Education: His Trumpet Was Never Uncertain

Notre Dame's incoming president was holding one of his first press conferences. Only sportswriters had shown up, one of them carrying a football, which he tossed to Father Theodore Martin Hesburgh, with a request that the priest assume the hike stance. "I'm not the coach," snapped the new leader of America's foremost collegiate football power, "I'm the president!" And he strode from the room. "That happened only once," recalls the 69-year-old Hesburgh, who is now preparing for his retirement; it will come next week, after a reign that is the longest and, by some accounts, the most distinguished of any major U.S. university head. The school he took over in 1952 was, according to Hesburgh's own blunt estimate, "ordinary." Since then:

-- Enrollment has nearly doubled, to 9,676, and the proportion of undergraduates rated in the top tenth of their high school classes has risen, from 30% to 95%.

-- The graduate school has moved from the doldrums to solid rankings in theology, philosophy and mathematics.

-- Endowment has jumped from $9 million to $400 million-plus and the budget from $9.7 million to $176.6 million.

-- Campus buildings have increased from 48 to 88, including an imposing 14- story library, renamed for Hesburgh last week, which holds 1.6 million publications.

Far more important to Hesburgh have been the changes in Notre Dame's governance and its amalgam of scholars. In 1967 he persuaded the Congregation of Holy Cross, his order of priests and the founders of Notre Dame, to cede control of the institution to a lay board of trustees, though the school would remain Catholic and its president a priest of the order. This was a radical step in Catholic education, where virtue and even legitimacy are often judged by proximity to the church hierarchy. To Hesburgh, however, ecumenical leadership was essential to turning the university's vision outward toward the world.

Hesburgh is openly proud of the result. "We have trustees who are black, white, men, women, Hispanic, Protestant, Jewish," he told a campus newspaper + recently, "and they come from all over the country and beyond." He is equally pleased to have opened the doors of the formerly all-male school to women in 1972. Today about one-third of Notre Dame's students are female. To replace what he once described as "academic programs encrusted over the decades," Hesburgh insisted that students take an unusually extensive requirement of core courses (currently 39 hours out of the baccalaureate's 120), and he held to that principle through the curriculum-battering '60s.

As for football, it still has its place at Notre Dame, though an increasingly modest one (since 1981 the team has posted a 34-31-1 record). More impressive, however, are the team members' academic statistics. Some 95% of the football players in the past 25 years have graduated, compared with a figure as low as 20% at unrepentant jock factories. Adds Father Edmund Joyce, Hesburgh's longtime executive vice president, who will also retire next week: "We're playing by another set of rules."