The Hesburgh Transformation

1952–1987 · the thirty-five years

Theodore M. Hesburgh became the university's fifteenth president in 1952, aged thirty-five, and held the office until 1987. The university's own accounting of the thirty-five years is the entry's spine: the operating budget rose from $9.7 million to $176.6 million; the endowment from $9 million to $350 million; sponsored research from $735,000 to $15 million; enrollment from 4,979 to 9,600; the faculty from 389 to 950; some forty buildings were added across the tenure. The governance of the institution changed its nature inside the same span. For many decades the university had been governed under the 1844 charter by a self-perpetuating board of six Holy Cross priests; on 28 March 1967 that board approved statutes joining six laymen to the six priests in a body replacing it, "The Fellows of the University of Notre Dame du Lac," and on 8 April 1967 the Fellows ratified the statutes and delegated general governance to a Board of Trustees mixing lay and religious members — the transfer, in the charter document's own historical note, from the Congregation to the mixed board. The fourteen-story Memorial Library, opened in 1963 and renamed for Hesburgh in 1987, carries the era's scholarly ambition in the building record's own file. Hesburgh steered the university through the turbulent 1960s and admitted its first undergraduate women in 1972. He died in 2015. His successor John I. Jenkins's judgment stands in the university's history as the era's epitaph: Hesburgh "turned a relatively small Catholic college known for football into one of the nation's great institutions for higher learning" — and the university records that his goal of a preeminent Catholic research university "was fully realized when Notre Dame in 2023 was selected as the only Catholic institution to join the Association of American Universities."

1. University of Notre Dame, campus history, "National prominence"; hesburgh.nd.edu
2. Charter of the University of Notre Dame, historical note on the 1967 Statutes
3. Notre Dame News, Hesburgh obituary and accounting, 2015