Fighting Irish

[david johnson]

Since some of our members are discussing the Cleveland Indians mascot, here is a similar topic - an ESPN personality has deemed the Notre Dame mascot as being non-pc and calls for it to go. Mascots do not bother me.

[jbuck919]

When I was teaching full time in Maryland I had a terrible time getting my best students to consider the best colleges. Often it was a problem with their families who assumed that they would be bankrupt, when in fact the very best schools still offer meaningful scholarships to whomever they accept in the first place.

An exception, but one that tests the rule (the real meaning of "exceptio probat regulum") was a brilliant boy who wanted with all his heart to go to Notre Dame (the big one, I mean, as there are several colleges with that name). Of course I wrote him a super recommendation, edited his college essay, and so forth, and of course he got in. Then he went on to law school there and returned to Baltimore where he practices labor law. Nothing succeeds in goodness like being good in the first place, and I mean that also in the moral sense. Still, his reasons for wanting Notre Dame were all wrong. His non-college-educated father who had a menial job at the postal service decided one day that he wanted to root for a college team and make it a matter of father-son love, so he just up and picked the obvious choice, the most famous American football team from a Catholic university. It was rooting for the Fighting Irish that gave this boy his great American dream in life. Who am I to gainsay that?