When I was on the Faculty at Notre Dame... - weekly column

Lawrence Hall
Mhall46184@aol.com
Poeticdrivel.blogspot.com

When I was on the Faculty at Notre Dame…

Tom Morris is a modern American philosopher of such influence that he once persuaded a board or committee of august personages at Notre Dame that I should be on the faculty.

And I was.

For a few weeks one summer.

Along with a dozen or so other recipients of a summer National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Fellowship in the long ago.

Be impressed.

The maître d’ / headwaiter / manager of the faculty dining room was definitely not impressed, but that’s a story for another paragraph.

In illo tempore Dr. Morris (“Call me Tom”) was a professor of philosophy at Notre Dame, entrusted by President Reagan and William Bennett, then chairman – no human is a chair – of the National Endowment for the Humanities, to divert some of that endowment to a few mere high school teachers. Now Tom writes books, books of such great wisdom and clarity that you and I can understand them, and speaks to groups of the wise and the powerful (and possibly sometimes to the merely silly) all over the world.

And so it came to pass that I filled out forms and wrote essays and was chosen to participate in an NEH Summer Seminar to study philosophy with brilliant and funny Professor Morris at the University of Notre Dame.

A year or so later Tom asked several of us to read a draft of his work in progress, Making Sense of It All: Pascal and the Meaning of Life.

My contribution is a comma on page 34. I’m very proud of that comma, so if you find that book please do look up my comma. You can then say that you know someone who made a significant contribution to a brilliant contemporary work of philosophy easily understood by all (even by me).

All this babbling is a too-long preface to a marvelous recent book by Tom, The Oasis Within. The book is a series of little lessons and thinking exercises framed in the story of a boy and his uncle on a camel caravan through Egypt in 1934.

The story can be read solely as a story, and it would be both diverting and useful, but the thinking reader will also consider the many questions about the meanings in one’s life and the nature of the good, the true, and the beautiful. In an unhappy time when discourse is pretty much limited to people screaming ill-considered absolutes at each other, we listen to young Walid and his Uncle Ali reflect on the events of each day progress in their journey, and their friends Hamid, Masoon (warrior and cook), Hakeem, Bancom, an unnamed lady of great wisdom, other travelers and business people, and treacherous (Boooo! Hissss!) Faisul.

In the end, Walid learns that he is a royal prince, but that adventure is developed further in the next book in the series, The Golden Palace and The Stone of Giza.

Every event in the story is of course itself and each chapter is centered on daily happenings along the way, but each is also representative of the challenges everyone faces in life and the need for careful observation followed by ethical and rational choices. Each chapter, then, can be considered as a leisurely daily lesson in perceiving, thinking, feeling, and developing logical solutions in pursuit of an ethical purpose.

The Oasis Within is not a religious book, nor is it antithetical to any religious faith, except perhaps to those who believe in The Lizard People and albino monks lurking in secret caves beneath the Pentagon.

A common misapprehension is that philosophy is an alternative to faith, which is simply not so. “Philosophy” is Greek for the love of wisdom, and wisdom is but careful observation and wise application. On pages 123 and 138, for instance, the consideration of a duality at first struck me through my filter of Christianity as sailing close to Manichaeism, and I quibble with the use of the terms “fate” and “destiny” on page 145, but then this book is not a religious text, and, after all, a happy and challenging debate on any topic is an essential of civilization.

When we install a new battery in the lawn mower or a car, there are but two choices about electrical polarity – we connect the cables and battery positive to positive and negative to negative. There is no trinitarian doctrine of the battery, and “positive” and “negative” in the context of a vehicle’s electrical system are not value judgments.

Thus it is with books of philosophy and conversations with Uncle Ali. We listen to each other and we learn from each other. If we scream at each other then nothing worthy is accomplished.

The Oasis Within is available from amazon.com as an inexpensive paperback.

And now, let us harken back to those golden days of yesteryear, when we
One day we chose to exercise a faculty privilege and enjoy lunch at the faculty club. We dressed up (in those Ye Olden Days, nice dresses for most of the women and blazers and ties for most of the men), and with our faculty cards in hand presented ourselves.

The courtesies and kindnesses extended to us by Professor Morris and, indeed, every academic we were privileged to meet at Notre Dame did not extend to the faculty club. The maître d’ / headwaiter / manager regarded us with the icy disdain of Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Agatha finding a caterpillar in her vichyssoise, and only after some persuasion and presentations of proofs of our specialness and a bit of standing our ground and refusing to go away were we hoi polloi (that’s like, you know, Greek, and, like, stuff) (the only Greek I know) grudgingly permitted to enter the dining room. The poor man did not tell us to wipe our feet or refrain from blowing our noses on the linen napkins, but we could tell that he was not anticipating appropriate demeanor from us.

In the event we enjoyed a perfectly nice lunch, lifted a glass in honor of our wise professor, discussed Blaise Pascal’s Pensees, (I had seen a working reproduction of his calculating machine, ca 1642, at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, but no one was impressed), and refrained from putting our feet on the table or throw bread rolls at anyone.

I think Uncle Ali would concur that not putting one’s feet on the table or throwing bread rolls at lunch comes under topic #6 of the Seven Secrets, about developing good character.

The headwaiter would probably agree.

http://www.tomvmorris.com/
http://ami19.org/Pascaline/IndexPascaline-English.html

-30-

Notre Starbuck's

Mack Hall

A recent news photo features a Notre Dame senior wearing a wispy I-finally-got-some-testosterone beard and a slogan skivvy shirt, both now as obligatory in America as a keffiyah is in South London, the tee whining: “Please don’t ruin MY graduation.”

You just know that this will tug at the heartstrings (what are heartstrings, anyway?) of 22-year-old corporals and privates fighting it out in 120-degree heat in the deserts of Afghanistan and Iraq. “Please!” they will write in impassioned letters to Time magazine and Dan Brown, “Don’t let the meanies ruin that lad’s college graduation. After all, he has worked so hard in air-conditioned classrooms for the last four years.”

On Friday, an 80-year-old priest singing the hymn “Immaculate Mary” on the campus of Notre Dame was arrested for trespassing (the ironies stack higher than the ego of archbishop and archembezzler Rembert Weakland). The sensitive, bearded youth in the slogan undershirt will be safe. That old meanie who meant to ruin the sensitive youth’s graduation was hustled off by at least three kampus kops. Ya gotta watch out for 80-year-olds singing hymns; they’re dangerous to the tough, rational minds forged and sharpened in the fires of four hard years of intellectual give-and-take at Notre Decaf Latte’.

And it’s all about freedom of speech. But whose? Mine, of course, because I’m special; my mother says so.

If you’ve ever listened to a graduation speaker you are painfully aware that you have forever lost an hour of your life when you could have been doing something far more creative, such as trimming your nose-hairs or giving the pooch its heart-worm medicine.

Every commencement speaker assures his listeners that his speech will be different from any they have ever heard, and yet all graduation speeches manage to auto-negative pressure themselves into a grey hole of mixed metaphors and pure Woosterian blather:

“Young women and men: you are the long-awaited hope of the huddled masses, just like your MySpaces say. Your four hard years of intellectual endeavors and service here among the dreaming spires of Bob’s College are the key that will unlock the road to the bright, shining future mountaintop of this promising land of visions of ours. Go forth and make your realities the dreams of the marginalized and dispossessed whose hearts and minds await your deconstructed truths of the nature of personkind.

“Some might say that you are a lost generation of FaceBook surfers interested only in the glib and the shallow. But last night your class president, Heather “Mike” Scumwalligan-Snortle, the first-ever transgendered, undocumented, poly-racial graduate of Bob’s College (hold for wild applause), simultaneously a single mother and a single father, who had to make do with only five federal grants, shared with me some of her-his thoughts about making America great again: draft beer (hold for more wild applause).

“I can only concur with Ms. Scumwalligan-Snortle’s golden dream of a richer, better America that reaches out to the homely and the homeless and beerless with a fearless courage and bravery that speaks and thunders and whispers the wonderfulness of the Bob’s College Class of 2009 (hold for applause and air-horns). I see your selflessness and your generosity and your open-mindednesses and, like, stuff, misspelled in glued-down glitter on your mortarboards. Anyone who can spend long, selfless hours in brotherhood and sisterhood with his or her sisters and brothers gluing glitter on a mortarboard while singing the sound-track from Mamma Mia is a real intellectual with an iconic passion for the future of accessible health care for all, including dachshunds.

“I see among the graduates Poncy Thworbt, president of Gamma Alpha Sigma Fraternity. Some people say that fraternities are outworn institutions that have become nothing more than excuses for promoting alcoholism and homoeroticism. Some people see fraternity brothers stripping pledges naked and beating them up so they can call each other friends and brothers, and ask why. Well, my fellow Americans, I ask why not. My fellow inheritors of Turtle Island, when you’ve shoved the head of a freshman down a toilet bowl until he almost drowns, that’s brotherhood, that’s love, that’s compassion, that’s respect for the dignity of one’s brothers and sisters.

“And with us today is Heather-Mysteee-Shannon StarDawn who in solidarity with the starving children of the world composed a heartfelt song and accompanied herself on her guitar, spending weeks making a MyMyMySpaceToob of her heartfelt and passionate artistic performance in order to comfort the starving children of every race and creed and color on our planet. Now that’s what I call making a difference. You rock, Heather-Mysteee-Shannon-Dawn!

“Some cynics might suggest that you should now get off your baccalaureates and get what they claim is a real job. How little they know! You, the Bob’s College Class of 2009, know the agony and suffering and sacrifice of constructing a really good MyMyMyFaceBook entry (pause for air-horns)! You’ve all labored long into the night, sustained by nothing more than beer and pizza and pure thoughts, downloading shiny, glittery, public-domain unicorns onto your unique ‘blog to demonstrate to the world how special you are. You tell me that’s not real work!

And so let the word go forth that you are very, very special indeed. Go forth and heal and change the world and the harp seals and the polar bears with your passions as iconic filmmakers, artists, community activists, computer graphics designers, and writers of cutting-edge haiku, and give back by taking a gap year at someone else’s expense so that you can make a difference!

(Wild applause)

Notre Dame and the Upside-Down Helmet

Mack Hall

You can talk of your Judge Judy and your high school principal and your mother-in-law, but you have never been truly judged and found wanting until you have had a dinner-jacketed maitre d’ at the Notre Dame faculty club evaluate – and find inadequate – your very soul with the subtle arching of an eyebrow above his unblinking reptilian eye.

I was honored to spend a happy summer at Notre Dame under the mentoring of the brilliant and wonderfully humorous Thomas Morris (whom you can find at http://www.morrisinstitute.com and whose books you can find at Amazon.com and other good bookstores). I and the other Fellows of that year’s National Endowment for the Humanities were nominally – remember that adverb – members of the Notre Dame faculty for the six weeks, and I still have my faculty I.D. card somewhere.

Toward the end of our summer we Fellows decided to put on shoes and clean shirts and take a celebratory dinner in the faculty club just to say we had done so, and after appalling Jeeves and some members of the real faculty we enjoyed ourselves immensely in the elegant dining room. It was a fitting end to a marvelous six weeks.

Notre Dame was founded in the middle of the 19th century by a French missionary order, but its football reputation rests on generations of Irish lads who were not welcome at Harvard or Yale. Thus, an accident of immigration resulted in the school mascot NOT being “The Fighting French.” This paragraph has nothing to do with the narrative, and as a teacher I’d take points off for it, but I like it so I’m leaving it in.

The Notre Dame adventure continued when Tom asked me and several others to read and comment on the draft of what would be one of his best books, Making Sense of It All. This was an enjoyable labor for which he gave me many thanks. In all humility I must confess that Tom did not ask me to read or comment on the draft of his next book.

Notre Dame remains dear to me all these years later. I remember with a “I Survived” mentality how our lot were billeted in Saint Edward’s Hall, Lentenly un-air-conditioned during a record-hot summer in which the temps reached 106 day after day. Thus we sloshed in the covered pool when possible, spent our off-class hours reading and writing in the mechanized air of the student commons, and walked in the cool of the evenings, sometimes participating in the Notre Dame tradition of praying the Rosary in the Grotto at dusk.

The Basilica of the Sacred Heart is only a few steps away from St. Edward’s Hall, and we usually entered by the east door beneath these words carved in the stone of the arch: “God, Country, and Notre Dame.” This is much better than “Me, Me, and AIG” or “Me, Me, and Enron” or perhaps “He Who Dies With the Most Toys Wins.” On either side are bronze plaques commemorating the sons – and now daughters, I fear – of Notre Dame who died in America’s wars.

Someone pointed out to me the light at the entrance – a bulb fitted into the upside-down World War I helmet of Fr. Charles O’Connell, who survived and became the 12th president of Notre Dame. I suppose Fr. O’Connell wanted to make sure he could find his helmet in the middle of the night the next time Germany started a war.

Notre Dame du Lac (“Our Lady of the Lake”) began as a grade school in a log cabin in a frozen wilderness in the 1840s, but the French missionary priests envisioned a great university topped by a golden dome and a statue of the Blessed Mother. Generations of sacrifice and service made it so.

The whole point of Notre Dame is that it is a Catholic university. The football team, the upside-down helmet with a light bulb in it, the lovely lakes, the reconstructed log cabin, the rather stupid-looking leprechaun, Knute Rockne and The Gipper – all these are fun, but they are not what Notre Dame is about, the transmission of Christian civilization, via such great teachers as Thomas Morris, from one generation to the next.

The current administration of Notre Dame has invited the President of the United States to speak at graduation in May. Normally this would be a “how nice” thing, because no one listens to graduation speakers, not even to presidents. One attends graduation to dress up like a monk or monkette, pose for pictures, and toss one’s hat and maybe one’s cookies later on, not to listen to someone expel the usual flatus about dreams being the key (there’s always a key) that unlocks the road to the future of the door or something. I dare to say that were Jesus Himself to speak at Notre Dame’s ceremonies in May the graduates would be too busy text-messaging each other to notice: “dud hu d dud in whit keg mi pl8s l8ter.”

Unfortunately, the current president’s fashionable enthusiasm (hey, all the cool kids are doing it, right?) for infanticide has gotten all tangled up in this Christianity thing. When Jesus said that children should be permitted to come to Him, He didn’t mean that the children should be shot, gassed, burnt, poisoned, or flushed first. Indeed, He was very clear that a failure to protect children would be severely punished.

Jesus appeared in a time when the dominant Greco-Roman culture highly approved of killing off any babies, especially girls, whom the sperm-donor or the state found lacking. The modern science of economics under Hitler would later label such children – and folks past retirement age -- as “useless feeders.”

Certainly one may speak freely in a public forum, and the president probably won’t even mention killing babies anyway.

But this forum is different. This forum is Notre Dame, named for Jesus’ Mother, who chooses life. Further, the speaker is going to be given an honorary doctorate in, oh, doctorness or something, which would imply a Christian school’s ratification of his contempt for the lives of the most vulnerable among us. This ratification is to be made during the graduation of hundreds of young men and women who are now forced into an unhappy alternative: to attend the graduation they have earned and thus possibly be construed as approving of the killing of babies, or staying away entirely and denying themselves their special day. That choice that was not part of the deal when they entered Notre Dame four years ago.

One wonders if the current maitre d’ at the Notre Dame faculty club -– or anyone else -- will lift an eyebrow at that.