Free The Green Revolution by Ralph McInerny Page A

campaign he was now leading against the Notre Dame football program would spell the ultimate quietus of his dreamed-of center. Lipschutz had thought through the matter carefully, listening to all his arguments and finding them good. What he would engineer was an inescapable either/or. Was the university serious about becoming a leading research university? If so, how did this comport with the madness of exploiting young men on the football field, young men who could scarcely be called students in any serious sense, and at who knew what cost of revenue?
    â€œHorst,” FitzJames said. “Football brings in millions.”
    â€œThat is the story.”
    â€œYou don’t believe it?”
    â€œA better question is, where does such money go? Into the professionalization of all the other sports in which the university engages.”
    â€œThat is their story,” Wessel agreed.
    â€œSo what is Notre Dame to be? A farm team of the professional football leagues or an honest-to-God university?”
    The steering committee liked it. The next order of business concerned the means of publicizing their demand.
    â€œThe blimp that flies over the stadium during football games runs ads on its sides.”
    â€œHardly appropriate.”
    â€œA vigil in front of the Main Building?”
    â€œOr at the athletic department.”
    â€œThe decision will not be theirs,” Lipschutz decided. “Let us consider the Main Building.”
    It was one of Lipschutz’s guilty secrets that he loved the movie Patton . He owned a copy, and he had watched it more times than he would want his friends, or enemies, to know. A scene from the movie sprang before his eyes. Patton in Palermo, in battle helmet and jodhpurs, silver pistols on his belt, boots gleaming, mounts a great stairway at the top of which the archbishop awaits him. A steely-eyed glance at the prelate and then, genuflecting, George Patton kisses the episcopal ring. The onlookers go wild with ecstacy. What a coup! Was it not possible that, analogously, after mustering at the foot of the stairway leading up to the entrance of the Main Building, the president and his minions, moved by the placards, would appear at the top of the stairs? Horst Lipschutz with a solemn expression mounts the stairs, gives the president a Patton look, and then presents him with the cogent and eloquent petition. No genuflecting or kissing of rings, of course. No need for that. What was the president if not primus inter pares —if indeed that?
    Lipschutz liked it. It only remained to pick an appropriate day—and to go over and over the petition on which Lipschutz had been working since it first occurred to him that the present dismal football season represented a golden opportunity to strike while the administration, whose fingerprints were all over the appointment of this outrageously overpaid coach, was reeling and vulnerable.

13
    After the Boston College game, Neil Genoux had accompanied the presidential party to the fourteenth floor of the library for what was to have been a celebration of a reversal of the abysmal fortunes of the football season. But Notre Dame had lost yet again. Ignominiously. Genoux’s reminder that Boston College had been beating Notre Dame regularly in recent years was not well received. Notre Dame had lost a game that, in the opinion of those gathered in the aerie on top of the library, with its magnificent views of less than magnificent things to view, Notre Dame should have won.
    â€œHe should have switched quarterbacks,” opined W. T. Gravitas, a member of the board.
    The presidential response to this was a shy grin and a dipping of the head. Genoux wondered what the presidential response to Armageddon would be.
    â€œIs Roger Knight here?” Genoux was asked by Mimi O’Toole. the wiry wife of an obese husband who was on the board for purely monetary reasons.
    â€œDo you know him?”
    â€œKnow him! I wish I did. You