On Palm Sunday, 1959, I finished reading The Education of Henry Adams, a required Great Book my last seminar in the General Program at Notre Dame, now called the Program of Liberal Studies. Adams described his German education as a total failure except for his “only clear gain—his single step to a higher life.” That single step happened at a music hall “drinking beer, smoking German tobacco, and looking at fat German women knitting, while an orchestra played dull music.” One day he was surprised to notice that his mind discovered beauty in that dull music: it was a movement of a Beethoven Symphony. Adams declared, “Among the marvels of education, this was the most marvelous.”…

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Father Robert Schwenker OMI, a 1958 Notre Dame graduate, died last Tuesday. He had been jogging in one of the poorer neighborhoods of Bogotá, where he lived. A hit-and-run.

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“Nick, do you think we’ll be able to see Touchdown Jesus from our seats?” I ask my brother about the infamous mural overlooking the football field.

“I dunno. I hope so.”

Nick and I sat in the back seat of our 1984 white-with-wood-paneling station wagon as Michael Jackson’s Bad played on our cassette player. We normally knew the words, but in our excitement we couldn’t remember them all. Or maybe we were too anxious to sing. We hadn’t slept the night before; our anticipation kept us awake through most of the night. Our matching blue-and-gold nylon windbreaker jump suits—I now shudder at the fashion faux pas our parents were subjecting us to—made swishing noises against the seats. We thought we looked good. We thought we were cool. We were wrong, but it didn’t matter because it was the ‘80s and we were on our way to watch our first Notre Dame football game.…

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Alumni Awards

The Rev. William Corby, CSC, Award will be presented to Brigadier General_ Francis X. Taylor ‘70, ’74MA, USAF (ret.),_ at halftime of the Purdue football game on October 2. Taylor is assistant secretary for diplomatic security at the U.S. State Department. Previously he served as ambassador at large for the coordinator of U.S. counterterrorism. He also served as director of the Office of Foreign Missions, deputy commander of the 487th Combat Support Group in Comiso, Italy, director of mission guidance in the Office of Special Investigations at Bolling Air Force Base, director of special investigations for the Air Force Inspector General, and commander of Air Force special investigations. During 31 years of service in the Air Force, Taylor was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, Legion of Merit and National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal. He assisted in establishing the Notre Dame Air Force ROTC…

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Tim Roemer ’81 M.A., ’85Ph.D. is serving on the 9/11 Congressional Commission investigating the events leading up to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. . . . Anthony Walton ‘82 co-wrote a book with former NBA star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar about the first all-African-American tank unit in WWII…

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As a wicked late winter wind swirls outside her small, cluttered office on the University of Chicago campus, Nancy Cox ‘78 talks softly about the culprits she hunts down.

“Think of it as a detective story in which someone has to locate a person somewhere in the world,” she says. "They’ll try to track them down to a continent, to a country, and then a city, then finally block by block to locate them in the house."…

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New Testament Greek and Exegesis: Essays in Honor of Gerald F. Hawthorne, edited by Amy M Donaldson ’99M.A. and Timothy B. Sailors ’00M.A. (Eerdmans). Christian scholars offer a view of their current studies of the New Testament. Contributors include David E. Aune, ND professor of theology.

Coalwater, Kevin Kramer’91

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Optimal Investing: How to Protect and Grow Your Wealth with Asset Allocation, Scott P. Frush ’99MBA (Marshall Rand Publishing). A step-by-step guide on how to build a financial portfolio. The author, a certified financial planner, discusses the theories and principles of asset allocation, then offers model portfolios for investors with different desired levels of risk. …

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compiled by Carol Schaal ’91M.A.

Three Weeks With My Brother, Nicholas Sparks ’88 and Micah Sparks (Warner Books). Best-selling author Nicholas, known for romantic love stories, and his brother, Micah, took a three-week trip around the world last year. As Nicholas writes, the book is a story of two journeys: “one that took my brother and me to exotic places around the world, and another, a lifetime in the making, that has led us to become the best of friends.” That lifetime, as readers learn, has been too often marred by tragedies that tested their faith. Black-and-white family photos are sprinkled throughout the text.

…

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The near south side of South Bend once smelled of sweat and security. Workers poured in and out of the giant Studebaker factories there, making cars, making healthy paychecks. The monstrous brick buildings denoted a vibrant community living off the profits of heavy manufacturing.…

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Mary Sue Twohy ‘91 had an epiphany at a smoky bar in Arlington, Virginia, in 1996. “All through my first song I could hear the clink of glasses and the voices of people talking,” Twohy says. "So I set down my guitar and sang ’Sweet Mercy’ a cappella. The crowd went nuts." When she stepped away from the mike, she realized her career as a folk musician was about to skyrocket.

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Editor’s note: The following letters were received through the magazine’s React Online form and from those written or emailed to the magazine.

Reading Mr. Anthony DePalma’s article on the “Soul of a University” was both moving and enlightening. As the parent of an only child, who is currently a senior in high school, I am fraught with anxiety about letting go while being concerned whether my child will be well taken care off at the college she selects to attend and still get an excellent education that will help her prepare well for a productive future.…

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I just read “Escape From Purgatory” by John M. Nichols in your Spring 2004 issue. Not only was there much truth in the article, but it was also written in such a comical way it was a joy to read. I think you should have Mr. Nichols submit an article for each issue. Rest assured your readers would turn to his writing before reading anything else in each issue.…

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I took the old collegiate seminar (“A Death in the Curriculum”) under an infuriating fellow named Daniel Koob, even complained to a dean about the demands and hated the required aggravations . . . until about midyear, when I discovered I was breathing outside the womb—and wanted to be there! Basically, I had learned to read—not just the text at hand, but all…

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It’s a neat trick. Every 48 days a recently discovered speck of light in the night that astronomers call KH 15 D vanishes. Then, 20 days later —presto—the star reappears. What’s going on? As with any disappearing act, it’s most likely smoke and mirrors, or, in this case, the cosmic equivalent.

Peter Garnavich, a Notre Dame associate professor of physics, and colleagues from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and Wesleyan University theorize that a large, swirling disk of dust and gas, “leftovers” from the star’s birth which eventually will coalesce into a planet, is the cause of the star’s periodic winking.…

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For poor people it is the classic Catch-22. Ever since the welfare reforms of the ’90s, most aid recipients have been required to work to qualify for the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program. The problem is, since you need dependable transportation to get to work, very often you need a car. But if you own a car worth more than $1,000 you no longer qualify for aid in nine states, while other states have a higher limit.…

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“Boggle” might be the perfect name for the planet Notre Dame’s David Bennett and an international team of astronomers discovered recently. The distant world, estimated to be one-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter, is so far away from Earth and the means of its discovery is so novel that it boggles the mind.…

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Maybe it’s that lady Jamaican click beetles see the guy beetles with the orange lights as more their type, or maybe it’s that the bats who dine on them have trouble finding the orange fireflies. Whatever the reason, Notre Dame biologist Jeffrey Feder and graduate students Uwe Stolz and Sebastian Velez have strong genetic evidence that natural selection is occurring in the Jamaican click beetle population. Beetles that glow orange at night appear to be winning over the ones who glow green or yellow-green.…

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When the wind gusts, skyscrapers swing, sway and twist. Sometimes they creak and groan. But that’s okay because they’re designed to do that, and most of the time the movement is imperceptible. “Tall buildings dance; the flexibility allows them to handle wind load, the force of the wind,” says Tracy Kijewski-Correa, Notre Dame assistant professor of civil engineering.…

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Did the University decide to cap enrollment in the business college?

Last year a report from the Provost’s Office to University trustees showed that almost one out of every three members of the class of 2003 earned a business degree. That was up from about one in four 10 years ago and about one in five 25 years ago. The average at the other national universities ranked in the top 20 by U.S. News & World Report…

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On June 8, 2004, the Saint Joseph County Council unanimously approved the University’s plan to close Juniper at Douglas Road. Traffic will be rerouted onto a new road just west of Ivy Road on the east side of campus. The road will be paid for by Notre Dame and will run mostly through University property. The plan also calls for a realignment of Edison Road south of campus.…

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Last December the Hannahville Indian Community, which lives in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, sued Notre Dame and the federal Interior Department, saying the community was cheated out of a tract of land on the Notre Dame campus near the modern-day WNDU television studios.

The Hannahville Indians are successors to the Potawatomi people who were living in Northern Indiana when Father Sorin arrived in 1842. They allege that the state of Indiana illegally transferred Potawatomi-owned land to Notre Dame in violation of treaties dating to the 1820s. The University says it acquired the land legally. …

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Organizers of a protest estimated that 145 students went on hunger strikes spring semester to call on Notre Dame to stop doing business with Taco Bell.

The students, mostly members of the Progressive Student Alliance, were supporting a national boycott called by a farm workers group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. The coalition says Taco Bell’s tomato suppliers pay unfair wages to migrant workers in Florida. It wants the restaurant chain to pressure the suppliers to pay a living wage.…

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A Muslim scholar rated by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world joins the Notre Dame faculty this fall.

Tariq Ramadan is expected to teach Islamic philosophy and ethics in the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies. He’ll hold the Luce Chair in Religion, Conflict and Peacebuilding, a full-time, tenured position.…

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Graphic design graduate student Mark Cook wanted to document life in the Saint Joseph/Benton Harbor area of Michigan as best he could.

He set aside a minute.

On March 26, 30 graduate and undergraduate students armed with cameras, audio recorders and notebooks set out to help Cook capture ordinary life in the twin cities, located on Lake Michigan at the mouth of the Saint Joseph River, about 35 miles north of campus. They did so by training their eyes and recording equipment on various locations for 60 seconds, from 3:26 to 3:27 in the afternoon. Cook then assembled the images into a kind of computerized slide show. The production mingled photographs with text from students and others in the community who agreed to write down what they were thinking about and doing at the designated minute.…

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The end of the school year brought an end to the jobs of the female security monitors in the women’s residence halls

A spokesman for campus Security/Police said that after reviewing the program internally and consulting outside professionals the department decided the monitors weren’t accomplishing the department’s mission of providing security to all resident students.…

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The Nalgene craze has hit Notre Dame.

These virtually indestructible, techy-looking plastic bottles are showing up on campuses across the country and have become almost an extension of the student wardrobe. At Notre Dame they can be seen everywhere—nestled in mesh pouches of backpacks or dangling from a belt loop or backpack strap, often tethered by another trendy accessory, a carabiner, those D-shaped spring-loaded clips originally designed for rappelling. …

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Father Malloy has been named chair of an NCAA task force that will look at how to stop sports wagering by student athletes.

As part of its work the group will analyze results released in May from an NCAA-commissioned national study. Through anonymous surveys, student athletes at programs of all sizes were asked how often they bet on sports. Almost 35 percent of male student athletes said they had engaged in some type of sports wagering behavior in the past year. The figure was 10 percent for female student athletes.…

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Year Built: 1939

Capacity: 206

Male or female? Female since 1973

They Call Themselves: Babes since 1999; before that, Banshees

Named for: Brothers-in-law William P. Breen, class of 1877, an attorney, and Frank B. Phillips, class of 1880, a banker. The two benefactors were both from Fort Wayne, Indiana. Breen was a charter member and first president of the Notre Dame Board of Lay Trustees, established in 1920 by then-President James A. Burns, CSC…

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Speaking a day before the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, Minnesota Supreme Court Justice and former football great Alan C. Page ‘67 told the audience at Notre Dame’s 159th commencement that some things have changed for the better in regard to race issues in this country.…

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