The University of Notre Dame offers two honors that garner broad attention among Catholics and beyond. There is the annual honorary doctorate and address at commencement, and the Laetare Medal, which Notre Dame describes as the “most prestigious award given to American Catholics.” 

The 2025 medal recipient was announced on March 30, Laetare Sunday, the fourth Sunday of Lent. Kerry Alys Robinson, president of Catholic Charities USA, will receive the medal at the annual May commencement ceremonies. The medal honors a Robinson as an individual, but also expresses support for Catholic Charities, which has had to cut programs and lay off workers due to major budget cuts by the Trump administration. 

The 2025 commencement speaker was announced March 18. It will be Notre Dame alumnus Admiral Christopher Grady, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is the current acting chairman after President Donald Trump recently fired Gen. CQ Brown. The decision to honor an alumnus and the highest-ranking military officer neatly sidesteps the awkwardness of having either President Trump or Vice President JD Vance honored at commencement. 

Some have mistakenly considered that to be a break with the tradition of presidents speaking at commencement. It is not. Since the first presidential speaker at spring commencement in 1960, seven of the 12 presidents in office have not been invited to Notre Dame’s commencement. Only five have. The tradition is not what many people think it is.

 

Presidents at Notre Dame

More presidents have been honored at Notre Dame commencements than any other institution aside from the military academies. FDR, JFK, Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, both George Bushes and Barack Obama have all been awarded honorary doctorates. Yet not all in the same way.

JFK was honored at commencement in 1950, 10 years before he was elected president. FDR and Ford were given honorary degrees at special ceremonies, not the annual spring commencement. Eisenhower and Bush the Elder came in the last year of their presidencies, 1960 and 1992 respectively, not in the months following their first inauguration. 

The first president to attend the principal commencement was Dwight Eisenhower in 1960. Holy Cross Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame from 1952 to 1987, was having a hard time getting a commencement speaker — several he had invited were unable to come. His secretary suggested trying President Eisenhower, albeit relatively late. To Notre Dame’s surprise, Eisenhower accepted. So delighted was the supreme allied commander on D-Day that he interrupted the 45th reunion of his class at the U.S. Military Academy to travel to South Bend.

Even more remarkable, that first presidential commencement included an honorary degree for Cardinal Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope St. Paul VI. A retiring president and future pope were Notre Dame’s campus together. 

 

The Carter Commencement

The Eisenhower visit did not mark the start of anything. President Ford was given an honorary degree at a special St. Patrick’s Day convocation in 1975. It was the next president who really began the Notre Dame presidential commencement tradition.

President Carter was invited in May 1977, soon after his inauguration. He delivered a significant and substantive address, setting out the foreign policy of his administration. Carter argued that it was time for America to move past “its inordinate fear of communism,” as the Soviet Union was in decline, and refocus its priorities on the promotion of human rights.

That Carter chose Notre Dame for such an important address was due to two factors. First, his personal admiration for Father Hesburgh, appreciated by the former Georgia governor as a great champion of civil rights. Second, the deeply religious Carter wanted to restore the prominence of moral values to U.S. foreign policy. Thus, he chose the most famous religious university in America to do so.

 

The Reagan Return

What Carter began President Reagan elevated. With Carter having made Notre Dame the site of an agenda-setting address, Reagan was offered the same opportunity — even more fitting given that the former actor had played George Gipp in the Notre Dame football film Knute Rockne All-American. 

The drama heightened when Reagan was shot in March 1981. He kept his appointment at Notre Dame in May, his first trip outside of Washington after the assassination attempt. There he delivered the first of his key presidential speeches marshalling the necessary forces to win the Cold War. 

While his speech at the Brandenburg Gate in 1987 — Tear down this wall! — is best remembered, it was at Notre Dame in 1981 that Reagan first declared that communism was unacceptable as a moral force and would soon be despatched from history: 

“The West will not contain communism, it will transcend communism. We’ll dismiss it as a sad, bizarre chapter in human history whose last pages are even now being written.”

After Reagan, President George H. W. Bush did not come in 1989, the year of his inauguration. He could not have possibly matched Reagan, and Bush needed to get out from Reagan’s shadow. He did come when running for re-election in 1992. In that election year, Notre Dame attempted bipartisanship by awarding the Laetare Medal to Democratic Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York. 

The decision to honor Moynihan generated significant criticism due to his consistent voting record in favor of abortion rights. That criticism led to President Bill Clinton not being invited to commencement during his two terms.

The Carter-Reagan tradition was revived for President George W. Bush, who was honored in May 2001.

 

The Obama Controversy

Having decided to invite Bush at the outset of his presidency, Notre Dame felt obliged to invite President Barack Obama. Father Hesburgh, though retired, was still a presence on campus, a hero of the civil rights movement and former chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission. That the first Black president would not be invited was unthinkable. 

The subsequent controversy was white-hot, with dozens of American bishops decrying Notre Dame’s decision to honor Obama given his abortion agenda. Professor Mary Ann Glendon of Harvard, recipient that year of the Laetare Medal, declined the award and did not appear at commencement with her former student, the current president. 

Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, then president of Notre Dame, went ahead with the commencement but regretted the “political circus” it caused. He did not wish to have that again. And thus, Obama was the last president to address commencement. 

Toward the end of Obama’s second term in 2016, Father Jenkins decided to honor with the Laetare Medal the two Catholics who were seated behind Pope Francis when he addressed Congress in 2015, Vice President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and Speaker of the House John Boehner, a Republican. It was another attempt at bipartisanship. 

It also meant that when Biden was inaugurated in 2021, there was a face-saving way out of repeating the Obama controversy. Biden had already been honored at commencement 2016, so a return could be seen as superfluous. 

For public presentation, Notre Dame invited Biden but he declined, citing a scheduling conflict — always an available excuse for a president. Notre Dame generally does not speak about what invitations are or are not issued. It declined to do so this year. So it was clear that the Biden invitation-and-decline was arranged artfully ahead of time with the White House.

 

The Trump Difference

Honorary degrees are not hard to get for prominent people; Father Hesburgh himself held the world record, having received more than 150 of them. Celebrities collect them like stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Just last year, Harvard gave an honorary doctorate to Tom Hanks and NYU to Taylor Swift. 

Despite his long record of celebrity in multiple fields, Trump has another kind of honorary degree world record. He has been stripped of more honorary degrees than he retains — an amazing distinction. 

Trump has been granted five honorary degrees, from Lehigh University (1988), Wagner College (2004), Robert Gordon University (2010) and two from Liberty University (2012 and 2017). It was at Wagner that Trump gave the graduates what he found to be helpful advice: “Always have a prenuptial agreement.”

Robert Gordon stripped Trump of his degree in 2015, after his call for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Lehigh and Wagner followed suit in 2021 after the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Liberty, the university founded by Jerry Falwell, alone has not rescinded its two honorary degrees. The second, awarded in May 2017, was a sort of a consolation prize given the same month that Notre Dame did not invite Trump.

Notre Dame was never going to grant Trump an honorary degree for the same reason that no other prestigious university in the world ever has; he is ill-suited to the occasion. Much later, Father Jenkins said that Trump did not meet “a certain bar in terms of just moral decency.”

 

The Vice Presidential Solution

In 2017, Notre Dame invited Vice President Mike Pence to address commencement rather than Trump. Given Pence’s devout Christian faith — he converted from Catholicism to evangelical Protestantism — and that he was the former governor of Indiana, it was a suitable alternative. It was the first and only time the vice-presidential option was used.

So why not use it again this year with Vice President JD Vance, a convert to Catholicism in 2019?

It would not be a surprise if Notre Dame were to invite Vance in future years; he is eager to engage questions of faith in public life and has made arguments rooted in his faith for the Trump administration’s policies. 

The timing this year, though, would be awkward, even without Robinson of Catholic Charities receiving the Laetare Medal. 

Vance falsely accused the Catholic bishops of making money from refugee resettlement, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops is currently suing the administration for refusing to honor contracts for services already delivered. The Trump administration then decided to end its decades-long partnership with the USCCB on refugees. 

If Vance were to be invited, it would be better to wait for a less conflictual time.

Also delicate is Vance’s hostility to Ukraine, about which he said in 2022, “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” That same year, Notre Dame highlighted its solidarity with Ukraine by inviting Archbishop Borys Gudziak, the leading Ukrainian Catholic bishop in the United States, to be its commencement speaker. Notre Dame cares about Ukraine. It is too soon to host Vance after the vice president shouted at President Volodomyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office.

The tradition of presidents at Notre Dame is more complex than often presented. This year Notre Dame handled it well. No Trump, no Vance, but their top soldier and an alumnus to boot.

It may well be that the high-water mark of Carter and Reagan in 1977 and 1981 should have been a grand finale rather than part of an ongoing series.