By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
Forty-plus years after graduating from the University of Notre Dame, I now see that the professor/student relationships of my college years really were rather transactional—a rapidly created but short-lived form of intellectual intimacy.
As a student I would sign up for a class, spend many intense hours/days during a compact period of time with a subject matter mentor, be guided/judged by that expert in his or her field, and then—usually—that quid pro quo relationship would abruptly end.
By making this observation, I am not trying to be negative or critical. They were meaningful transactions. It also is difficult enough to maintain a close relationship with people just around the corner, let alone those halfway across the country in South Bend, far from my Salt Lake City home.
On occasion, I miss some of those academics who were so important to me during my early twenties. And sometimes I wonder—whatever happened to old Professor So-and-so after I left ND in 1983?
The internet helped me find some answers.
Kathleen Maas Weigert probably was the closest thing I had to a mentor at Notre Dame, where she was Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Letters and Associate Director of the Center for Social Concerns. We spent many long and happy hours working on programs together and talking about social justice. She inspired me. I stayed in touch with her for a while after graduation, but then life got in the way.
Professor Weigert now is a Professor Emeritus at Chicago’s Loyola University, where she taught Sociology as well as Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies. She had earned her Ph.D. from Notre Dame, but in 2001 moved on to found the Center for Social Justice Research, Teaching and Service at Georgetown University. Notre Dame appropriately gave her its 2000 Reinhold Niebuhr award for her long commitment to social justice education.
Since my ND graduation, I’ve been curious if my Government major Professor John Roos—who taught me about Congress—was appalled at the recent dysfunction of that national legislative body he knew so well. Roos had advised Indiana Congressman John Brademas, the House majority whip from 1977 to 1981. When Roos died in 2022 at age 79, his obituary described his 44-year ND teaching career as the work of a “utility player” because he taught courses about Congress, Democracy, Political Theory, Thomas Aquinas, Ancient and Medieval Political Theory, Catholic Political Thought, and Politics and Literature. Today, Notre Dame annually presents the John Roos Award to students with the best senior honors thesis in the area of American politics.
John Kozak, the professor in my freshman year Unified Science course (aka science for Arts and Letters majors), was a teacher to the end, literally. He taught a class the day before he died on January 13, 2021. He had served as a professor of chemistry and an associate dean of the ND College of Science before moving on to work as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Georgia and as provost at Iowa State University. In 2003, Kozak joined DePaul University in Chicago as the provost. In a long and distinguished career, he published over 200 papers and worked as a consultant for the World Bank.
The man who first taught me Constitutional Law, Donald P. Kommers (1932-2018), also wrote over 100 major articles and books, including the leading course book American Constitutional Law: Essays, Cases, and Comparative Notes. He lectured widely in the United States as well as in Germany, Japan, Austria, Chile, Italy, and Croatia. In 2010, Germany’s Federal President awarded him the Distinguished Service Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for his three decades of scholarship on German life and law.
My Calculus professor at Notre Dame, Thomas Sudkamp, was a celebrity when I took his class, but I never knew it until later. Sudkamp was working on his Ph.D. and teaching mathematics at ND when he made a name for himself (“Suds”) on the legendary Bookstore Basketball courts. Suds was chosen tourney MVP one year, and his team won the campus-wide event the next. He went on to teach and serve as provost at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and now works as Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs for the Ohio Department of Higher Education.
As popular as Suds was, I never saw him on TV. That distinction went to Fr. Richard McBrien (1936-2015) chair of the Notre Dame Theology Department for over a decade and the author of the popular book Catholicism. I took his course with the same name. McBrien also wrote another two dozen books and penned a national column for Catholic newspapers. Broadcasters turned to him frequently for public comment, and McBrien was almost always highly critical of what he viewed as an extremely conservative and reactionary Catholic hierarchy. He also served as a paid consultant for the film The Da Vinci Code.
Although I often saw McBrien on television, print newspapers like the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and The Washington Post regularly turned to Professor Jay Patrick Dolan (1936-2023) for insight on their religion reporting. Dolan studied/taught Catholic history—focusing on the people in the pews—at Notre Dame for over 30 years until his 2013 retirement. I took his course about Catholics in America, and I am pretty certain our course materials later became part of his 1985 book, The American Catholic Experience: A History From Colonial Times to the Present,now considered the standard text in American Catholic history.
While McBrien and Dolan wrote books, William G. (“Bill”) Storey sold them. Storey, a professor emeritus of Theology, died in 2014 at age 90. I was in his Church Evolution (Catholic Church history) class for a year, a longtime rite of passage for anyone studying Theology at ND. In 1980, he and his partner purchased a large collection of used books and opened Erasmus Books, an eclectic bookstore in their home. Storey ran the store after his retirement in 1985 and also composed, edited and published several popular books of prayers. Last time I checked, Erasmus Books was still in business.
Speaking of Theology, the Notre Dame of my day trained many of the future leaders of that academic endeavor. Professor Priscilla Pederson (she taught me about Zen Buddhism), went on to lead the Department of Religious Studies at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. My “Introduction to Theology” teacher, Professor Philip Devenish, later taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, pastored two Congregationalist communities, and ran a wine distribution business.
The man who taught my Christian Ethics class, Stanley Hauerwas, eventually left ND for Duke Divinity School, and today is considered one of the world’s most influential living theologians. Time magazine named him “America’s Best Theologian” in 2001. He responded by saying, “Best is not a theological category.” Hauerwas also was the first American theologian in forty years to deliver the prestigious Gifford Lectures (established in 1887) at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
And then there were the wonderful Holy Cross priests.
Soon after I left ND in 1983, my assigned academic advisor Fr. Edward “Monk” Malloy (we only met once) went to on serve as ND’s president. He still teaches and lives in Sorin Hall on campus. My Philosophy 101 professor Fr. David Burrell (1933-2023) taught in Israel, Bangladesh, Uganda, and Kenya. My “Church in Latin America” professor, Fr. Claude Pomerleau (1938-2019), taught in Chile and Uganda.
My dorm rector, the late Fr. Gene Gorski (who called us all his “pillars and stalwarts”), taught in France and studied Zen in Asia. Fr. John Dunne (1930-2013) travelled too, but also went on writing and challenging ND students, as he did me, with the question at the heart of his first book The City of the Gods—if I know I must die, then how shall I live?
Their fellow Holy Cross priest Fr. Don McNeill (1936-2017) continued, as his obituary noted, to give “academic and institutional expression in numerous theology courses, community-based research projects and service learning immersions.” His 1982 book Compassion explained, “Compassion asks us to go where it hurts, to enter into places of pain, to share in brokenness, fear, confusion and anguish.” The apex of McNeill’s compassionate work, known as Notre Dame’s Center for Social Concerns, today involves more than 2,500 students annually in its social justice programs, just like it did me way back when.
Two of my most intriguing professors were women—identical twin sisters—who were just starting their academic careers when I took their courses. Each armed with undergraduate degrees from Mount Holyoke College and a Ph.D. in their chosen field from Johns Hopkins University, Carson Daly taught me Major British Writers and Maura Daly tried valiantly to teach me Beginning French. Having professors who looked exactly alike for two different courses during the same twelve month period sometimes was a disorienting experience. I may have said “oui” when asked in one class about Beowulf and absentmindedly answered “Monsieur Chaucer” when called upon to name a great French writer in the other.
After ND, Professor Carson Daly went on to work in both the public and private sectors, and served as dean and even president of other colleges. Professor Maura Daly won a Fulbright scholarship, did research in French Literature at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, and also worked in both the public and private sectors. In 1987, the Daly sisters and their mother Joan Daly worked together to translate (from French to English) and publish a book about the history of the Jesuit order written by André Ravier, a widely respected European spiritual writer and Church historian.
I have not seen nor spoken with either Daly sister in four decades. Still, I like to think Professor Carson Daly might be proud that one of her former English students actually wrote and published his own book too (Monastery Mornings, my 2021 memoir about growing up at a Trappist monastery in Northern Utah). I also hope, however, Professor Maura Daly would not be too disappointed that I could not write it in French.
These ND people, and many others, launched me on what has been a wonderful life adventure. It’s one reason so many of us alums still tear up when we sing the climactic words of our school’s alma mater, “and our hearts forever, love thee Notre Dame.”
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
