Sheil Catholic Center

When the Sheil Catholic Center celebrated its Golden Jubilee in 1989, a group of talented and dedicated associates researched and wrote a history of the first 50 years. We are reprinting that history here.

The Vietnam War and Its Impact

Just as Father Krump, assisted by Father Mueller, assumed his new duties at Sheil the anti-Vietnam War movement was reaching its climax, and with the debacle at Kent State, even the generally conservative Northwestern campus found itself galvanized into actions of protest. In the Spring of 1970 the campus went "on strike." Cordons of students lined Sheridan Road in a symbolic protest for peace, Deering Meadow became the site for mass student rallies and the university faculty debated in long meetings about the appropriate actions of solidarity. Swamped in the general turmoil was the scheduled final presentation of an organizational self-study for Sheil Center that had been worked out over the year under the direction of students like Mike Abbene and Durward Hofler.

That self-study was prompted by a problem that perhaps many never be fully solved: How to find an efficient and appropriate structure of leadership and management in a multi-functional and increasingly diversified community.

In its earlier history Sheil was a student organization run by duly elected officers with special responsibilities for academic, religious, and social activities. But as with all student clubs, there were cycles of good times and bad, of efficient and less-than-efficient leadership. Furthermore, the climate of student life and attitudes at the close the turbulent '60s were hardly conducive to structures of authority, and, in any case, the Sheil community was growing beyond the students themselves.

The pattern that eventually emerged was a combination of recruitment and volunteerism. A student or a chaplain with an idea or plan would recruit others to help bring it to fruition and then seek out those able to continue the work into the following year. Under such a flexible system, some groups or programs could quickly vanish, perhaps deservedly so, while others could continue to flourish for as long as long as the need for them was manifest.

There was a brief attempt in the mid-'70s to maintain four standing committees similar to those of the old Sheil Club committees-Spiritual Life, Academic Programs, Social Activities, Social Action-but the venture soon petered out.

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