Campus Life

Paul Fenlon on the steps of his beloved home, Sorin Hall

Of all the bachelor dons Paul Fenlon was the best-known, not merely because he lived his role the longest and the most fully. As Father Edmund Joyce said in his funeral eulogy of him, Fenlon had a gift for friendship, and on the campus he lived among his friends: priests, faculty, students. He acquired them easily and kept them firmly. His teaching was an extension of his Sorin life, the only life he ever wanted. He professed to hate the noise and misrule of the hall, and so he did when they disturbed his habits, the most adamantly regular I ever observed. But he was desolate without the hall's life and verve,
reluctant to spend a single night in Sorin when it was empty of students.

Fenlon had style of his own making, as fresh and as inviting as a celery stalk. This is what he passed along to his students: a sense of style, a distaste for vulgarity, a love of elegance without show or snobbery. That ought to be the first aim of liberal education, and those who have it in ways that students can understand and respond to, as Paul Fenlon did, ought to be more cherished in the educational scheme
than they are. Like the bachelor dons, that sensibility is going out of our culture, drowned in rock.

Fenlon dispensed his style in Sorin rooms almost perfectly described in a piece on the bachelor dons in the 1907 "Dome," the University's yearbook.

His snug little chamber is crammed in all nooks, With worthless old knicknacks and silly old books, And foolish old odds and foolish old ends, Cracked bargains from brokers, cheap keepsakes from friends.
Old armor, prints, pictures, pipes, china (all cracked.) 
Old rickety tables and chairs broken-backed, 
A two-penny treasury, wondrous to see; 
What matter? 'Tis pleasant to you, friend, and me.

Drop the armor and the pipes (but not the cracked ashtrays)and you have Fenlon's Sorin rooms, set down a quarter of a century before he came to Notre Dame. The tradition of the bachelor dons was waiting for him; he wore it well, and stayed content when his friends Shuster and Frederick shone in larger worlds. The tradition has died with Fenlon, not, I think, to return soon.  But for Fenlon it would have died sooner at Notre Dame.

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