By JAMES K. FITZPATRICK
Unless they have some connection to the University of Notre Dame, it is unlikely that readers of this column will have heard of the school’s proposed Campus Crossroads Project. The project is still in its fundraising stage. One of our readers, J.L. of Indiana, writes to offer some observations about the project’s implications for the university’s future and Catholic higher education in general. But let’s look at the project itself, before considering J.L.’s thoughts on the matter.
What Notre Dame is proposing is a $400 million undertaking to be completed by August 2017. The money will be raised through a combination of fundraising commitments, the sale of new premium club seats for Fighting Irish football games and the issuance of bonds. The university promises that the project will not make an impact on tuition or financial aid.
The plans call for new buildings to be attached to the current football stadium. The drawings in the promotional material give the impression that the new construction will not detract from the look of the stadium. The brochure states that the goal is to make the area around the stadium, which is used for football games only 10 or 12 times per year, “a year-round hub for academic and student life.”
The new buildings will house academic departments, including, according to the brochure, “the Department of Sacred Music, including recital and rehearsal space, classrooms, and offices, the Department of Anthropology and Department of Psychology,” as well as “a digital media center with a 2,000-square-foot studio, and production and classroom space.” The new facilities “will be used by faculty, students, strategic communications, athletics, and information technology. The space will position Notre Dame as a national leader in the digital media space in higher education.”
The brochure assures potential donors that the famous Basilica of the Sacred Heart and Golden Dome atop the school’s administration building “will always be at the heart of the campus.”
J.L. thinks Notre Dame’s administration doth protest too much. He writes, “The Project would by design complete the process of establishing a second geographical focus for the university campus. Should the Project become actual, it would be a celebration in stone of the apparent drift of the university over the past three-quarters of a century or more. The second geographical focus would be an outward sign of the inward disposition moving the university, willy-nilly, away from one central spiritual and intellectual center to an elliptical orbit about two foci.”
J.L. has firsthand knowledge of the changes he describes:
“Over the past seven decades, 11 members of my family, spread across three generations, have attended Notre Dame. Some have even taught at the school. We have witnessed the drift. There should be little question of which is tail and which is dog in the proposed architectural hybrid. The whole Project might seem to be akin to affixing the Porch of the Stoics to the walls of the Colosseum in ancient Rome. But a more extended and perhaps more appropriate analogy comes to mind.”
The analogy J.L. offers for our consideration is one worth taking time to ponder. He asks us to recall the “peculiar, self-distanced American autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, especially the memorable chapter titled ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin.’ In that chapter, Adams celebrates the near-fatal irruption into his psyche of the phenomena of radioactivity and the generation of electrical energy.
“In the presence of the stories-high dynamos at the Paris International Exhibition of 1900, Adams claims that he found himself lying on the floor with ‘his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.’ These machines, Adams continues, were a ‘revelation of mysterious energy like that of the Cross; they were what, in terms of medieval science, were called immediate modes of the divine substance.’ The energy, the power, the sheer force that once emanated from the Virgin Mary and enabled, e.g., the construction of the Gothic cathedrals, Adams found transmogrified into or replaced by that generated in the silently humming forty-foot high dynamos.
“These mysterious new forces, forces somehow akin to those once infused into man by the Cross and radiating through the Virgin Mary, had been unleashed upon the world, while the cathedrals became museums. What some fear is that the completion of the Campus Crossroads Project at Notre Dame would be, like the Paris Exhibition of 1900, a monumental display of the process of the transmutation or replacement of energy. In this case the segue would be from the Virgin to the dynamic of the commercial-athletic complex, a transmutation perhaps to be epitomized by the installation of a ‘JumboTron,’ the ‘Feelies’ of Brave New World on electronic steroids.
“Upon the Crossroads Project’s completion, then, one could briefly traverse in space the traverse in time that Adams felt. One could move from Notre Dame’s famous Grotto (Adams did admit that some Virginal force still seemed to emanate from Lourdes), or a student chapel, or the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, seeing and hearing what once dominantly moved the university, to a parking lot next to the metastasized stadium and find oneself lying on one’s back, with one’s historical neck broken, feeling what moves the university in our time.”
J.L. assures us he is not dealing in hyperbole: “I believe that I have observed at Notre Dame the sort of evolution of energy that Adams noted in his autobiography. When I was a student at the university in the earliest fifties I had the sense that much of what many faculty members had to transmit to me they had learned on their knees. When I returned to teach late in the next decade I did not have the same sense about my colleagues. The new commercial-academic-scientific-technological complex does not recognize the knees as a primary organ of learning. We are seeing the signs of a significant change for the university, the results of the compromises made at the 1967 Land O’ Lakes Conference.
“The administration apparently came to what it felt were necessary terms with leading foundations for the sake of increased access to academic affluence when it promoted the Land O’ Lakes Statement. The Conference was concerned with intractable issues involving academic freedom, university governance, and the relation of the Catholic university to the Church.
“Perhaps an institutional drift toward elephantiasis, specialization of function, reorientation and re-hierarchization of priorities is inevitable at a modern university, even a Catholic one. Perhaps the Land O’ Lakes Statement and the antecedent negotiations with foundations were most prudent. Perhaps the Campus Crossroads Project should be celebrated. Perhaps. Perhaps we should also recall that, in many traditions, it was at the crossroads, a place ‘between the worlds,’ that suicides were buried.”
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Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about this and other educational issues. The e-mail address for First Teachers is fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net, and the mailing address is P.O. Box 15, Wallingford, CT 06492.
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