Tom Doyle emerged from a stairwell onto the first floor of Keough Hall and headed toward the front door.
It was 10:30 at night on the eve of the first home football game of the season. Even a rookie rector like Doyle, head of a residence hall barely two weeks old, knew that a lot of night lay ahead of him. With weekend parietals -- the curfew for males and females to be out of each other's dorms -- not until 2 a.m., most rectors don't hit their pillows before 3 on Friday and Saturday nights. Tonight would be no exception.
Doyle, who received a bachelor's degree in 1989 and a master of divinity in 1996 from Notre Dame, had just finished chatting his way through the three upper floors of the men's dorm. Now, wearing a smile he hoped said "I'm sure we can all have a good time and act responsibly," the 29-year-old watched as group after group of perfumed visitors entered the building and signed in at a table facing the front doors. To one side of the table was another set of doors -- to the hall chapel, a subtle reminder of moral obligations not to be forgotten in pursuit of amber brew.
After exchanging a few hellos in the lobby, Doyle continued on to his first-floor apartment, his rounds complete.
Except he doesn't call them rounds.
"I prefer 'courtesy visits.'".
That's the sort of upbeat spin-doctoring one might expect from a former student government president (1988-89) turning priest like Doyle, who expects to take his vows with the Holy Cross order next year. But you get the feeling he's sincere.
The same goes for the 25 other priests, nuns and brothers who constitute Notre Dame's rector corps. They like what they're doing and are convinced it's important, important enough to stay cooped up with hundreds of 18- to 22-year-olds for years -- in some cases decades -- on end.
Notre Dame's hall rectors are the field generals of a student life program built around all-at-once development of mind, body and spirit and endowed with an in loco parentis attitude toward care and control of young adults.
"The Jesuits used to sneer in a friendly sort of way that we're still running a French boarding school," says Father Dan Jenky, CSC, Dillon Hall rector from 1975-82 and now rector of the graduate residences. "Actually, that's true. It's a very close way of living with students. So in the course of a day you're yelling at somebody for a stereo being too loud, you're checking their English paper, you're waking them up to tell them their grandfather just died, you're passing out keys, you're taking them to the hospital, you're telling them to get out of engineering and get into liberal arts. . . . It's that array of ways that you live with them that is unlike anything else I know of."
Like Jenky, who holds bachelor's and master's degrees from Notre Dame, most Notre Dame rectors are members of Catholic religious orders, but that's not a prerequisite for the job. Non-collared William W. Kirk, assistant vice president of student affairs, was a rector while attending Notre Dame Law School.
Many rectors have taught several years in Catholic secondary schools. They usually possess at least a master's degree in theology, divinity, philosophy, counseling, English or some other field relevant to helping students attain higher education within a Catholic environment. Many serve as advisers to campus groups and take classes themselves. Some teach, but the number is much smaller than in years past because the First Year of Studies Program has decided to place more full-time instructors in charge of freshman seminars.
Otherwise, Notre Dame rectors do everything a secular university's resident director might do -- the obvious difference being that they're counted on to minister as well as administer.
For rector priests, that responsibility often involves saying Mass Sunday night in the dorms. Occasionally it means providing a pastoral presence in tough times.
Students returning to Farley Hall in fall 1996 were confronted with the loss of one of their most likable hallmates, Patricia Kwiat, who would have been a senior. She died, along with her older sister, in the July 1996 TWA plane crash in Long Island Sound.
"They were grieving, and it was very difficult for them," Sister Carrine Etheridge, IHM, says of the returning students. Etheridge had traveled to the Kwiats's funeral in New York. When classes resumed, she joined students in planting a memorial tree in front of Farley and the "remembering" celebration of the woman's life. The hall also established a memorial scholarship.
The semester was in full swing in February 1979 when Cavanaugh Hall rector Matthew Miceli, CSC, found himself leading prayers and taking visitors to the hospital to be with hall president Andy Sowder. The senior had returned to campus early from a skiing trip to Michigan with what was initially diagnosed as a cold. It turned out to be meningitis. He slipped into a coma and died a week later.
An earlier rectoring experience Miceli recalls vividly involved a resident who knocked on the door to Cavanaugh three days before the dorms were scheduled to reopen from Christmas break. The priest scolded the student for not knowing the schedule and refused to let him.
"He just listened with his suitcases in hand and then started to cry," Miceli recalls. "I let him in and then went and got a sandwich for him. I found out that when he went home for Christmas he was met by a strange man at the door. His parents had split up. I still get watery eyes because I remember how sad it was."
Now 73 and an emeritus member of the theology faculty, Miceli holds the record for length of service as an ND rector, 30 years. While today's students complain about 2 a.m. parietals (midnight on school nights), he can recall the days of 10 p.m. bed checks, when the rector controlled a master switch to cut off lights in all residents' rooms at 11.
Some students still do think of rectors as little more than overcautious baby sitters. In a September 1996 article in The Observer, the student newspaper, senior Matthew Loughran described an attitude prevalent among upperclassmen when he said he'd decided to move off campus this year "to escape parents that are stricter than my real ones."
Like real parents, though, Notre Dame rectors insist they have only the best interests of students at heart.
"I care for them, I worry about them, I pray for them," says Etheridge, "and I know that other rectors do the same. That's what makes us different from other places."
It's also why, personally and through their staff of resident assistants (RAs) and assistant rectors, rectors watch for warning signs of trouble in residents' lives.
Sister Sue Bruno, OSF, rector of Pasquerilla West, recalls the time her staff discovered evidence suggesting one of the women in their dorm had bulimia. Binge-purge eating sometimes afflicts women at Notre Dame and other universities because of the pressure they feel to look perfect as well as achieve perfection in their studies and other campus activities. Unsure how the woman might react if confronted, Bruno reluctantly called a suspect to her apartment to broach the subject.
"She just broke down and cried and cried and said 'I have wanted to tell someone for so long,'" says Bruno, who referred the woman to counseling that helped her manage the problem.
Bruno has received the opposite reaction, too. Rectors say alcohol is involved in the vast majority of behavioral problems they have to deal with, and when Bruno confronted a student early this year about an obvious overindulgence the night before, the resident vehemently denied she had a problem.
"She said, 'You know are making me really angry.' And I'm like, 'I'm making you angry? I'm telling you what you looked like last night, and if that's making you angry I can understand it. All I can tell you is what I saw and what I heard. I'm not happy with that, and that's why we're having this discussion.'"
Not all interactions between rectors and students involve disorders or tragedies, of course. Farley rector Etheridge recalls the time one of her residents came to her in tears because a drunken male visitor had eaten her goldfish.
Sister Jean Lenz, OSF, assistant vice president of student affairs and one of Notre Dame's first female rectors, headed Farley from 1973 to 1983. She says, "I always told [residents] they could come to me with any good news, too." Which they did -- sharing delights such as a marriage proposal or word of acceptance into graduate school.
Lenz enjoys special fame among rectors for how she handled an unusual situation in the mid-1970s. One spring evening around midnight she received a call from a priest across campus warning that a group of some 400 male students were making their way toward the North Quad. Suspecting mischief afoot, she put down the theology papers she was correcting, went to the hall entrance and opened the door to have a look around.
"Oh, my God, it's sister!" shouted one of students, who, like the rest of the multitude, was naked.
Momentarily speechless, the nun recovered enough composure to assure the streakers, "You are not getting in here like that!" -- at which point someone in the mob suggested they terrorize Lyons Hall instead.
Rectors say the toughest part of their job isn't disciplining students -- which they say takes up no more than 10 percent of their time -- it's "the 24-hour-ness" of the work. "I know that if I'm feeling down and lonely, all I have to do is close my door or lie down to take a nap and someone will be knocking in a minute," quips Father Bill Seetch, CSC, rector of Flanner Hall.
They also have to be able to shift gears quickly.
"It's an emotional roller coaster," says Lenz. "You'll be talking with a student who's very upset because she's just found out her parents are getting a divorce, the door will be open just a crack, and someone will stick her head in and say, 'Hey, sister, do you have any paper plates?'"
It is, says Lenz, like living in a fish bowl: "There's no way you can hide any aspect of yourself." Which can create some startling views.
Jenky recalls an incident his first year as a rector of Dillon Hall, which in the mid-1970s was considered "one of the last really out of control halls" on campus. He threw out 36 students that first year.
Once, in the middle of the night, he heard a crash out in the hallway and ran to investigate. Finding that a water fountain had been yanked out of the wall, he says he used the name of the Savior in a phrasing and at a decibel level not ordinarily heard from the pulpit.
"That was probably the first time any of them had ever heard a priest swear," Jenky says.
He immediately regretted his outburst but has since realized it showed the students something important they might not have suspected before: Priests are human.
Outraged blasphemy aside, rectors say they feel privileged to be able to counsel students. They can feel the spirit of God working through them, telling them what to say.
Echoing the experience of other rectors, Doyle says that after dispensing some insightful advice to a Keough resident earlier this year he later wondered, "Where did that come from?"
To an outside observer, rectoring may appear to be a thankless job -- doubly so when you consider that most of its practitioners have taken a vow of poverty.
But it has its rewards. Alumni returning to campus often look up their old overseer to introduce him or her to spouse and children. Rector priests perform weddings and baptisms for former dormmates. Miceli knows of 13 sons named after him and even one daughter. "Her name is 'Michelle,'" the senior priest says, "but they call her 'Michelly.'"
Perhaps the strongest evidence of rector job satisfaction is how long some choose to remain in the vocation -- or at least remain in the environment. Even though he retired from rectoring in 1990, Miceli lives "in residence" on the staff of Zahm Hall. Fellow Holy Cross priests Edward A. Malloy, Notre Dame's president, and E. William Beauchamp, executive vice president, also continue to live in the dorms. Malloy was an RA in Flanner Hall in 1969. He served as assistant rector, and for a semester acting rector, of Sorin Hall between 1979 and 1982, and he still lives there. Beauchamp, an RA in Grace Hall from 1972 to '74 and assistant rector there the following two years, has resided in Alumni Hall since 1981.
Jenky says that when he served as religious superior for the Holy Cross community for six years in the 1980s, one of his most difficult duties was telling older priests whose health had deteriorated to the point where they needed special care that they had to move out of the dorms.
"To say that they resisted," he says, "is the understatement of the world."