Notre Dame Down Under

The tram rattles over yet another bumpy street in the charming city of Fremantle, on Australia's west coast, as the driver continues her fast-paced narrative. Convicts imported in the 1850s. The port town as the site of a secret submarine base in World War II. The 1987 America's Cup, with Fremantle as the proud host city.

Then the tram bumps down a narrow street lined with imposing warehouse-like brick buildings. The driver points out an arch emblazoned with the words "Notre Dame Australia" and cranks up her spiel again. "That," she says confidently, "is a branch of a university by the same name in the U.S."

Too bad. The driver just failed her local history exam. While there are plenty of ties between what the Aussies refer to as Notre Dame Indiana and their very own Notre Dame, the Australian school is not a branch of the other.

Still, the tram driver's mistake is a common one. "They don't understand the concept of a private, Catholic university here," says Margaret Haydon, director of marketing and communications at Notre Dame Australia, referring to the typical Australian view of the young university whose doors opened a mere half decade ago.

Australians are not merely unfamiliar with the idea -- they are downright suspicious of it. And the suspicion is understandable. In a country where university education has always been government subsidized, the notion of students paying full freight for higher education can be both unwelcome and unappealing.

"Australia has no tradition of church-related or of private higher education," says Peter Tannock, vice-chancellor (read: president) of NDA. In fact, Australia's very first private university, Bond, didn't appear until 1987. Before then, all of Australia's universities were government-supported and students paid for a portion of their education only after graduating and earning a certain salary.

Trouble hit, as it often does, in the form of decreasing governmental revenues. "A funny thing happened in Australia," says Notre Dame Law School Dean David Link, who was on loan to NDA as its first president from 1990 to January 1993. "When money got scarce in Oz and less and less was available for education, the government started to cut into curricula control."

Link shudders when he relates how he once heard a member of the Australian Federal Ministry suggest that universities "should do away with things -- things like history and philosophy -- because they're not cost-effective."

Things aren't that bleak these days, and government funding of higher education is now on an upswing. Still, a few of Australia's public universities have initiated something Notre Dame Indiana is quite familiar with -- private fund-raising. Sydney University, Australia's oldest, hired a consultant from the States three years ago to launch its fund-raising efforts. "In terms of services, I think we have become rather too dependent on the government drip," Dame Leonie Kramer, chancellor of Sydney University, told The Daily Telegraph Mirror.

For Notre Dame Australia, which began offering classes in 1992, the state of the "government drip" is not a serious problem. Although the university receives some funding for research projects, the bulk of NDA's income is derived from tuition, endowment income and private support.

NDA's fee structure would make parents of private university students in the United States envious. Half the $5,200 (about $3,950 current U.S. dollars) yearly tuition fee charged to full-time Australian students may be deferred, interest free, until the student graduates. For overseas students, the yearly tuition charge is $9,500 Australian.

It's called The Cosmography of Ptolemy and it's on display in the Notre Dame Australia library. The rare volumes were a gift from the Vatican library -- a friendly, if esoteric, gesture. The Vatican library also sent along a translation . . . in German. The folks at NDA have a sneaking suspicion someone in Rome thought the new university was in Austria.

Established by an Act of Parliament in 1990, NDA is proudly and assertively Catholic. Says Provost Helen Lombard, "This belongs to the church. It's not archdiocesan; it's not a religious order. It was a lay initiative."

A stroll around the administrative offices of NDA makes one result of that initiative obvious: The offices are filled with women. A woman as provost. A woman as registrar. A woman as bursar. A woman as head librarian. A woman as marketing director. Some are sisters; some aren't.

"It's just a matter of talent. I haven't gone out on a mission to feminize the university," says Peter Tannock, "but I did go out to get the best."

Notre Dame Australia's ties to the church are less legal than collegial. "To keep it Catholic depends on the trustees," Lombard, a Benedictine sister, notes. "It shows great trust in lay people. Maybe it's expressing the church of Vatican II."

The archbishop of Perth (the capital of Western Australia) has the right to appoint or nominate a number of NDA trustees. And it is the responsibility of the 12 trustees, as the NDA handbook notes, "to preserve the essential Catholic character of the institution."

NDA also agreed to provide for the training of those who might work in such church agencies as schools or hospitals. "The church of the 21st century in Australia is going to be predominantly a lay church," Tannock says. "The church has significant needs for trained personnel." Those needs are particularly strong in Australia, he notes, because about a fifth of Australian students attend Catholic primary schools.

The university's Catholic identity has proved a mixed blessing. Since Aussies are familiar with Catholic lower level schools, the leap to a Catholic university was not such a large one. "Being a Catholic university gave it an automatic relationship to elementary and secondary schools," says Tannock. "It was an asset in explaining to the community why it is appropriate to do this."

Still, suspicions and questions arose -- including the age-old jibe, "is a Catholic university an oxymoron?" Says Tannock, "Some feared a ghetto culture; narrow, inward-looking. Now, that hasn't happened."

Others questioned whether it wouldn't better for Catholic students to test themselves in a secular environment. "There's validity in that," says Tannock, but he points out that since NDA is a town university, students already conduct their lives in a secular environment.

Aussie doubts about the rights of a private university peaked when NDA was offered about 400 acres of land by the state government of Western Australia. The land grant offer, which might have become an NDA campus, created a major controversy. "The government was heavily criticized for offering a private Catholic higher institution the land," says Tannock.

During the rather public dispute, a new government came into power and the land grant offer was withdrawn. So, for the foreseeable future, NDA will remain a town university, much like Georgetown or Oxford.

Father William Beauchamp, C.S.C., executive vice president of Notre Dame Indiana, has arrived in Fremantle for a Board of Governors' meeting. He's also here to dedicate a statue, a gift from the American Notre Dame to the Australian one.

The dedication takes place on a mild March Sunday afternoon -- except to Beauchamp, it's more like 3 in the morning. Jet-lagged and worn, he jokes about the distance he's traveled: "This is about as far away as you can get from the U.S. Notre Dame." The crowd chuckles, although Beauchamp's remark is more accurate observation than jest.

"It would be hard," affirms vice chancellor Tannock, "to find a more isolated place on earth than Fremantle. Next stop is Africa or Antarctica." And short of going to Antarctica, it would be hard to find a spot more distant from the Midwestern Notre Dame. Even given short airport layovers, travel time runs more than 30 hours.

The odd-seeming tie of two Notre Dames halfway around the world from each other has a rather simple explanation: Father Ted Hesburgh.

The startling idea of a private, Catholic university in Australia was conceived by current vice-chancellor Tannock and Dennis Horgan, an Australian entrepreneur, with the blessing of the archbishop of Perth. Horgan began purchasing empty buildings in Fremantle for possible use by a new university -- or "uni," as they're often called in Aussie-speak. Then, on February 23, 1988, the cruise liner Queen Elizabeth 2 pulled into Fremantle's port. On board were two men very familiar to Notre Dame Indiana: Father Hesburgh, newly-retired as president, and the retired executive vice president, Father Edmund Joyce.

During a helicopter tour the two Holy Cross priests took with Horgan and Tannock, "our nonstop conversation went on concerning the feasibility of building a Catholic university in Western Australia," Hesburgh would later write in Travels with Ted & Ned, his account of the year after his retirement. "I think we came to the cautious conclusion that it was a good thing to do."

Hesburgh also suggested that the university be conceived as a "Pacific Rim university which would take a third of its students from Western Australia, another third from the rest of Australia, and a third from the other Pacific Rim countries." That advice was prophetic; Tannock says NDA now is trying to attain precisely that student-body.

When a planning committee of priests, religious and lay people began visiting universities in several countries in search of ideas, Notre Dame Indiana was on its list. "They liked the way Notre Dame saw itself as a Catholic university," says Link. That regard eventually prompted the committee to chose Notre Dame as its model.

And yes, they were also quite fond of the name.

When editors of the NDA student newspaper, The Ru'bric, began printing stories about a series of theological debates on campus, the subject was worded in positive terms. "Next week's topic," ran one headline: "Abortion should be legalized."

"That's debate wording," says Nicki Nolan, a second year student majoring in philosophy and literature and a member of the newspaper staff. While correct in a debate forum, the wording incensed some members of NDA's administration. Or, as Nolan diplomatically puts it, "there was a huge row."

That experience would have a familiar ring to most graduates of Notre Dame Indiana, where battles over student media are a common occurrence.

Since NDA is a town university, it is spared some of the issues the U.S. Notre Dame must face. With commuter students, says Mark Hales, director of student life, "We find it a much easier task. We don't have to be legalistic, authoritative."

Yet NDA does view pastoral care of students as one of its major roles. "Notre Dame [Australia] says this university is involved in the formation of students," says Hales. "We're creating a whole different experience of university life in Australia."

The school's current size, about 400 undergraduate and 200 postgraduate students, helps. "When we're bigger -- 2,000 by the year 2000," says Hale, "I hope we'll still be able to deal with students in depth."

The feeling of community seems to be working. "It's close-knit. I'm really liking it," says Clare Lyra, a second-year student, as she perches on a plastic chair in the high-ceilinged student union building. "I think I just like the atmosphere -- they know you."

Adds first year student Tim Cronin, "My friends think it's pretty cool."

Hales says his biggest challenge was to get students involved in campus affairs. It obviously has worked. "We would run rings around other universities for the level of participation of students," he says.

Take Nicki Nolan. Along with her newspaper writing, she is co-president of a performing arts group and last semester directed a one-act play; she's also captain of the Net Ball team, a member of the Student Life Committee, and a year ago was head of Campus Ministry. "I kind of knew the attitudes would be different here," she says. "There's a chance to do lots."

Still, some student experiences never change. When Joel Dando tells his "Major British Writers" class that the mid-term exam will be given next week, a student quickly raises her hand. "Can you tell us what we should be studying?" she asks.

It's been called, derisively, The Temple.

"My friends thought this was an odd choice," says first-year student Illi Whitfield of her decision to enroll at NDA. "'Cause it's small, 'cause it's Catholic, they thought it'd be too much like [high] school."

Nicki Nolan's friends knew she'd been admitted to the University of Western Australia. When she chose to attend NDA instead, their reaction was pointed: "Why the hell would you want to go someplace like that?"

"Students are very sensitive to the criticism that they can't get into other places," says Joel Dando, a professor of English at NDA. That aspersion, while not true in Nolan's case, was prompted by the official NDA stance on what are called Tertiary Entrance Exams.

"I have thought for years that the university admissions process in Australia is, in simple terms, stupid," says Tannock. The process involves a student's score on the Tertiary Entrance Exams, a mathematical plotting of high school grades, and a complicated formula that produces a specific number ranking for every student. Tannock believes high school students often model their class choices around subjects covered in the tertiary exams, and he calls it a "distorting instrument." NDA does not require the exams; instead, it considers grades and teachers' recommendations, and it interviews every single candidate before making its admission decisions.

Tannock often states in public his dim view of the process used to rank secondary level students, and he hopes his stance eventually will spark a national debate on the system.

Despite such controversies, students at NDA are beginning to detect more public approval of the small Catholic private university. "By the time we graduate," says Scott Trenorden, a first-year student, "it will be highly thought of. It's becoming more and more known."

For their part, faculty have not had to struggle with NDA's reputation at all; developing a new university is considered a plum job. "My colleagues everywhere are just jealous as hell," says Dando.

If the students won't come to the university, the uni will go to them. This simple but innovative idea sparked the opening of the Kimberley Centre, a "special purpose" campus in Broome, Western Australia, more than 1,000 miles north of Fremantle.

"Our atmosphere is different," says Kimberley Centre director Pat Rhatigan. The Centre's purpose also is different. It offers a range of programs from clerical training for people with low literacy skills to classes leading to a bachelor's degree in education.

The centre runs three programs designed especially for Aborigines, the indigenous people of Australia. For cultural reasons, says Rhatigan, "They can't always be away from their communities for a long time." Centre planners worked around such obstacles. One of its programs requires only 20 days of study on campus each semester; the rest is done in the student's home community. "It's really a multi-media approach," Rhatigan says. With the aid of a tutor, the student completes a computer-assisted learning package using a computer, video camera and television. "That program is working out excellently -- it's quite superb," Rhatigan says proudly.

Just as racism is not unknown in the United States, neither is it absent in Australia. So the Broome campus, situated near several Aboriginal communities, has another, loftier, goal: "We're hoping to be a campus of reconciliation -- to have black and white study together," Rhatigan says.

It's a beautiful Friday in March, the beginning of fall, and the buzz is going around the spacious NDA administration building. "The fleet's in!" at least three people excitedly tell a visitor.

The excitement is understandable. Fremantle, a town of around 30,000, is getting more than 7,000 U.S. military personnel dumped on it. Their R&R is a massive boost for Fremantle's economy as land-starved sailors snatch up jewelry, T-shirts and postcards and keep the servers scurrying in bars and restaurants.

Some of those visitors eventually will make their way to Mouat Street, where the gracefully restored brick buildings of NDA predominate.

"The students have been asked to Sunday services on the fleet ships," says Mark Hales. "The Notre Dame connection is strong."

That connection also, NDA officials readily admit, works to their advantage. "They've given us credibility in the early stage when we needed it," Tannock says of the four high-level administrators from Notre Dame Indiana -- President Father Edward A. Malloy, C.S.C., Provost Timothy O'Meara, Beauchamp and Link -- who serve on NDA's Board of Governors and helped the new university crystallize its vision.

One line has been clearly drawn, however. "Notre Dame U.S. made it absolutely clear that they wouldn't be diverting financial resources to us," says Tannock.

Instead, Notre Dame Indiana offered something almost as helpful: students. Each semester more than 25 undergraduates, including some from Saint Mary's College, head Down Under to become NDA's only residential students. They live in Port Lodge, a former sailors' flophouse with tiny rooms and no air-conditioning, but they quickly slip into the Fremantle ambience -- the beach that's two blocks from the main NDA building, the streets lined with funky outdoor cafes, the anything-goes fashion parade.

This summer, the boat started going both ways. The first group of NDA students is now attending classes at Notre Dame.

A final benefit of the world-spanning connection comes simply from Notre Dame Indiana's high name recognition; Aussies sometimes witness firsthand its power and draw. Marketing director Margaret Haydon fondly remembers the sailor on R&R who showed up at the uni and asked politely if he could visit the common areas and sit in the courtyard for a few hours. "He said just seeing the name made him feel closer to home."