “People just fled this field. The thought was: ‘If you’re not going to consider teaching people how to dress as a traditional art, then why should you bother studying the art principles and how they apply to clothing?’”

Home Economics in public schools got dumbed down or shrunk during the ’70s, and the entire system of teaching dressing, both in schools and in women’s magazines, was dismantled.

“All the knowledge that the Dress Doctors used to pass on to new generations was gone,” Przybyszewski says.

But there’s an interesting moment in the 1980s, as more women entered the workforce, when a book titled Dress for Success, first published in 1975, attempted to resurrect some semblance of the art of dressing.

“What this book did,” says Przybyszewski, “is rediscover some of the basic principles of what the Dress Doctors had been teaching for decades. The author advises that since women are going to enter the workforce, they had to dress in a more professional way.

“And since everyone during the ’60s and ’70s dressed like they were going to either the playground or a patio party, women needed to learn how to re-dress. Unfortunately, what they ended up with were lots of suits with little ties — designers’ attempts to re-create for women what men had in a standard suit and tie.”

It didn’t work.

So where does that leave us today? Are we doomed? Despite the gradual dismantling and marginalization of the art of dressing as an academic subject, how is it that some 21st century people still have managed to learn and apply the Dress Doctors’ basic principles of design, fit, color and occasion?

“Well, bits of the Dress Doctors’ advice, as though the pages were scattered to the wind, do show up in magazines and modern books, and some people may have put it all together. Secondly, these well-dressed people may simply prove that the Dress Doctors were right — that the principles of art, when applied to dress, naturally satisfy the mind and the eye. Some people still seek that satisfaction when they get dressed.”

But probably not the lady in pajama pants at the grocery store.

Susan Guibert is an assistant director in the Notre Dame office of public relations. She can be reached at sguibert@nd.edu.

An Irish home with London accents

2012-04-30T08:30:00-04:00

Sometimes looks can be deceiving.

For Londoners and tourists zipping past the red brick and brown terra-cotta building along Waterloo Road, the imposing letters stretching across much of the fifth floor identify the place as “The Royal Waterloo Hospital for Children and Women.” Smaller signs on descending floors inform passersby that the hospital is “Supported by Voluntary Contributions” with “Patrons” such as His Majesty King Edward VII, Her Majesty Queen Alexandra and the Prince and Princess of Wales. On the ground floor, over a door, there’s even direction to the “Out Patients Department.”

But spend some time examining the building, which appeared as “The Royal Veterans Hospital” in the 2009 movie Sherlock Holmes, and you see a modest plaque mounted next to the entrance with the phrase “Conway Hall” on one line and “University of Notre Dame (USA) in England” right below.

For the first time, Notre Dame has a student residence beyond campus it can call its own. Restoration of the art-nouveau façade — the 1823 building previously was rebuilt in the early 1900s — went hand-in-hand with a complete renovation of the interior.

The result, made possible with a gift from Notre Dame trustee Robert M. Conway ’66 and his wife, Ricki, can accommodate 268 students in 50,000 square feet of living space. The building now houses a chapel, an activities center, common rooms, study areas and flats that house four to eight students apiece. Completed at a cost of $62.1 million, Conway Hall opened last August, more than four months ahead of schedule.

At the dedication Mass on January 20, Rev. John I. Jenkins, CSC, ’76, president of Notre Dame, pointed out in his homily that the date marked the anniversary of the death in 1873 of Blessed Basil Moreau, founder of the Congregation of Holy Cross. Moreau, a French priest, had dispatched another French priest from his order, Edward Sorin (along with six Holy Cross brothers), to the United States to found a school.

The Notre Dame that Sorin established in 1842, according to Jenkins, now sends more than half its undergraduates to study abroad. Moreau’s international vision — he also sent religious to Algeria, Canada and what’s known today as Bangladesh — animates Notre Dame in a similar way.

In 1964, the University launched its first study-abroad program in Innsbruck, Austria. Today, less than a half-century later, more than 40 different programs in 20 countries exist for Notre Dame students and faculty. London’s 400 undergraduate and Law School students each year make it the largest.

Structurally and symbolically, Conway Hall represents the University’s efforts to become more international in its work and more global in its influence.

In his homily Jenkins called London “a center of culture, commerce and communication” as well as “the world’s most international city.” Having both Conway Hall and the University’s London Centre, a 15-minute stroll over the Thames River and through Trafalgar Square, allows Notre Dame to enhance both teaching and research.

What are called “Conway Conversations,” established by English literature Professor Greg Kucich, director of the London Undergraduate Program, bring academics, business figures and artists together for seminars, readings, concerts, debates and informal discussions. In addition, the London Centre, which co-hosts a full day’s discussion about internationalization and London to mark the Conway Hall dedication, hosts a steady lineup of lectures and international conferences with partners that have included Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre and Cambridge University.

Jenkins calls Conway Hall “the largest international residence building for the flagship program of an ambitious international agenda.” That agenda involves two distinct yet related objectives — students and faculty from Notre Dame going abroad at the same time students and scholars from abroad are coming to Notre Dame. Indeed, a few days after the Conway Hall festivities, University admissions officers met with prospective British students at the London Centre.

At a dinner following the dedication ceremony, Robert Conway, senior director of Goldman Sachs in London and a former chair of the academic affairs committee of the Board of Trustees, recalled his own student days at Notre Dame in the 1960s, but he concentrated on the present and future, especially the capacity of overseas study to provide “a transformational experience” in a young person’s knowledge of the world, maturity, confidence and sense of independence.

“They are why we are here,” Conway said of the students. “They are why we do what we do.”

Bob Schmuhl is the Walter H. Annenberg-Edmund P. Joyce Professor of American Studies and Journalism at Notre Dame, where he directs the John W. Gallivan Program in Journalism, Ethics & Democracy. He taught at the London Centre in 2004 and is teaching there this spring.

Sidewalk style

2012-04-20T07:00:00-04:00

At first glance, Notre Dame in the wintertime isn’t exactly a bastion of fashion. Couture takes a backseat to cozy in the teeth of South Bend’s chilling climate.

But take a look past the dull blacks and browns, and ND’s subtle sidewalk style starts to emerge. Outlined against the blue-gray sky, bursts of bold color and offbeat accessories announce individuality, moxie and a determination to look — dare we say it — cool.

Dressing Up

2012-04-20T06:55:00-04:00

Bandage skirts wrap shivering legs tight, as chattering platforms tap the alleyway pavement. Eager eyes scan the crowd, taking in the color, fit and cut of each costume. Girls pretend they see a friend and dart to the front of the line. Boys jealously watch, miles from the entrance. Holding out their IDs, the ladies wait for evaluation. Bouncers appraise each entry, with a quick peek at the card and a much longer look at the outfit.

It’s a Thursday night at Feve.

To Feve or not to Feve — is that even a question? Notre Dame undergrads eagerly anticipate the day they can get into Club Fever, known as The Backstage Grill by day and the hottest club South Bend has to offer on Thursday nights. It’s a Domer hot spot that starts the weekend off on a fun, carefree note, a place to forget exams and obligations for a few blissful hours.

Once inside, lacy layers abound, as everywhere you turn another skirt rides up another behind. Men rock plaid shirts and jeans, emphasizing just how “chill” they are. Hazy lights illuminate the basement, where Domers meet and mingle amid drinks. Conversation flows, easy and worry-free.

As you lay your eyes on your love for the night, you slowly but surely make your way to the dance floor. Maybe, just maybe, you end up in “the cage,” a barred and elevated stage students love to dance on. Whatever happens, it’s sure to guarantee laughs the next day.

Feve demands different levels of fashion intensity from guys and girls. Men keep it simple and casual, rarely venturing from their standard T-shirts or button-downs. For the ladies, however, Feve is a land of short skirts, tight shirts and heels your mother would die seeing you in. Girls let their hair down and their hemlines up during this special night each week, taking advantage of the chance to be somebody outside their classes and extracurriculars.

From 9 to 5, it’s all about the J. Crew cardigans, Ralph Lauren cords, Frye leather boots and Tory Burch totes. Between 5 and 7, it’s time to throw on some running shorts and take a jog around the lakes. After that, pull on the Uggs and sweats, sit around and relax. Once the clock strikes 9:30, the transformation begins.

The contradiction between the classroom and Feve uniforms epitomizes a challenge Notre Dame girls face. It’s the Rory Gilmore vs. Carrie Bradshaw, Hermione Granger vs. Serena van der Woodsen dilemma. We’re expected to be smart, quirky and cute, but there’s no denying the pressure to be beautiful, seductive and loads of carefree fun.

On Notre Dame’s campus, these personae collide just as they eventually did for the more conservative characters of our childhood. Rory, the sweet bookish teen on the WB’s old hit show Gilmore Girls, eventually rebelled and flew her scandalous flag. Harry Potter’s know-it-all Hermione coursed through puberty, and suddenly the jerseys were chasing her instead of vice versa.

Gossip Girl’s glamorous Serena van der Woodsen always commanded an audience among men, and Sex and the City’s Carrie Bradshaw was unashamedly focused on attracting male attention. An emphasis on drawing the eyes of the opposite sex exponentially multiplies in college, where hormones and hopes run high and wide.

At Notre Dame, we’re spiritual sisters by day, sorority sisters by night. The University expects us to be exemplary members of society. The reality of college calls us to be a pretty party in a petite package.

While strapping on our heels and heading out for the evening, we find ourselves asking, “Who will we be this time around? Rory and Hermione? Or Serena and Carrie?”

Girls just want to have fun. Cyndi Lauper knew what she was talking about then, and her words still ring true today. Being young and free is a blessing, and we don’t want to miss taking advantage of it.

But no one can deny that the pressure to be a femme fatale sometimes weighs just as heavily as those textbooks in our backpacks. It’s hard to find the balance, and it’s hard to discern if and when we really need to. For now, when it becomes too much to worry about, you can find us on the Feve dance floor.

Adriana Pratt of Carmel, Indiana, is majoring in political science, with a minor in journalism, ethics and democracy. She is an assistant managing editor at Notre Dame’s independent student-run paper, The Observer.

Style Points

2012-04-13T07:30:00-04:00

Any given Saturday during football season, the Hammes Notre Dame Bookstore is brimming with students, alumni, parents and friends looking for that perfect piece of Irish apparel.

Whether it’s The Shirt or the jersey of the season’s MVP, the options for fan gear seem endless. And with one walk across campus — game day or not — even a non-Domer will see the importance of ND-specific clothing.

But what happens when fashion makes its way onto the football field?

The Notre Dame football program has been synonymous with tradition for generations. From the gleaming gold helmets to a stadium intentionally void of a JumboTron, ND has made being classic a trend. Though green jerseys or special green accents have been utilized occasionally since the early 1900s, this football season saw changes that were more uniform — pun intended.

Celebrated former Notre Dame linebacker Maurice Crum Jr. ’08 described the new uniforms as “a great twist on a classic and a way to uphold the Irish tradition while being modern.”

The Irish first entered the world of style when they donned the “Under the Lights” throwback-style uniform for the Sept. 10, 2011, match-up against storied rival University of Michigan. The standard blue-and-white jerseys received some friendly competition from this adidas-designed version consisting of a white jersey with kelly green stripes paired with classic gold pants and the first shamrock-emblazoned helmet worn since the 1960s. Though the game ended in a heartbreaking loss, the uniforms remain a standout moment of the game in more ways than one.

Besides providing water cooler fodder for the following Monday, the uniforms also presented the University with a marketing opportunity by playing off of fans’ purchasing power and offering the retro-style jerseys for purchase.

The Irish pushed the bounds a little more a few weeks later when they descended on the Washington, D.C., area for the November 12 showdown against the Maryland Terrapins. This time, the Notre Dame helmets, gilded enough to rival the famous Dome, featured a shamrock design similar to that utilized for the Michigan game, but one writ larger in both size and flair. The helmet also displayed another deviation from the standard with a green facemask, a far cry from the traditional gray.

The uniform changes for this match-up were especially significant because they were the first displayed in a Shamrock Series contest. The neutral-site games in which the Irish face big-name opponents at even bigger-named venues will take the Irish to Chicago’s Soldier Field this fall for a (near) home game against the Miami Hurricanes, with a trip to Cowboys Stadium to face Arizona State the following year. Fans will be watching to see just how big and bold the team will get with its uniform tweaks and eye on style.

But is one shamrock-splattered helmet more than enough?

“I’m the biggest fan of the famous gold helmets . . . spray painted by students and then worn the next day at the game. They are the purest form of gold you’ll find on any athletic uniform,” stated SectionB blogger Alex McNamee. “And with the awful helmets [worn for the Maryland game], Brian Kelly is getting rid of that. . . . Respect tradition. Stick to it.”

However, the players seemed to enjoy the more brazen looks for the field. Some even took to Twitter and Facebook to playfully brag. Former Irish running back James Aldridge ’10 also enjoyed seeing something different on the field. “I like the new look because it is simple but has a modern touch,” he said. “It definitely feels like we have caught up with the times as far as our uniforms go.”

Some players went an extra step to pep their uniforms on their own. Kyle Brindza, Notre Dame’s freshman kicker, caused quite a stir with his electric-green cleats, which he described as a random bit of fashionable fate when he received one pair of purple and one pair of lime green cleats from Adidas.

Brindza told ESPN he saw “no other choice” when selecting his fancy footwear. “I wasn’t wearing . . . purple shoes.”

It is unlikely that Notre Dame will go as far afield as some universities have with future on-field looks, but perhaps some continued flair will add a (kelly green?) line or two to college football’s most storied program.

Amelia Thompson blogs about style at highendrearend.wordpress.com/.

Echoes: Father Sorin’s Velocipede

2012-04-13T07:00:00-04:00

The departure of Schuyler Colfax to Washington, D.C., to assume the vice presidency under Ulysses S. Grant was not the only big news story in South Bend in early 1869. On January 14 of that year, Colfax’s newspaper, The St. Joseph Valley Register, described the dramatic arrival of a promising new invention:

“A velocipede, all the way from France, passed through our streets — in an express wagon — on Monday last. Its destination was Notre Dame, where it will, no doubt, become quite a favorite with the exercise-loving students.”

This bicycle, as we would call it today, was an 80-pound affair composed of a solid iron frame, a suspended leather saddle, handlebars and two wooden carriage wheels, the front one boasting the all-important pedals.

Crude as it was, it had already sparked velocipédomanie in its homeland. Proponents touted the compact conveyance as the solution to the age-old quest for a practical, human-powered vehicle — a clever mechanical horse destined to serve as the “people’s nag.”

The man who engineered this curious acquisition was none other than Rev. Edward Sorin, CSC, Notre Dame’s founding father. In the autumn of 1868, after presiding over the bucolic oasis for nearly a quarter century — during which time the student population had ballooned to almost 500 — he had returned to his homeland for a prolonged visit.

Although he had relinquished the University’s presidency to assume higher duties with his religious order, Sorin was still involved with its affairs. He sought out Bordeaux wine and cigars for resident priests and faculty as well as “premiums” for the students (knickknacks to be awarded at graduation for academic achievements). He was also determined to set up an exchange program with Notre Dame de Ste. Croix in Neuilly-sur-Seine, outside Paris, and a similar program for the young women of Saint Mary’s College.

Shortly after his arrival, while strolling the streets of Paris, he heard a frightening rumble. Wheeling around, he saw a man flash by, straddling a curious contraption. “What is that?” he asked his companion. “A velocipede? I must have one for Notre Dame.”

Sorin’s reaction was similar to that of the Paris correspondent to The New York Times, who had observed the first of these creatures during the 1867 Universal Exposition. Under the heading, “A Revolution in Locomotion,” the reporter marveled how the “scarcely visible” velocipede could eclipse 12 miles an hour, giving the rider “the comical appearance of flying through the air.”

Among its advantages were “great economy of time as well as money,” “immense development of muscle and lung” and the fostering of “independence of character.” For women, it would “force adoption of the bloomer or some other more convenient costume.” For urbanites, it would provide much-needed mobility. “Is it not a disgrace to the inventive age we live in,” the reporter concluded, “to see a man obliged to employ, in order to get through the street, a great vehicle, as large almost as a house? So let us have the velocipedes.”

They were not, however, fast in coming to the United States. Before Sorin’s purchase, American carriage-makers had imported a few French models for study, but most hesitated to undertake production. As a trade journal explained, the proposition was costly, with no guarantee that the maker “could get at it profitably” before the fad faded. Thanks to Sorin’s vision, Notre Dame would become the first American institution blessed with the newfangled bicycle.

A swift-footed creature

On December 10, 1868, Sorin wrote to his students to signal that a prized specimen was on its way to them. “I wish I could have sent a dozen, but my income did not allow of more than this one. That it will be a source of new and great enjoyments, I have no doubt.”

Writing to Rev. William Corby, CSC, then Notre Dame’s president, Sorin elaborated: “Such is the furor of the people about this new invention that I came very near to be obliged to wait 2 months. The price is 250 francs, unpaid, for a good reason, that my treasury is out.”

Corby might well have deemed Sorin’s purchase rash. That sum amounted to about $50, fully a third of the room, board and tuition Notre Dame charged for an entire semester. But Sorin was a man of swift, decisive and unpredictable action. He had, after all, pursued his plan to found a college in the New World before he had cleared the idea with his superiors. On January 11, 1869, Corby demurely replied: “They [the students] are delighted with the idea of having a velocipede. But it has not arrived yet. When last seen it was at Cleveland, Ohio.”

In fact, it would arrive on campus that day. Three priests spent the afternoon trying to ride the bicycle outdoors, to no avail. As one witness noted, “The roads here leave much to be desired.” The students fared little better, trying to tame the “fiery steed” in the gymnasium. Recalled one: “[We] took turns, each one riding until he fell off, and such a fall generally involved a skinned shin. The cautious Father Granger nervously cried out: ‘Watch out! You break zumpsing!’”

A student committee, replying to Sorin, tactfully acknowledged their struggles: “Many thanks for the beautiful velocipede which you have so kindly sent. That it will be the source of immense amusement we have no doubt, but as yet it has not been found.”

A faculty committee also wrote to Sorin: “We rather think that the velocipede is the emblem of the rapid race Notre Dame is to run in the attainment of all that is true, beautiful and good.” Expressing its hope that Sorin would return to the University in time for the silver jubilee that spring, it added, “The only danger is that the reckless swift-footed creature may carry us all to destruction before your return.”

Despite his caprice, Sorin knew the velocipede would give students a much-appreciated outlet. They had demanding schedules, rising at 5 in the morning and studying until 6 each evening, six days a week. As one historian observed, “It was a regimen typical of the French educational practice, designed to keep a student so active he had neither time nor energy to get into mischief.”

Besides, Sorin recognized that the velocipede artfully addressed two topical objectives. First, exercise. As the United States transitioned from an agricultural to an industrial society, its citizens were thought to be increasingly sedentary and deprived of fresh air. Notre Dame had long encouraged its students to partake in sports, notably baseball, but the greater the variety the better.

The other pressing concern was speed, that is, to be fast and efficient. Senior Thomas William Ewing no doubt had the University’s velocipede in mind when he delivered an address to his classmates in April 1869 on the progress of locomotion. Observed the witty Ewing: “We live in a fast age; we talk fast, read fast, break fast.”

Barely a month after the arrival of Notre Dame’s velocipede, the mania had spread across the United States. The New York Times proclaimed, “Never before in the history of manufactures in this country has there arisen such a demand for an article.” American carriage-makers worked around the clock to produce bicycles. Rinks opened in every major city to teach the new art.

Naturally the craze reached South Bend, a bustling town of 10,000 with several carriage-makers, including Studebaker of future automotive fame. Locally made bicycles were displayed in the windows of hardware stores, and Hood’s Opera House regularly hosted races and exhibitions. The Register reported that local boys challenged the Notre Dame students to a velocipede race in hopes that they would be “slowed out of a few greenbacks.” But the newspaper failed to record the outcome.

The true test of the bicycle, however, would play out that spring, when South Bend’s velocipedists took to the road (or the smooth sidewalks). There was little doubt that they could exceed the legal limit of 6 miles an hour, but whether they could comfortably maintain such a clip over long distances remained to be seen.

The Register noted with a hint of optimism, “Those who have tried the velocipede say it doesn’t require any more strength and exertion to run it than it does to saw hard wood with a dull saw.” The Notre Dame faculty, however, found their model neither fast nor bearable. In May 1869, the student magazine Scholastic reported that several members had pedaled “some distance from the College,” but that “nearly every one of them returned limping, wincing, and rubbing parts affected.”

Sorin returned to campus in late May to a tumultuous reception. He must have been pleased to learn how much his velocipede had been ridden, indoors and outdoors. But as the Register observed, interest in the vehicle was fading rapidly:

“The velocipede mania has about exhausted itself here. Only occasionally a solitary bicyclist may be seen wobbling along our pavements, and with the approach of summer, these solitary ones will also disappear.”

What became of Notre Dame’s velocipede is a mystery, but it likely fell to pieces and was cast aside before the arrival of fall.

Sorin, who died in 1893, did not quite make it to the University’s golden jubilee. But he did live to see two generations of bicycles on campus. The first, prominent in the 1880s, was the fleet but precarious “high wheeler” comprised of an enormous front wheel and a tiny trailer. The second was the so-called “safety” bicycle, the prototype of the modern bicycle with its chain-and-sprocket drive and inflatable tires. It at last delivered on the bicycle’s promise to furnish safe, efficient and enjoyable transportation.

Editor’s note: The answer to one important question about Sorin’s velocipede eluded writer David Herlihy during his October visit to campus and the University’s archives, where even a meticulous search for the original receipt proved futile. Exactly what kind of bicycle was it? Herlihy sent the one photo he found of the Notre Dame bike to his expert contacts in the United States and France, and the strong consensus “is that it was most likely a Sargent velocipede, since it strongly resembles several existing models as well as the Sargent patents.” Continues Herlihy, “That would be consistent with Sorin’s statement that the velocipede was made by a ‘large house In Paris’ (though not the largest, which would have been Michaux).” And now you know the rest of the story.

Boston-based freelance writer David Herlihy is the author of Bicycle: The History and The Lost Cyclist, the story of Frank Lenz and his ill-fated round-the-world journey on a safety bicycle in 1892-1894.

Photo from Notre Dame Archives.

Sister Jean Lenz, OSF: Leading with her heart

2012-04-03T08:45:00-04:00

My first meeting with Sister Jean: January 1975, O’Shaughnessy Hall, freshman year, sitting spellbound in her class, The Gospels of Christ.

My last meeting with her: October 8, 2011, Dujarie House nursing center, before the ND-Air Force game, catching up, laughing, going to Mass in the chapel, eating lunch together, all the time Sister Jean seated in a wheelchair, fighting pain from the cancer that eventually took her.

The years in between: becoming friends, with Sister Jean always ready to listen and ride the roller-coaster events of life with me — the miracle of falling in love, marriage (she gave the homily at our Sacred Heart wedding, and I can still hear her words about love’s mystery), births, deaths, miscarriages, counseling sessions, pink slips, cross-country moves, new jobs and promotions. When I won a trip for two to Hawaii at my 25th ND class reunion, Sister Jean was thrilled that it coincided with my 20th wedding anniversary. But you didn’t need to be a winner to catch her ear. She knew in her bones that loss is one way God gets our attention, breaks our hearts open to something more, and that God’s love does the shattering.

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Sister Jean’s last lecture: Once Sister Jean shared a dream about teaching class in the ND Stadium. She didn’t provide any specifics, but all who knew and loved her can imagine their own version of Sister Jean’s last lecture to a packed house.

Sister Jean Lenz’s last lecture

“I had this crazy dream the other night. I was teaching class in the Notre Dame Stadium.” — Sister Jean Lenz, OSF

Over 80,000 strong, decked out in blue and gold, we stream into the stadium, grads telling Sister Jean stories as we settle into bleachers, eyes straining to see the welcoming, daring woman standing at the coin-toss spot on the 50, then the crackle of the mic, a hush falling over the crowd, waiting to hear her voice, her laugh, one last time to be held by her wide-open heart.

Lesson One: Be prepared to believe anything . . . as long as it’s incredible

She starts with our favorite, the Parable of Spring Streakers. Early in her career as rector of Farley, a pioneer of ND’s venture into co-education after 130 years as an all-male bastion, near midnight, deep into grading theology papers, suddenly the husky-throated chant, “Farley! Farley! Farley!” Swinging the door open toward a crowd of some hundred young men wearing only their masculinity, ready to charge the hall but stopped cold by Jean’s shout: “You’re not coming in here dressed like that!” “Oh, no, it’s Sister Jean!”

Scrambling behind bushes, frozen in shock, stooped backs facing a nun standing tall, then a cry of brotherhood: “Let’s get Lyons!” Jean dashing to the phone, warning the Lyons rector to bolt her doors against the marauders of springtime. Catching her breath, Jean asks Farley’s security guard, Hazel, “Am I dreaming or did this really just happen?” Behind her, the clapping of Farley women.

Lesson Two: Grow up and grow deep

“Looking back on my life, there’s been more peace and chaos, laughter and tears, more life and death and grace than I ever dared to imagine,” she says. “So much gift!” The lion’s share of rectoring — refereeing shouting matches between roommates, listening to parental problems, romance woes, counseling that “some people get you ready for other people,” all those evening talks and walks around the lake, her life a front-row seat at a long-running Broadway drama.

Her darkest days, facing the passing of Farley women — Cindy, Terry, Kathy, Mary, Michelle and Rita — so much grief giving way to wisdom, resurrection, in the re-telling of their stories, keeping them alive.

Always the torrent of students’ questions about the life of the Spirit, yet in the silence of watching others kneel down and pray, in chapels, at the Grotto, on retreat, words fell away, and as Eliot wrote, “At the still point of the turning world . . . there the dance is.”

Lesson Three: When you’re asked to run through sprinklers at midnight, say yes

Sometimes when there’s a knock on your door, Jean said, it’s a request, a summons to take you beyond your comfort zone, to grace, to joy. “Will you run through the sprinklers with me?” asked the Farley resident. “I heard them swish on outside but don’t want to go alone.”

“For a moment I stood still with a stare, my mouth open, then I closed the door behind me, and we left Farley laughing,” she said.

“In all, we ran the whole north quad, finally arriving back at Farley’s south entrance — drenched, laughing, out of breath, a bit exhausted, and so refreshed.” That midnight moment, an apt image for her 38 years at Notre Dame — drenched in laughter or sorrow, breathless or exhausted or so refreshed.

Now names, faces come out of nowhere — students she taught or knew, all the Farley women, her 10 Franciscan sisters with her in rector ranks, Holy Cross colleagues, ND staff, workers at the Pay Caf, friends, family. “In the midst of late-night musings, especially when the heat hangs heavy, I think I hear a knock at the door, and I’m so ready for another sprinkler run in midnight moonlight, but deep down I know that only happens once in a lifetime.”

In the packed ND Stadium, silence. Then Jean’s classic farewell, “Bye-bye for now.”

Editor’s Note: Sister Jean Lenz’s book, Loyal Sons & Daughters: A Notre Dame Memoir, provided much of the background material for “Sister Jean’s last lecture.”

Marianne Murphy Zarzana writes and teaches in the English Department at Southwest Minnesota State University, Marshall. She and her husband, Jim Zarzana ’85Ph.D., are the parents of Elaine Zarzana ’08. Her blog about writing, Fly-over Country, is at mariannezarzana.com.

Seen & heard on campus

2012-04-03T08:25:00-04:00

The University community returned for the spring semester to a letter from the president, Father John I. Jenkins, CSC, asking students, faculty and staff to “report promptly and fully any questionable conduct.” Although he cautioned, “We must be careful not to judge prematurely,” Jenkins said events at Penn State University had prompted Notre Dame “to consider what we can do to prevent similar transgressions here.” Noting connections between “what is alleged to have occurred at Penn State with the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church,” he said “universities and religious institutions may be particularly vulnerable to such failures” because of the “pride and devotion that may have made otherwise good people . . . reluctant to report behavior that was so dramatically at odds with their ideals, or to report people whom they respect and for whom they care.” The letter affirmed that Notre Dame does not tolerate the abuse or exploitation of individuals and called for the reporting of “problematic” conduct, broadly understood to include “ethical lapses, failures to adhere to University policies by faculty or staff, student honor code violations, safety concerns, criminal conduct or any other situation that needs attention.” . . .

A St. Patrick’s Day to remember was in the works as the magazine went to press in March of 2012. Enda Kenny, the Taoiseach — prime minister — of Ireland had announced plans to stop on campus to pay his respects to Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, and confer Irish citizenship upon the University’s 94-year-old president emeritus. Kenny’s itinerary on the Irish-American high feast had him en route from Chicago to New York as part of his annual St. Patrick’s Day trip to the United States. . . .

The Notre Dame Bike Repair Shop, a valued modern component of a venerable campus cycling tradition that dates back nearly 150 years — see Father Sorin’s Velocipede" — closed this winter when it lost its garage in the Old Security Building to a renovation and expansion project that will provide workshop and studio space for architecture, art and design students. The student-run service of the Notre Dame Security Police provided free repairs to students, faculty and staff, culling its stock of replacement parts from the fleet of abandoned bicycles that security officers collect at the end of each year. Junior Jon Schommer, a student mechanic, said the shop fixed 331 bikes in 2010-11 and required only a heated garage on campus for bike and tool storage. Student letters to The Observer decried the shuttering as a blow to campus sustainability — and safety, considering the cost of fixing damaged gears and brakes at professional shops. Most heartfelt was the lament from Carroll Hall resident Jason Kippenbrock, who worried the closure would “condemn Vermin [the mascot of campus’ most far-flung dorm] to perpetually long and tedious journeys to class as we attempt to survive the year without our precious (albeit prone to breaking) bicycles.” . . .

Coming in around #65 on Twitter’s Irish-language Hot 500 is Notre Dame Brian Boll (@bhriain), who graduated in January. But the Detroit-area native didn’t just start racking up the tweets on his first day of introductory Irish. Boll changed his major several times before settling on a self-designed program in Irish Cultural and Language Studies, where he has similarly distinguished himself in demonstrating how social media can support the learning of a foreign language. Last year he tweeted in Irish twice a day on average, mostly “about current events . . . things I’m interested in, including plenty about the Irish language itself and the community surrounding all that,” he says. The activity notched his place on Indigenous Tweets, a website created by a St. Louis University computer science professor to help speakers of minority languages build online communities through Twitter. Now Boll hopes to work in the Gaeltacht, Ireland’s Irish-speaking, nonvirtual community in the island’s rural west, where he spent the summer after his freshman year in a language immersion program. . . .

When it comes to tweeting, the tapping out of one’s fascinations to adoring followers in 140 characters or less, not even Brian Boll can keep up with Skylar Diggins (@SkyDigg4) the junior point-guard phenom and social-media über-magnet. Tweetscenter, a website that tracks and evaluates athletes’ social media performance, listed Diggins — who had nearly 150,000 followers as of the end of February — sixth on its Power Rankings, not quite as high as celebrity athletes Chad Ochocinco or LeBron James but out ahead of Tim Tebow in the purported quality and frequency of her posts. But the soundbyte stardom hasn’t robbed Diggins of her wits or perspective. “Do you think we don’t know that we don’t make a lot in the league?” she retorted when asked by New York Times Magazine writer Andrew Goldman about female professional athletes’ salaries and her career hopes. “We can’t sit on the edge of the bench waving a towel and get paid $400,000, so we have to make sure we come up with a strong Plan B. Right now I’m in business-management entrepreneurship in one of the country’s top undergrad business programs.” . . .

Joining the likes of coaches Ara Parseghian, Muffet McGraw and TV sportscaster and Notre Dame parent Dick Vitale, Carolyn Woo has been named an honorary Notre Dame alumna. In January, Woo formally stepped down as the Martin J. Gillen Dean of the Mendoza College of Business, a position she had held since 1997, to serve as president and CEO of the Baltimore-based Catholic Relief Services. “For me, I move forward to follow the mission and mandate of Notre Dame: to trust in God, to share our blessings and surrender ourselves for bringing about the kingdom of God here and now,” Woo said upon receiving the distinction in December. At press time, the University had not made any announcements about the search to find Woo’s successor as dean. . . .

The Prince of Wales couldn’t lift the award that Michael Lykoudis, the Francis and Kathleen Rooney Dean of Notre Dame’s School of Architecture, presented to him January 27, 2012, at Saint James’s Palace in London. Even with Lykoudis and philanthropist Richard H. Driehaus there to help, Prince Charles decided against moving the model of Athens’ Tower of the Winds from its safe perch on the dais. A longtime supporter of traditional architecture and sustainable urban planning — the basis of the Notre Dame architecture curriculum — His Royal Highness has championed development, reconstruction and preservation efforts around the world. He has also been a forceful critic of modern architecture, endearing him to classicists and their supporters such as Driehaus, who each year at Notre Dame presents a major award in his name to a practicing classical architect. To recognize Prince Charles, the School and Driehaus established a one-time honor — The Richard H. Driehaus Prize at the University of Notre Dame Patronage Award — which included a $150,000 donation to the Prince’s Foundation for Building Community. “Perhaps like a piggy bank, it’s inside there,” Prince Charles said of the cash prize, gesturing toward the heavy model during his address to the foundation’s annual conference. The foundation will use the gift to establish an intensive, one-year undergraduate diploma course in sustainability and the building arts, a longstanding ambition that the award made possible. “If I may say so,” the Prince added, “it’s come like Father Christmas.” . . .

The University’s accomplishments in overseas development programs, especially in East Africa and Haiti, and its consolidating interdisciplinary strengths in research that targets pressing global problems in energy, the environment, technology, economic development and public health, were showcased late last year in a day-long Forum on Global Development in Washington, D.C. The event, a Notre Dame-led collaboration through the Office of Research, brought together members of Congress and federal foreign aid officials with ND faculty and active partners from foundations, businesses and humanitarian organizations to talk about development investment, infrastructure and human dignity amid a budgetary atmosphere increasingly keen on innovation and measurable results. “The work that Notre Dame is doing globally not only alleviates human suffering but also defines America to the world,” U.S. Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois told participants. “Time and again Notre Dame has risen to the challenge, and today we need you more than ever.” Watch videos about the forum and Notre Dame’s global development programs at globalforum.nd.edu. . . .

The winter of 1959 was hard on American pop music, and the bad news on the doorstep nearly reached the Golden Dome. On The Day the Music Died, a gathering February snowstorm notoriously claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson and their young pilot when their plane crashed after takeoff from Clear Lake, Iowa. Six weeks later, mindful of that disaster, the members of The Kingston Trio found themselves in a grimly similar situation, their plane descending and the pilot fighting engine trouble, en route to a gig at Notre Dame. “We knew we were dead,” singer and guitarist Bob Shane recently told The Fretboard Journal. This time, however, the night ended happily. While the band drained a liquor bottle, their pilot, who’d flown B-17s during World War II, managed a safe landing in a field just a few miles from campus. They even made it to the old Fieldhouse on time. There, however, events took another unexpected turn when a priest greeted them with a warning: Keep your on-stage language clean lest you find yourselves unplugged. Recalled Shane, “We finished the first opening act and nobody is cheering; [bandmate] David [Guard] said, ‘Father such and such said that if we did any blue material here they would turn off the lights and the sound.’ Then there is this silence. And then a sole voice from the top of a bleacher called out ‘Horsesh—!’ And the whole place went crazy. The crowd was pounding their feet on the bleachers and making this weird rumbling sound. That was some day.”

Cafe Choice: creative work by Notre Dame people

2012-04-03T08:20:00-04:00

The Kings of Tharsis: Medieval and Renaissance Music for Epiphany, Schola Antiqua of Chicago, Michael Alan Anderson ’97, director. (Discantus Recordings). The ensemble performs songs ranging from plainchants to six-voice motets, chiefly by 16th century composers, all celebrating the feast of Epiphany. The album features music that previously had not received a modern recording. Full texts, translations and previews of the songs on this 10-track CD can be found at chicagochant.org.

Pray for Rain, Mutts (Mutts Music). This first full-length album by the rock ’n’ roll band with attitude, with lyrics by Mike Maimone ’04, is dedicated to “the protesters on Wall St. who have inspired people of all races, faiths & political affiliations to unite.” The trio of Maimone, keyboard/vocals; Bob Buckstaff, bass; and Chris Faller, drums, is described by Time Out Chicago as “Like Tom Waits fronting a garage band.” Songs from the 11-track album can be downloaded at muttsmusic.com.

God Bless America, University of Notre Dame Band, directed by Dr. Kenneth Dye. This celebration of the band’s 166th year and 124th football season is available both as a CD and a DVD. Among the highlights from its 2011 season are the band’s halftime show with the music group Chicago and its performance on the front lawn of the U.S. Capitol Building. Along with popular hits performed by the group, traditional school songs are also included. The CD and the DVD can be ordered at web.band.nd.edu/catalog/.

Discover Christ: Developing a Personal Relationship with Jesus, Bert Ghezzi ’69Ph.D. and Dave Nodar (Our Sunday Visitor). “What is the meaning of life?” “Why does Jesus matter?” “Why is the Resurrection important to us?” Through personal stories, scripture and testimonies, the authors guide readers through a series of pivotal questions that invite them to embrace the answer found in the New Testament. They conclude with a look at “Community and Sacraments: Why We Need the Church.”

Windfall Nights, William Claypool ’72 (iUniverse). A novel of redemption, the story follows Julian, a fifth-year college senior, and Thomas, a handyman Julian meets at his part-time job as a night bellman at a second-rate hotel. The two men later go their separate ways, but each arrives in Saigon at the height of the Vietnam War, where Julian is pursuing his career as a journalist and Thomas is following his destiny.

Here Lies Hugh Glass: A Mountain Man, A Bear, and the Rise of the American Nation, Jon T. Coleman (Hill and Wang). In 1823, trapper Hugh Glass was nearly killed by a grizzly bear, and two members of his company eventually abandoned the dying man. Glass then crawled 200 miles to safety and sought revenge on those two men. Coleman, a ND associate professor of history, here looks at the myth that grew around this frontier man and discusses how such tales of Western survival contributed to building the idea of American exceptionalism.

The Harrisburg 7 and the New Catholic Left, William O’Rourke (University of Notre Dame Press). The religious antiwar protests of the Vietnam War era form the background of this reprint, which brings to life the 1972 trial of seven anti-war activists who were accused of conspiring to raid federal offices, bomb federal property and kidnap presidential adviser Henry Kissinger. The 40th anniversary edition features a new afterword by the author, a ND professor of English, that includes a history of the new Catholic Left for the past four decades.

Attack of the Theocrats: How the Religious Right Harms Us All — and What We Can Do About It, Sean Faircloth ’82 (Pitchstone Publishers). This country’s founding principle of the separation of church and state is at risk, the author writes, as “our present descent toward theocracy and the privileging of religion in law unjustly harms us in multiple ways.” He discusses how religious bias can, for example, hurt our children, since religious child-care centers in some states are exempt from safety regulations. He ends with “a patriotic plan to reclaim America.”

Contested Illnesses: Citizens, Science, and Health Social Movements, edited by Phil Brown, Rachel Morello-Frosch, Stephen Zavestoski ’94, and the Contested Illnesses Research Group (University of California Press). Health social movements are at the forefront of promoting social and policy changes to address such factors as environment and ecological health. Here essayists examine such issues as “Air toxics exposures and health risks among schoolchildren in Los Angeles”; “Women’s experience of household chemical exposure”; and “The public paradigm of the environmental breast cancer movement.”

Undisputed: Notre Dame, National Champions 1966, Mark O. Hubbard ’72 (Vantage Press). Avid football fans still debate Coach Ara Parseghian’s decision to kick a field goal rather than go for a winning touchdown in the Nov. 19, 1966, 10-10 tie game between ND and Michigan State — which played to a TV audience of 33 million, at the time the largest TV sports audience ever. The author here covers the players, coaches and the details of that famous game and the winning 1966 season, which resulted in a national championship for the Notre Dame football team.

Café choice web extra

God’s Icebreaker: The Life and Adventures of Father Ted Hesburgh of Notre Dame, Jill A. Boughton and Julie Walters (Corby Books). Written especially for young readers, this biography of Father Ted, who served as president of Notre Dame from 1952 to ’87, tells stories of the priest who dedicated his life to the Catholic Church, higher education, civil rights and world peace. A timeline and a series of black-and-white pictures round out the text.

Beat Yesterday: A Business Novel, Dan Coughlin ’85 (BookBaby). How does a business sustain success over the long term? The author, an executive coach, focuses on how an individual’s behavior impacts short-term and long-term results. Its practical insights are part of a fictional story of two men struggling to stay true to their purpose at work. The business novel is available in two e-book formats — one for Kindle and the other for iPad, Nook, Sony Reader and other devices.

Blind Spot: War and Christian Identity, Dorothy Garrity Ranaghan ’66M.A. (New City Press). A founding member of People of Praise, a charismatic, ecumenical Christian covenant community, the author here discusses the complex subject of war and violence. Stanley Hauerwas, professor of theological ethics at the Divinity School of Duke University, writes, “Dorothy Ranaghan helps us see the difference the Holy Spirit can make for how we as a Church can be an alternative to war.”

Litigation and Prevention of Insurer Bad Faith, 3d, Dennis J. Wall ’73 (West Publishing). This two-volume resource explains the rules of insurance bad faith law and offers examples of state and federal complaints and answers as well as bad faith law developments from every U.S. jurisdiction. It also includes sample correspondence between the insured, insurer and counsel and a look at future expectations about bad faith law.

Cicero’s Practical Philosophy, edited by Walter Nicgorski (University of Notre Dame Press). The nine contributors’ essays here focus on a discussion of the key moral virtues that shaped Cicero’s ethics, as well as on many of his primary writings. It features Nicgorski’s seminal essay, “Cicero and the Rebirth of Political Philosophy.” The editor is a professor in Notre Dame’s program of liberal studies and a concurrent professor of political science.

Law, Person and Community: Philosophical, Theological, and Comparative Perspectives on Canon Law, John J. Coughlin, OFM (Oxford University Press). Father Coughlin, a Notre Dame law professor, probes the relationship between canon law, theology and natural law. He addresses how canon law relates to current issues in legal theory, including the right of religious freedom for individuals and communities.

European Transformations: The Long Twelfth Century, edited by Thomas F.X. Noble and John Van Engen (University of Notre Dame Press). Part of the Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies series, this collection showcases essays by 19 medievalists. The contributors address such topics as feudalism, women’s roles in medieval society, and Jewish and Muslim communities, with a look at England and France, Scandinavia, Iberia and Eastern Europe. The editors are both history professors at Notre Dame.

Deaths in the family

2012-04-03T08:10:00-04:00

There may be no higher compliment paid a teacher by a former student than the one Princeton University biologist and Nobel laureate Eric Wieschaus ’69 gave his old Notre Dame professor a few years ago when he told Vanderbilt Medical Center’s Lens magazine how “*Harvey Bender* showed me it was possible to have a good life as a scientist.” Bender, a genetics expert whose Drosophila laboratory at Notre Dame was an early proving ground for Wieschaus’ prizewinning work in the embryology of the infamous fruit fly, died in October 2011 at age 78.

Related article
Sister Jean’s last lecture

Bender came to Notre Dame in 1960 as a young developmental biologist with enviable research credentials. But what Dr. James Gajewski ’78 remembers was the “absolute dedication to teaching” his professor displayed to the thousands of students who took Bender’s courses over the next 50 years. Known as a phenomenal lecturer, Bender liked to joke, provoke and ask questions and became known for essay-driven exams in which students had to think through genetics problems based on confounding data sets. Gajewski, who uses the same techniques with his medical students, called the exercise an “extraordinary gift” to generations of doctors and research scientists.

Many of those students also became dinner guests in the home where Harvey and Eileen Bender ’77Ph.D. raised three children and shared their Jewish faith with visitors through a short prayer service before each meal. Such acts of hospitality continued, Gajewski notes, even after a lost tenure battle at Notre Dame, a successful discrimination lawsuit and settlement forced Eileen Bender to pursue her academic career elsewhere. Harvey, who followed his spouse in death by one year, loved his Notre Dame students and what he considered their atypical zeal for deeper values. Now, the Bender children and several of those students are working together to create a lifetime teaching award for science faculty in his name.

When Guillermo O’Donnell died in November of 2011, the moment evoked tributes for his seminal writings on authoritarianism and democracy from colleagues around the globe. At Notre Dame the professor emeritus of political science will be remembered foremost as one of the scholars whose labors put the University’s rising international studies programs on the map.

O’Donnell was “already an academic superstar” in 1982 when then-president Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, and Father Ernest Bartell, CSC, ’53 recruited him to serve as the first academic director of the nascent Kellogg Institute for International Studies, says Scott Mainwaring, the institute’s current director. A native of Buenos Aires who observed firsthand in Argentina many of the political processes he would scrutinize in his research, O’Donnell would not receive his doctoral degree from Yale University until 1987, the year after the publication of Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, a classic volume he co-edited with scholars at the Woodrow Wilson Center. His capacity for asking big-picture questions about the origins, weaknesses and strengths of emerging democracies and his evident concern for the dignity of the poor shaped influential concepts in works that were translated into several languages. In 2006, the International Political Science Association presented him its inaugural lifetime achievement award. For Mainwaring, “He stands as one of the most important thinkers about democracy and dictatorships in the history of political science.”

For 15 years at ND, O’Donnell applied his gifts to the tasks of shaping Kellogg’s research agenda, attracting prominent scholars to campus and sending energized graduate students into the social sciences. His encouragement of the work of promising younger academics mirrored the collegiality so esteemed by his peers. “His analysis and insights are as important today as they have ever been,” one wrote in a tribute published on Kellogg’s website. “Guillermo O’Donnell will be missed.”

Nai-Chien Huang, who died in January of 2012 at age 80, produced one book in an academic career that spanned five decades: a collaboratively written textbook on solid propellant rockets published in 1969, the year of the first manned lunar landing and his first on the aerospace and mechanical engineering faculty at Notre Dame. But the list of nearly 100 published technical papers in his curriculum vitae is littered more illuminatively with words like “fracture mechanics,” “creep buckling,” “fatigue crack speed,” “snap-through,” and “collapse” — just the sorts of things that undoubtedly lure thousands of imaginative former children into serious engineering studies every year.

Colleagues remember the Chinese-born and educated Huang in part for his good humor, so it’s not difficult to imagine the delighted boy inside the serious researcher who wrote “Dynamic Instability in Ice-Lifting from a Flat Road Surface through Penetration with a Sharp Blade.” Until his retirement in 2001, Huang was ND’s authority in structural design, fatigue and fracture whose expertise was sought by the likes of Amoco, U.S. Steel and the U.S. Air Force. His research explored the causes and consequences of failure in a wide array of materials and applications, from industrial yarns to aircraft fuselages. Emeritus Professor Victor Nee says his friend and former colleague brought the same uncompromising eye to the students in his undergraduate and graduate courses in such subjects as Mechanics, Dynamics, Elasticity and Thermal Stresses, and it won Huang tremendous respect.

“He was a great teacher, always impeccable in his presentation,” wrote Professor Joseph Powers. “He loved Notre Dame, its students and faculty, and he was a great role model . . . including for me.” Huang is survived by his wife of 49 years, Geraldine, and their two children.

Charles “Lefty” Smith, the father of Notre Dame hockey, passed away in January of 2012, three days after his retirement and two days before his 82nd birthday.

Smith, a legendary Minnesota high school coach, came to the University in 1968. He not only coached Notre Dame’s first varsity hockey team but also managed the ice rink in the newly completed Athletic and Convocation Center (eventually named the Joyce Center), ran skating classes, started a youth hockey league and taught the Zamboni drivers how to lay the ice.

When Irish hockey moved into the new Compton Family Ice Arena this past October, Smith dropped the puck for the opening game — on the ice at Lefty Smith Rink.

Smith coached for 19 seasons, won 307 games, earned some Coach of the Year honors and produced six All-Americans. All 126 players who skated for Smith completed their collegiate eligibility and earned degrees. But Smith’s legacy went far beyond such achievements. “Lefty created an extended family through his time as our coach,” said All-America forward Greg Meredith ’80, one of more than 80 players who participated in the “Lefty Fest,” attended by 37 family members and 250 members of the Irish hockey community.

“Beyond being a hockey coach,” said Matt Boler ’88 at the February event, “I’ve never seen a man who was so compassionate, so full of life and so engaged. He truly loved his players, he loved his friends and family. He’s a seminal character of Notre Dame.”

When Smith left coaching in 1987, he supervised 22,000 volunteers when the University hosted the International Special Olympics, whose 6,000 athletes from 72 nations competed in the 12-day event, and became facilities manager at the University’s Loftus Sports Center. There until this past winter, his office walls were blanketed with photos of friends and former players and their children — the people who made hockey a family sport with Smith at the helm.

Letters to the editor

2012-04-03T08:00:00-04:00

Editor’s note: The letters that appeared in the spring 2012 print issue are marked with double asterisks (**).

Call it marriage

**When I was married in the District of Columbia on June 18, 2011, my friend and classmate Lorie Masters was kind enough to write about this joyous occasion in the classnotes section of the winter issue. You, however, saw fit to change the word “marriage” to “united in a ceremony.” Not only is your editorial policy intellectually and logically flawed, it is also downright insulting both to my husband and to me. We are married and have exactly the same legal status as any heterosexual couple married in the District of Columbia.

The attitude evidenced by your editorial policy is, in my view, most decidedly hypocritical and anti-Christian. Please answer me this question: Had I married a Jewish or Muslim woman outside the Catholic Church, would you have edited the column in the same manner? I think not.

Shame on this great institution. Our marriage occurred seven months ago. Our “union” began more than 30 years ago. Had I known that Notre Dame considered “union” the celebratory marker of our relationship, I would have asked Lorie to include that in her column in 1981.

Allyn J. Amato ’81J.D.
Alexandria, Virginia

His mother, too

**I very much enjoyed reading about David Matthews and his development efforts in South Bend. That story, however, had a glaring omission when citing Pete Buttigieg as the city’s mayor. His father’s faculty status was noted but not the mayor’s mother — J. Anne Montgomery, who earned a master’s in fine arts from Notre Dame in ’91 and taught at the University for 29 years.

Ellyn Stecker
South Bend, Indiana

Common grounds

**The article on Leo Burke’s work to introduce business school students to the concept of a shared commons (“A World that Works for Everyone”) was very heartening. Having given a lecture for the Notre Dame Energy Center in 2005 on energy sector decarbonization — in which I placed the imperative of action on climate disruption squarely within Judeo-Christian and American thought traditions dealing with the commons — I was happy to hear that at least someone outside of the philosophy and theology faculties is bringing forward the importance of this issue. There is nothing more central to Biblical teaching than our shared responsibility for the commons, and the fact that it comes as a surprise to anyone attending Notre Dame is deeply disturbing.

Michael Hogan ’80
Montpelier, Vermont

Rich and poor

**In her velvet-glove plea for the government to equalize income for all regardless of acuity, ability or achievement (“My Fair Share”), Lori Barrett makes a case only Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez and Barack Obama might love. She leans heavily on Columbia University economics professor Joseph Stiglitz, the liberal writer and perhaps only one of his kind ever fired from the World Bank.

In rebuttal, I offer the following precepts — not original to me and of unknown origin: (1) You cannot legislate the poor into prosperity by legislating wealth out of prosperity. (2) What one person receives without working for, another must work without receiving. (3) The government cannot give to anybody anything that it did not first take from someone else. (4) You cannot multiply wealth by dividing it. (5) When half the people get the idea that they do not have to work because the other half is going to take care of them, and when the second half gets the idea it does no good to work because what they earned is halved, that is the beginning of the end of any benevolent society.

Thomas C. Murphy ’53
Green Bay, Wisconsin

**Lori Barrett thoroughly documents the problems associated with the growing wealth gap. But, as with all others, the root cause eludes her. Rising unemployment, poverty and declining incomes are all a natural consequence of an ever-worsening over-supply of labor. The inverse relationship between population density and per capita consumption has been slowly, steadily eroding per capita consumption as our population soars. And since per capita consumption and per capita employment are inextricably linked, rising unemployment and poverty are inescapable as long as economists mistakenly lean on population growth to stoke macroeconomic growth.

Simply put, there are too many workers competing for too little work, and the problem grows worse as the world’s labor force grows by another 100,000 workers every day. There are no solutions to ever-worsening global unemployment that don’t begin with stabilizing the population.

Pete Murphy
Clarkston, Michigan

**Lori Barrett closes her article by telling us that “greed does no one any good.” Except that it does. If there is no benefit to being greedy, the behavior would not exist, and some Americans have grown wealthy beyond the dreams of Croesus because of greed. But beyond this obvious oversight, there is a much deeper aspect to greed. Simply put, a technologically advanced society cannot exist without some of its members being greedy. The greedy accumulate a surplus which can be deployed to allow some members of society to specialize in an activity other than gathering food.

So, if properly managed, greed can be harnessed for the good of society. Entrepreneurial greed (good greed, if you will) creates economic activity where none existed before and fosters job creation as a side effect. Financial greed (bad greed) enriches some while passing the costs on to others. It is essentially a form of redistribution where wealth is transferred from the many to the few.

The key to a balanced and functional society is to formulate tax policy so that good greed is encouraged and bad greed is penalized. This is quite the opposite to what the United States has now.

Guy Wroble ’77
Denver, Colorado

I have just concluded the article ‘My Fair Share’ in the recent Notre Dame Magazine. While intelligent in its makeup, it is scary in its “conclusions.”

In my years of public and private education I was taught at various levels about the right to education and the rights to good jobs. Nowhere was I ever told society had an obligation to provide either. It was up to many influences but most important, our own initiative. I, myself, spent 30 plus years teaching in area private, Catholic schools without anyone forcing me to do so. My economic results were obvious. Nevertheless 4 children went to college and life has been both fun and rewarding. At age 60, without normal retirement benefits, I entered the financial industry as a stockbroker for a local firm. Again I like the job and respect our company, which has grown from 3 to 500 brokers in its 14-year existence.

Anyone who has lived in the United States has already won the lottery by accident of their birth, but many do not know it or appreciate that fact. The current economic crisis that is global in nature is going to require difficult choices to be made by people who may not want to make more choices. Our free decision-making dictates our job far more than any other factors. As you state, , a job guarantees many things but wealth is not one of them. I have never found anyone who knows what is “fair” for other people. This country gives us the best opportunity of any in the world to follow our own dreams. Jealousy because the byproduct of some people’s dreams in financial success is stupid.

Please excuse the paper, but I have a meeting. . . . I will probably be working for many more years (I hope).

Phil Donnelly ‘63
Albany, New York

I found Ms. Barrett’s “My Fair Share” article most interesting in what it did not say as opposed to what it said. No one will deny that there is a growing divide in America between the rich and the poor. Ms. Barrett missed a great opportunity in not setting forth some of the basic reasons as to why this divide has occurred and as to why it will continue to occur until America get back to its roots.

America was founded on the basis that it would be a country of freedom from religious and political tyranny, of family units, and where everyone who worked hard had an opportunity to succeed. I would observe that our government has severely diluted the basic freedoms that we started with, that the family unit is largely now gone, and the work ethic which we once cherished and allowed us to unparalleled greatness as a nation is hard to find. I would suggest that it is these three factors that have largely contributed to the growing divide between the “rich” and “poor.”

— Our government today is “hell bent” on over-regulating and socializing our country; each day it takes away our freedoms. Witness the “new and improved” health care act which mandates that every citizen purchase health care, excepting of course the president, members of Congress, members of the Supreme Court, and presidentially selected unions who are all given a pass. Query: what happened to due process for all?

— Family units, historically a man and woman who joined to have children, and who instilled in their children the basic tenets of their faith, our freedoms and work ethic, are rapidly disappearing as the norm in American society.

— Last, our work ethic has been disappearing for years. We now have over 14 million unemployed Americans while we simultaneously have over 12 million illegal aliens working in our country making a living because many unemployed Americans have declined to accept the very jobs that illegal aliens have undertaken. Note President Obama’s recent comment that Americans had gotten lazy.

And exactly what is one’s “fair share”? If it is unfair for members of Wall Street to receive “outrageous” salaries and compensation rather than giving part of it to other employees;

— Why is it not unfair for a star athlete to be paid millions every year to play a sport rather than giving part of their “outrageous” salaries and compensation to the ticket takers and vendors who work with them?

— Why is it not unfair for movie stars to get paid millions of dollars for acting, rather than giving part of their “outrageous” salaries and compensations to the members of the support staff that produces the movie and works with them?

— And finally, why is it not unfair for our president and the members of our Congress to each receive millions of dollars each year in “outrageous” salaries and compensation rather than sharing with the taxpayers for whom they work and by whom they are paid?

Is there a growing disparity, certainly. However, when we examine “one’s fair share,” our review, to be “fair,” necessarily requires that our review is not limited to Wall Street alone but must necessarily include all those receiving “unfair compensation,” including but not limited to athletes, movie stars, our president and all politicians.

Moreover, as we go forward in analyzing this disparity, and formulating what everyone’s “fair share” is or should be, I would suggest that we would be well advised to remember the observations of noted economist and scholar Milton Friedman, who so pithily observed: “The record of history is absolutely crystal clear that there is no alternative way, so far discovered of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by the free enterprise system.”

William L. Kallal ’66
Cheyenne, Wyoming

I always feel for the less when I read an article like the one printed in the latest Notre Dame Magazine, this one by Lori Barrett called “My Fair Share.”

I’m not going to go on a long screed on why printing such an article is an embarrassment for the magazine, instead just a few thoughts.

I challenge the editors to look into the claim, and the ramifications of the claim, presented as fact, that the wealth divide is growing. What exactly does that mean? Does that mean that the richest have more than the poorest?

If so, it is a point so vague in effect that it actually means nothing.

But it sure sounds baaaaad, doesn’t it? The question that seems to matter is, "Are people better off monetarily than they were five, 10 years ago?

The answer to that is yes. I hate to break this to people, but the point of a healthy economy is to make people richer. Of course that will never happen at the same rate for all. That’s impossible — under any scenario.

Our economy has not been healthy but people do have more money over what they had, say, 10 years ago. That some have more than others is not the point. In fact, you could say that the entire thrust of Occupy and wealth redistribution in the name of fairness is nothing more than a justification for envy (jealousy for those that have something you’d like) and theft (taking, in the name of taxing, from one group in order to give to another group (don’t forget that dependency eventually leads to degradation).

Worse is the inflammation that comes from the old canard about the “dying middle class.” The middle class, if you are to believe the hype, has been dying since the day it was born. Look closer. Also, look at more than just a few articles out there on the subject. There are many that perpetuate the same false premise over and over. In fact, if you look hard, those that perpetuate it are those that often simply want to increase taxes on higher income earners. They like that, raises the lust. Of course, they get away with it because it’s “fair.”

When you hear the following two Trojan horses, grab your wallet because someone is going to take something from you: “It’s not fair! and, It’s not safe!” That’s what they say right before you lose something you had.

But please look harder and come to a more fully informed conclusion. That’s all I ask, read more into it. Look at a broad spectrum of the supposed “facts.”

Lastly, what was the point of the article? That people should go to school more and that unions should be stronger? That money is the root of all evil? That there is some group out there that is "getting away with murder”??? I think that was the point, but I’ve got admit that there was a rueful twist when I realized that the author seemed to believe that strengthening unions, as they exist now in reality and not in some idealized version in her head, is honestly seen as a “solution.”

I love NDMagazine, always have, but as a ND economics major, nothing is more cringe-inducing than reading a grab bag article that preys on economic stereotypes, that stirs people up with the old standbys (“the middle class is dying!!!!”), and then either doesn’t bother to offer a “solution” or if it does offers incredibly bad ones.

If it’s just an opinion piece then okay, everyone is entitled to their opinion. Unfortunately, misinformed opinions have a way of not exactly helping.

Thomas Brannigan ’86
Via email

Worth fighting for

**Barbara Turpin’s “How Could They?” essay was a masterpiece for someone like me. Born a Northerner but a Southerner by choice, I’ve lived in the South for 49 of my 74 years. In a short time I learned what Ms. Turpin learned in her pilgrimage to Gettysburg. Although the figures about slave ownership vary, it was clear that the soldiers in the field weren’t fighting so somebody could own slaves. Camaraderie, states’ rights and an oppressive federal government drove the men in gray, not slavery.

Daniel Rapp ’59
Taylorsville, North Carolina

**While in Charleston, South Carolina, recently, I visited the city’s Confederate Museum, which proudly displays countless uniforms, swords, photographs, bullets, medals and other artifacts from the War Between the States, as some Southerners refer to it. A day earlier I’d visited a plantation where generations of slaves were forced to pick cotton and manufacture bricks. I enjoy history, so this was all very interesting to me. But an important fact crept back into my consciousness. For whatever other reason Southerners supported secession, they knew a Confederate victory would protect the institution of slavery. In an era of heightened reverence for the military, let’s remember there is nothing heroic or noble or intelligent in killing unquestioningly for an unjust cause — no matter how nostalgically later generations may remember it.

Ed Cohen
South Bend

**I applaud Barbara Turpin’s understanding of the Civil War, but for some reason she feels compelled to compare the bravery and sacrifice of those soldiers with her stereotypical assumptions about Vietnam-era service — that Americans who fought and died in Vietnam did so out of coercion, mindless discipline and unquestioningly obeying orders on behalf of people who did not want us there against an enemy whom we admired for their tenacity in their commitment to a cause. Had she spent as much time studying the Vietnam War as she has the Civil War, rather than merely accepting her 1960s perspective, she would know the answer to the question, “How could they?”

As a Marine platoon leader in Vietnam, I saw too many friends and young Marines pay the price for others to not understand the cause we fought and died for. Any reasonable study of American post-World War II history would put that war appropriately within the context of this country’s decades-long commitment to challenge and contain the spread of communism. That era was known collectively as the Cold War, and we won it with the final collapse of communism in 1989.

So yes, there was a cause — the defense of freedom and our way of life. Like our forefathers, we fought for a cause, for patriotism and a commitment to our fellow countrymen, whether they appreciate it or not. The sacrifices made in that long ago Cold War protected the rights of a whole generation of self-righteous dissenters to develop and express their cynical opinions — opinions they are entitled to as long as they are not misconstrued as fact.

Patrick J. McDonnell ’65
Lake Forest, Illinois

Memories of Cuba

As someone whose family history with Cuba goes way back, I enjoyed your winter issue article (“The Rome of the Americas”) and it brought back memories. I thought you might be interested to learn of another connection between ND and Cuba — my grandfather, or “Abuelo” as we called him — C.C. FitzGerald, Class of 1894.

C.C., short for Christopher Columbus, was second generation Irish, born in The Dalles, Oregon, in 1873. After the death of his mother, at the age of 12, he was packed off to go east by train — we’re not sure if he was even accompanied — to get his education at Notre Dame. He went through grade school, high school and college there, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1894. He even taught for a year after graduation before joining the Southern Railway as a civil engineer.

In 1898, he enlisted in the U.S. Army as a captain in the combat engineers, going to Cuba to fight in the Spanish American War. I have a photo of him in uniform standing next to his war horse on a banana plantation that sits prominently in my living room.

Apparently he stayed in Cuba to clean up after the war, including helping to raise the USS Maine from Havana harbor. At some point he returned to the United States and married an Irish lass, Eugenia O’Day, in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1903, but he had been so in love with Cuba that he took her back there and went into partnership with a Cuban to form a civil engineering company, Ingenieros Civil y Contratistas, which was very prominent and successful in Havana. The firm was no doubt responsible for building a number of the buildings referred to in the article. I know, for instance, that they built much of the old Havana Yacht Club. Abuelo retired in 1950 and continued to live in Havana until kicked out by Castro in 1960, having all his life and family possessions expropriated. He and my Abuela moved back to Lexington, where they died several years later.

C.C. was well-connected and respected throughout Havana. Having been there the longest of any American, he was considered “The Dean” of the American community. I know he also had fond remembrances of his upbringing and education at Notre Dame and had a large influence in my going to Notre Dame and studying engineering myself. As a matter of fact, I have the gold medal Notre Dame bestowed on him on the 50th anniversary of his graduation.

Needless to say, Cuba holds a dear place in my own heart. I was born there myself, but I have not been back since the summer of 1960, when we helped my grandparents get out. And I have mixed feelings about going back until the political situation there changes, although at a professional level, being in the travel writing and reporting business, there is clearly an evolving story there.

Mike Thiel ’67
Rye, New Hampshire

Remember the rules

The third commandment is found in Exodus 19:7: “You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.” I am disappointed that the story, “If I can’t remember who I am…” was printed in the winter 2011-12 Notre Dame Magazine. The story takes our Lord’s name in vain. To print a story that included the use of our Lord’s name as a curse word is offensive. I have always felt as if Notre Dame stood as a force to fight against the tide of such cultural depravity.

DeAnn Swinton
Notre Dame Parent
Southlake, Texas

Re: Patrick Hannon’s article in the winter edition (“If I can’t remember who I am”) — I enjoyed the article but think it’s too bad the Catholic Church still embraces celibacy because he’ll never get to see the second nine through a grandchild’s eyes.

Ken Peirce ’65
Via email

Suite miscount

Whoever was counting the house for the premiere missed four people in the balcony — three students together in the first row and me alone in the third. I was following the advice given us freshman year by an English professor who urged us to attend as many cultural events as possible at Washington Hall. His rationale was that our wives in future years would drag us to concerts, the opera, ballet, etc., and we should start to learn about these now. It was wonderful advice and I followed it assiduously, missing less than a handful of events over my four years. Because of Cunningham’s innovative choreography, the evening is still vivid in my recollection. I have seen his troupe 3 or 4 times over the intervening years. All incoming students should receive this advice.

Charles G. Conway ’56

Via email

Type size problem

To whom it may concern: I want to voice a concern about the size of lettering in the recent ND magazines. I realize that space is “everything” now days, but I simply quite reading most of the articles because it takes too much time to focus on the words. Thanks and what ever.

Dick Golob ’55
Sunnyside, Washington

Dr. Graf’s skills

I enjoyed the article about Kenneth Graf M.D. in the winter 2011-12 issue. Ken and I did our post-doctoral training together at the same Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, hospital. He was as dedicated, caring and skilled then as the article so cogently depicts him now.

Joseph Leaser M.D.
Via email

Hildegard revisited

I was interested to see that Dr. Fassler is studying Hildegard of Bingen. For several years I lived not far from the Abby of St. Hildegard in Eibingen, Germany. The beautiful Abby sits among the vineyards high in the hills above the Rhine River. It was one of my favorite places to visit. There is a quiet serenity and joyous atmosphere that emanates from the buildings, art, and especially the sisters; doubtless from their founder’s spirit. I often bought jelly, noodles, crackers and excellent wine from their Abby store. I am still saving several bottles for a special occasion! I will never forget the site of one of the sisters directing the grape harvest, the Rhine valley in the background and her full habit whipping in the wind.

Emily Wickham ’85
Via email

Icy times

As I sit here, during another frigid New England day, I came across the brief article (“Seen & Heard”) on the new hockey arena and it brought a smile to my face; remembering the first Irish hockey game I saw back when it was still a club sport. It was during the 1966-67 season outdoors in South Bend against Michigan State. I don’t remember the score or even who won, but I do remember how bitter cold it was. Those guys must have really loved that sport to practice and play outdoors in those conditions. Congratulations to those originators and the program for persevering.

Russ Pennell ’71

Franklin, Massachusetts

Peace Corp safety

I read “Pioneers on the Peace Corps frontier” in the autumn 2011 issue. As a ND MSA graduate and senior, I am presently extending my service as Peace Corps Volunteer in Tanzania, Africa. I feel it is totally safe to serve wherever Peace Corps is working. They have very high standards of security for their volunteers. I taught two years in a village at PMSS for math, computer, English and library skills. Now I moved and I am teaching at Tumaini University: I am in the math education department, so I am teaching new TZ math teachers.

Secondly, I would like to encourage more seniors to volunteer during their retirement. We are so blessed in USA with good health and so many benefits. It is a privilege to serve where there is a need for teachers, health workers and other professional.

Thirdly, I was blessed to be in Dar es Salaam for town hall meeting with Director Williams and to attend the 50th celebration in 2011. I will never forget the program which emphasized our continued working together for fellowship and unity for USA & Tanzania for the next 50 years. Maybe I will still be volunteering here when Peace Corps celebrate 75 years in TZ!! The world is truly very small and universality of humanity is very rich. Welcome to any underdeveloped country to serve for a few weeks or two years!

Marilyn Bick ’84 MSA
Tumaini University
Iringa, TZ Africa

Letter from campus: Time to move on

2012-04-03T07:20:00-04:00

I had thought this would be a healthy, almost cathartic experience but now find myself either too emotional or too scattered to find the right words. I had been asked to write about my leaving Notre Dame after 32 years — four as an undergraduate and 28 as a development officer.

One thing is for sure. After all this time, I still love the place . . . in a deeper, more subtle way, perhaps, yet with more objectivity.

Because I’ve been privileged to enjoy a close view of Notre Dame, I am sometimes asked to characterize the place. My favorite explanation is to paraphrase a travel guide about Ireland, which describes the country as a “beautiful, maddening place that once you visit, you fall in love with it.” That’s my version of Notre Dame — a beautiful, maddening place, and one I care deeply about.

The place is a little maddening for some obvious reasons. It’s too bureaucratic at times, with occasional incomprehensible rules. We hand out tough decisions (think admissions), and fond traditions get eliminated. We can be too overt in our pursuit of the dollar. We are tentative sometimes when we could be more direct and a little too direct when we could be more sensitive.

I know that I, too, have added to some of these maddening moments, and I am sure none of us is fully Notre Dame until we have experienced the “maddening” side.

However, the University’s beauty far outpaces its frustration. And I think that is always its challenge: to be cognizant of the maddening side so it does not overtake the beauty.

At its most basic, the beauty can be found in the place’s people and their experiences — the joy of your acceptance letter, the pride of graduation, a Basilica wedding, the response of Notre Dame friends when you are most in need. We have all experienced these types of moments and plenty of other beautiful events that define Notre Dame, and we are never sure when the next meaningful moment will occur. Somehow it always does.

Notre Dame’s beauty is also grounded in its ability to renew. I doubt I will ever again work where I experience such a sense of renewal more rapidly than here. I will miss Notre Dame’s uncanny ability to pick us back up after a bad day . . . a conversation with a student, a performance, Mass or event, or the campus itself — the Grotto, the Basilica — or a good talk at Leahy’s or Legends with colleagues and friends.

It took great soul-searching to decide to leave here now. But the timing seemed about right. The University offered a rare opportunity to retire early for those of us who have been here awhile. In the end, it motivated me to step away, to try something different. I am grateful for that. It has prompted me to think back, to remember how it starts, this “relationship” with an institution, with a place.

Each of us associated with Notre Dame has had someone in their life who introduced us to the University — a parent, a friend, a teacher, a sibling. For me, it was my dad, Jim, class of 1948. Dad passed away a number of years ago, but his voice is still strong in my heart and my head. When he and Mom dropped me off on campus for my freshman year in 1972, he took me aside and said, “You’ll never be alone now.”

I didn’t get what he was saying then. I do now. Dad was right. I never have been since and I don’t believe I ever will again be alone. Notre Dame has taken care of that. Wherever I go, whatever situation I find myself in, I will remain permanently connected to this maddening, beautiful place.

So perhaps I am not leaving at all.

Dan Reagan retired at the end of March 2012 as associate vice president for University Relations, having directed the University’s last two fund-raising campaigns. He and his wife, Margot Fisher Reagan ’87J.D., will stay in South Bend, where Margot is a superior court judge and Dan now a consultant.

Sobesoles for the feet and society

2012-04-03T05:10:00-04:00

One man gathers what another man spills: The South Bend Soles Project

Kevin J. Melchiorri is a Notre Dame industrial design graduate student.

A sabbatical from seriousness

2012-04-03T05:00:00-04:00

We can take things pretty seriously here at Notre Dame Magazine, and we take our role on behalf of the University very seriously. We grasp the importance of representing the institution as an intellectually vibrant, spiritually robust enterprise dedicated to the Catholic faith and invigorated by pioneering research and scholarship. Notre Dame’s mission and vision, its traditions and aspirations, are manifest on our pages.

As an extension of the University’s effort to bring its voice to the international conversation on serious issues, the magazine routinely engages such troublesome topics as war and peace, death and dying, cultural and societal trends, inequality and injustice, and some of the most divisive issues among Catholics today. And we try to do so with reason and heart, with sensitivity and balance, and with a sense that the Notre Dame family is all in this together.

Then one day this past fall, having wearied — at least temporarily — of the very earnest and well-intentioned seriousness, we thought: Enough already. Let’s loosen up and have some fun.

We decided to do “Notre Dame Magazine’s First Annual Style Issue,” knowing full well that technically you cannot do a “first annual” issue on anything. And knowing full well that none of us (except probably Liam Farrell ’04) exhibits much of a fashion sense, we threw caution to the wind and ventured undeterred into this bold world of fashion and style and, well, clothing (one thing we all have in common, we figure, however we might disagree on other stuff).

One word of caution, however: Even though we set out simply to have fun, we discovered en route that the subject is indeed fraught with meaning and does offer serious insights into contemporary American life. So beware of such, and know we tried to keep that weight to a minimum. And if you don’t like what we’ve done here, please forgive our playfulness and be patient. We will be serious again soon enough.

One other thing you should know about this issue: It is the last for associate editor John Monczunski, who retired at the end of March. John came to work at Notre Dame about the time the magazine was started and joined the magazine staff full time in 1974, two years after the initial issue. So he has been a mainstay almost from the beginning — essential to planning and execution, helping to shape the editorial philosophy, guiding those of us who came after, bringing in first-rate writers and recently applying his talents and experience to our website.

First and foremost, John is a writer who has penned countless articles for the magazine on an impressive array of subjects, most notably some of the finest science writing found on our pages. And, perhaps more important, John is one of the truly good people I’ve known in my life, a person of conscience, grounded in a strong sense of the spiritual, in doing the right thing, in living a life according to Gospel values. His daughters Julia ’02 and Laura ’07 are Notre Dame graduates, and John’s departure leaves a tear in the fabric of the magazine’s family.

Kerry Temple is editor of Notre Dame Magazine. Email him at ktemple@nd.edu.

‘Suite’ at 55

2012-03-02T09:00:00-05:00

Daniel Madoff stands in a rigid pose on the Decio Mainstage Theatre stage as the spotlight rises. Wrapped in a skin-tight, light blue costume, the young dancer contorts his body in a series of complex phrases that have become synonymous with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

The strain of flesh pressing against wood can be heard from the balcony as Madoff stretches his foot across the stage in the opening solo of “Suite for Five,” the same piece Cunningham himself first danced some 55 years earlier at Notre Dame’s Washington Hall.

It’s no coincidence that this piece, originally titled “Suite for Five in Space and Time,” was chosen to open the program performed November 10-12 at Notre Dame’s Marie P. DeBartolo Performing Arts Center (DPAC) in the final weeks of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s two-year Legacy Tour. This last swing through the Midwest, like its other celebratory stops in Hong Kong, Paris and New York City, has featured revivals of works long-absent from Cunningham’s vast repertoire as the final generation of dancers chosen and trained by the renowned choreographer says thank you and goodbye before disbanding in 2012.

Cunningham, who died in July 2009 at the age of 90, managed his legacy as meticulously as he choreographed his dances, setting out plans for this tour and the future of his work.

“It was very poignant but also very exciting to be able to let our students be a part of this history and have it come full circle at Notre Dame,” says DPAC executive director Anna M. Thompson, who has presented or commissioned the company on four other occasions.

For the University, the three-night performance capped a semester of immersion in Cunningham’s work and collaborations, which included the exhibition “Warhol’s Camera” at the Snite Museum of Art, featuring the pop artist’s images of Cunningham, as well as symposiums and class lectures in dance, art history, music and poetry.

“There was a lot of teaching on modernism before the company got to town,” Thompson says. “We had [composer] Christian Wolff here talking to music and aesthetics classes. We had Bonnie Brooks [Legacy Plan Fellow of the Cunningham Dance Foundation] talking to poetry and performance classes. That all gave tremendous depth to the experience, because it gave a larger context to the work.”

Cunningham was not only considered one of the most important choreographers of his time, he was one of America’s greatest dancers as well and a leader of the avant-garde movement throughout his 70-year career. Although he started as a ballroom and tap dancer, his professional modern dance career began with a six-year tenure as a soloist in the Martha Graham Dance Company. In 1953 he formed his own company as a forum for his groundbreaking ideas of shape and form.

Cunningham rebelled against the conventions shaping dance narratives at the time, replacing traditional storytelling with non-programmatic movement that exalted dance on its own terms. He choreographed independent of musical scores and predetermined rhythms. Alongside composer and life partner John Cage, his most frequent collaborator, Cunningham would merge choreography and score only at the last minute.

“I think he is the only choreographer really who stuck to the idea of dance and music being separate from each other,” says David Vaughan, the company’s archivist.

“With other kinds of contemporary dance you have the ability to relate to the music,” Thompson elaborates. “If you look at Paul Taylor or Lar Lubovitch, they often use music from contemporary pop culture. You don’t have that with Merce.”

Cunningham choreographed more than 180 dances in his prolific career. During the tour stop at Notre Dame, his company performed “Suite for Five,” “Pond Way” and “Antic Meet,” three of his most notable works. “Antic Meet” — a 1958 dance reconstructed with a co-commission from Notre Dame — features a tongue-in-cheek setting that includes a dancer’s attempt to slip into a sweater with three arm holes and the memorable image of a single male dancer attached to a chair.

It was the opening piece, “Suite for Five,” however, that seemed most poignant for the occasion. One of Cunningham’s more physically demanding works, the dance foregrounds slow solo and duet passages that use tilts, jumps and balances in a dance assembled in six sections.

When Thompson discovered that “Suite for Five” had made its debut at Notre Dame, “I about fell off my chair,” she says.

“You have women dancers in these body suits in 1956 on what at the time was an all-male campus?” she adds, laughing. “Modern dance, avant-garde dance? I’m not thinking that’s going to go over big.”

In fact, Vaughan says, that first audience on May 18, 1956, only consisted of “a couple of priests and maybe six nuns.”

“Performances in those days were few and far between for the company,” Vaughan says. “I think Merce himself used to write letters to various schools and universities looking for engagements. That’s likely what happened here.”

Now, 55 years later, the company will disband.

That doesn’t mean that Cunningham’s impact won’t continue to be felt. Thompson says the University’s semester-long immersion has been so well received that it will be used as a model for future DPAC projects. Meanwhile, Cunningham’s plan created a trust that will now oversee the availability and continuation of his work in the years ahead.

Jeremy D. Bonfiglio is a South Bend-based writer and a frequent contributor to this magazine.

Photo of dancer in “Antic Meet.”

Images of Us

2012-03-02T08:00:00-05:00

Remember those connect-the-dots coloring books we used to get as kids? When I was 10 or so, my brother Charlie gave me a set of connect-the-dots sewing cards. Each one was made of stiff cardboard, and you were supposed to use the thick needle and yarn to sew from dot to dot. The concept was the same as the coloring books: from an assortment of apparently random dots on a blank page, the outline of a familiar object would emerge.

My most indelible memory of this gift, however, is the outrage I felt when I opened it. I can’t remember why it made me so mad. Looking back on that Christmas day from the vantage of my present self, I think I know. At age 10, every kid thinks she knows how to connect the dots. No stupid coloring book or sewing kit can do it half as well as a fifth grader. Except that it is actually really hard.

Connecting the dots is what I’ve spent my life trying to do, as a teacher and scholar and more recently as a mentor of kids from the west side of South Bend. The payoff is great when you start to see how dots — people, events, ideas, economics and even the past — hook up to make meaning.

It can also be painful. Living in the United States these days is to hear stories of violence every day. Just the other night in South Bend a woman was badly beaten by a robber apparently frustrated that she had no cash on hand. Her two young daughters watched and screamed and cried, and were taken in by the neighborhood women who are keeping mum.

The silence swaddling that violence makes sense, I think, if you connect the dots. It crystallizes several factors that exist in certain neighborhoods of South Bend or any U.S. city: poverty, hopelessness, unemployment, drug abuse, gangs, under-resourced police and, especially, the growing number of armed people roaming city streets.

The fact that a single victim might happen to be a woman may be incidental, a random dot in the tapestry of urban blight. The fact that her fearful neighbor is a woman is less random.

Women have for centuries stood witness to violence and have long been afraid to speak up for fear of reprisals. It’s not because we’re meek or accepting but because we have other people to think of, mainly our children. We know that those women who have spoken up have not always fared so well, nor have their families.

Just connect the dots as you think about all the nameless women who spoke out against abuse and who lived to regret it, in Chile, Rwanda or Sudan, in the Middle East, Afghanistan or East Asia. Go further back in time and remember the suffragists, many of whom were shamed into silence or starved into submission.

As a professor of French, I think about the activists of the 19th century, such as the so-called Vésuviennes (known for wearing culottes) or the pétroleuses of the Paris Commune, whose outrage over the French government’s refusal to honor republican principles materialized in social movements with an outrageously high number of civilian dead. Many of the dead were women, and their kids were orphaned as a result.

I think about Marie-Jeanne Roland, the wife of a high-ranking 18th century government minister and an outspoken politico, who may well have regretted her involvement with the revolutionary cause of 1789-92 when, from the foot of the guillotine during the Reign of Terror, she realized her daughter and sole survivor would pay the price.

Speaking up is hard to do. Compassion is fleeting, and in the end you’re all alone. You only have to connect the dots to see this.

I connected other dots this past summer, working on the Amnesty International exhibit “DIGNITY: Poverty and Human Rights.” The exhibit, making its U.S. debut at Notre Dame’s Snite Museum of Art now through March 2011, is the visual centerpiece of our contribution to a worldwide commemoration of the 18th century Swiss philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). We at Notre Dame are focusing on Rousseau’s role as a pioneer of humanitarian thought.

The DIGNITY exhibit, unveiled in Paris in 2010, delivers a jolt to viewers in its portraits of what poverty looks and feels like from five countries: Egypt, India, Mexico, Nigeria and Macedonia. The stories take on different forms depending on the people’s situations. The portraits of Me’phaa people from Mexico frame the most basic human wish: an end to the ethnic persecution and murders that have devastated their numbers. Two photos show a woman and a small girl holding photos of their dead menfolk — a brother, a father. Two other women speak out from portraits of despair, telling of the nightmares they still see in their mind’s eye of the soldiers who repeatedly raped them. They said they were afraid to speak for a long time, and they’re still afraid now. But the risk is worth it, they say, if it will end the violence.

By bringing this exhibit to the United States, people like me — academics and art museum professionals with a political conscience — hope to raise awareness about such atrocities. Each haunting section calls for observers to respond through words and support. It feels good to be involved in a cause like this. It feels good to help mobilize some action that may make an impact. Yet the images and histories give me pause. Although I admire the women who spoke out from Mexico or Macedonia, I now worry about them. I wonder if they regretted bringing attention to themselves. I wonder if they are still alive, still able to work, to care for their families.

I also keep thinking about that nameless woman robbed and beaten in South Bend, her neighbors and the many others who’ve entered my mind during the planning for DIGNTY at Notre Dame. The dots seem to be converging. Human rights abuses that I once thought were far away are drawing near.

Julia Douthwaite is professor of French and Francophone Studies at Notre Dame. She is coordinating the launch of the Amnesty International DIGNITY exhibit touring the United States, beginning with its début this month at the Snite Museum of Art. Her most recent book is The Frankenstein of 1790 and Other Lost Chapters from Revolutionary France (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press, 2012).

See the Dignity@nd slide show.

The House Rock Built

2012-03-02T06:00:00-05:00

When Dayne Crist woke up from what he thought was a nightmare in November 2010, he was horrified to learn that not only had Notre Dame actually lost to Tulsa, but Brian Kelly and Michael Floyd were, indeed, zombies.

After a heartbreaking loss to USC in 2009, Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen and wide receiver Golden Tate made sense of it the only way they could — by painting a picture of a sad clown and getting drunk at an underground cockfight, respectively, all to the strains of R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts.”

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Sites to behold

Welcome to “Stuffing the Passer,” the puppet show put on by the blog The House Rock Built that provides Notre Dame fans a funhouse mirror through which to view their team.

There’s puppet Brian Kelly, who speaks in a Kennedy-esque accent; puppet Dayne Crist, who has a recurring problem with fine motor skills; puppet Tommy Rees, who at one point mentions he is ND’s starting quarterback “pro tempore”; and puppet Michael Floyd, who is blue with green hair, does not lack confidence so much as he lacks clothes, and believes the Main Building was built in 2008 so he would “have something to base jump off of.”

Michael Fotopoulos ’03 and Brian Stouffer ’04 are the comedic brain trust behind the series. These Chicago alums trade their day jobs — described as “cubes in undisclosed locations” — to become amateur Muppeteers in their free time.

In an Internet full of fans who take the trials and travails of their teams seriously, the House Rock Built is often a whimsical breath of fresh air.

“We have really tried to just show our affection for our school,” Stouffer says. “We saw a need out there.”

The two Domers were neighbors in Keenan Hall and first started writing things together for the Keenan Revue, the annual popular send-up of campus life. Post-graduation, they were involved in separate blogs and “it just kind of snowballed from there,” Fotopoulos says.

According to the duo, the puppet show was born during a going-away party for a friend who was moving to New York. Conversation drifted into the existence of the Muppet Whatnot Workshop at FAO Schwarz, where people can purchase customized Muppets, and the potential of doing a show centered on Notre Dame.

“It started out as a joke, and we just got too many beers into it,” Stouffer says. “We were like, ‘Oh my goodness, we have to start doing something.’”

The ensuing productions have definitely been on the guerilla filmmaking side, making up in enthusiasm what is lacking in budget. One recent innovation was an $8 tripod from Walmart.

“We basically doubled our efficiency,” Stouffer says. “It’s fun having the giant challenge.”

II.

College sports, with their fervent rivalries and fan bases, have proven fertile ground for the Internet. The website SB Nation, for example, hosts hundreds of sports blogs. Many are specifically tailored to college football, from Purdue-centric Hammer and Rails to Penn State-focused Black Shoe Diaries and Michigan-dedicated Maize n Brew.

A standard-bearer of this subculture is Every Day Should Be Saturday, a blog that covers college football through its uniquely jaundiced eyes. Past features have included an award for the program that has the most run-ins with the law and NCAA violations, and recurring satirical Top-25 rankings from long-time coach Howard Schnellenberger, who routinely finds “suspenders” to be a worthy No. 1.

Things can take an even more entertaining turn in the blog’s comments section. That’s where dozens of college football fans enter a virtual sports bar and rag on each other’s teams, illustrate their emotions with television and movie clips, and spin inside jokes like how the Clemson Tiger’s eyes make him look like a drug addict.

Perhaps the biggest Notre Dame footprint on the Internet belongs to NDNation, which basically functions as a discussion board for Fighting Irish fans. Other sites, such as Her Loyal Sons and One Foot Down, have tried to mix humor with more straightforward analysis. The lines between traditional media and blogs continue to blur, with Keith Arnold ’02, a writer from NBC, even taking part in a virtual, weekly Q&A discussion called the Irish Blogger Gathering.

For years, one of Notre Dame’s most popular and informative blogs was Blue-Gray Sky, a collection of people who knew each other from Notre Dame or from posting on the Internet. Their work was noticed by mainstream publications such as Sports Illustrated. Despite officially shutting down in March 2010, the site still gets comments on its website.

Jay Barry ’92, one of the blog’s founders, says Blue-Gray Sky entered the Internet landscape at a “fortuitous time.” Few pure Notre Dame blogs existed, and other college football sites were just getting started as well.

“There was sort of this nascent base of college football blogging,” Barry says. “I was kind of shocked and surprised ND didn’t have more established blogs.”

And the proliferation of new media tools such as YouTube and TiVo allowed more comprehensive access to game film.

“The DVR made all the difference in the world,” Barry says, referring to the digital devices that can record and store hours of live television.

Those forces let Blue-Gray Sky feed a niche for original humor, long-form analysis and play-by-play breakdowns concentrated on a single team. In one corner there was a rundown of the greatest villains in Notre Dame football history (Desmond Howard, Jimmy Johnson, the referee who threw the clipping penalty flag in the 1991 Orange Bowl). In the other corner were analyses of offense formations.

“We had the luxury journalists don’t,” says Pat Mitsch ’99, a former Blue-Gray Sky contributor who edited Maple Street Press Irish Kickoff 2011. “We could write as long as we wanted and whatever we wanted.”

Even the most successful labors of love can get submarined, and Blue-Gray Sky met a fate similar to many other blogs when obligations such as children entered the picture. Barry estimates that at one point he was working 10 to 20 hours a week on the blog, and about 300 posts still remain in draft form.

Mitsch says the late nights — and an era of football games that could be equally as dark — left some marks.

“It took its toll, especially when the team was terrible,” he says. “We’ll encapsulate the Charlie Weis-era, for better or worse. There were a lot of late nights, but it was fun.”

III.

For the average college football fan, there has likely never been a time when there are simultaneously as few and as many places to get information.

Games — the central product of college football — are placed in limited hands, with the monolith of ESPN controlling a good deal of the landscape and other networks concentrating on specific conferences or teams where available. But it is now possible to follow a team without ever laying eyes on major media because of the Internet explosion.

Sure, actually seeing the gold helmets on game day will require Fighting Irish fans to buy tickets or tune into NBC or ESPN. The monopoly on trenchant analysis is over, however, especially when it can come in the form of puppets.

“There is always going to be a spot for a team-oriented site,” Mitsch says. “They will probably be the amateur guys doing it in their off-hours.”

That is certainly the case for the puppeteering team of Stouffer and Fotopoulos. During the football season, they comb the Internet for the hot topic of the week, which could be anything from the stadium evacuation during the Notre Dame-South Florida game to conference realignment.

Those topics then get filtered through layers of the language that reflect the duo’s background as members of a generation raised on Sesame Street, The Simpsons and South Park. “We tend to speak in constant pop culture references,” Stouffer says.

Yet the world they have created is most definitely their own. All the characters, Fotopoulos says, “have their own quirks” in “Stuffing the Passer.” Coach Brian Kelly may call his quarterback “Tommy” in real life, but online the sophomore is stiffly addressed in patrician-Northeastern style as “Thomas.”

“We’re not exactly parodying the actual people,” Stouffer says. “They are the Muppet imitations of them.”

Sometimes, however, reality and parody come pretty close together. Over the years, a rather manic puppet incarnation of former Irish wide receiver Golden Tate has made a habit of referencing his infamous 2009 leap into the Michigan State band, occasionally in holiday song (Oh touchdown tree/Oh touchdown tree/We love you more than field goals/And in the air or on the ground/Jump in the band and dance around).

Shortly before Notre Dame played the Spartans in the fall, Tate’s Twitter account hinted he and his puppet may not be so far apart, posting, “All I kno is someone better keep the tradition going and jump into MSU band.”

It’s all part of the strange and sui generis Notre Dame love letter known as the House Rock Built.

“I hope [the players] enjoy it,” Fotopoulos says. Notre Dame “is very, very much a part of who we are.”

Liam Farrell is this magazine’s alumni editor.

This is the man who will fix South Bend

2012-02-14T10:00:00-05:00

Predicting the future is a deadly business. One year ago a dying magazine, Newsweek, proclaimed South Bend a dying city — No. 8 on its lethal list of the “top” 10 — based on U.S. census figures showing the city’s precipitous and unexpected drop in total population (down 3.9 percent since 2000 to 104,215) and in residents under age 18 (down 2.5 percent). To the dismay of the city’s outbound mayor and residents young and old, the statistical pairing put South Bend in the familiar company of troubled neighbors like Cleveland, Detroit and Flint, Michigan.

Back then, Newsweek expressed doubts that South Bend would ever recover.

But predictions are the lifeblood of magazines, so here comes another dangerous prophetic dalliance in the darkest days of the dead season: Should reports of South Bend’s death prove greatly exaggerated, the first signs of its revival will be found half a block from the Saint Joseph River at the corner of Niles Avenue and Washington Street.

Today that weedy, empty parking lot is in the hands of a 29-year-old Notre Dame graduate architecture student, a proud product of South Bend’s struggling public school system who also happens to be one of the leading land developers in north central Indiana.

David Matthews doesn’t look like your typical builder — least of all in the era of Donald Trump. His slight frame shows no evidence of a lunchtime steak habit; the blue oxford shirt, dark denim and black dress shoes mostly suggest an afternoon of teaching John Updike to undergrads. Yes, those are Ray-Ban frames, but they have clear lenses that convey the alert, unorthodox mind behind Matthews’ green eyes.

The fact is, Matthews isn’t your typical builder. He broke ground on his first confirmed real estate success, the innovative Ivy Quad development that rises across Twyckenham Drive from the varsity lacrosse and soccer fields, the year the housing bubble popped, when he was 26. He pays more up front for durable, high-end materials (3-cm granite countertops for instance are standard at Ivy Quad because “it’s more affordable to pick a higher standard and buy a whole bunch of it than to go a lower standard where you can pick anything”) and superior construction methods. He hires Amish framers (“They don’t build the fastest, they’re never in a hurry. And they’re very consistent and really easy to work with . . . and, yeah, they’re good”). He handles all sales himself so he can catch the body language that communicates prospective buyers’ inarticulate likes and dislikes.

He’s never known a housing boom, and yet he just moved in to one of his own units at his second venture, the profitable, downtown East Bank development, with its attractive brick and limestone facades and its exhilarating views of the falls and the Morris Performing Arts Center. And he doesn’t harbor anxieties about that uncertain future.

“A lot of developers think that if you can squeeze a dollar out of a project and into your pocket, it’s better,” he says. “But I’m from South Bend, you know? My business partners at Ivy Quad are from South Bend. This is our community, and what we build is going to stand for decades to centuries, so we better do it right.”

Youth movement

Matthews, of course, isn’t the only homegrown twentysomething to put his talent where his heart is. In November, South Bend voters overwhelmingly chose Pete Buttigieg, the 29-year-old Rhodes Scholar and son of Joseph Buttigieg, Notre Dame’s William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, in the first race for an open mayoral seat in 15 years. Though “brain drain” threatens South Bend much the way it does communities across the Midwest, younger faces are increasingly prevalent in its energetic business and economic development communities.

Truthfully, the news isn’t all bad. Last summer, hopeless old South Bend won a prestigious All-American City award from the National Civic League, which cited revitalization of the northeast neighborhood and a campaign to reduce high school dropout rates among reasons for the designation.

Before the contrarian Matthews came along, however, no one had quite figured out what to do with what locals commonly view as an embarrassment and Matthews calls the city’s strongest asset — all that vacant land in the city’s deurbanizing landscape, especially along the river near the central business district. “Vacant land is awesome,” he says, “if you build on vacant land.”

That a townie kid would launch his vision for “fixing” downtown South Bend with luxury condominiums near Notre Dame is ironic, particularly when competing developments close to campus were laboring to find buyers. But Matthews saw untapped opportunity in the market, sold the idea to local investors Jim and Julie Schwartz ’89, hired adjunct Professor Frank Huderwitz ’80, ’92M.Arch. to design Ivy Quad’s first phase, and soon found his business model paying off despite lower per-unit profit margins. He has been especially successful at finding year-round occupants, another elusive target for new housing developments near campus.

“We had to start somewhere,” Matthews says, explaining his long-term goal to build for every price point. Even in this economy, he adds, surveying the University’s skyline from the back deck of an Ivy Quad townhome, the sounds of hammers and hydraulic cranes emerging from the rooftops of Phase II, “the Notre Dame market is good.” Meanwhile, he says, the project has supported 120 local jobs.

It’s not the first time the Purdue-trained industrial engineer has found a way to tap Notre Dame money for the benefit of the community. As a teenager, not all that long ago, he sat beneath the stadium press box on football Saturdays and sold programs to raise money for the Adams High School swim team. But Matthews’ story probably starts a few years earlier when, fresh off his award-winning performance selling Boy Scout raffle tickets, he found a copy of How to Buy a House with No (or Little) Money Down on his parents’ bookshelf. “And I wanted to do it when I was 9, and my mom wouldn’t let me,” Matthews says, laughing out loud.

By the time he bought his first house, with the intention to fix and re-sell it, Matthews had left Purdue’s doctoral program to figure out what he really wanted to do. He’d interned for Disney, worked for the Department of Defense at Maryland’s Fort Meade and even did a stint at a copper pipe factory in Elkhart, Indiana, listening to the Harry Potter series and modern Greek language tapes on headphones while feeding parts into a machine. “I wanted to go to Greece,” he says.

He wound up keeping that home he’d intended to flip, intrigued with the change he was able to make when he reconfigured the windows and walls to bring more light inside. Taking his entrepreneur father’s advice, he shadowed local business people and found his way into development, quickly gaining executive experience with a smaller-scale project.

Soon he was building Ivy Quad, making more money than he knew what to do with and acting like a retiree, traveling and even joining the competitive ballroom dancing club at Notre Dame. There he’d become friends with architecture students like Crystal Olin ’10M.Arch. and Aimee Sunny ’10. Olin in particular recommended books from her urban design curriculum, and Matthews began tapping Notre Dame students for input and hiring recent graduates.

“And then I was getting kind of bored,” he recalls. “I was tired of flying, so I was trying to figure out what to do. I didn’t want to join a country club. So I was like, hmm, grad school again.”

Looking into programs, Matthews shopped around the region. “The head of one program in the Chicago area actually asked me, ‘If you could get into Notre Dame, why would you bother coming here?’” While he felt technically prepared for his work, Notre Dame’s classical curriculum offered him history, theory and skills like watercoloring that he felt he lacked. “The classical program is based on more of a structured understanding of architecture, where they teach you proportions and the orders of things and that whole process of how to make beautiful buildings.” He met professors at the school’s weekly public lectures and in August 2010 went back to school.

Light and magic

Being a full-time developer as well as a full-time student takes some of the grade pressure off and helps Matthews keep his focus on learning. He says he’s building “much better now because of my education next door,” adding that he leaves the heavy architectural lifting to designers like Velvet Canada ’09M.Arch., Selena Anders, a visiting assistant professor, and others on his in-house staff. He also calls upon friends like Lauren Eaton ’12, Luke Olson ’08, and fellow graduate students Sylvester Bartos and Christopher Whelan, whom he credits with sparing him some embarrassing mistakes.

Professor Alan DeFrees ’74 says what Matthews gives back to the School of Architecture is just as valuable. “He’s full of good ideas. He’s a sponge for learning.” In DeFrees’ Acoustics and Illumination class, the students were comparing the use of steel angle versus limestone for a lintel. Matthews came in with prices demonstrating that the more durable but less conventional limestone cost less and labor costs would be lower, too. DeFrees says that kind of contribution helps both graduates and undergraduates, for whom such real-world matters are still relatively abstract.

Matthews’ work also demystifies development as a possible career path — one generally with more control over outcomes than architects typically enjoy in their often uneasy professional co-existence. In DeFrees’ veteran opinion, Matthews steers clear of two ruinous paths — developers who override their architects because of cost considerations, and architect-developers whose extravagant tastes overshoot potential buyers’ sense of good value.

Like his pupil, DeFrees also spent his childhood in South Bend. He returned later to study at Notre Dame and takes pleasure in Matthews’ “remarkable” success. Touring Matthews’ East Bank townhomes with their exceptional views of the downtown, DeFrees noticed subtle applications of lighting principles and techniques he’d taught Matthews in class. And while standard practice in the building trade almost invariably produces suburban results, DeFrees finds Matthews’ higher-density, mixed income developments communal, pedestrian friendly and civic-minded. “He knows how to design for his market,” DeFrees says.

Salvation in a simple idea

Finding that market without the benefit of Ivy Quad’s proximity to Notre Dame was Matthews’ East Bank challenge. As it turned out, what he discovered was probably the last thing any reasonable person would have expected from an unreconstructed former manufacturing hub in the flatlands of northern Indiana: A view.

From street level, the East Bank site was not so impressive, surrounded by modest structures and abutting the river at Colfax Avenue. But Matthews sensed what he couldn’t see: By raising the site with earth excavated for drainage at Ivy Quad, and by orienting the layout obliquely to the street, East Bank could offer its residents an unprecedented perspective of the city from spacious top-floor patios that captured its best features while maintaining a comfortable level of privacy.

Matthews then made another crucial decision. Rather than accepting the city’s usual offer of land sold at assessed value with property tax abatements he could pass on to buyers, he convinced officials to essentially sell him the land for free. Homebuyers would begin paying taxes immediately but, Matthews insisted, he could build an affordable, high-end townhome community that otherwise well-behaved local professionals would throw elbows to buy.

Voila, new taxpayers. And the first real hope that downtown South Bend might once again become a place more people would happily call home.

People actually attended the May 2010 groundbreaking ceremony. “Nobody shows up because some guy’s building condos,” Matthews observes. “Nobody cares.”

This time, 70 people cared. “And these weren’t contractors. These were city employees, attorneys, bankers and accountants — people who work and live in downtown knew about it and they showed up. Because people care about South Bend, and they want to see South Bend succeed.”

Eighteen months later, East Bank was finished and occupied. Matthews, who also obtained a grant from Downtown South Bend to make improvements on adjacent streets and neighboring properties — like a new outdoor mural depicting the work of the artists who work inside the Fire Arts Gallery across Sycamore Street — calls it his “catalyst.”

River Race, that weedy, empty parking lot a few blocks south along Niles Avenue, is his “litmus test.” Showing potential buyers the view from East Bank is helping with sales. Matthews already has three refundable deposits in hand with the groundbreaking penciled in for sometime this spring. What he has in mind for the site, which will rise directly above the falls where the East Race waterway begins its separate course, is a row of 10 townhomes priced as close to $200,000 as he can get. It’s tough to build good quality homes at that price, he admits, but mortgage rates are favorable, and he knows if he can sell to teachers, police officers and recent college graduates, he can sell to anyone.

The site plan includes top-tier commercial office space with underground parking and a rooftop café, two other rarities in the city.

“The way that you fix downtown, in my mind, is you need to get pedestrians on the sidewalks,” he says. Lunchtime isn’t enough. Most merchants and restaurateurs require solid, round-the-clock support if they’re going to take a chance on the city again. During the Christmas season, Michigan Street storefronts are filled with temporary pop-up shops brimming with holiday cheer, but without a reliable, year-round customer base within a five-minute walk, entrepreneurs fear losing out to suburban malls and Mishawaka’s Grape Road.

Farther east along the river are 30 abandoned acres near the old Transpo bus depot, another spot Matthews considers prime for this kind of durable, attractive urban infill. At 20 homes per acre and an average of three people per household, he knows he can meet the threshold Chicago analysts use for building a new grocery store — just the kind of anchor that gives small businesses confidence.

So, can David Matthews turn South Bend’s Tales from the Crypt into Sleeping Beauty?

Once upon a time, Professor DeFrees knows, South Bend was a bustling American city, larger than Sacramento, Austin, Mobile and Phoenix. He sees no reason it can’t grow again. But numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. “The energy that David brings makes a big difference. He’s showing people that South Bend is worth the investment.”

“I want developers to make a lot of money doing things in South Bend because that means more people will come and try the same thing. And then South Bend will be a successful city,” DeFrees says. “It used to be a beautiful city. Maybe people like David will turn it into a beautiful city again.”

John Nagy is an associate editor of this magazine.