Alliance for Catholic Education
Friends,
This week the Notre Dame family lost two titans. Last Tuesday, chairman emeritus Don Keough passed away at age 88, and as you surely know by now, president emeritus Fr. Ted Hesburgh, CSC died on Thursday at age 97.
Don Keough is the man largely responsible for establishing Notre Dame as the preeminent center for scholarship in Irish Studies and he and his family have been extraordinarily generous to ACE over the years. Next week actually, I'm heading to Ireland to spend a few days training some Irish principals and lead teachers in our school culture model at the Notre Dame Keough-Naughton Centre. I'll post some pictures and things on Twitter if you'd like to see what we're up to (@dallavis). Next week, in this space I'll share a link to an amazing video of Mr. Keough, who was president and COO of Coca-Cola when the "New Coke" fiasco occurred in 1985. It's a beautiful example of positive leadership through absolute failure.
There are so many stories of Fr. Ted's zeal for the Gospel, his love of the priesthood, his devotion to Mary and his reliance on the Holy Spirit. Just as we spent a lot of time this past summer talking about Fr. Sorin's missionary spirit and zeal in founding Notre Dame, we'll devote time this coming summer to deepen our understanding of Fr. Ted's extraordinary life, his commitment to excellence and persistence, and his witness to what it means to be a man with hope to bring.
As we prepare on campus to celebrate Fr. Ted's life - and to welcome an astonishing array of distinguished guests, from diplomats to presidents to cardinals to football coaches - I want to share just one thing Fr. Ted wrote that has influenced my thinking over the past five years.
My favorite thing Fr. Ted ever wrote was an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in 2010 at the tender age of 92. The voucher program in Washington DC was about to be de-funded by the US Senate and President Obama declined to save the program. Fr. Ted, founding member of the Civil Rights Commission, wrote a scathing indictment of the politicians playing games with the program.
Fr. Ted made the stakes clear by how he framed the issue, writing, "If Martin Luther King Jr. told me once, he told me a hundred times that the key to solving our country's race problem is as plain as day: Find decent schools for our kids."
First, if anyone ever honestly starts a sentence, "If MLK told me once he told me a hundred times," you better listen up! More importantly - imagine the journey Fr. Ted witnessed in the United States: When President Eisenhower first tapped him to serve on the Civil Rights Commission, black Americans could not drink from the same water faucets as whites in the South. Fifty years later, Fr. Ted would find himself publishing a letter in the Wall Street Journal asking a black president to live up to the challenge Dr. King had made to Fr. Ted five decades earlier. Sadly, Obama and the Senate did not listen up, and the program was defunded, resulting in 1,700 children losing scholarships and several school closures. A few years later the program was reinstated when Republicans swept back into office, but it was too late for many schools.
Despite the negative outcome, what I love about the piece is that Fr. Ted viewed the DC voucher fight in its proper historical context - as part of a decades - really centuries - long battle for civil rights and equal opportunity. It's interesting to me that 50 years later, the solution that is "plain as day" to civil rights is equal educational opportunity. Decent schools for our kids. And 50 years later, we still don't have that. Not even close.
This insight - that the full realization of the civil rights movement can't happen until all our kids are in decent schools, and equal educational opportunities are essential for the full flowering of civil rights - informs my own belief in every parent's right to choose the best school for their child, and it informs my own advocacy for policies that create and expand those rights. And more than 50 years since Fr. Ted and MLK joined hands at Soldier Field to sing We Shall Overcome it seems we are still a million miles from having decent schools for all our kids, and that imbues an urgency into each of the values of our work, to seek, persist, excel, love, serve - so that I feel compelled to do these things now, today, soon, as quickly as possible.
And every time there's a challenge to these choice policies, or there is a fight to get a new one passed, and every time I'm feeling the challenge of the urgency this work demands, I'll be praying Fr. Ted's favorite prayer, confident that he and Dr. King are now together, in a much better position to help nudge these prayers along:
Come Holy Spirit!
- Christian