Fathers Hesburgh, Joyce, Malloy and Poorman will quit trying to make Notre Dame a "great research university" while maintaining Notre Dame's tradition of strong undergraduate teaching and learning when they hear me say it, but the quality of undergraduate education at Notre Dame has improved tremendously since the "great leap forward" a quarter of century or so ago.

Of course Professor Charles Rice and I disagree about almost everything, so what else is new?

This is one of those debates where what's old counts for something. Unlike Professor Rice, I'm a graduate of this University (science pre-med, 1953). I know what the University was like in the "good old days." I came back and joined the philosophy faculty in 1959 and have spent the intervening years in inter-disciplinary research and teaching requiring me to maintain contact with faculty and programs in many departments in the humanities and the sciences. Some very perceptive children (six in all) of mine were in continuous attendance at the University between 1974 and 1992. Finally, unlike Professor Rice, I actually teach Notre Dame undergraduates.

Every bit of information at my disposal indicates that the quality of learning and teaching in all departments in Arts and Letters and Science, the two colleges my children and I know best, has been steadily improving since 1977 and is currently at an all-time high.

We're not perfect yet, but Professor Rice is pointing in the wrong direction. For starters, we need academic administrators who can think outside the "business model" box, and we need Residence Life administrators whose understanding of gender relations has outgrown the "same-sex play group" style of small children.

We've got a long way to go, but our problem is not that our dreams are too big.

Edward Manier

philosophy professor

South Bend

March 20

• Effects of war felt in an Islamic republic
  
• Quality of teaching at an all-time high
  
• A defense of the strike against Iraq
  
• This is peace?