Happy Birthday Fr. Ted!

As the 2nd part in our series on Title IX, we would like to wish a very warm Happy Birthday to Father Theodore “Ted” Hesburgh, CSC today! A celebrated figure in the worlds of civil rights, academia, and Roman Catholicism, Fr. Ted has accomplished a lot of things in 95 years on the planet. He was one of the longest tenured presidents of an American university, serving Notre Dame for 35 years in its highest office. He has walked hand in hand with Martin Luther King Jr. in the struggle for racial equality, visited the South Pole, carried the Olympic torch, served as an advisor to multiple US presidents, and been awarded a world record 150 honorary degrees.

But among his accolades and achievements, none sticks out as more influential than his leadership to make Notre Dame a coeducational university.

Notre Dame became coed in 1972, coinciding with the passage of Title IX into federal law. So, right away, Notre Dame was doing something it had never done before: field women’s sports teams. A school that had been synonymous with its men’s football team entered into a new phase of history: one in which the Fighting Irish would become known for something other than their success on the gridiron. The women of Notre Dame brought their first national championship home in 1987 when the fencers took the title. Since then, women have secured 8 additional national titles in three sports for the Irish, and led the nation in academic performance on several occasions.

There was a time when thinking of Notre Dame with women would have been something of a joke. Notre Dame was an all-male institution. Simple as that. It wasn’t misogynistic, but thinking of a Notre Dame with female students would have been, at one point, laughable. It took a visionary, imaginative leader in Hesburgh to conceptualize a Notre Dame that saw no boundaries to entry, and no limits to the minds it could educate.

The same kind of vision and intellectual imagination is needed in viewing sports in our culture. There was a time in which sports were considered simply a male affair, but it took pioneers in women’s sports, like Pat Summitt, Billie Jean King, Muffet McGraw, Annika Sörenstam, and countless others to expand narrow conventional thinking on sports. Title IX was a start, but there are still boundaries to overcome, and women and men everywhere working to incorporate more women into sports, and help young girls and women live up to their potential in sports.

The beauty of bringing about equal opportunity in sports is that its implications lie far outside the gymnasium, the diamond, or the field. When we learn to see men and women as equals in sports, we learn to see them as equals in politics, in academia, in business, …in life. So often sports is a predictor of future social trends (much as Jackie Robinson was a harbinger for racial equality), and so as a society, we must think honestly, critically, and thoughtfully about the role of women and girls in sports. And to do that, we need thoughtful, visionary leaders. We need more people like Fr. Ted!