My Notre Dame experiences
as an undergraduate and a faculty member make me think that the
Victory March celebrates the University's victories not
only in athletics but also in individual lives, like mine. In
my seventh year of retirement, after teaching in ND's English
Department for 40 years, I can now recount our encounters.
I graduated from
Benton Harbor High just six months before President Truman, on
December 31, 1946, marked the final victory of the Allies in World
War II. My hopes for a college education depended on the G.I.
Bill, so I immediately signed up for a two-year stretch in the
Navy. I served as an Electronic Technicians Mate, 3rd Class, assigned
to the USS Chilton, a transport anchored in California's San Diego
Harbor.
In early 1948, only
months before my enlistment ended, I applied for admission to
three home-state universities: Michigan, Michigan State and Western
Michigan. One day, working on a transmitter, I searched the files
for the needed electronic manual and came across -- guess what
-- a University of Notre Dame catalog. What in the world was a
Notre Dame catalog doing aboard a ship in San Diego Harbor? And
how come I came across it only now, in a file drawer I had rummaged
through for months?
I read it thoroughly,
thought about applying there and finally decided, "Well, why not?"
President Truman's
demobilization program released me from the Navy two months early,
in April 1948. Waiting for me at home were admissions conferred
by all three Michigan universities, but nothing from Notre Dame.
Something kept me waiting, and Notre Dame finally responded, offering
admission and requiring an immediate payment of $25.
I had to think about
it, not because of the up-front fee but because it was Notre Dame.
Friends and classmates supplied no help for my decision. My high
school principal, whose advice I sought, informed me that Notre
Dame was an elitist all-boys school and that I would feel extremely
out of place when I saw Notre Dame classmates delivered to campus
in limousines.
Still, I thought
about it, and Notre Dame won. I sent the $25.
I found Notre Dame
students to be mostly veterans, like me, on the G.I. Bill. In
fact, ND's tuition was capped to the amount paid by the G.I. Bill,
and the school provided campus jobs that paid for room and board.
I never saw a single student dropped off by a limo.
Notre Dame's curriculum
was mostly required courses and areas. I became an English major,
the curriculum of which centered on a required four-semester sequence
of humanistic literature taught by Professors Rufus Rauch and
Frank O'Malley. Luckily, I had enough freedom to take creative
writing courses from Professors Richard Sullivan and John Frederick.
I chose Italian as
my required language and took some six semesters from Professor
Paul Bosco. By coincidence, Professor Rauch's syllabus included
a translation of Dante's Inferno, and the combination
of Italian language and Dante intrigued me so much that I also
took a course on Dante's entire Divine Comedy, taught
by English professor and poet John Nims.
So what did Notre
Dame have to do with this? ND informed all its seniors about the
U.S. government's recently instituted Fulbright Scholars Program,
which provided a year of study abroad. I couldn't resist. I wanted
to go to Italy to study Dante and Italian literature, so I applied
for a year of study at the University of Florence.
In 1952, I graduated
from Notre Dame with a bachelor's degree in English, but with
no grant, no plans for graduate school and no job. At the last
minute, however, professors Sullivan and Fredrick offered me free
participation in the University's summer creative writer's conference,
chaired by Professor Nims. This award rescued me, and not just
for that week. I write fiction to this day.
About a month after
graduation, the U.S. government, to my surprise, awarded me a
Fulbright Scholarship for a full year of study at the University
of Florence. The grant not only saved the year and got me deep
into Dante and Italian literature, it initiated my lifelong academic
direction and made me go for an advanced degree. In four years,
Notre Dame had redesigned me. In the end, it would take over completely.
From Italy, I sent
out applications for admission and financial aid to master's degree
programs at various universities. Because Notre Dame had turned
me into a Fulbright scholar, Stanford not only accepted my application
but offered financial aid, the only university to do so. I couldn't
accept their offer, however, because the financial aid was small.
I had left the United States engaged to the girl I met in my sophomore
year at Notre Dame. I wanted to marry her immediately upon my
return, and at this writing, we've been married for 51 years.
For my master's degree, my wife and I went to the University of
Michigan, where tuition for state residents was minor. I got my
degree in one year.
Then I wanted a Ph.D.
It turned out that Notre Dame's humanistic curriculum, capped
by my Fulbright year in Italy, qualified me for Stanford's new
Ford Foundation doctoral program in English and Humanities. I
applied, and Stanford awarded me a four-year Ford Foundation grant.
It's now clear to me that ND had, from the beginning, set me up
for graduate work at Stanford.
Even then, Notre
Dame did not leave me alone. After completing Stanford's course
work and doctoral exams, I had to come up with a dissertation.
Most of my courses at Stanford were in 19th-century British literature,
but I couldn't forget the Middle English poem I had studied, in
translation, under Professor Rauch at Notre Dame: the Medieval
religious epic Piers the Plowman. That work had so captivated
me that I studied it over again, in the original Middle English,
at Stanford. In the mounds of scholarship I read, I felt that
the poem had not yet been understood. I had to break through the
epic's darkness and release its light.
I chose that subject
for my dissertation, and Stanford accepted my proposal. Through
that religious poem, and through my study of Dante and Italian
literature in Florence, Notre Dame had turned me into a medievalist.
After four years
at Stanford, with course work, exams and dissertation proposal
completed but no dissertation and no degree, and with three children,
it was the job market for me. In 1958, the academic job market
was weak. I applied to universities in the East, West and Midwest,
but not to Notre Dame. Why? Because once I got to graduate school,
both at Michigan and Stanford, I found myself so far behind other
students in the coverage of English and American literature that
I had to work hard to catch up. I convinced myself that Notre
Dame's religious and humanistic education was good for a future
owner of a shoe store but not for a future academic.
Then Notre Dame challenged
me again. In my mailbox, I found a letter from Father Soleta,
then chairman of ND's English Department. He had apparently learned
that I was on the job market and offered me an instructorship
that paid $5,200 a year. Once again, Notre Dame ambushed me, and
it did so when I still had no job nailed down.
When I joined the
Notre Dame faculty in 1958, the sixth year of Father Hesburgh's
presidency, I found a different university. In every respect --
administrative organization, degree requirements, curricula, student
housing, University benefits, and so on -- the professionalism
of the place had been radically strengthened, refined and elevated.
My dissertation,
though, was a problem. It took me four years to find the theological
context that finally opened to me the meaning of Piers the
Plowman. That left me only one year, the last available by
Stanford's rules, to write my dissertation. Luckily, I was awarded
a Danforth Teacher Study grant for that year, and Notre Dame gave
me a year's leave of absence. I produced my dissertation, The
Spiritual Basis of Piers the Plowman, in the nick of time.
On my way to Stanford
for the post-dissertation exam, I met Father Hesburgh at the South
Bend airport. Sitting together and chatting on our way to Chicago's
O'Hare, he bolstered my confidence in the face of Stanford's six-hour
oral Ph.D. specialist examination.
My doctorate was
conferred in 1963. Shortly after, a book publisher contacted me
about publishing my dissertation with a subsidy of $200. I welcomed
the opportunity to publish my first book but couldn't afford the
subsidy, so I passed the publisher's letter along to the Main
Building to see if Notre Dame would help. The University granted
the subsidy immediately, and when the book came out, Father Hesburgh
sent me a congratulatory letter and thanked me for the copy I
had sent him.
By the time my dissertation
was published, I was an assistant professor. My wife and I had
six children (in a span of seven years: the rhythm method, of
course). I received promotions and salary increases after that,
but during the first 15 years or so, my Notre Dame salary kept
our family struggling. Eventually, I looked for another job and
finally accepted the chairmanship of the English Department at
Bowling Green State University in Ohio. I signed the contract,
informed Father Hesburgh and reported the matter to Jim Robinson,
our department chairperson. We had been losing faculty members,
and Jim didn't want to lose another, so he spoke to Dean Crosson.
They raised my annual salary by $2,000. It did not match the Ohio
offer, but it was marginally enough to make it not quite worth
the cost of moving to Ohio. I withdrew from the offer. Notre Dame
won again.
The English Department
had already made me director of Graduate Studies (1966-69), and
after Jim Robinson's term, Arts and Letters made me the department's
chairperson (1972-78). When, in 1978, I received a Creative Writing
Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, both the
English Department and the Graduate School chipped in enough money
for me to take a year's leave of absence and finish my novel in
Europe, most of it in Italy.
And so it went, for
another 16 years, until I retired. It's all been Notre Dame's
doing. For some 50 years, from undergraduate to faculty member,
my life has been repeatedly diagnosed, outmaneuvered and directed
by Notre Dame's strategies. I have to admit, of course, that it
was all for my good, as well as the good of my beloved wife and
my dear children, all six of whose college education has been
made possible by ND's Education of Faculty Children's Benefit.
So all I can do now,
after seven years of retirement, is try to get used to these revelations
and learn to relish the thoughts and feelings that Notre Dame
puts into my heart and my head when I hear students sing:
What though the odds
be great or small,
Old Notre Dame will
win over all
While her loyal sons
are marching
Onward to victory.
(October 2005)
