In September, the University of Notre Dame inaugurated a new president, Rev. Robert A. (“Bob”) Dowd, C.S.C. Father Dowd succeeds Rev. John I. Jenkins, C.S.C., whose successful 19-year run was crowned, in 2023, with Notre Dame’s admission to the American Association of Universities, a consortium of the nation’s leading public and private research universities. The transition to a new administration allows Notre Dame to revisit core questions of identity and purpose, including Catholic higher education’s role in a rapidly secularizing culture. Jenkins pursued many of the same goals as his secular peers, including endowment growth, ambitious campus building projects, and a prominent place in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. It remains to be seen whether the appointment of Dowd, a dark-horse candidate, signals the university’s intention to place greater emphasis on its Catholic mission.
Located in South Bend, Indiana, far from major media centers, Notre Dame has quietly but steadily ascended to the elite ranks of American higher education. Founded in 1842 by members of the Congregation of Holy Cross, a relatively small order, the university was for decades a mostly provincial institution that educated the sons of Catholic immigrants (women were not regularly admitted until 1972) to find a place in the middle class and occasionally to enter the priesthood. Notre Dame was known principally as a football school, the home of a legendary coach, Knute Rockne, and of one of his great players, George Gipp, both immortalized in the 1940 film, Knute Rockne, All American, starring Pat O’Brien and Ronald Reagan. Not until Rev. Theodore M. Hesburgh’s 1952 appointment as president did Notre Dame begin to build a national reputation, as the university sought greater independence from the institutional Catholic Church in the name of academic freedom.
Despite Hesburgh’s secularizing move, the spirit and symbols of Catholic life continue to dominate Notre Dame’s campus. Unlike many Catholic universities, such as Georgetown and Fordham, Notre Dame has never had a lay president. More than four in five of its undergraduates identify as Catholic, versus less than half of Georgetown undergraduates. Every residence hall has a chapel, and Sunday Mass remains well-attended, even as students’ Saturday night activities grow more irreverent with each passing year. (When I attended in the 1980s, there was no real “hookup culture,” and even couples in longer relationships sometimes maintained a posture of official denial as to whether they were having sex.) The student body remains politically conservative and mostly commercial in its ambitions; Notre Dame graduates earn high starting salaries, even relative to graduates of peer institutions. Students nevertheless consider service important, even as few now take religious vows.
Perhaps it is inevitable that Notre Dame will follow the path of the great Protestant church schools, such as Harvard, Yale, and the University of Chicago, and gradually embrace secularism. Climbing the ladder sometimes means leaving old friends behind: Notre Dame’s endowment stands at $20 billion, and for incoming freshmen, tuition, room and board, and fees now approach $100,000 per year. According to a 2017 New York Times report, Notre Dame, like Yale, now enrolls more students from families in the top 1 percent of U.S. annual household income than from those in the bottom 60 percent.
While secularization may come slower at Notre Dame, which has always insisted on its unique character, the culture wars have increasingly encroached on campus life. The 2002 presentation of The Vagina Monologues, a play containing graphic discussion of lesbian sex, brought angry letters from alumni. So did the university’s 2016 presentation of its Laetare Medal to then-vice president Joe Biden, a Catholic who supports abortion rights. More recently, Notre Dame permitted a graduate student to perform a drag show on campus, a decision unpopular even with many current undergraduates. For decades, the university has sought to have it both ways: to be in the world, but not (too much) of the world. That posture seems increasingly untenable amid the hardening orthodoxies of U.S. higher education.
The university’s mission statement illustrates these internal tensions. In one paragraph, Notre Dame insists that, as a Catholic university, it “draws its basic inspiration from Jesus Christ as the source of wisdom and from the conviction that in him all things can be brought to their completion”; two paragraphs later, it recites a more familiar secular creed, pledging to uphold the “academic freedom that makes open discussion and inquiry possible.” In this and other public statements, Notre Dame has tended to ignore the tension between its Catholic mission and the culture of American higher education, which has become increasingly hostile to religious faith.
There is now something defensive in Notre Dame’s stance toward the outside world, an eagerness to please that hides a vestigial insecurity. The other side of that insecurity is an arrogance that is the natural outgrowth of believing that you’re right on all the important questions—against the tenor of the age. When Notre Dame refers to itself as “the leading Catholic research university,” we must be meant to hear a special emphasis on “Catholic,” especially given that Georgetown is higher ranked in most dimensions and closer to institutional power owing to its history and Washington, D.C. location.
Notre Dame’s experience with college sports is instructive here. Football has always been central to Notre Dame’s identity and was key to its rise. In 2015, however, as Division I college sports drifted toward greater commercialism, Father Jenkins gave an interview to the New York Times in which he appeared to draw a line in the sand. Notre Dame, he told the Times, would not participate in a system in which athletes bargained collectively for a share of athletic department revenue. Lately Notre Dame has appeared increasingly Jesuitical in its efforts to keep to its principles while doing what its alumni desperately want it to do—keep playing big-time football. In 2023 Senate testimony, then-athletic director Jack Swarbrick expressed his support for collective bargaining, without acknowledging any discontinuity in Notre Dame’s position.
A university is not Catholic whose faculty are not Catholic. Notre Dame acknowledges this in its mission statement, which recites that “The Catholic identity of the University depends upon, and is nurtured by, the continuing presence of a predominant number of Catholic intellectuals.” Catholic faculty representation, however, has been declining at the university for decades. When Notre Dame last released data on the subject in 2012, the number stood at just barely above 50 percent. Moreover, not all of those counted as Catholic are observant.
While Notre Dame makes significant efforts to recruit Catholic faculty, the pool of Catholic Ph.D.s is shallow, and the university’s academic departments are increasingly competitive. Should Notre Dame prefer Catholic candidates when hiring for the physics department or the College of Engineering, or should it solely focus on Catholic hiring in the humanities, where a professor’s values may be more immediately relevant to the subject matter? These are difficult choices. I cannot defend with any conviction the notion that the school should prefer mediocre Catholic scholars to distinguished agnostics. And any hiring mandate imposed by Fr. Dowd would surely be met with resistance by the faculty and possibly by the loss of valued senior members.
I struggle to articulate what principles to follow were I in Fr. Dowd’s chair. I’m inclined to say that I would recognize the LGBTQ student organization on campus but probably wouldn’t have permitted the drag show; that I would have invited President Obama to speak but wouldn’t have given the Laetare Medal to then-Vice President Biden. Such ad hockery obviously won’t do when you’re leading a large institution. People need to know what you stand for. And if you don’t have firm principles, the undertow of the broader culture will always drag you toward permissiveness.
The implicit pact of modern secular culture seems to be that we will not ask ourselves and each other questions about ultimate value. In their place, we substitute professional norms, status games, psychotherapy, and a vast and tepid sea of tolerance. Of course, a university should be in the business of asking these questions, or it is merely a trade school. Religion is not the only way of doing so; it is not necessarily even the best one. But Notre Dame has remained distinctive by asking and providing definitive answers to these fundamental questions. Father Dowd now faces the task of reconciling his many constituencies to the fact that those convictions—if Notre Dame continues to uphold them—may always keep the university slightly outside of the mainstream.
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