University of Notre Dame’s 18th president, the Rev. Robert A. Dowd, waves to the crowd during his inauguration ceremony at Purcell Pavilion on Friday, Sept. 13, 2024, in South Bend. © Michael Clubb – USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
We devote this bulletin to the inauguration of Rev. Robert A. Dowd, C.S.C., as the 18th president of the University of Notre Dame. The event was distinctly Catholic and also overwhelmingly celebratory. With no hint of any fault lines in the university’s Catholic identity, there was also no hint of Father Dowd’s views on this crucial question. Still, there was much of interest.
The Inaugural events
Here are links to the principal videos and texts:
- The entire convocation and inauguration ceremony video (1.5 hours)
- Highlights of two-day celebration video (2 hours)
- “Get to Know Father Bob” video (6 minutes)
- Representative report of the events (Our Sunday Visitor)
Except for the “Get to Know Father Bob” video – which we urge upon you — the videos are quite long. To get a sense of what went on and an impression of Father Dowd, we suggest reading his address and watching as much of it and of the first listed video as you have time for.
The Inauguration and Father Dowd’s speech
The production values of the inaugural events were very high. Notre Dame knows how to put on a show. And everyone who participated, from Fr. Dowd’s first grade teacher to Father Dowd himself, did well.
It was a time of enthusiastic celebration, not sober contemplation of questions about the school’s Catholic identity, and Father Dowd’s speech reflected that spirit. It was a testimony to Notre Dame’s past achievements and a vision of a future in which Notre Dame will be “the leading Catholic research university in the world.”
Notre Dame is called, Father declared, to “build bridges” in a fractured world and “to push the frontiers of human knowledge,” cultivating “a disciplined sensibility to the poverty, injustice, and oppression that burden the lives of so many.”
One might raise a question here and there, to be sure. Father’s repeated invocation of the “building bridges” imagery, for example, might seem a tad too sweeping. There is, certainly, “Blessed be the peacemakers,” but there is also “Woe to you, you hypocrites!”
But time enough to see how this appealing spirit of generosity plays out amidst the many grave threats to the school’s Catholic identity that Father Dowd will confront.
We now turn to the part of the talk that has been widely publicized – “means blind” and “loan free.”
“Means Blind” and “Loan Free”
Notre Dame, the eighth wealthiest university in the United States and the twelfth richest in the world, has a relatively unenviable record for hosting low-income students.
Pell grant figures are widely regarded as “the best available gauge of how many low-income undergrads there are on a given campus,” and in a report on the percentage of Pell Grant students at the country’s foremost universities, Notre Dame ranked near the bottom at 23d out of 25.
Accordingly, Father Dowd’s announcement of a new “loan free” policy, together with an expanded “means blind” admissions policy, is most welcome.
He said:
I am proud to announce that Notre Dame will go loan-free and need-blind for all undergraduate students, including both domestic and international students. This means, if you are admitted to Notre Dame, no matter how much money your family makes, you will not have to worry about student loans, and no matter where in the world you call home, you will be eligible for financial aid.
This requires some unpacking.
"Loan Free"
Since Father said “If you are admitted … you will not have to worry about student loans,” one might suppose he was referring to federal loans. It is the huge student federal loan debt that gets widespread attention. More than 43 million debtors hold federal student loans, with a collective balance exceeding $1.7 trillion
But, as the University press release makes clear, the new policy refers only to the loan portion of financial aid provided by the university.
Student loans will not be a component of the financial aid offer for full-time first-year and transfer undergraduate students entering fall 2025; instead, that need will be met with gift aid. While Notre Dame will not include loans in financial aid packages, families may still elect to take out federal student or private loans.
At Notre Dame, the most recent data show the university granted need-based financial aid to 53% of students (out of 73% applying). That aid averaged $60,694 per student, and of that amount $3,426 was in the form of loans.
It is that loan component of university-provided assistance that will in the future be in form of grants.
While Notre Dame considers it meets 100% of students’ financial needs, many students and their families borrowed substantial amounts from the federal government and private sources – 34% of students from the government and 20% from private sources.
The median per student federal debt was $19,000 and the average private debt was $26,616. These types of loans will be unaffected by the new policy
Still, this is a significant step that should lift Notre Dame from 77th place among national universities for the lowest student debt on graduation – below, e.g., Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Northwestern, Stanford, Brown, Duke, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Vanderbilt, Chicago, Emory, and Johns Hopkins.
And we hope this measure also presages a brake on tuition to benefit the 40% of students who pay the full extraordinarily high sticker price.
“Need Blind”
Notre Dame and many other schools have long been “need-blind” on admissions for domestic students – that is, students are admitted irrespective of ability to pay.
But only eight have extended that policy to foreign students, and now Notre Dame joins that group.
Father Dowd explained,
We want an undergraduate student body that reflects the rich diversity of the Catholic community in and beyond the United States, which requires a Notre Dame education be both accessible and affordable.
Hosting foreign students is considered inherently desirable in higher education and a source of revenue for many. When the proportion of foreign students is high, concerns about the effects on a school and displaced United States students mount. But with only 7% international students compared with much higher numbers at most major universities, Father Dowd’s move seems unexceptionable.
One does hope, though, that those admitted will be largely Catholics who will return to their native countries as leaders in Church and state.
Post-Inaugural Oath of Fidelity
In an interesting National Catholic Register article, senior editor Jonathan Liedl (N.D. ’11) reported that Father Dowd would take the Church-prescribed Profession of Faith and Oath of Loyalty before Bishop Kevin C. Rhoades sometime after the inauguration.
Liedl reported that other Catholic university presidents, including those of Catholic University of America and Holy Cross College, had taken the Oath at their inaugurations. It appears those at major universities had also done so privately or not at all.
Why not at Father Dowd’s inauguration? No one would say. We think it obvious. It would appear to link Notre Dame too closely to the Church to suit many in governance and influence at the university.
Still, it is good to know Father Dowd is taking the Oath. Thank you, Mr. Liedl.
Inaugural Panel
Unhappily, there was one blemish to the program.
In a thoroughly researched article, The Irish Rover disclosed that one of the participants in an Inaugural panel, Sanda Ojiambo, was a former Planned Parenthood executive.
Conclusion
A brisk start for Father Dowd. Now for the hurdles. They will be formidable, and so we close with what Father Bill Miscamble, C.S.C. , said about Father Dowd at our breakfast meeting in June:
We should give thanks that such a decent and compassionate priest will be our leader at Notre Dame. We know he will come under multiple pressures. May the Holy Spirit inspire his leadership.
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Oremus
Let no one deceive himself. If any one among you thinks that he is wise in this age, let him become a fool that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is folly with God. (1 Cor 3:18-19)
O God our Father, Eternal Wisdom and Love, You have created us in Your own image and likeness, and called us to live in humble obedience to You and according to the order which You have established to govern the universe. You sent Your Son, Wisdom Incarnate, to save us from sin and to reconcile us to You and to one another. He established the Church to be a saving witness of Wisdom and Love, Goodness and Truth to a rebellious world. We implore You to dispel the darkness that surrounds us. May all who have rejected the truths of creation, seeking to replace Your design for the human race with one of their own, be awakened to the destructive folly which passes for wisdom in this age. Enlighten us all by the Truth which sets us free and grant that we may courageously embrace the scorn and contempt of the wise of the world so that we may joyfully share in the Wisdom of God. Through the intercession of Notre Dame, our Mother, we make our prayer in the Name of Jesus, Your Son, Who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, forever and ever. Amen.
The above prayer is by Sycamore Trustee Father John Raphael (’89). To join us in regular prayer projects such as our Novena for Catholic Education and our Meditation on the 12-Days of Christmas, please join our Apostolate.
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One Response
Fr. Dowd is a decent and compassionate man; no one who has known him can doubt that.
Sadly, it is exactly by means of the weaponization and perversion of “compassion” and “decency” that the utopian-leftist elements at Notre Dame, and in our post-Christian world at large, have achieved such a drastic shift away from a truly Catholic culture, towards the ongoing embrace of what JPII aptly called the culture of death. As G.K. Chesterton once argued, the problem with the modern world is not its vices but its virtues, which have been detached from their proper location within the larger holistic context of Christianity, and have thus been allowed to run amok and cause all sorts of trouble.
Or, as Flannery O’Connor said: “When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.” It is thus unsurprising that one of the the promoted inauguration speakers seems to believe that the compassionate goal of advocating for the poor in Africa involves quite a bit of evacuating the poor of Africa, violently, from their mothers’ wombs.
Let’s indeed pray, then, that Fr. Dowd’s gentle and compassionate nature — and that of the University itself — can return to finding its true fulfillment not according to the priorities of the world at large, or of the corrupt academy, or of tired, bourgeois liberalism, but rather in the radical call to holiness of the Gospel, and in close union with Christ.