Notre Dame Magazine // Notre Dame Magazine

A World that Works for Everyone

2012-02-06T09:00:00-05:00

You would expect Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business to focus its teaching on making profits from the world as it is instead of asking students to explore how to fundamentally change it.

But that means you probably haven’t met business Professor Leo Burke — a former entrepreneur, Motorola executive and, in his student days, manager of the Notre Dame football team.

At first glance, Burke ’70 hardly seems a rabble-rouser. Wearing tassel loafers, navy blue slacks, a tasteful blazer and wire-rim glasses, he looks exactly the part of a business professor. Yet when standing at the podium in an Executive Leadership Seminar — so slender it appears a strong breeze would carry him away — he sounds like a community organizer crossed with a moral philosopher. “When we are able to work out of our deepest values, we can work with a compassion for others that changes systems.”

He’s speaking to students in the executive MBA program who travel to South Bend once a month for an intensive four-day battery of classes. They are successful business leaders, many of whom have already climbed far on the corporate ladder and believe a Notre Dame MBA will boost them to the top, so you might expect some eyes to roll at this outspoken display of idealism. But everyone sits riveted by Burke’s message, scribbling notes in unison when he asks, “What inner capacity do you need to access in order to make a difference?”

“He urges you to go deeper, look harder,” says Kristin Mannion, a senior majoring in business information technology management who took his undergraduate course in 2010. “He’s a brilliant thinker and leader.”

“Even the biggest curmudgeons in class can’t help but stop and think about what he’s saying,” says Kerry Davis, 42, a global sales manager for a Chicago company and an executive MBA student. “Leo is such a gentle soul and lives with such a sense of purpose.”

The purpose that’s driving Burke’s life right now is an ancient idea he believes will be crucial to the future of humanity and our planet: the commons. At first, the term can provide more confusion than inspiration. Many people think of the commons as a park in downtown Boston or as communal grazing lands seized by English noblemen before and during the Industrial Revolution, turning many self-reliant peasants into unwilling factory workers.

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About the Commons

Burke explains that “commons” has taken on a broader definition over the past 10 years, which could ultimately affect life in the 21st century as much as industrialization did in the 19th and 20th. The commons has now come to mean everything that we share together, which is owned by no one individually. This includes air and water, parks and roads, the Internet and scientific knowledge.

“The total inheritance of humankind upon which life depends,” is how Burke describes it. That’s from the website of the Global Commons Initiative, a project he’s launching out of Mendoza. But here’s the shorthand explanation he uses frequently in the classroom and conversation: “The commons means a world that works for everyone.”

Burke stresses the commons is not some abstruse theory — it’s part of the fabric of our daily lives. “You are actually participating in the commons, whether you know it or not, when you are volunteering at your local library, organizing a blood drive, doing a project with the Knights of Columbus or working with open source software.”

This idea of managing resources everyone shares depends on old-fashioned virtues like cooperation and collaboration, which play a huge if little-noticed role in making the world go ’round — even in a nation like the United States devoted to individualism and private property.

Burke and others in the nascent commons movement point out that modern life would be impossible without all the things we share — starting with water, the atmosphere, biodiversity and the bounty of nature. We also depend on human creations such as language, cultural customs, stories, religious practices, scientific knowledge, civil society and public services. These natural and cultural riches are not the exclusive property of anyone. They exist for everyone to use, exchange, improve upon and pass on to future generations.

Even the market economy with all of its rewards for individual initiative, commons advocates say, would fall to pieces without a solid foundation of commons-based institutions: the legal system to settle disputes, police enforcement to protect property, schools to train employees, regulatory agencies to protect people’s interests, educational institutions to do basic research.

One example of the commons at work is the Internet, which was not developed by Apple or Google but by the U.S. government, thanks to our tax dollars. It has become the information and communications nexus of the modern world precisely because it is based on the ideals of sharing, not hoarding. The Internet offers a textbook example of how a commons functions.

But the workings of the web are now on a collision course with copyright laws, which lock away information and creative work from anyone not paying for them. Copyright, along with patent laws, serves a useful purpose by making sure people can benefit from the success of their creations. But copyright laws have grown increasingly repressive through the years.

The original Copyright Act of 1790 established a 14-year copyright with a chance to renew for another 14 years if the creator was still living. The Sonny Bono Act of 1998 sets copyright at 70 years beyond the death of the creator, or 120 years from the time of creation if owned by a corporation. Some have charged that this disrupts the natural creative cycle of human civilization, in which ideas and culture become available for everyone to use and reinvent.

So how do we reward creators for their work but not stifle everyone else’s creativity? Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig looked to the workings of the commons for a solution and came up with the Creative Commons license — a system in which writers, musicians, photographers, designers and others allow people to freely share their work but retain the right to charge for commercial uses. Today, Creative Commons licenses are recognized in 50 countries, including the United States, and cover more than 150 million individual works.

In his classes, Burke assigns the book Capitalism 3.0 by Peter Barnes, co-founder of the organization On the Commons. Barnes proposes that commons assets such as the airwaves, the Internet, watersheds, groundwater, city streets and the atmosphere be managed for the benefits of everyone.

Barnes translated this commons idea into legislation to curb global warming, which has been introduced in Congress by senators Maria Cantwell (D-Washington) and Susan Collins (R-Maine). Under Barnes’ Cap-and-Dividend plan, we all are equal owners of the sky and must impose increasingly stiff restrictions on carbon emissions to protect our property. By the same token, any fees companies pay in compensation for their pollution should be distributed to the American public equally. This approach differs from President Barack Obama’s Cap-and-Trade proposal, in which companies keep the profits from buying and selling the right to emit carbon.

Writing in the international magazine Kosmos, Burke declares, “What makes the commons come alive are human relationships — the dynamic interactions of people working together to address shared needs.”

David Bollier, co-founder of the international Commons Strategy Group and author of Silent Theft, says Burke’s own way of working seems to mirror the commons itself. “Not having ego hang-ups and the need to take credit for everything allows him to work in powerful ways of putting people and ideas together.”

Through the Global Commons Initiative, Burke has established both MBA and undergraduate courses in the commons at Notre Dame, launched an open-source commons curriculum available to everyone (now part of the London-based School of Commoning) and is working with the United Nations Institute for Training and Research on an “Introduction to the Global Commons” curriculum. Once associate dean for executive education at Mendoza, he has now cut back to half-time teaching and research so he can travel the world forging partnerships with commons advocates and scholars.

Still, a question remains: As important as the commons may be, why study it in a business school rather than in humanities or social science departments?

Dean Carolyn Woo, who helped Burke create the Global Commons Initiative before she left Notre Dame in December, reels off five answers to that question without stopping for a breath. 1) Understanding the global dimension of business is essential for anyone in the work world today; 2) Managing complex systems, including the interdependent relationships that characterize the commons, will be necessary for tomorrow’s leaders; 3) Safeguarding God’s creation is at the core of the Mendoza College’s purpose; 4) Paying attention to the commons promotes the school’s mission to “ask more of business”; 5) Giving students a wider view of the world on many levels will better prepare them for the future.

“The culture we live in today is so competitive,” says Woo, who left the deanship to head the international Catholic Relief Services. “There’s this whole idea that there is only one winner, and everyone else loses. We want people to realize that we are not always keeping score, that our capacity to care for others is part of our own growth.

“Notre Dame’s founding mission is that we do good for society, not just for ourselves,” she continues. “The global commons is one more aspect of broadening our perspective to serve other people.”

Indeed, the Catechism of the Catholic Church affirms the importance of the commons: “The right to private property, acquired or received in a just way, does not do away with the original gift of the earth to the whole of mankind” [No. 2403].

Burke’s research documents commons principles in Roman law and the Magna Carta as well as encyclicals by popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, John XXIII, Paul VI and John Paul II. “Throughout history the commons has focused on those resources necessary to sustain life,” he writes. “As such, it is closely related to the ‘common good,’ a key concept in Catholic Social Teaching.”

For all the excitement he generates among students and colleagues about the potential of the commons to help us solve seemingly intractable problems like economic inequity, ecological decline and social alienation, Burke is candid about the forces that threaten our shared inheritance.

He notes that each day brings more news about companies “releasing vast amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, patenting the genes necessary to cure cancer, privatizing water, depleting ocean fisheries and claiming seeds as their intellectual property. Corporations face ever-increasing pressure from capital markets to externalize and maximize short-term profits. This orientation often runs counter to the long-term view needed to sustain shared resources for hundreds of years.”

That’s why, he believes, “It’s fundamentally appropriate to examine the commons in a business school, because a lot of what we are doing today to destroy the commons comes from the process of maximizing profit,” which is generally what business schools teach. “That’s not to say that profit in itself is bad, but too often we don’t think enough about what happens in the pursuit of it.”

Burke notes that 20 years ago few B-schools offered classes in sustainability. Now almost all do. He predicts the same thing will happen with the commons, which today is the focus of courses in only a handful of universities and no other business programs that Burke is aware of.

“My concern is that our students absolutely get the best education in marketing, finance, accounting, et cetera, but we also need to invite them to look at the world expansively. I want to make sure we are preparing our students for the world they will live in and lead.”

Yet Burke is quick to point out that a greater understanding of the commons is no panacea for all that’s wrong. He cautions, “Too much emphasis on the commons might not leave space for entrepreneurial efforts that are beneficial.” But we are a long way from needing to worry about that, he adds. The critical balance between individualism and the common good is radically tilted in the direction of the individual in modern society.

In his executive MBA classes, which meet in South Bend and Chicago, he uses the Great Lakes as a case study. “People love the Great Lakes, and they were once a great environmental success story. But people don’t realize they are in trouble again. The pollution, the fracking, the diversion of water. Lake Michigan could become the Aral Sea, which has lost 85 percent of its water in the last 30 years.”

Rather than emphasize “gloom and doom,” which, he says, “does not work in teaching because people just tune out, you must remind students that along with things breaking down, there are opportunities for breakthroughs.” He introduces the commons as a tool that business, investors, citizens, government and nonprofit groups can use to work together to find solutions to looming problems. When you view something like the Great Lakes as a common asset held by everyone who lives there, he says, it stimulates new creativity.

Burke tells a story of a hedge fund manager who, like many executive MBA students, did not at first see the practical application of the commons in his life. “Sure, you can’t walk into the office the next Monday and change everything you do,” Burke admits. But after more discussion in the classroom this student realized the idea was at the core of something he cared deeply about.

“He grew up in the Midwest, and during the summers his family would vacation on the Wabash River,” Burke narrates. “Now in his 40s, he vacations with his children on the river. He was distressed that a chemical company (private sector) is polluting the river, and the state department of natural resources (public sector) is not adequately enforcing environmental laws. He expressed concern whether the river would be healthy for his grandchildren. He came to understand that the Wabash River is a commons. That gave him a whole new view of how the river could be cared for.”

As passionate as Burke is about the commons, he is careful to remember his role in the classroom is educator, not proselytizer. “Ninety percent of our executive MBA students are here to enhance their careers,” he says, “so I am not here tell them how to think, only to offer some questions that I hope will enable important conversations to take place, not only in the classroom but maybe later at a PTA meeting or on the golf course.”

“Notre Dame’s business school is a very market-driven place,” says Amy Fitzgerald, 34, an executive MBA student who worked on economic development projects for the British government before undertaking a mid-career transition. “So I was surprised to hear about the commons here, although he made sure we understood the difference between commons and communism. It’s like my eyes have been opened, even if I struggle with how to integrate the commons into my work.” Fitzgerald, who lives in Evergreen Park, Illinois, is thinking about creating a class in the commons for high school students.

“Students love [Burke], I think, because they get a perspective that they cannot get anywhere in the business curriculum,” says James Quilligan, an international development adviser to world leaders ranging from Jimmy Carter to West Germany’s Willy Brandt to Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere, who is now advising the U.N. Global Compact on the significance of the commons. “In turn, Leo has found that his students bring innovative strategy and solutions to the problems of commons management.”

After a long day in the classroom, Burke shows his executive MBA students Amazing Grace, a 2006 movie with Albert Finney about English politician William Wilberforce, who after 26 years of rancorous debate finally pushed through legislation in 1807 that banned the slave trade across the British Empire.

“At that time there were people who said we couldn’t outlaw slavery because of the effect on the economy,” which is an argument we hear today about changes, Burke tells me after introducing the movie. He’s already seen the film a dozen times, so I persuade him to take me on a tour of his favorite campus commons.

We step into a steamy summer evening, and he points out Holy Cross Chapel inside Stinson-Remick Hall, where he slips away sometimes to meditate. Burke leads me through the quads, past Hesburgh Library, the Dome and the Basilica, and then into the Grotto before stepping onto the pathway circling the lakes — all places shared by the Notre Dame community as special sources of meaning, inspiration and pleasure.

One of his favorite Notre Dame commons, he explains, is not a place at all but the Center for Social Concerns, a service-learning center that puts the Gospel and Catholic social teaching into practice. Every time a cell phone rings in his executive MBA classes, he says with a smile, the recipient of the call must put 20 bucks in a jar to be donated to the center.

As we round Saint Joseph’s Lake, a long-threatening thunderstorm finally cracks the sky and we dash toward a sheltered patio outside Moreau Seminary. Burke is reminded of his time as student manager for the football team, which then bunked at the seminary on nights before home games. Part of his job was seeing that the players got to bed early. He recounts it as a great experience getting to know such stars as Alan Page ’67, Joe Theismann ’71 and especially coach Ara Parseghian.

“That’s where I first learned about management,” he recalls. “Ara was a remarkable leader, very charismatic and caring. A taskmaster but very ethical and fair.”

Burke had grown up in Richmond, Virginia, where his father and uncle — both Domers — ran a family furniture store. As with most students, he found that coming to campus as a freshman opened up a feast of new ideas. “Students were talking about all kinds of issues — social justice and what’s really important in life.”

He graduated with a sociology degree in 1970 and headed to Indiana University for a master’s in political science. Ironically, Elinor Ostrom, who won the Nobel Economics Prize in 2009 for decades of research about how the commons functions in communities around the world, was on the faculty, but Burke never took a course from her. His concentration was jurisprudence.

In his life’s work, Burke has been continually drawn to both visionary exploration and practical action. After graduate school he became a sales rep for a gift and greeting card firm, eventually starting his own company specializing in artistic cards for museum shops. In the 1980s, intrigued by how the emerging field of organization development was introducing insights from many arenas into the workplace, he earned another master’s in the subject and joined Motorola Corporation as director of its in-house College of Leadership and Transcultural Studies. “By that point,” he says, “the company was operating in so many countries they realized that executives needed special training in order to do their best work.”

After 12 years at Motorola, he was lured back to Notre Dame to become associate dean for executive education. Dean Carolyn Woo deemed his diverse experiences just right for shaping the Mendoza College’s programs for students already in the midst of their careers. “He’s a combination of reflection and action, a deep soul and a proven implementer, a hermit and a person of the world.”

Suddenly bells start ringing amid the thunderclaps. We sit quietly for a few moments, savoring the cool breeze as we watch lightning illuminate the heavens across the lake. I ask Burke for more details about the connection between the commons and new breakthroughs in scientific understanding. “The spiritual implications of quantum mechanics are remarkable,” he says softly. “What we are hearing from physicists is that all things are unified.

“You don’t have to be a Buddhist to believe that,” he adds. “Jesus says it. Catholic social teaching says it. Now science says it. I think this insight could provide us with a new model about how we organize our society and our economy.”

He’s quiet again, as if trying to figure out a puzzle in his mind. “I really try to listen closely to my students, and what I hear all of them say is that their families are most important in their lives. I hear them say they want to make a difference in their communities. But the way we work today, and the way our economy works, doesn’t always support that.

“There’s a huge gap between what we want for our children and grandchildren, and where we are headed right now as a society,” adds Burke, who is awaiting the birth of his own first grandchild at the time we speak. “The commons gives us new ways to bridge that gap.”

Looking up I notice the rain has stopped. The night is now illuminated by lightning bugs instead of lightning.

Burke stands up, gazing at the sky. “The commons means a world that works for everyone,” he offers, before heading back across campus in the gloriously cool air to rejoin his class.

Jay Walljasper is the author of All That We Share: A Field Guide to the Commons and editor of OnTheCommons.org. See his article imagining South Bend as a bastion of the commons in the year 2035. His website is JayWalljasper.com.

How could they?

2012-02-06T08:30:00-05:00

My friend Mary and I had been on the road for 10 hours already and were anxious to get to our destination. As we headed east along the Chambersburg Pike, our eyes scoured the countryside for any sign of the park — it was a national park, after all, and one would expect signs — but there were none. All we saw were the fertile farmlands of southeastern Pennsylvania.

All of a sudden, out of the corner of my left eye, I spied a man on a pedestal, holding binoculars. Glancing to my right, I saw the barn familiar to me from a certain mid-19th-century photograph. As my foot pushed down on the brake pedal, my brain began to process the two images. The man on the pedestal holding binoculars was not really a man but a statue of Union Brigadier General John Buford, who first spotted the arrival of Confederate troops here on June 30, 1863, as they marched east down the Chambersburg Pike. The barn marked the location of McPherson Ridge, where Buford and his 2,200 cavalrymen tried unsuccessfully to hold off 7,000 Confederate infantrymen until reinforcements arrived.

No signs had guided us here, but we knew we’d reached our destination: Gettysburg.

My passion for the Civil War dates from my first viewing of Ken Burns’ documentary on the war that was aired on PBS in 1990. Over the years since then, I’d read many histories of the period. As part of a book group Mary and I belonged to, we read Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, which recalled the author’s travels throughout the South with a group of Civil War re-enactors. More than anything else, Horwitz’s book spurred me to plan my own tour of Civil War battlefields one day.

Since I’d planned to retire at the end of the 2010-11 academic year, and since 2011 marks the 150th anniversary of the start of the war, I thought, what better time to take that trip? So just six days after my last day of work at the end of May, Mary and I packed up our cameras and other belongings in a rental car and headed east for two weeks.

I had a general idea of what I hoped to accomplish on the tour. None of the books I’d read had given me a clear idea of what happened on the battlefields, and the maps were really inadequate. I also couldn’t figure out how generals, North or South, knew where to position their troops on a huge battlefield like Gettysburg, or, in an age without even walkie-talkies, how they conveyed their wishes to their subordinates. I wanted to know how the battles were organized and coordinated. I thought that if only I could see the battlefields, I could figure these things out.

The tour, then, began as an intellectual exercise, like completing a giant jigsaw puzzle. But that solitary statue of Buford, emerging so unexpectedly from an ordinary farm field, presumably on or near the spot where he first saw those Confederates marching down the Chambersburg Pike on that day almost 150 years ago, had a profound effect on me. It was as if Buford had suddenly stepped out of history to remind all visitors of what had happened here so long ago. I’d been so focused on battlefield logistics that I’d almost forgotten that I would be walking on hallowed ground.

Mary and I eventually did find our way to the Gettysburg National Military Park and its new visitor’s center, where we secured the services of Doug, a licensed battlefield guide, for a two-hour tour. For reasons that we never quite figured out, but for which we were both extremely grateful, Doug stretched out our tour of the roughly 6,000 acre park to five hours.

Doug took us to all the park’s notable sites, indicating to us the placement of troops around the battlefield on each of the three days of fighting and explaining how the generals communicated to their subordinates on the field. (They used flags.) But that information was no longer of interest to me.

Because by then I’d stood with Union Brigadier General G. K. Warren atop Little Round Top and understood, as he did from this vantage point, how critical that spot was to commanding the entire battlefield. And I’d stood where Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Union General George Meade had watched the progress of General George Pickett’s Charge on the third day, from opposite sides of the field, and understood how 5,600 Confederate casualties resulted. The nearly 12,000 men who stepped off from the woods that day had to march across a mile of open ground and scramble over fences, all the while being raked with fire from the Union-held Little Round Top on their right and Cemetery Ridge on their left.

I have no knowledge of military tactics or battlefield logistics. But it doesn’t take a West Point graduate to look out over that field and conclude that such a charge would be an invitation to slaughter. Surely the men who stepped off that day knew what they were getting into, and yet they went anyway. They went anyway.

Standing at the wall where Union forces repulsed the one small Confederate force able to breach the Federal line, a place known to history as The Angle, I couldn’t help but wonder how men could go on after a disaster such as this, how they could continue to march into battle and trust the leadership of their generals. It seemed inconceivable to me, and yet they did it.

My question was no longer how the generals did what they did on the battlefields, but rather why the troops continued to fight and die in such extraordinary numbers on both sides. Above and beyond what has motivated soldiers the world over since the dawn of time, I wanted to know why these men, the men who fought in the Civil War, went anyway.

Here are the numbers. At Gettysburg, out of the 150,000 men engaged in the three days of battle, 51,000 became casualties (killed, wounded or missing). Of the three million men who fought in the Civil War on both sides, 620,000 died of battle wounds or disease, during or after the war. This number exceeds the nation’s total losses in all of its wars from the Revolution through Vietnam.

I imagined that one of the reasons soldiers went anyway may have been the 19th century’s attitude toward death. Because medicine was so primitive, death was more prevalent. A third of all children born in the United States in the 19th century did not live to adulthood. And the sick or injured were usually cared for at home, where they died within view of their friends and families, not among professionals and shut off somewhere in a hospital or nursing home. This is not to say that people valued their lives less than we value ours; I mean only to say that death then was seen as normal and not as a medical failure.

But being more accepting of death is a far cry from volunteering for it, as these men did. That, it seemed to me, required a commitment to something higher. Both sides, of course, believed in the rightness of their cause, that God was on their side. But no sooner had my thoughts turned that corner, no sooner had the word “cause” entered my head, than all rational thought took flight. I understood that the cause for which they fought, whatever it was, was extremely important; it was what ennobled their self-sacrifice, elevating it above mere fatalism. But the very notion of a “cause,” any cause, caught in my throat, almost physically choking me.

While I could pity the soldiers who fought at Gettysburg, as a cynical member of the Vietnam War generation, who learned to be wary of all grand causes since they often turn out to be nothing but grand delusions, and who wasn’t sure there was any cause worth killing and dying for, I couldn’t view them as anything other than poor deluded fools.

We moved on to other battlefields, but with each stop we were confronted with more carnage and more evidence of incompetence. In just 12 hours of fighting at Antietam on September 17, 1862 — the bloodiest day in American history — there were 23,000 casualties, more than twice the total Allied casualties on D-Day. In Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862, Union General Ambrose Burnside threw his infantry against a firmly entrenched Confederate position on Marye’s Heights not just once or twice but 14 times. The result: 12,600 Union casualties. In July 1864, in the wake of an explosion under the Confederate line detonated by Union troops in an attempt to break the siege of Petersburg, those troops poured into the resulting crater to attack the Confederates instead of going around it, because their leader, Brigadier General James Ledlie, wasn’t there to direct them. He was rumored to be behind the lines getting drunk, and 3,800 Union casualties resulted from what one Confederate general referred to as “the turkey shoot.” My mind kept circling back to the question of what kept these men going.

Maybe it was the heat at Gettysburg that had fried my brain. The temperature on the battlefield that day had been 95 degrees, and we’d been out in that heat for five hours. Or maybe it had been the shock and the profound emotional impact of seeing the statue of John Buford rising from the earth out of nowhere that had caused me to forget everything I knew about the Civil War. More likely, it had been easier to see those soldiers as deluded fools than to see myself as a prisoner of my own historical circumstance. Whatever the reason that rationality had taken flight at Gettysburg, it returned during the subsequent two weeks of our tour.

The Civil War was not Vietnam, of course. It wasn’t fought halfway across the globe, in the jungles of a little country in Southeast Asia few Americans had even heard of, on behalf of a people who didn’t want us there. As our tour demonstrated all too well, it was fought right here at home, in our own cities and towns, on our own farmlands and along our own country roads, because of a contradiction between our principles and our practice, between what we professed to believe in — the equality of all — and the fact that four million of us, one in seven, were slaves. That house, Lincoln said, could not stand; to have believed otherwise — that we could survive permanently as half free and half slave — would have been delusional.

What was at stake in the Civil War was who we, as Americans, really were. We had a stake in the outcome of that conflict that we did not have in Vietnam. In addition, those who fought in Vietnam were primarily conscripts, not volunteers as they were in the Civil War; presumably, their motivations for fighting were different. In Vietnam, according to vets themselves, men wanted only to get out alive. And no one whose primary motivation was to get out alive would have followed Pickett across that Gettysburg field. No, the Civil War was not Vietnam.

So why exactly did Pickett’s men follow him? What possesses a person whose basic instinct is self-preservation to sacrifice himself? Civil War historian James McPherson addresses that issue head-on in his book For Cause and Comrades, which was inspired by what he saw with his own eyes on his first visit to Gettysburg.

Surprisingly, one really can’t say that military discipline is what drove them. Discipline on both sides during the Civil War was notoriously lax. Fully 50 percent of those eligible for the first Confederate draft in April of 1862 failed to sign up, with no consequence to them. And while desertion was widespread in both armies, execution for it was relatively rare. After serving briefly with the Confederacy, for example, Mark Twain spent the war years out west.

Nor can one say that Civil War soldiers were more unquestioning in obedience to orders than soldiers today. Their letters and diaries show just the opposite. In this very democratic, individualistic mid-19th -century society, privates thought they were just as good as officers and deserving of the same respect. They were determined to “have their rights,” they wrote.

In American society at the time, duty, honor, patriotism and the concept of manhood — most importantly, the need to prove it — were more powerful motivating forces than discipline and coercion. Also, because men from the same communities often enlisted together in the same units, peer pressure compelled them to fight instead of flee. And there was the “band of brothers” effect; they fought for each other, if not for anything else. Religious faith played a role as well, perhaps not so much in motivating them to enlist — although some soldiers called the Civil War a crusade — but in sustaining them in the midst of battle. These values are what kept men in the ranks long after the sense of glory or adventure for which many of them had enlisted had lost its luster.

Finally, I think that respect for and confidence in the leadership of Robert E. Lee, who had brought the Army of Northern Virginia unexpected successes at Fredericksburg and Chancellorsville, also propelled Pickett’s men across that field. Both they and Lee thought that under Lee’s leadership, they were invincible.

Above all, there was the cause for which they fought. In Vietnam, U.S. soldiers didn’t know what they were fighting for, and they couldn’t help but notice how tenaciously the soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army fought precisely because they knew what they were fighting for. As McPherson wrote, “It is impossible to understand how the huge volunteer armies of the Civil War could have come into existence and sustained such heavy casualties over four years unless many of these volunteers really meant what they said about a willingness to die for the cause.”

In the Civil War, there was no escape from the motivating power of The Cause. Some Union soldiers immediately saw the major issue at stake in the war as slavery and fought to destroy it. But many saw the conflict originally as one of law vs. anarchy, and only came around to seeing it as one over slavery toward the end of the war. Others, such as Sullivan Ballou of the 2nd Rhode Island Volunteers, whose poignant final letter to his wife on the eve of the first battle of Bull Run was immortalized in Ken Burns’ documentary, fought to preserve the legacy of liberty bequeathed to them by the Revolutionary generation.

Some Confederates did see themselves as fighting to defend slavery, but most saw themselves as fighting for liberty, too — i.e., against enslavement by the North. Apparently, the paradox of fighting for their own freedom while holding others in chains was lost on them. The South, of course, also fought for home and hearth.

Finally understanding why Civil War soldiers went anyway wasn’t the reason I eventually changed my mind about them. During the two weeks after Gettysburg, I’d seen the landscapes of many battlefields, from Antietam to Fredericksburg to Petersburg, and having seen over and over again what those soldiers were up against, I developed an enormous respect for all of them, on both sides of the conflict, no matter what kept them going and whatever the cause for which they fought. Their fortitude on the battlefields we saw — so many of them D-Days in their own right — and in the face of either hubris or incompetence on the part of their high command, is simply astonishing, worthy of my respect and appreciation, not my scorn.

After the fall of Richmond and Petersburg in early April 1865, the chase was on as Lee retreated from Petersburg with Grant and his 120,000 troops in hot pursuit. The plight of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia at this point was heartbreaking. The Confederacy had fallen apart and had no resources left with which to supply its army. Starving, exhausted from days and nights of marching without rest, barely clothed or shod, their flanks constantly harassed by Union troops and drawn homeward by pleading letters from loved ones, thousands of Confederate soldiers deserted.

Remarkably, 35,000 men remained with Lee. These men had no “country” any more, or perhaps Lee was their country and they were fighting just for him. Whatever their cause, while I did pity them for all they had suffered, as I’d pitied the men at Gettysburg, I no longer saw them as poor deluded fools.

Mary and I set out to follow Lee and the remnants of his once glorious Army of Northern Virginia from Petersburg all the way to Appomattox. When we first planned the trip, we thought that following the retreat would provide us with nothing more than a scenic drive. After seeing for ourselves the nature of this war, and the sacrifices made on both sides, we followed the retreat for a different reason: To pay our respects to the soldiers of both armies, who had fought so nobly and so bravely for so long.

And so for eight long hours, we followed the twists and turns of narrow, rarely traveled and often unmarked back country roads, through pristine Virginia farmlands, from Namozine Church to places with names like Jetersville, Deatonville, Rice’s Depot, Amelia Court House, Double Bridges, Holt’s Corner and New Store. It was like making the Stations of the Cross. But it wasn’t until I was standing in Wilmer McLean’s front parlor at Appomattox Court House, where Lee surrendered to Grant on Palm Sunday, 1865, that I fully realized what I had only dimly perceived two weeks earlier in front of that statue of General Buford in Gettysburg: what had begun as a tour would end as a pilgrimage.

Barbara Turpin, a former associate dean of Notre Dame’s Graduate School, retired in 2011.

ND Folk Choir releases first live CD

2012-02-06T07:30:00-05:00

If you have attended Sunday Mass at the Basilica of the Sacred Heart since 1981 you may well remember belting out “How Can I Keep from Singing,” the hymn that has become the unofficial anthem of the Notre Dame Folk Choir. Now imagine it sung in perfectly enunciated four-part harmony by a Folk Choir ensemble — along with 1,500 professional church musicians — and you’ll have a feel for the choir’s newest CD release and its first-ever live album.

Last summer, during a heat wave that kept temperatures above 90 after sunset, the choir performed inside a sweltering Saint Boniface Church in Louisville, Kentucky, at the National Pastoral Musicians’ Conference, an annual gathering of professional Catholic musicians. The choir’s director, Steve Warner ’80M.A., says the concert took months to plan, since it brought together 15 current students and 35 alumni and required near-perfection.

“We knew going into it that we wanted to record, which meant the stakes were high right from the start,” says Warner. “You’ve got one chance for an hour and five minutes to make it right. There’s no second take.”

The concert ensemble of past and present members had performed together only once before, the previous night at a parish in suburban Louisville that raised money for a local shelter for homeless men.

The live album, From Gethsemani to Galway, charts the 30-year journey of the Folk Choir from its collaborative relationship with the Trappists of the Abbey of Gethsemani, just an hour south of Louisville, to the choir’s famous summer tours and a more recent pastoral ministry initiative in Wexford, Ireland, called Teach Bhride, or House of Brigid.

The 17-track album was released through World Library Publications in November 2011. The CD opens with “You Have Put on Christ” and then Warner’s arrangement of “The Lord’s Prayer.” Its final track is the powerful anthem “We Are Marching.”

Much of the Folk Choir’s music was written or arranged at Notre Dame by Warner and Karen Schneider Kirner, the choir’s associate director. Warner wrote harmonies for all of the songs the choir performed at Saint Boniface to encourage audience participation. “Sometimes, the veil between heaven and earth gets stretched very thin,” he says of the performance, “and this was one of those moments.”

Kathleen Toohill was this magazine’s autumn 2011 intern.

Networthy ND 22

2012-02-06T06:00:00-05:00

Pirates and the Protestant Reformation, anti-matter and crying babies. Those are some of the topics covered in this edition of Networthy. One thing is certain: No one can ever accuse Notre Dame people of having narrow interests.

If the short film Fishing Without Nets, co-written and produced by John Hibey ’05 is even a tenth as exciting and intense as the movie’s trailer (and it must be since the fictional film about Somali pirates told from their perspective won the 2012 Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize in short film making) then hang onto your seat. The film short, directed and co-written by Hibey’s longtime friend, Cutter Hodierne, who made a name for himself with his 2010 concert film U2:360 Degrees at the Rose Bowl, drew so much buzz at Sundance, that a feature-length version is now in the works. Hibey and Hodierne hope to begin filming the feature this summer, possibly in South Africa.

Notre Dame historian Brad Gregory, along with the University of Chicago’s Martin Marty, were guests on the WGN radio interview show Extension 720 in January, discussing Gregory’s newly published book, The Unintended Reformation, about the long term and sometimes surprising effects that the Protestant Reformation has had on the modern world. Listen to a podcast of their discussion.

Ever since John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 talk to Southern Baptist ministers in Houston, the question of a presidential candidate’s religion was thought to be a non-issue. However, apparently not. It has resurfaced this year with some Christians being uncomfortable with Mitt Romney’s Mormonism. In his New York Times Opinionator blog ND philosophy professor Garry Gutting examines whether a presidential candidate’s religion ought to be an issue.

Light sabers and time travel aren’t real — at least not yet — but another science fiction plot convention, anti-matter, truly does exist. Notre Dame adjunct professor of physics and Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln tells all about it in an entertaining brief video.

Writing in the British newspaper The Guardian, ND Law professor Mary Ellen O’Connell argues against . the “targeted killing” policy of the Obama Administration which has employed drone aircraft to kill targeted civilians — including an American citizen— in Pakistan and Somalia

Once upon a time (namely the latter half of the 20th century), all the psychological experts advised parents to let their child “cry it out.” The advice then was if you want a healthy, independent child, don’t respond to an infant’s sign of distress. Today, we know that is the worst thing a parent can do, ND child psychologist Darcia Narvaez says in her Psychology Today blog.

The Playroom: Normal boy stuff

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

When my son was 3, I signed him up for skating lessons at the local ice rink. Somehow now, four years later, I’m a hockey mom. And I spend a lot of time lacing up skates in boys’ locker rooms.

Most of what I hear doesn’t bother me. It’s your average potty talk, poop and butts. Then some dad will growl at the boys to stop it, and they’ll giggle and turn on some hip hop song and circle back around to wiggling butts, and then another dad will growl at them. Normal locker room stuff, “normal boy stuff,” I don’t mind it much.

I didn’t even mind when I got a hockey stick stuck down the back of my jeans when I crouched down to lace up my son’s skates. At my age I’ll take any compliment I can get. But I think the dad who did it was as surprised as I was, so I guess that wasn’t “normal boy stuff,” it was more of a mistake.

So I’m used to boys’ locker rooms, potty talk and hockey sticks and all. But today my son did something that kind of surprised me and made me uncomfortable. I think it’s probably “normal boy stuff,” like the time he and his best friend dropped their sticks and started clobbering each other on the backyard ice over who was supposed to shoot and who was supposed to pass. I was kind of upset after we had to pull them apart, but my husband just gave my concerns a chuckle and called it “normal boy stuff.”

The other night my son and his friend were playing video games down in the playroom. They didn’t know I was watching. I was enjoying myself, taking a break from the laundry, watching the boys have fun. When my son won the game, he pulled down his pants, wiggled his butt and mooned his friend. I was shocked. The boys thought it was hysterical, as did my husband when I marched upstairs to report “what those two have done now.”

I was told once again it was just “normal boy stuff,” like jumping out the windows, off the porch, on the beds and into the car, offering your sister 10 bucks to smell the dog’s butt, giggling at farts, making poop in a blender and shopping for weapons. And although I’m used to it, sometimes I falter a bit raising a boy. I question if my son is okay, normal. As a girl, I’m not always comfortable with “normal boy stuff.”

So the other day I was standing in front of our school, where we have a beautiful new statue of Mary holding the infant Jesus. As I was admiring the statue, I got to thinking that the Holy Mother raised a boy, too, and since I was just standing there waiting for my son, I started to pray and ask for some guidance. I asked for a little more patience and understanding and maybe even a few ideas on how to handle all the butt talk.

While I was praying, a little boy who was tired of waiting for his brother to get out of school walked up to the statue, dropped his pants and peed all over the Holy Mother’s feet. He pulled up his pants and ran off into the bushes to play, just normal boy stuff.

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

Magazine job opening

2012-01-31T09:00:00-05:00

John Monczunski, an associate editor at Notre Dame Magazine, is retiring at the end of March, and the magazine now has an opening in its editorial department. See the job posting for details.

Homily for Sister Jean Lenz, OSF

2012-01-30T16:00:00-05:00

Funeral Homily for Sister Jean Lenz, OSF
Mass of the Resurrection
Our Lady of Angels Chapel
January 25, 2012

Once again, on behalf of the Joliet Franciscans and Jean’s family and friends, I want to thank you all for coming and welcome you to this commemoration and celebration of Jean’s extraordinary life in Christ. These are sad days for those of us who have such fresh memories of a woman who inspired us, taught us, changed us, and loved us — and whom we deeply loved in return. Indeed, there is a hole in our hearts and a hole in the congregation tonight. This is the group that Jean would have loved to be with, to tell more stories, to relive great days, to shine that incredible smile, to simply share the moment, or as she would always say, to “enjoy the local color.”

But for all that sense of loss, these are also days of genuine joy that Jean is at last home with God, set free from the limits of this world and now fully immersed in the love that filled her heart for 81 years. As we come together this evening around the Word of God that so imbued everything Jean did, and the Eucharist that formed her sense of service and generosity in imitation of Jesus, we recall the gift from God that Jean was — to her family; her Franciscan community; her cherished friends; to students, faculty, colleagues, staff, alums and others connected to Notre Dame; and to the many, many people who came to know her and treasure her through the years. I am keenly aware that I’m only one of hundreds here tonight who could offer memories of Jean and her profound effect on our lives — our sense of what’s important, our faith in God, our desire for goodness, our love of others.

I will take my cues from the first reading from Sirach, “to praise the godly in their own time, as . . . their virtues have not been forgotten.” A few of Jean’s virtues that will not be forgotten:

Jean was humble. In a world full of self-absorption, Jean was comfortable enough in her own skin that she didn’t have to draw the attention, didn’t have to press her point, didn’t have to make sure she was in the mix. Indeed, she actually enjoyed some of the “hiddenness” of her life. True, she was best friends with the president of Notre Dame, and trustees and lots of influential people sought her out constantly, but she was also best friends with the head housekeeper in Farley, she knew the cooks in the old Oak Room by name, she would carry on with the groundskeepers about the lawns. She could engage the most serious topics with the most important people, but she saved lots of time simply to play with nieces and nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews.

She would read a book and have by far some of the most astute things to say about it, but she would always lead with interest in what others thought, what others took away from it. In meetings, she would listen intently before saying anything. (Now there’s a distinction we could base her canonization on.) In fact, Jean was the gold standard for the art of listening. She actually listened to people. She wasn’t just waiting to talk; she wasn’t just gathering her thoughts; she wasn’t just trying to create a pause for the sake of drama. She really listened, and because she combined that listening with profound compassion and uncanny intuition, she offered people sacred time and space for understanding, hope and healing. She gave generations of students the room to grow, grow deep and grow up. No one was a better counselor, adviser, confidant or spiritual director. Humility does that for you.

She was honest — probably the most striking example of truth practiced in charity I’ve ever known. Colleagues could carry on for an hour about the dimensions of a particular challenge or mini-crisis in student life, and then Jean would wrap up the discussion in a phrase that would capture the whole thing perfectly. I mean perfectly. We would not only have a grasp of what was at issue, we would know what had to be done, whether the path was easy or difficult. She did that truth-telling for colleagues, but she also did it for students, for parents, for friends, for seekers, for the lost and abandoned, for the smug and powerful, for anyone who would care to listen. And she always did it with unfailing charity.

Those who knew her well came to appreciate that when Jean found something “interesting,” it was code language for what the rest of us would have said in words much more judgmental, dismissive and oppositional. Whenever she would roll those eyes and back up a little bit and pronounce something “interesting,” all of us would know that major disapproval had just been exercised. Truth, grace and charity . . . always in combination.

Jean had the soul of an educator. She loved knowledge, she loved teaching, she loved learning. She asked a million questions and was one of the most intellectually curious people I’ve encountered. Sometimes that disarming honesty would team up with that love for knowledge and she would ask the question that nobody else would have the courage to pose. When she was lost in a good book or article, you just didn’t want to disturb her. I can’t tell you how many times I passed her at her signature booth in LaFortune and did not stop to say hello. Why? Because she was totally immersed in the Chicago Tribune and I knew it was a moment of unvarnished pleasure for her.

Wouldn’t you give a couple university endowments to hear her laugh one more time? That laugh — full of body language and sparkling eyes and sometimes a very red face! Jean’s humor was an expression of a deep sense of joy — genuine joy — that few attain. She was so grounded in and so appreciative of the human condition that she saw immediately the beauty, the irony, the pretense, the foibles, the connections. And her first impulse was to smile, to light up, to laugh with, to enjoy the gift and grace of it all.

Jean lived in the moment. It explains why so many years passed at Notre Dame without her really counting them. In that vein, please indulge me one more story. When I visited her at Thanksgiving, I found her, like many of you did, to be moving in and out of touch with her surroundings. She would sing a love song to Jesus and then suddenly she would talk about some advertisement that was actually on the TV in her room. In the midst of all that flux, I attempted some conversation and said, “Jean, think of all those incredible years at Notre Dame.” She immediately shot back “38 of them.” Startled, I said “and all the time you spent in Student Affairs. So many years first with David Tyson, then Patty O’Hara and then me.” Her eyes widened and she looked me straight in the face and said, “Oh my God, do you think it’s finally catching up to me now?” And then she was back to singing.

She loved Francis and the Joliet Franciscans. She loved her family and was totally animated whenever she talked about Jack and Pat, Ray and Ethel, Trudy and Mike, as well as nieces, nephews and others that were the light of her life. She would return from Lake Wawasee each summer floating on a cloud of great family stories. She loved Chicago. She loved Notre Dame.

She loved all of her students, but (dare I say it) in a special way she loved those women who had joined Notre Dame when it first went co-ed — because she was one of them. The talk in recent times really is not overblown or exaggerated: She truly was a trail-blazer, a pioneer, a legendary figure in the institutional history of Notre Dame. The University had known 130 years of male-only student life when Father Ted invited her to come serve as rector of Farley and help move Notre Dame to a new place. Yes, 130 years. It was a change, a transformation to “loyal sons and daughters” that only Jean’s authenticity, discernment, wisdom, courage and humor could pull off.

In describing those early women she grew so close to, she would tell you with no prompting that they went on after graduation to do such amazing things — distinguished physicians and researchers and judges and wives and mothers who raised beautiful families. She always left off the last part — that they had achieved so much because of her encouragement, her belief in them, her simple, powerful witness that faith in Christ was the strongest foundation anyone could ever have to build a life on. And she cared so much for them individually as they navigated the big questions. As Sheila O’Brien wrote to me a few days ago, “Who will have their arms open to us now?”

Finally, Jean was full of faith. When Jean said she was going to pray for you, you knew it wasn’t a throw-away line . . . that she was actually going to spend time . . . in prayer . . . with God . . . about you. As he has so often, Father Ted said it best, “The time students spent with her exposed them to goodness, fun and deep beauty. Her teaching brought them face to face with the Christ in whom she deeply believed.” Indeed, the time all of us spent with her brought us face-to-face with Christ.

At this time of sadness, let’s draw our deepest consolation from a truth that Jean taught with her life — that those who are formed and transformed according to the Way, Truth and Life of Jesus do not die. They live forever with the God who raised Jesus from the dead, the God they have come to know and love. They are welcomed into a Kingdom they have already begun to build. Tonight let’s remember, believe, give thanks and celebrate that even as we pray for her here, she is with God in a place she recognizes well and loves with all her heart. Welcome home, Jean, to eternal company with God, the source and fulfillment of your amazing, blessed life.

Sister Jean Lenz, OSF, former assistant vice president for student affairs at Notre Dame, died Jan. 21, 2012, at Our Lady of the Angels Retirement Home in Joliet, Illinois, after a long illness. She was 81 years old.

Father Poorman is the executive vice president at the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon.

Soundings: Stories with Sister Jean

2012-01-30T14:00:00-05:00

The last time I saw Jean Lenz it was pretty much like the first time — and all the times in between. I smiled throughout the conversation, listening to her talk.

It was last summer, as I recall, on the sidewalk between Flanner and Grace. We were heading in opposite directions, but we stopped and took the time to talk. As always, she had a few stories to tell. Jean always made me smile with her stories. Mostly it was the way she told them.

Always fresh, amused and unaffected, she brought a certain incredulous but affectionate cheer to the tales of undergrad escapades, the things the young men and women tried to get away with, like the time a mob of streakers showed up at the door of Farley. Jean always had this fun, “Can you believe it?” attitude toward life’s odd little corners.

But her stories could also be thick with empathy and love when she talked of growing pains, a death in the family or a parent’s divorce. You could tell she felt the student’s pain, too. The compassion she showed to a Chinese graduate student paralyzed when struck by a car one drizzly night on Notre Dame Avenue was an exacting measure of her big heart.

Jean had a million stories from her days as rector here and her years in the Office of Student Affairs. She was a big, glowing candle in the middle of Notre Dame’s journey into co-education, a solid, embracing refuge and home. She was beloved by generations of women. She epitomized Notre Dame.

In many ways, Jean was the place where many students got their Notre Dame education, where the institution delivered on its promises or not. She was right in the fray with them — very serious business. And yet one of Jean’s charms was that she didn’t seem to take herself too seriously. She really enjoyed what she did; she really enjoyed — really loved — the students.

I wasn’t surprised to hear she had died this past weekend. I had been stunned late last fall when I heard her condition was terminal. I was also surprised by her age; she was 81. Jean was ageless, always youthful. I think it was the students who kept her young, and the joy she took in following their journeys through a lifetime.

I knew Jean mostly in passing. I would interview her for magazine articles, have conversations in hallways and on sidewalks. She regaled me with stories, her tales speaking eloquently of Notre Dame.

Jean was also a member of this magazine’s editorial advisory board, representing the students and student affairs office. I loved having her at the meetings — meetings that could get serious, even a little tense at times.

Jean always offered a wise touch and a light demeanor, reminding us it is people who really matter, how the people are affected by a decision, and showed how not to make ourselves more important than we were. She seemed to have such a good sense for what really mattered in life.

In fact, I always thought of Jean Lenz as one of those who led the way. She was one of the people at this place who lived in a way that showed the rest of us how it should be done. And yet Jean was also such a model of goodness that the rest of us could hardly live up to the example she set.

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

Gotta Have It Now, Right Now

2012-01-30T09:00:00-05:00

As I write this article, I am struggling to resist the urge to peek at my email. I realize that checking it would partly be an escape for me when the words don’t flow freely. But I also may be a perfect example of how technology has intensified people’s need for instant gratification.

Related article
Wired for Rewards

Even though I don’t know what my inbox might hold, it’s that uncertainty, along with the expectation I just might find a gratifying message, that makes me want to look.

David Greenfield, founder of the Center for Internet and Technology Addiction in West Hartford, Connecticut, likens my email experience to playing a slot machine. I’m not going to feel the excitement of winning a jackpot, but subconsciously I realize that a waiting message could contain a bit of good news. “The hit when you get a good email is like the hit of winning money,” says Greenfield. “It provides instant gratification.”

Whether on our computers or at casinos, we are indeed a culture increasingly driven by our need for instant gratification. We want — no, demand — everything right now. Once a virtue, patience is becoming as rare as handwritten letters.

Examples of the need for instant gratification abound. A friend who works at a Williams-Sonoma store was fuming one day recently when a shopper called him incompetent and demanded his name and the customer service number so she could report him. The crime: She had to wait 10 minutes to pay for her bag of pasta.

Everything from on-demand movies to scratch-off lottery tickets to instant messages has heightened people’s sense of urgency. At Walt Disney World, FastPass tickets cut your wait time for the most popular rides. Cosmetics marketers promise a facelift in a flash with products like Maybelline Instant Age Rewind. Online, instantly downloaded music purchases have put record stores out of business. And there’s no need for high school seniors to worry for long about college admission decisions: Apply “early decision” and learn your fate within a month or so.

“Things are happening so fast and information can be obtained so quickly that it does bias us toward instant gratification,” says Darrell Worthy, assistant professor of psychology at Texas A&M University. “Five or 10 years ago, I would have been more able to sit down and read an entire journal article. Now I tend to read through the abstract and figures more quickly. I’m focused on acquiring the gist of things.”

Although people save time and may even be more productive in our accelerated world, the need for instant gratification raises concerns about our work ethic, social interactions, character development, even our mental health. Some people are so impatient and so driven by instant technology that they never unplug, never slow down. They don’t take time for contemplation and relaxation, and, according to some mental health professionals, they are at greater risk for addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, gambling, video games and the Internet.

A number of societal trends, including easy credit and unfettered consumer buying before the Great Recession, the explosive growth of legalized gambling and the technology revolution, have stoked people’s desire for instant gratification. At the same time, our business and government leaders also demonstrate little tolerance for moderation and long-term planning. Staggering federal and state budget deficits show a reckless lack of self-control, and Wall Street’s fixation with short-term results puts pressure on companies to deliver quarterly gains at any cost. That mentality, along with personal greed, accounted in large part for the financial scandals at Enron, Tyco and other companies a decade ago, and for the extreme risk-taking that brought down Lehman Brothers and the world economy in 2008.

A “spend now, save later” mindset also figured strongly in the housing market collapse. While predatory lenders took advantage of unqualified prospects in the subprime mortgage crisis, the homebuyers were also to blame for their unwillingness to delay a home purchase until they truly qualified for credit. Their parents likely worked extra hours or took second jobs as they scrimped and saved to buy a home, but who can wait that long anymore?

Financial experts fret about people’s failure to delay gratification and save money, especially for their retirement years. “I feel that America has become the culture of now, the culture of present consumption,” says Stephen Utkus, a principal with the Vanguard Group’s Center for Retirement Research. “It’s a major problem that people can’t get over their present-day bias and plan for retirement. And the financial system has been an enabler with the easy access to credit.”

The U.S. personal savings rate began dropping in the mid-1980s, the era of Madonna’s “Material Girl,” and has never come close again to the double digits of the 1970s and early 1980s. Meanwhile, consumers’ debt load rose steadily during the previous decade, peaking in 2007 just before the economy cratered.

Wanting things faster is by no means a new phenomenon. The Polaroid instant camera was invented in 1948, the same year the first McDonald’s fast food restaurant opened. FedEx created its powerful international brand with the 1980s ad slogan, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.” At about the same time, the microwave oven became a kitchen staple and the plastic squeeze bottle took the anticipation out of pouring Heinz ketchup.

But the world moves ever faster, and it seems that people are becoming less and less patient. Remember the days when waiting for a dial-up connection for the Internet seemed perfectly reasonable and gave you enough time to grab a cup of coffee? Now if a high-speed connection takes more than a few seconds, people complain to their Internet provider.

Can’t stand waiting a few seconds for search engine results? Now, Google Instant reveals possible matches while you’re still typing in your request. Google determined that people type slowly, taking 300 milliseconds between keystrokes but only 30 milliseconds to glance at another part of the page and scan it. If everyone around the world uses Google Instant, the company estimates, they will save more than 3.5 billion seconds a day in Internet search time.

That figure is something the millennial generation would surely appreciate. The need for speed is especially pronounced with millennials, who literally grew up on technology. They were born in the 1980s and 1990s as, first, personal computers and video games, and, later, the Internet and cell phones came to dominate our lives.

My teenage son and other millennials find it hard to believe that their parents once had to sit through television commercials, search for a pay phone to make a call if their car broke down and spent hours in the library combing through books for college research papers. A college intern who worked for me recently didn’t know what I meant when I suggested he look in a telephone directory or call directory assistance when he couldn’t quickly track down a source on the Internet for an article he was writing.

Helicopter parents who hover over their millennial children have fed into the need for instant gratification by intervening to solve every problem, buying them the latest in fashion and technology, and dishing out praise for even the smallest accomplishment.

Because many things have come easily to millennials, they aren’t always willing to pay their dues. Some educators and employers worry that their work ethic isn’t as strong as that of previous generations and that they are willing to cut corners and even cheat in school to get what they want now.

For their part, millennials make no excuses for their impatience. Nearly three quarters agree that they want instant gratification, according to a survey by the career center at California State University, Fullerton, and Spectrum Knowledge, a research and training firm in Cerritos, California. “It is almost an innate instinct of ours to receive instant feedback for something we do, not because we are greedy, careless or selfish but because we grew up that way,” Kristin Dziadul said in a post on Social Media Today, an online community for PR and marketing professionals. “Many people criticize our age cohort because we are this way, but consider how you would respond to things if you grew up experiencing feedback or rewards after everything you did.”

As millennials grow older, their need for instant gratification is extending well beyond the virtual world. Teachers find it harder to engage millennials in class because many want fast-paced, interactive lessons that entertain them. I once sat in the back of a classroom at the University of California at Berkeley and observed a fascinating discussion of business ethics. I was appalled that several students were checking email and surfing the Internet rather than paying attention.

Struggling to compete with YouTube and Facebook, some professors try to connect lessons with popular music and movies. Others give condensed reading assignments rather then entire books. And some schools even provide students with video iPods for online lessons.

While I applaud such creativity and dedication to trying to motivate students, I believe such approaches could shortchange them. Already many students aren’t developing the sound problem-solving skills they will need in their lives and careers. They don’t take time to do the thoughtful research that ambiguous problems — the stuff of life — require.

Millennials also expect near daily praise and feedback from their teachers and bosses, as well as rapid promotions and steady pay increases. Julie Heitzler, human resources manager at the Orlando Airport Marriott Hotel, sometimes feels she should be further along in her career at age 29. Yet when she looks around at her peers within Marriott, she finds that she is one of the few millennials at her level. “As I’m growing older and younger millennials are entering the workforce,” she says, “I am starting to see that some of the expectations, especially timing, we have for our careers can be unrealistic.”

Millennials’ reward mentality is proving to be a major challenge for employers around the world. I recently spoke at a college recruiting conference in Venice, Italy, where employers complained about their excessive expectations. “They don’t want to wait,” Federica Gianotti, a recruiting specialist for Iveco, an Italian truck and bus manufacturer, told me. “It’s always ‘What can the company give me?’ not ‘What can I give the company?’”

The Great Recession and its aftermath have certainly thwarted millennials’ desire for instant gratification in the form of a dream job. “There’s a lot of pent-up frustration,” says Jim Case, director of Cal State Fullerton’s career center. “They’re not getting jobs and a lot of postponement — marriage, buying a house — is being forced on them by the economy.”

As the millennials demonstrate so vividly, it’s technology and gadgets, from social networks to smartphones, that have really put our culture on steroids. Mobile phone owners between 18 and 24 years of age exchange an average of 109.5 text messages a day, according to the Pew Research Center, and 90 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds sleep with their phones. One new bride recently posted the happy news on her Facebook page — as she was walking out of the church. Some surveys even show that people check texts and answer cell phones while having sex because they simply can’t wait to see who’s contacting them.

While the millennials epitomize the instant gratification culture, the next generation could want things even faster. Some parents are giving babies and toddlers cell phones, iPads and other tablet devices loaded with entertaining applications that may or may not have any educational value. A new survey from Common Sense Media found that 10 percent of children under age 2 have used mobile devices, as have 39 percent of 2-to-4-year-olds and more than half of 5-to-8-year-olds. The growing number of televisions, computers and mobile devices in homes and automobiles recently prompted the American Academy of Pediatrics to warn parents to limit children’s time in front of video screens so they have time for creative play and interaction with other people.

To be sure, ever-faster technology can be beneficial when it connects us to the right information in seconds. Some people maintain that instant technology not only is rewarding, but it also makes them more productive. Many pride themselves on multitasking on computers and mobile devices. But a growing body of scientific research shows that multitasking is a myth. The need for stimulation from multiple sources simultaneously plays havoc with our brains and our performance. A Stanford University research study in 2009 concluded that people who are being bombarded with several streams of electronic information do not pay attention, control their memory or switch from one job to another as well as those who complete one task at a time.

People can talk on the phone while answering emails and watching a video, but their focus is split and performance suffers. What’s more, the compulsion to check email, send texts and talk on cellphones becomes extremely dangerous when people are driving. The National Safety Council estimates that more than a quarter of all traffic crashes — over 1.6 million a year — involve cell phone calls or texting. Some lawyers even call mobile phone use the DWI of the 21st century.

The need for a quick technology fix is making people not only less focused but also less considerate. Inevitably, perhaps, instant gratification comes at the expense of civility. Although it’s impolite and annoying to others, people these days routinely check their email and send texts in the middle of dinner with friends, during business meetings or while speakers make presentations at conferences.

At a performance of The Color Purple on Broadway, friends of mine had to endure texting between the woman seated next to them and her husband a few rows behind. The couple couldn’t stay focused on the play that they had paid over $200 to attend and didn’t mind disturbing those around them.

Such behavior recently prompted the Steppenwolf Theatre in Chicago to ask patrons to refrain from texting until intermission. Glowing phones on vibrate may be quiet, but they can be quite distracting in a darkened theater. “When people live in the now, they want to share their experiences in real time; they can’t wait to announce that they’re blown away by the play they’re watching,” says David Rosenberg, Steppenwolf’s communications director. “But for us at the Steppenwolf, sending texts and tweets during the performance is distracting and unacceptable. Actors complain that they can see the lights from the texting, and more audience members are saying they’re distracted from the play.”

A few of those texting and tweeting theatergoers might be looking for a date after the play. That may seem like short notice, but some of the latest mobile apps promise the ultimate in speed dating — or at least hookups. While traditional online matchmaking services mean weeks of searching profiles and meeting potential mates, new mobile applications, such as Blendr and OKCupid Locals, offer instant gratification by connecting people in the blink of an eye. Through location-based technology, the apps reveal who is nearby and might be up for a drink, a date or just a sexual encounter.

Such quick and easy connections could devalue relationships and lead to an obsession with sexual hookups. Of course, the need for instant gratification underlies most addictions, whether to sex, drugs, alcohol or gambling. Now some therapists believe people suffer from Internet addiction because they’re hooked on social media, video games, and online gambling and sex sites. There is even debate among therapists over whether to add Internet addiction to the next edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.

Some universities, including Notre Dame, provide counseling services for Internet addiction, and specialized treatment centers offer both outpatient and residential programs to people who lack the impulse control to disconnect from computers and smartphones.

“We try to prevent our children from gambling, but there isn’t the same cultural awareness about how addicting digital technology can be,” says Hilarie Cash, executive director of the reStart Internet Addiction Recovery Program in Fall City, Washington. “Parents aren’t placing the appropriate boundaries around Internet use; they don’t understand how addictive the gratification can be from constant text messaging and online game playing.”

Since it opened in 2009, the reStart therapeutic retreat center has attracted about 40 young adults, mostly between the ages of 18 and 28, whose online obsession interfered with their college studies and their offline relationships. The patients spend at least 45 days at the center where they receive therapy and have no access to digital technology. Many also need to develop better daily habits, including hygiene, exercise, diet and sleep.

While most people won’t fall victim to an addiction, some mental health professionals and academics worry that we are so connected to the Internet and smartphones that we aren’t taking time for contemplation and relaxation.

Mark Zupan, the dean of the Simon Graduate School of Business at the University of Rochester, finds updating his microeconomics textbook with his co-author much more efficient these days using the Internet rather than doing research in a library. But he told me that he sometimes longs for the time when he could lose himself in a library for three or four hours without any interruptions. He also misses the days when he couldn’t access email from airplanes. “Now if I’m on a flight where I can get email, I feel that I have to go through all my messages before we land,” he says. “That used to be time to read and relax.”

Indeed, downtime and thoughtful reflection are essential to sound decision-making, creativity and innovation. Breakthrough solutions to problems don’t come easily or quickly — or through Google searches. In fact, a friend of mine won’t let his children use Google for their homework until they have tried to figure out answers through plain old thinking.

“We have devalued the time we spend alone just thinking, but it’s that time for reflection that leads to the big ideas,” says Daniel Forrester, the author of Consider: Harnessing the Power of Reflective Thinking in Your Organization. “Multitasking is espoused and almost glorified in the United States, but it is dehumanizing us and making us less creative.”

There are some signs of resistance to constant connectivity, particularly on social networks. An online group called the Anti-Facebook League of Intelligentsia pledges “to revive man’s ability to experience life” and celebrate “a spirit of self-sacrifice in place of self-indulgence.”

To most people, waiting is a waste of time, a feeling that technology only accentuates. But Harold Schweizer, an English professor at Bucknell University, begs to differ. He is an ardent advocate of the value of waiting and has written a book titled On Waiting. To him, waiting and delaying gratification can be regenerative and restful, as well as a time for inspiration and fresh ideas. Instant gratification, on the other hand, must be frantically repeated and is in the end “no gratification at all,” he says. “Indeed, instant gratification is perhaps the endless delay of gratification.”

He has incorporated pauses and waiting time into his teaching to give students more time for unexpected insights about a poem or other piece of literature. “Objects and experiences acquire value through the act of waiting,” he says. “If instant gratification devalues, if impatience is a form of greed, perhaps patience, then, is a generosity, an intentional giving of one’s time, a giving of oneself.”

So there’s truth in that old chestnut — what’s worth having is worth waiting for. Successful entrepreneurs certainly must have a tolerance for delayed gratification. Watching their dream come to life in a new product or company is rewarding, but they know it may take years to see a financial payoff.

Delaying gratification can take practice. For most people, willpower doesn’t come naturally. That’s why FranklinCovey, a training and consulting firm in Salt Lake City, Utah, sees a new business opportunity in teaching “urgency addicts” to manage their time by focusing on what really matters on the job and in their personal lives. “As humans, we have always been wired for instant gratification, but technology has kicked up that biological need,” says Leigh Stevens, a partner in FranklinCovey’s productivity practice. “We have to stop the madness and be deliberate about choices. We have to learn to act on the important and not react to the urgent.”

Some people have developed their own individual strategies to try to control expectations for instant responses to messages. Ron Culp, a public-relations consultant and director of the graduate program in PR and advertising at DePaul University, checks his email frequently and may write replies right away — but he doesn’t hit send. Instead, he sets up the responses so that late night messages don’t go out until the next morning. That way, people won’t start expecting instant responses no matter what the hour.

Others take breaks from being connected 24/7 by exercising without any electronic appendages. Schweizer at Bucknell, for example, slows down by hiking, bicycling and kayaking on the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania. “I move my arms and legs in the rhythm of my body, in the rhythm of the time that I am,” he says, “and I recover a little.”

The Pew Research Center found in a 2011 survey that 29 percent of cell phone owners turn off their mobile devices for a while just to get a break. That’s what Kate Robertson does sometimes. She also removes email from her iPhone every few months so she isn’t constantly checking it and can take time to really enjoy conversation with friends or a stroll around the streets of downtown Chicago where she works.

“It’s nice to think and just observe what’s around me,” says Robertson, a project manager at Eduvantis, a consulting and marketing services firm for colleges and business schools. “Do I really have to see the latest Groupon offer immediately?” But the 30-year-old concedes that she feels lost without her phone, especially because of its music and maps. “And I do get excited when I receive a message,” she says. People get instant gratification from their phones, she believes, because they feel “like they are loved, that they have friends looking for them, friends responding to them.”

When people like Robertson decide to untether themselves from technology, they may need to prepare their Facebook friends and other online connections, who expect the gratification of an instant response.

“There is social pressure to be immediately responsive,” says David Levy, a professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, who advocates balancing technology with meditation and contemplation. “It’s becoming harder to create protected space and time for yourself because it might be read as being uncaring or unavailable by others.”

He and other experts strongly encourage parents to help their children develop the ability to delay gratification and lose their sense of entitlement. Parents and teachers can make young people work more to earn rewards and privileges, praise them when they exercise self-discipline and show them the value of taking time to think reflectively. “We need to reward self-control in children rather than focus on building their self-esteem,” says Roy Baumeister, a social psychology professor at Florida State University and co-author of Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength. “The two traits that most predict success in life are self-control and intelligence.”

Research indicates that some individuals may have a predisposition to either impulsivity or self-control. Some 40 years ago in the most famous study of instant gratification, children at Stanford University were told they could eat one marshmallow right away or wait 15 or 20 minutes to get two. Some couldn’t resist the temptation; other held out longer in anticipation of a bigger treat.

Follow-up studies with some of the children as adults revealed that the tendency to seek instant or delayed gratification didn’t change over time. What’s more, the children who waited longer at age 4 later scored significantly higher on the SAT, were better educated, felt a stronger sense of self-worth, coped more effectively with stress and were less likely to use cocaine/crack than those who couldn’t delay gratification.

“As a group, those who could not stop themselves at 4 could not at 40,” says BJ Casey, director of the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medical College. “This appears to be a personality trait that is relatively stable.” She and fellow researchers observed differences in the brains of the two groups in one of the follow-up studies (see related story), but she says it isn’t an issue of either nature or nurture. “We know that experience can turn genes on and off. Even early experiences could have shaped the behavior of the 4-year-olds and those experiences could have continued.”

Whether we are governed more by nature or nature, Mother Nature sometimes takes control and shows us we can’t always get the instant gratification that comes even from something so basic as electricity. An editorial in the Westport, Connecticut, newspaper in September suggested that people suffering power outages from Hurricane Irene should try to patiently accept the fact that “the plug is pulled on instant gratification” and they can’t always be first in line to get what they want — their electricity restored.

I agree with the editorial’s premise based on recent firsthand experience. After losing heat and electricity for six days following the freakish October nor’easter in New Jersey, I learned to survive without lights and my desktop computer and even without my cars, which were trapped in the garage by nonfunctioning electric door openers.

Resourceful people, including myself, were still able to get our hit of instant gratification — and caffeine — by recharging ourselves and our mobile phones and laptops at the local Starbucks. It became my town’s central meeting place, as people swapped stories about the storm and shared extension cords to make the most of the limited number of electrical outlets.

Turns out we can give up the comforts of a cozy, warm room, refrigerated food and even our cars much easier than the instant gratification of texts, tweets, email and Facebook connections.

Ronald Alsop is a freelance journalist and the author of eight books, including his most recent The Trophy Kids Grow Up: How the Millennial Generation Is Shaking Up the Workplace. He can be reached at ronald.alsop@gmail.com or thetrophykids.com.

Come on, baby, end my wait

2012-01-30T08:00:00-05:00

As we inch closer to the due date, I try to wrap my mind around this baby situation. My wife isn’t so tortured. She celebrates her birthday when we’re on the cusp of the third trimester. It’s just the two of us for now, and while our lives are on the verge of big changes, Hattie feels at peace. “I’m in my mid-30s,” she tells me. “I’m ready for the next phase of my life.”

We count down the days, and I try to make sense of it all. With 90 days to go, we start baby classes. They seem never-ending. In infant first aid, we learn to bang away on the baby’s back if she’s choking. That’s unsettling. So is infant care basics, where we learn about diaper blowouts.

Hattie’s belly grows bigger. During the second trimester, it had a cute roundness. Now it’s out of control. One night she cooks at the kitchen counter and almost dips her belly in a plate of spaghetti and tomato sauce. “You got to watch that thing,” I say. “Maybe we need to put police tape around it.”

When we register, I ponder car seats and strollers. I also think about five years earlier, when we last registered together. I held the scanner gun as we roamed a Manhattan Macy’s before our wedding. Hattie lived across the river, and our nights were filled with music, food and the PATH train. Times have changed. Now I’ve got the scanner gun again, and we’re at a Babies “R” Us in a suburban Boston mall.

With 86 days to go, Hattie reads one of those baby books that’s supposed to calm fears but instead seems to create them. “I was reading about how babies’ heads flatten,” she says. “Look at this. They wear this football helmet-like thing to correct it.” “Are you trying to freak me out?” I reply.

With 70 days to go, Hattie researches bassinets. Most are around $100, but one made in Europe costs $300 and promises to contain no formaldehyde. “Formaldehyde?” I say. “They put that in bassinets?”

We fill out preliminary paperwork for the baby’s birth certificate. Filling in info about my birthplace, my mom’s maiden name, my ethnicity, I think of the descendants who in 100 years may look at this as they research the family tree. We’re all just a link in the chain.

With 56 days to go, I stare at Hattie’s bare, bulging belly. Weird things are happening. “I don’t think you have a belly button anymore,” I say. Hattie agrees: “At this rate, my innie will become an outie.”

With 48 days to go, the crib arrives. Hattie takes pictures. I double-check that the nuts and bolts are tight.

The crib is just the start. An all-out assault of stuff fills the baby’s room. It’s enough gear to drive you to madness, but Hattie has managed to organize it all. She tells me about changing pads, about bottles, about slow, medium and fast nipples. “A fast nipple?” I say.

With space at a premium, Hattie stockpiles boxes of diapers in the living room. I stare at them and think about how every last one will eventually fill up with icky things. It’s too much to comprehend.

Nearing five weeks to go, I give myself another week before I officially start to freak out. “Don’t worry,” my sister, mother of two, assures me. “You’re going to make it through and be happy.”

Everyone has a story. My buddy tells me of his wife’s unexpected C-section, of how she lost lots of blood, of how the situation became so serious that nurses escorted him out of the room. I don’t tell Hattie that story.

Everyone also tells me to sleep as much as I can now. But I’m not worried about a lack of sleep. What I am worried about is the next 21 years, give or take.

With 10 days to go, a co-worker gives me advice: “Whatever you do, just don’t drop her.” Thanks for the tip.

Every day, everything grows larger: Hattie’s belly, her puffy feet, the magnitude of her aches, the realness of the situation. We spend our days waiting for something to happen. On the couch, we stare at Hattie’s belly and watch it move.

Hattie is ready to go. I’m still not, but I realize that doesn’t matter. In dark moments, I linger on the changes to come, how daunting everything seems. I push those thoughts away. I’ll be fine. We’ll be fine. Hattie and I first met nearly 10 years ago, two people searching for someone to share a life with. We found just that. It’s now time for the next chapter.

The due date comes, and the due date goes. With the date to induce more than a week away, Hattie and I make plans to go out to a Saturday dinner one last time. We never make it.

Friday. 7 p.m. We’re eating chocolate chip pancakes for dinner, and Hattie suddenly announces, “I feel uncomfortable.” Five minutes later, she says again, “I feel uncomfortable.” By 8:30 we’re on our way to Massachusetts General Hospital. Passing Fenway Park on the Mass Pike, Hattie says, “Look at the lights.” We zoom past the game and the glow, on to new adventures.

John Crawford lives in Waltham, Massachusetts, with his wife, Hattie, and their baby, Riley, who was born in April. He’s an associate editor of Babson Magazine, the alumni publication of Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

Water, water everywhere, but not enough to drink

2012-01-30T07:00:00-05:00

As climate change accelerates, worldwide fresh water supplies are predicted to become increasingly stressed. However, since oceans cover 70 percent of the planet, you might be skeptical of a water problem. With all that sea sloshing around, there should be enough for everybody, right? Just remove the salt. Problem solved.

Well, not quite. As much as desalination, making fresh water from saline sources such as the ocean, may seem the perfect answer to the world’s increasing fresh water needs, it is a limited answer, William Phillip of Notre Dame and Menachem Elimelech of Yale write in a recent Science article.

Great strides in desalination truly have been made in recent years, the chemical engineering professors say. Innovations such as improved membranes and better pumps have dramatically improved process efficiency, and large-scale reverse osmosis desalination plants are being constructed at a rapid pace. In fact, they note worldwide desalination capacity is projected to double by the year 2016.

Despite those gains, however, the researchers say the number of people living in water-stressed regions is projected to increase from one-third of the world’s population to two-thirds by the year 2025.

Phillip and Elimelech argue that desalination may be one tool to help solve the world’s fresh water needs, but it is does have its downside. For instance, desalination is probably the most energy-intensive method for increasing water supplies, and there isn’t much hope for improvement.

The Notre Dame and Yale professors point out that “reverse osmosis,” the most advanced desalination technology, has been tweaked so much in the past 40 years that it is near the theoretical and practical limits of its efficiency. Since the desalination process itself is about as good as it gets, they argue any future improvements are likely to come in the pre-treatment phase, where other contaminants, such as organic matter from decomposing seaweed, are filtered out.

“The main point we wanted to make is that desalination should be thought of as an option only after all other more sustainable fresh water sources, such as conservation and water recycling, have been exhausted. Just about any fresh water treatment technology is much less energy intensive than desalination,” Phillip says.

John Monczunski is an associate editor of this magazine.

Illustration copyright iStockphoto.com.

Molarity Redux: Lassie Goes to Hollywood

2012-01-30T06:00:00-05:00

Welcome to Molarity Redux, the 27th strip in the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends.

Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives. View the first five classic strips and check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips, also available in the cartoon archives.

'Near perfection' — The 1936 Notre Dame championship basketball team

2012-01-23T09:00:00-05:00

The hardcourt wizardry of forward Tim Abromaitis and guard Ben Hansbrough on the men’s squad and superstar guard Skylar Diggins on the women’s team stoked national championship chatter among Irish basketball fans a year ago, but many remain unaware that such excitement had occurred before. In mentioning past Notre Dame championship teams, one inevitably thinks of George Gipp, the Four Horsemen and other gridiron heroes. Back in the 1930s, though, Notre Dame dominated college basketball much the way Knute Rockne’s teams had barreled through the football landscape.

Coached by George Keogan and propelled by what one publication called “the immortal trio of Notre Dame basketball,” in 1936 the team captured Notre Dame’s last undisputed men’s national championship, playing a brand of basketball one New York Times sports reporter called “as near perfection as it could be.”

Keogan was no stranger to winning. He had one national title under his belt, and his 327 career coaching wins place him second today only to Digger Phelps at 393. After an uneven 1934-35 season in which his Irish squad posted a 13-9 record, he pinned his hopes on a few established veterans and a promising crop of untested sophomores.

The team opened with seven straight victories, mostly against lighter opponents such as St. Joseph’s College. In a sign of what was to come, sophomore scoring machine Johnny Moir took a pass from 6-foot-6 sophomore center Paul Nowak to notch the season’s first basket, against Albion, while substitute forward Ray Meyer and guard Tom Wukovits, both sophomores, combined laser passing with unyielding defense in support of seniors George Ireland, John Ford, Johnny Hopkins and Frank Wade.

They stumbled in their first big test, falling 54-40 to a speedy Purdue bunch that had been the Big Ten co-champion the year before, then followed with an unusual contest against Northwestern. After both squads had left the floor in an apparent 20-19 Northwestern victory, official scorers detected an error and declared a 20-20 tie. Since the players were already showering and much of the crowd had left, both schools agreed to accept the result, and the only tie game in Notre Dame basketball history went into the books.

Coach Keogan’s patience wore thin four days later when his team tallied a mere six points in the first half against Minnesota. Hoping to put a spark in his offense, Keogan turned to his talented sophomores, including Nowak, Moir, Tommy Jordan and Wukovits, who scored every point in a second half comeback to win, 29-27.

With an 8-1-1 record, the team began its “suicide schedule.” Over the next 10 games they would square off against eight reigning conference champions.

They began their run with a 43-35 win over Pittsburgh on January 10 and rolled past Marquette a few days later. “The game featured the playing of Notre Dame’s flashy crop of sophomores who dominated the scene from start to finish,” Scholastic magazine said of that performance.

After polishing off Pennsylvania, 37-27, the Irish headed to Syracuse for a game against a rival that had not lost on its home court in four years. Despite yielding a height advantage to Syracuse, who fielded five men over 6 feet tall, the Irish defense checked high-scoring center Ed Sonderman to swipe a 46-43 win.

The Irish now faced their harshest tests with consecutive matches against the top two teams in the country, legendary coach Adolph Rupp’s vaunted Kentucky Wildcats and New York University — the only team to which Kentucky had lost. Moir netted 17 and Nowak 11 to lead the Irish to a 41-20 victory, the most lopsided defeat of Rupp’s first six years at Kentucky.

Four days later, the Irish arrived at Madison Square Garden to take on powerhouse NYU. The game sold out three weeks before the match, and Scholastic magazine urged campus readers who wanted to listen to a radio broadcast to deluge CBS with letters asking for a transmission to the Midwest.

New York returned every starter from the team that had defeated Notre Dame the year before. Confident the local five could handle the Midwesterners, one New York Times reporter hoped that Notre Dame would at least put up a decent fight so the game did not bore fans.

The writer failed to account for both the Irish talent and Notre Dame’s national allure. More than 19,000 spectators jammed the Garden, at that time the largest crowd to watch a basketball game in New York. Keogan later admitted, “It was a sight to behold, and one that would make the blood of any coach fairly tingle.”

The outcome was never in doubt. After spotting NYU three points, Notre Dame raced to a 25-13 halftime lead. George Ireland shut down NYU’s high-scoring forwards and tallied seven points on the night. Filling in after the half for star Johnny Moir, who had gotten into foul trouble, Johnny Hopkins added another 10 as Notre Dame handed NYU a 38-27 defeat. It was the school’s first ever loss in Madison Square Garden, convincing even the infamously partisan New York sportswriters that “the finest basketball is not played in New York.” Most conceded that Notre Dame was the No. 1 team “from coast to coast” and some even urged their selection to represent the country in the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games.

Despite having garnered in 1927 his first Helms Foundation National Championship, the honor accorded the premier team in the land in the days before post-season tournaments, Keogan called his 1935-36 team the best in Notre Dame history because it had dominated a schedule no other squad could match. The team scored so speedily that they were the first to be called a “point-a-minute” squad. They set records in games won, total team points in one season, average points per game, and points in a single game — 71 against St. Joseph’s — in compiling a 22-2-1 overall record.

Moir, who established an individual season scoring record with 260 points, was named the nation’s outstanding college player by the Helms Foundation. He and Nowak were named consensus All-Americans. And while the Helms Foundation awarded the Irish their second national championship in nine years, University policy against post-season play eliminated any hope of participating in the Berlin Olympics.

Built upon the exploits of “the immortal trio” of Nowak, Moir and Wukovits, Keogan’s squads followed their 1936 run with back-to-back 20-3 records. Behind Moir’s scoring, Nowak’s rebounding and the passing and defense of Wukovits — nicknamed the “guarding angel” — in both years they convinced many sportswriters that they again deserved championship recognition. When they needed a breather, second-string forwards Ed Sadowski and Mike Crowe carried the load, but a follow-up national title proved elusive.

On March 4, 1938, the big three played their final home game before 5,500 fans. In defeating Marquette, Nowak scored 15 points, Moir 11 and Wukovits 7, earning a tremendous ovation at game’s end that recognized three years of stellar basketball and a 62-8-1 record.

After the game Scholastic writer John F. Clifford ’38 credited “the fastest breaking, deadliest shooting and sharpest passing trio in the game today” for producing “Notre Dame’s Golden Era of Basketball,” and equated their impact to that of the Four Horsemen.

Their basketball days did not end with graduation. Moir, Nowak and Wukovits became the first Notre Dame alumni to play professional ball, continuing their winning ways together for the Akron Firestones in the National Basketball League.

Two of their championship teammates made names for themselves as college coaches. George Ireland’s Loyola University of Chicago teams won 321 games over 24 seasons. In 1963 he led the school to a national title in a 60-58 overtime thriller against Cincinnati.

Meanwhile, Ray Meyer was building crosstown rival DePaul into a national power. Winning 724 games over a 42-year career, Meyer led his teams to two Final Four appearances. In 1979 he joined George Keogan in being elected to the Basketball Hall of Fame.

John Wukovits is a World War II historian who has written seven books about that conflict. Also a sports fan, Wukovits enjoyed researching his father’s 1935-38 teams.

Average Joe styles world-class bread

2012-01-23T08:00:00-05:00

Joe Bellavance ’89 knows how to get people to stop at his trade show booth. He fires up an oven he’s schlepped there from home and bakes his signature artisan bread. “The smell of fresh bread is like moths to the light,” he says.

The bread visitors taste was actually 10 years in the making. As a stay-at-home father of three in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Bellavance enjoyed experimenting with different bread recipes. Until, that is, he discovered he couldn’t make his favorite — a crusty European bread, moist and airy in the middle, crunchy and brown outside.

“The key to a good crust is steam,” he says. He tried all the tricks, from leaving a dish of water in the oven to spritzing the crust at various times during the baking process. “I could never get what I wanted.”

Even a $200 cast iron pot he bought didn’t do it.

Eventually the self-described “hack baker” found a no-knead recipe online that approached the style and taste he wanted. Two years and countless loaves later, a business was born.

“A friend suggested that I should make an artisan bread kit,” says Bellavance, “and teach others how to make it.”

The 45-year-old serial entrepreneur is no stranger to business projects, previously working on computer software and renewable fuels. He says the bread kit idea, however, filled “my need to have creative input into the product.”

Average Joe Artisan Bread, LLC, officially began business in 2009. “I’ve taken what I’ve done and basically put it in a box,” Bellavance says. “It’s good for lazy guys like me.”

Lazy doesn’t really describe the assistant high school soccer coach, whose children are now 16, 14 and 10.

“He’s a really driven, smart person,” says Kelly Gayer, a minority partner in the Average Joe firm whose agency, Smartguys Advertising & Design, helped launch the artisan bread company. “He drives headfirst into stuff.”

Once the details of the signature crusty bread were refined, baker Bellavance put on his marketing hat. He took samples to the kitchen staff of Joseph Decuis restaurant, distinguished by AAA as a Four-Diamond establishment, in nearby Roanoke, Indiana. They were sold, and now serve his bread.

Bellavance makes it clear that just about anyone can get make a great loaf with his kit. “A lot of people are intimidated by baking,” Bellavance says. “But this is foolproof.”

His 80-year old grandmother and 3-year-old niece make the bread, he says, “and have had no problems.” And those who have purchased the kit frequently send photos of their successful results to the company’s website.

The artisan kit, whose gift edition includes a sturdy bread pot, mixing bowl, kitchen tools, ingredients, cookbook and cheat sheet, makes a variety of breads, from the European style golden standard to a Margherita pizza crust to a cinnamon-raisin crown (enhanced by pecans).

“Bread is one of those things that brings people together,” says Bellavance. “I’m proud of this.”

Carol Schaal is managing editor of this magazine.

If I can’t remember who I am ...

2012-01-23T07:00:00-05:00

I forget things more and more these days, a tendency I attribute to growing older. To be honest, at 51, I’m not sure which makes me more anxious: my thinning hair or my lethargic synapses.

A month or so ago, an 18-year-old student of mine (I forget his name) asked me how old I was. When I told him, he said to me in a consoling tone — he actually patted me on the back as he said it — “Hey, you’re heading into the back nine!” He was referring, of course, to the point at which a golfer makes the turn after the ninth hole and heads — inexorably, truculently and with grim resignation (these are my words, not his) — to the 18th hole, the clubhouse and a well-earned martini.

Now, as I think about it, that fresh-faced boy was patronizing me. This does not please me. I still feel young, but from his perch, evidently, I was not merely older. I was old. Avuncular. A gray fox. Damn him. While I have finally accepted the fact that I am not going to live forever, I still feel my best days are ahead of me, even if there’s no way I’m on the 10th hole anyway, given the average life span of Hannon men. I’m lucky — even with the vim and vigor of my young soul — to be on the 13th.

So you can see now how the prospect of spending the rest of my days resorting to what my older brothers and I call “the alphabet game” might depress me. For those of you unfamiliar with this game, it goes like this: Someone at a dinner party asks you — oh, let’s throw out an easy question — “Who was the lead guitarist for the rock group Cream?” You immediately conjure up his face — you saw him in concert four years ago after all, or was it five? Hell if you remember — wire-rimmed glasses; scruffy, three-day stubble on tan cheeks and chin; earnest, sad eyes. But damned if you can remember his name. So you silently start plowing through the alphabet, hoping one letter might drag his name out of some deep warren in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, kicking and screaming.

A, b, c, d, e, f: You go through the whole alphabet and . . . nothing. You begin again. You stop at the letter p for some reason. You continue. This goes on for three or four minutes, even as the conversation has pivoted to a new topic. You come back to the letter c. You stop there. You’re confident that his first or last name begins with that letter. Finally, you see the word clip. Clip, clop, clap . . . clap. Clap! Clapton. Eric Clapton! You shout out his name, and everyone looks at you funny because they were talking about the guacamole dip. But you are relieved nonetheless. Sweaty, taxed neurons of memory, you admit to silently, but they are still firing. That is the alphabet game. And I’m playing it more than I would like these days.

To be fair, I’ve never been good with names anyway. It might be a congenital condition. When I was a boy I thought my name was “Brianjackmikegregwhateverthehellyournameis” because that’s how my mother usually referred to me. And my father consistently called me Greg. I was named after my father. So maybe I can be forgiven then for the faux pas I committed when I was 18 and my folks were visiting me in my college dorm. We were walking down the hall on our way to dinner and up ahead a fellow I knew was standing by his door. An accounting major from Hawaii, he had a degenerative spinal disease I believe, so with his severely curved backbone he stood maybe 4½ -feet tall.

“Hey, Pat,” he said.

“Heyyyyy,” I said. I couldn’t remember his name if my life depended on it. I had a recurring nightmare in those days, where I was being tortured. Just tell us his name, the guy with the brass knuckles would say. I don’t remember! I would say. Just kill me and get it over with.

We all stood there awkwardly, as my parents waited to be introduced. This is what I said: “Mom, Dad, this is . . . is . . . my little buddy.” My little buddy? Jesus Christ. How mortifying still is that memory. His name was Don Robinson, by the way. I looked it up in my yearbook a few minutes ago.

Now here is an intriguing question: Would I be better off forgetting that shameful memory or do I cling to that memory because it reminds me of some essential truth of my being? I’m not sure. The irony of this predicament humbles me anyway. I am hounded by this memory of forgetfulness.

I sometimes wonder if my short-term memory loss suggests early onset Alzheimer’s or dementia, but my doctor insists that it does not. I’m just getting older, she tells me. Memory loss is to be expected, she says. She is quick to remind me that dementia doesn’t run in my family anyway. My doctor is well-meaning and probably right, but I find her diagnosis to be cold comfort. Is this what growing older — growing old — portends? Am I to hear in the fraying of my short-term memory an assuaging lullaby to go gently into that good night? Maybe.

But before each forgotten set of car keys, pen, hat, umbrella, book or film or song title, writer, singer, artist, painter, appointment, phone call or line of verse, I raise a defiant fist that masks a deep fear. I will not go gently into that good night. I will rage, rage — thank you, Dylan Thomas — against the dying of the light. Even as I move trembling, steadily toward it — this dying, this letting go — I sing all the verses of Don McLean’s “American Pie” by heart. This brings me immediate comfort.

It frightens me to think that I might lose my memory some day. I’ve seen what happens to those who have. They appear to be almost ghostlike. Though wrapped in flesh and bone and blood and contoured clearly by their humanity, they seem lost. They seem to have lost — along with their memories — themselves. Unanchored, they float in a sea of dreadful anonymity. They cry and whimper and fret. Often they lash out violently. Are they raging, raging against the dying of the light? I’m beginning to think so.

I’m also beginning to think that it might be a sin to quiet such fury with a syringe or a pill or a Dixie cup filled with God-knows-what. Lost and frightened and forgotten in a deep fog of unknowing, who wouldn’t scream at the top of his lungs in hope of being found? I hope I would.

I met a man once who was assuredly demented. He spent most of his day sitting in a chair looking out his bedroom window. His memory had been whittled down to five words, which he sometimes whispered and sometimes shouted. “A man had two sons,” he said over and over and over again. “A man had two sons.”

I still don’t know if he was referring to himself and the two sons he might have had or if he was recalling the first line of Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son. If I had to choose now, I would pick the latter, because those words begin what I think is the greatest story ever told: of a father who — mercifully — never forgot either of his sons, the stupidly foolish or the calculatingly obedient one. And since Jesus was obviously referring to his Abba — our Father in heaven — the thought that God has an eternal memory, that God never forgets, makes the prospect of my growing older with an unhinged memory slightly less frightening.

Still, the moaning of that man makes me uneasy. Will I suffer the same fate? The fear I harbor is this: Without these collected fragments of moments, these pieces of days that I can retrieve and savor and even weep over if I must, I will no longer know who I am because I will not remember who I was. And if I can’t remember who I am, what’s the point?

Memories allow me to believe — humbly, fervently — that I am in no small way important, that my little life has meaning, that I am part of a grand story, that I am an actor — leading, supporting or otherwise — on an impressive stage. Memories, these enduring imprints of faces and places and fragrances and melodies and textures and tastes, stand prepared to remind us that we are human persons, each of us with a compelling story to tell. And yet I have this gnawing feeling that I have sprung a leak and that slowly, one by one, my memories are dripping out of me. First I forget names, then places, then faces, then myself. I shudder at the thought.

Admittedly, we are not the only species with an ability to remember. Dogs remember where they buried their bones. Migrating geese in these parts have committed to memory all the drinking holes from the Arctic Circle to Guadalajara. Antelope remember exactly the sound a lion makes when it is prowling in the tall Serengeti grass, when it is licking its chops. We are the only ones, though, who have sense of a past. We are the only ones who can conjure the past and feel regret or gratitude. We are the only ones who are aware of the fact that we are teetering on a thin thread of now, aware that our brief lives are bookended by two eternities. We are the only ones who can be haunted or nourished by memories. We are the only ones who can forget. Maybe this is why we are the only species that can smile. Or frown.

Now I will contradict myself, and I’m not sure how I feel about this yet. Sometimes I think having a strong, vivid memory is not all it’s cracked up to be. Our unique human capacity for memory is as much a curse as it is a grace. For us, it is never merely a matter of what we choose to remember. Some memories are forever seared into our souls — individually and collectively — and often they are the painful, stultifying, shameful or horrific ones. We carry dark memories to our graves along with the bright. Some wounded memories never heal.

Who has it better, I wonder now: the afternoon lounging, sun-stroked cat or the memory-afflicted human person? Who has a better life: the well-fed, belly-scratched dog or us? Sometimes I envy pets and other animals — but not, oddly, grubs and worms and insects.

My memory can haunt me. I read somewhere that Jack Kerouac remembered everything he ever saw, heard, smelled, tasted and touched. As the San Francisco Chronicle reported, he “was also known to consume 17 shots of Johnny Walker Red in an hour, washed down with Colt malt liquor.” He died of alcoholism at the age of 47. Memories have a millstone-around-the-neck quality to them. Still, I treasure them, even the ones with scabs and scars. Without them, I’m lost.

I was back in my old neighborhood a few years ago. I had not been back in years. I parked the car next to my old house. It was autumn because the tree in my old front yard was a riot of red and orange and yellow. The blanket of mellow maple leaves covering the front yard triggered a memory. I was 4 years old.

In my memory it was a cool, brisk November day. In my memory it was twilight time. It might have been my birthday. I was sitting on the front porch steps playing with my Slinky. I saw my father’s car making its way up the street. It was a metallic green Pontiac GTO convertible. He pulled into the driveway and cut the ignition. He looked over at me and smiled. I jumped up from the step as he climbed out of the car. “Daddy!” I said. I ran toward him. As he neared the redbrick walkway I leaped. He caught me and swallowed me in his arms. I hugged his neck and detected a residue of aftershave. He kissed me on the cheek, hoisted me onto his shoulders and took me inside the house. It was the first time I remember my father kissing me.

Somewhere in the back of my memory I remember Proust was fascinated by memory, so as I mused on this memory of my father, I did a quick Internet search and found — wonderfully — this Proustian take: “When, from a long distant past, nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised for a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering . . . the vast structure of recollection.”

Now I see that distant memory for what it is. Waiting for its moment amid the ruins of all the rest, a riot of red and orange and yellow leaves on a cool autumn day a few years ago erased the line that separates past from present and mercifully reminded me that my father treasured me, and that he does still, though he has been dead these 26 years.

A little later, while I was still sitting in the car, a pigtailed girl came from the side of the house, retrieved her tricycle (was it red?) and began riding it in ever-widening circles on the driveway. At one point our eyes met. I smiled and waved. She smiled and waved back. Her little legs seemed to pump the pedals faster. She was performing for me, and this delighted me.

That little girl doesn’t know this, but I lived in that house once upon a time, and on an autumn day before she was born I was picked up by my father on a brick walkway covered in leaves and hugged and kissed and loved into importance.

William Carlos Williams wrote, “so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white /chickens.” For me, so much depends upon the memory of a red-bricked walkway covered in maple leaves, a stubbled chin and the sweet scent of Aqua Velva. If the riot of those autumn colors were to somehow be silenced, and the image of my young, scented father kissing me, his little boy, that November day were to somehow fade into oblivion, it would be as if a part of my soul had died. And I can’t let that happen.

Father Hannon works at the University of Portland and is the author of The Long Yearning’s End: Stories of Sacrament and Incarnation; The Geography of God’s Mercy: Stories of Compassion and Forgiveness; and Running into the Arms of God: Stories of Prayer, Prayer as Story.

The Playroom: Sound and fury

2012-01-20T06:00:00-05:00

I am sitting on cement bleachers at an ice rink southeast of Chicago’s O’Hare airport, our home ice. The kids and I are nearing the end of our day, I am tired and my butt is cold. I would like for the women seated near me to stop talking.

Endless, mindless chatter about nothing. What merit is left to silence? Do these women ever stop talking? Why doesn’t anyone just sit and listen? Sit and pay attention to the sounds of hockey practice, the sounds of children, of Tuesday nights and an hour spent at the rink.

The whir of fans in the large pipes suspended from the roof. The slide of sticks on the ice. The sound blades make as a skater picks up speed, the smack of a puck against the boards, the sharpness of a precisely executed hockey stop. The muted calls from coaches I can’t quite understand and the boisterous calls of siblings I do understand. The sounds of children as they climb the bleachers, chase each other and play games with tennis balls, rolls of tape and old Gatorade tops.

“Why isn’t that kid on the ice?” Constituted mutterings about the cost of ice time and these kids and how they mess around in the locker room and don’t get out there. Instead of walking over to the child and asking him if he needs help, one hollers across the rink, “Hey, come here! Let me lace your skate!” And I hear the expletives the child does not.

They talk even while they are lacing skates. When there is no more idle chatter they dial their phones and find other voices. How do people talk this much about nothing! I am tired and the voices create noise that sounds do not. I prefer silence and solitude to voices.

There is a need for voices to communicate, to reach out to colleagues, lovers and friends, to share. A need to give thanks, give directions, give back and sometimes ask for more. There is a need to conduct business, heal the sick, teach, research, comfort. Words can soothe a wounded psyche, encourage, elevate and inspire. Yes, we need voices.

But the noise of these women’s voices has driven me away from them. These women here at the rink are hockey moms like me whom I see on different days and nights depending on our intermingling schedules. I never sit with them, and if I end up too close to them, like I have tonight, I move away.

At best they probably think me a snob. Am I? Do I think myself better than they are? Maybe I do. These women annoy me, and I do not think I annoy people by not speaking. But then I realize that me and my solitude, my yearning for silence can be offensive. It is possible to offend people by saying nothing, by not using my voice, not speaking?

My brother is angry with me again, and I don’t know why. I am afraid that I have offended him. I want him to know how much I love him. But I have spent so much time being silent and sitting off by myself on the bleachers listening that I am unable to speak. I wish I could ask him, “What have I done to hurt you?”

Maraya Steadman, who lives in a Chicago suburb, is a stay-at-home mother of three children. Her website is marayasteadman.com/. Email her at maraya@steadmans.org.

The new Lou, Part II

2012-01-17T13:00:00-05:00

Editor’s note: When the Brian Kelly era began two years ago, it got Ted Mandell ‘86, ND professor of Film, Television and Theatre, thinking. The more he thought about Notre Dame’s 29th head football coach, the more he thought he saw the second coming of Lou Holtz. Now, last week’s announcement that Kelly had been offered and had accepted a two-year extension of his contract through the 2016 season has triggered another Mandell epiphany.

I saw that BK got a two year extension, and I thought, Hmmm, after two seasons is he still the New Lou?

Well, let’s see . . . Brian Kelly has the exact same record after 26 games as Lou Holtz (16-10).

At the conclusion of Holtz’s second season (1987), the greatest receiver in ND history (Tim Brown) finished his ND career on the sideline during the fourth quarter of a bowl game loss against a top defensive foe.

At the conclusion of Kelly’s second season (2011), the greatest receiver in ND history (Michael Floyd) finished his ND career on the sideline during the fourth quarter of a bowl game loss against a top defensive foe.

Timothy Brown and Michael Floyd both have exactly 12 letters in their names.

Louis Holtz and Brian Kelly both have exactly 10 letters in their names.

After two years, Holtz replaced his defensive coordinator with a position coach on staff and hired a new offensive line coach.

After two years, Kelly replaced his offensive coordinator with a position coach on staff and hired a new offensive line coach.

Notre Dame finished the 1987 season 8-4.

Notre Dame finished the 2011 regular season 8-4.

In 1987, Notre Dame beat #17 Michigan State 31-8, highlighted by two kick returns for touchdowns by Tim Brown, future Oakland Raider.

In 2011, Notre Dame beat #15 Michigan State 31-13, highlighted by a kick return for a touchdown by George Atkinson III, son of a former Oakland Raider.

In 1987, Notre Dame beat Navy 56-13.

In 2011, Notre Dame beat Navy 56-14.

In 1986 and 1987, Notre Dame had 10 losses by a total of 90 points.

In 2010 and 2011, Notre Dame had 10 losses by a total of 88 points.

In 1987, Bon Jovi’s “Livin on a Prayer” spent two weeks at #1 on the Billboard Charts.

In 2011, Jon Bon Jovi spent two minutes on the field at Notre Dame Stadium as the ND Band played “Livin on a Prayer.”

The live recording of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” was first released in 1987.

The studio recording of Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” was first played live inside Notre Dame Stadium in 2011.

And just in case you’re wondering for season three . . .

In 1988, Notre Dame defeated four teams ranked in the Coaches’ Poll Top 10.

In 2012, Notre Dame plays four teams ranked in ESPN.com’s preseason Top 11.

Meet the New Lou . . . same as the Old Lou.

Ted Mandell is a faculty member in the Department of Film, Television, and Theatre. Author of the multimedia book Heart Stoppers and Hail Marys: The Greatest College Football Finishes (Since 1970), he also filmed the documentary Inside The Legends, following Lou Holtz in his final game on the sidelines during the 2009 Notre Dame Japan Bowl.

Molarity Classic 111-115

2012-01-16T06:00:00-05:00

Strips 111-115 of the popular comic strip Molarity, which previewed in The Observer in 1977, follow the protest over the housing lottery, a little publication called by some “the dog book,” and the agony of finals.

111. The headline on The Observer was about 150 students pitching sheet tents to protest the housing lottery. The shortage of dorms meant that juniors might not get guaranteed housing in dorms on campus the following year. Father Hesburgh came out of the Main Building to talk with the students.

112. Edmund Price was the director of housing and the face of the administration when it came to the threatened lottery. The deal was that if not enough students opted to go off campus then the juniors would be entered into a lottery to see who got to stay on campus. At the time Grace and Flanner Halls were the newest dorms on campus and the only women’s dorms were Farley, Breen Phillips, Walsh, Lyons and Lewis. They had not even announced the construction of the Pasquerillas yet.

113. The professor in this cartoon was based on architecture Professor Steve Hurtt, who would literally say in class “blah, blah, blah” when he was skimming through the material. Strangely, with all the faculty and staff caricatures I did, I never got a complaint letter or any letter from any one of them. I was told the faculty read the cartoon as much as the students. About this cartoon however, I did receive a letter from a history professor who said the very thing happened to him but he got through the syllabus by “cutting out everything between Fort Sumter and Appomattox Courthouse.”

114. Back before social media there was a printed bound book called the Freshman Register in which our pictures appeared. It was nicknamed by insensitive people (not me) the “dog book.” BTW, in the last panel you can see in Mitch’s hair the name DEB. I guess I had not broken up with my home-town-honey girlfriend yet. For just about all the cartoons in my freshman and sophomore year you will find DEB hidden someplace. It was my Hirschfeld-Nina tribute.

115. This probably actually happened in the Memorial Library during finals, but I thought I made this up. The cover of The Observer has a photo of the world’s third tallest magician, Mark Davis ’82 (now Father Mark Davis), performing at a children’s party in LaFortune. I mention that only because we remained friends during the years. We met during a screw-your-roomate party at Breen Philllips, and we had more fun talking to each other than with our dates. Sorry.

See the first five classic strips. Check back monthly for more classic Molarity strips. Molarity Redux, the updated, continuing adventures of Jim Mole and friends, also is posted monthly. For those new strips, check out the cartoon archives.

Legendary Hockey Coach Charles “Lefty” Smith dies

2012-01-10T07:30:00-05:00

Charles W. “Lefty” Smith Jr., the patriarch of University of Notre Dame ice hockey after bringing the Irish program into the modern era beginning in 1968-69 and spending 19 seasons as Irish head coach, died Jan. 3 of natural causes in his South Bend, Ind., home. He was 81.

Havana notebook

2012-01-09T09:00:00-05:00

Government brutality in Cuba, one cause of the opposition to dictator Fulgencio Batista that prompted Fidel Castro’s rise to power in 1959, continued under the new regime. Evidence of the Revolution’s iconoclasm, which targeted symbols of the post-colonial republic’s ties to the United States, is everywhere. A statue of Cuba’s first president, Tomás Estrada Palma, was ripped from shoes that still stand on a plinth in Vedado, the core of contemporary Havana.

Not even the Cuban Telephone Company’s earnest mascot, Tonito Ring-Ring, who looked like Bob’s Big Boy’s Cuban cousin, was spared. Soon after Castro’s 26th of July movement forced Batista into permanent exile on New Year’s Eve 1958, Tonito was pried from the wall of the company’s monumental headquarters in Central Havana, marched down to the harbor and given a “burial at sea.” Two blocks away at the decommissioned Capitolio, the faces of founding fathers were rubbed out from the bronze panels that tell the republic’s story on the inside of the towering front doors. “Easy with the art!” Jorge Trelles cries out when the students share this discovery.

The destruction became personal for his wife’s family. Mari Tere’s great uncle, Felix Cabarrocas, revered today as one of the island’s most accomplished architects, died in 1961. His funeral cortege processed down the Malecón, the parkway that shapes Havana’s waterfront. When the casket approached the monument he designed in 1924 to honor the victims of the 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana’s harbor, police stopped traffic. As Jorge tells it, “Fidel chooses that day to rip the eagle off.” Like Tonito, the eagle was tossed into the ocean, “so that his whole family would see the desecration of the monument.” But he keeps the malice in perspective. “Those stories are light compared to . . . the firing squads, the killings. There were no scruples. The revolution was ruthless.”

Notre Dame’s first student to graduate with an architecture degree is among its most distinguished.

By age 30, Eugenio Rayneri Piedra, class of 1904, had won an international competition for his design of Cuba’s Presidential Palace. He would become the founder and first president of the Cuban Society of Architects. But his signal contribution to world architecture was his work as technical architect on the Capitolio, completed in 1929, the masterpiece of the generation that built the University of Havana’s modern campus and the Malecón — the esplanade and seawall that hugs Havana’s shore — along with other urban celebrations of Cuban liberty.

Too often the Capitolio is described as a replica of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., which slights its originality and epic craftsmanship. Visitors may notice one difference when they see the outside of its cupola from several places inside the building, where literally hundreds of lightwells and full courtyards provide illumination, ventilation and those breathtaking views.

Felix Cabarrocas’ firm provided early concepts and designs. “It needed a legion of the very best architects to be built,” the notable Cuban architect Julio César Pérez informs us — not to mention sculptors, painters, furniture makers, lamp designers and other artists.

Rayneri Piedra was responsible for much of the building’s interior, which already has been closed to the public for a year. Our guide, the distinguished restoration architect Jaime Rodriguez, is supervising the gargantuan task of preserving the building and grounds that will take at least another five. After introductory remarks and a warning to look out for roosting bats and other wild animals, Rodriguez and his colleagues lead us up a sweeping staircase beneath a barrel-vaulted ceiling that triggers my vertigo.

Inside the darkened chambers of the House Speaker we find unblemished Napoleonic furnishings. Narrow stairs lead us up to the Speaker’s podium and the House itself, past locked doors that conceal a private toilet and a shower with body sprays, “which we are coming to appreciate,” Luis says dryly. “In 1929, the building’s equipped with the latest.”

We pass security guards lurking in the shadows of inner corridors and finally disturb the privacy of a calico cat, which sidesteps us out a window onto the low ledge of a lightwell.

Nothing prepares us for the ceremonial Hall of Lost Steps. A replica of the 25-carat diamond once embedded in the floor marks the centerpoint of the dome above us, but the real stunner is the colossal bronze Statue of the Republic, reportedly the world’s third tallest statue under roof. “It’s kind of overwhelming,” says Stephen Zepeda, the student who chose the Capitolio for his pictorial essay. “I want to be able to know everything about the building now, but there’s not enough time.” Even taking pictures is a challenge. “Zoom in, and you get some cool details,” he says. “You miss how it fits, but then you can’t zoom out far enough to get the whole space.”

We have five minutes to explore Mercado Unico lest we risk missing our flight to Miami.

The Unico was never the urban glory the Tacón once was, but today signs of its decay are everywhere. Most of the mezzanine windows are broken and three of the four halls that front the busy surrounding streets are unused. The muddy courtyard is piled with stone and debris.

But inside that fourth hall on a Wednesday morning, the joint is jumpin’. Vendors eye potential customers from behind tables piled with everything from coconuts to pigs’ heads. Neighbors greet each other while filling their sacks with candies, green onions or bags of beans. Everyone seems to be arguing, but Luis assures me this is just normal conversation.

Grander markets than this one are integral to Havana’s history. Market buildings were a unique form that stylishly housed commercial activity within whole city blocks just as they had in European cities back to the days of the Roman republic. The Tacón anchored a bustling neighborhood near the Capitolio and was home to numerous families who lived in apartments above the street. Market buildings defined public space both inside and outside themselves, which makes them perfect subjects for students thinking through the collective problems of architecture and urban design, explains Ian Manire, the student who is analyzing the old Tacón and who will use what he learns to produce his proposal for a new structure on the site.

Nowadays, he says, “It’s a lost form. It doesn’t exist. Not many probably have been built even post-1900.”

The Trelleses feel the assignment is valuable for other reasons, too. Havana has a surplus of unused ground-floor commercial space that could be renovated, but a proposal for a new market packs a real symbolic — and potentially practical — punch.

“The market has always been a public building, an effort on the part of the government to provide infrastructure for the small agricultural business where people can count on finding them on a daily basis,” Luis explains.

“And now that private business is emerging in Cuba, this may actually be very timely as a project for consideration.”

Havana’s historian couldn’t restore the whole city for all the money in Cuba. “People in the government found it important to hold on to this,” Jorge observes on our stroll through the old city. “The rest of the city’s crumbling.”

Demolition is an inevitable part of the future, but it need not mean the city’s demise. “Nine out of 10 projects that we do, we begin with a demolition,” the architect explains.

Still, students of classical architecture and urban design get anxious about the creeping modernism, sprawl and big-box construction they believe have marred cities throughout the United States and Latin America. Drawing from their professional experience, the Trelles brothers encourage them to take up what Luis calls the “challenge to make something great in our own time.

“There’s no question in my mind that that’s going to happen in Central Havana,” he says. “So much of it is in desperate need of renewal and only a portion of it will be worthy of the investment. The other parts are going to have to be started from scratch.”

After a thoughtful pause, he adds: “I’d be very happy to contribute to that era.”

Stacey Philliber started with little more than a sketch of a section of her building drawn on a standard 8½-by-11-inch sheet of paper and later came across some old photographs. That’s all she could find in the resources available to her in the United States. But by the time we arrive in Havana, she’s begun elaborating that into a cross-section of the building’s full elevation in a drawing about 42 inches tall. Not a bad pre-visit fortnight for any architecture student flying blind, but then Philliber didn’t choose just any 10-story building with a tower on top. This is Leonardo Morales’ Cuban Telephone Company building, the 1920s Spanish Plateresque masterpiece of a man revered by his professional descendants as one of the best Cuban architects of all time.

Plateresque means “in the manner of a silversmith,” and Morales delicately dressed his building — down to its terra cotta cornices and balustrades — in dragons and eagles, a reference to the major streets that intersect at the site, Dragones and Aguilas.

Philliber doesn’t meet her building until the evening before we leave, but she’s able to visit its grand foyer and mezzanine and make sketches and photographs from the roof of a building across the street. She likes the mystery and guesswork that will go into her overall re-creation of the building’s design as well as her close-up study of its window systems and how they fit into Morales’ steel, brick and stucco walls. “You’re learning from someone else per se, but you don’t have all the information so you really have to think it through and figure out how they would have done it.

“I think that in particular will be helpful when we need to shift and think about these things [for our own designs]. We’re learning to ask the questions of what we know and don’t know.”

While his classmates each selected a single building for study, student Christopher Whelan’s job is to tie them all together in a site plan. After two days of criss-crossing Havana, the features he says are most important are the ubiquitous columns and the carefully designed streets. “After walking the streets and sweating a lot, you really appreciate these arcades,” he says. “On a map you can’t really tell how big these things are, how wide these things are, how tall they are. If there’s some way I can explain it in a two-dimensional site plan, I would love to try.”

Many site plans convey a city’s layout in simple black and white, but Whelan says that won’t do for Havana. “Color is a very important part of this city. I don’t want it to be monochromatic. I want it to have some life, some feeling.”

Havana is relatively safe at night despite being poorly lit. “The city is a disaster when it comes to lighting. Have you noticed?” Luis asks. “You walk around those parts of the Capitol and the lights are all out. And there’s only one or two occasional . . . bright lights. The place deserves the lower-level light that’s more consistently illuminated, like all great cities.” Jorge agrees. “They have a lot of work to do.”

“A very wise feature of Havana’s urbanism is the proportions between the height and the width of the street that help you to be sheltered,” Cuban architect Julio César Pérez points out to the students. “If you’re walking in Havana, you see that half the street at least is always shaded.”

What’s the value of a pricey visit to Rome or Havana? Student Joel VanderWeele explains. “You can’t understand a city without being there,” he says. “Maps and diagrams and pictures can do a lot, but there’s something spatial and something human about actually being in a place.”