University of Notre Dame - Dome Yearbook (Notre Dame, IN)

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with a finer group of students as persons. Ask any Notre Dame student what he likes best about the place, and he will answer simply, almost instinctively, nine times out of ten, The guys. The mix of students almost always comes out so well that practically everyone here is proud to belong to this group, proud to be considered a Notre Dame man, glad to share this very special esprit de corps. Yes, certainly, much of what happens here in four years happens because of the people who are here, faculty, students, everyone. But people are not the whole story. The same people somewhere else might appear quite differently pedestrian or prosaic. To a very great extent it is the place itself which conspires with the people to make Notre Dame unlike any other place on earth. Again, don ' t try to explain it. Franz Werfel once said of Lourdes that to the believer no explanation was necessary, and to the unbeliever, none possible. Notre Dame is something like that to Notre Dame men: They know it is some- thing special, they have fallen in love with this Rev. A. Leonard Collins, C.S.C., Dean of Students. Rev. Glenn R. Boarman, C.S.C., Student Chaplain. 28

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You can be thrilled by Notre Dame as freshmen, debunk it as sophomores, disown it as juniors, and finally tolerate it as sophisticated seniors. What do the four years mean to most Notre Dame men? The meanings are legion; to each his own. There are more than six thousand men here at any given time, plus 30,000 alumni elsewhere who have had the experience of four years at Notre Dame. Can one general- ize, try to find some reasonably common meaning to the four years spent here? One can try. I think one might try much more meaning- fully after some years have intervened, so as to leave the four years at Notre Dame within a framework of years before and years after. In this perspective, almost every Notre Dame man would, I believe, view these four years as the best years of my life . Then comes the immediate, almost frustra- ted question from the outsider: Why? What is so special about four years at Notre Dame that would not be equally true of four years at Stanford, Chicago, or Yale? Really unspoken is another hidden question: What gives you Notre Dame men that special brand of spirit and loyalty to your school and to each other? Do you get brainwashed, branded, or do they put something in your food at Notre Dame? Once more, the only possible answer, with a fragment of communicable meaning, is to ad- mit that something special does happen to a young man during his four years at Notre Dame. Much of what happens is a result of the unique kind of residential society that exists here - - Notre Dame men of all kinds, from all over, with a faculty equally cosmo- politan. There is a widespread attrition of different ideas and conflicting attitudes, the subtle interplay of personality on personality, the gradual emergence of leadership, spiritual, moral, intellectual, physical too, in the realm of sport. Under the aspect of geographical origin, there is no more national university in the United States than Notre Dame. By some unknown Providence, few schools are blessed Rev. Edmund P. Joyce, C.S.C., Executive Vice - President. 27

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Rev. Charles I. McCarragher, C.S.C., Vice-President, Student Affairs. Rev. Chester A. Soleta, C.S.C., Vice-President, Academic Affairs. 29