Theodore M. Hesburgh

Theodore Martin Hesburgh was born in Syracuse on May 25, 1917, to Theodore Bernard Hesburgh and the former Anne Murphy. His father was an executive at the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company. Reared in a religious home, Father Hesburgh often said he had wanted to be a priest from age 6. When he was in the eighth grade, four Holy Cross missionaries came to preach at his parish church and captivated him with their talk of Notre Dame. After graduating from high school, he entered the Holy Cross seminary on the campus of Notre Dame, and was later sent to Rome to study for advanced degrees in philosophy and theology. But with the outbreak of World War II, he was forced to return to the United States. He was ordained at Notre Dame in 1943, when he was 26. After taking his vows, Father Hesburgh asked to be assigned to an aircraft carrier as a chaplain. Instead, his superiors ordered him to remain on the Notre Dame campus to help teach naval officers who were being sent there for wartime training. He remained at Notre Dame throughout the war and served as chaplain to returning veterans. Father Hesburgh initially resisted going into administration at Notre Dame, preferring to stay in the classroom. But he was made vice president and assistant to the Notre Dame president, the Rev. John J. Cavanaugh. In 1952, at age 35, he took over as president. At the time, Notre Dame was a small university regarded as strong in football and weak in just about everything else but theology. Father Hesburgh set out to build up the faculty, upgrade the academic standards and increase the size of the school, which admitted women for the first time in 1972. He became an effective fund-raiser, inheriting a $9 million endowment and increasing it to $350 million. Today, Notre Dame has one of the largest endowments in the nation, exceeding $9 billion.