SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The University of Notre Dame is facing a fresh round of criticism after the institute’s chief academic officer told faculty that hiring women and minorities is “equally important” to its mission as is hiring Catholics.

John McGreevy, Notre Dame’s provost, shared the hiring priorities at the start of the spring semester in a Jan. 17 faculty-wide email, which has since been obtained by the Register.

After noting the importance of hiring Catholics and “other faculty deeply committed to our mission,” McGreevy wrote that “a second overlapping and equally important goal is to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities on our faculty so that we become the diverse and inclusive intellectual community our mission urges us to be.”

 

McGreevy’s equation of the importance of Catholic and diversity hiring has received criticism both on and off the South Bend, Indiana, campus. Detractors have described it as the latest indication that the prestigious university is overly influenced by secular ideologies and is willing to dilute its Catholic identity for the sake of its peer institutions’ esteem. 

Others, however, have defended the provost’s directive, describing it as consistent with Notre Dame administrators’ desire to better reflect the demographic makeup of the universal Church and to redress injustices committed along racial and sexual lines. 

The debate about priorities isn’t merely academic, however, as the provost’s stated vision is slated to guide Notre Dame’s academic hiring practices in the near future.

In his email, McGreevy wrote that his office will issue a new hiring guide “to support academic units in their pursuit of these goals,” which will go into effect on July 1.

“[The guide] will include strategies and best practices to build broad applicant pools, evaluate candidates equitably, and ensure that faculty candidates who visit Notre Dame can imagine themselves as thriving future members of our academic community,” he said.

The Register could not independently verify that the guide was sent out to heads of Notre Dame’s academic units by the end of January, as McGreevy said it would in the Jan. 17 faculty-wide communication. 

McGreevy’s email came out just days before the Trump administration announced measures to curtail so-called DEI practices on college campuses. It is unclear how the president’s Jan. 21 executive order, which includes cutting off federal funding to universities that promote such frameworks, will impact Notre Dame’s hiring practices.

Notre Dame administrators did not respond before deadline to a request for comment.

 

 

Notre Dame and DEI

News of the provost’s email was first publicized in a Feb. 17 First Things article by Scott Yenor, who described McGreevy’s directive as a “stunning announcement” that has nonetheless been “years in the making.” 

“Few universities are as trusted or admired by Christian believers as Notre Dame,” wrote Yenor, a Boise State University political scientist and Washington fellow of The Claremont Institute’s Center for the American Way of Life. “But Notre Dame has also built a DEI apparatus that threatens its Catholic mission.” 

“DEI” refers to “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” a set of practices that have been implemented in workplaces, government agencies and university campuses in recent years to correct perceived systemic disadvantages faced by minority groups.

DEI has been controversial within U.S. Catholic circles, as it has been in the country at large. Some prominent Catholics, like Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, have criticized the approach for presenting values like “diversity” as absolutes, supplanting true absolutes like “love” in the process. Others, like the president of Regis High School in New York City, have called for pursuing a Catholic alternative to DEI rooted in “belonging, dignity and justice.”

Yenor, who has also just published a 30-page examination of DEI practices at Notre Dame, described the university’s related policies as no different than its elite academic peers, but “wrapped up in Catholic social justice language.”

According to Yenor, a Lutheran, the university’s DEI-related activities have included the creation of an Office of Institutional Transformation in 2022 and the establishment within it of the Center for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in 2023. He estimates that DEI-related salaries cost the university $6.5 million, while the university put on 167 related events during 2024. 

The university has previously defended its promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion as consistent with its Catholic mission. 

Holy Cross Father John Jenkins, then the university’s president, described the DEI center’s opening as “a next step for Notre Dame to be fully the kind of community we aspire to be … the best version of ourselves.”

The university’s new strategic framework, which aims to make Notre Dame the preeminent global Catholic research university by 2033, also spoke positively of the connection between DEI and Catholicism.

“Becoming more diverse and strengthening the University’s Catholic mission is a single project, not two parallel tasks,” states the framework, which has been criticized by Notre Dame historian and Holy Cross Father Wilson (Bill) Miscamble for lacking a distinctively Catholic vision.

The Catholic university’s expansion of DEI initiatives in the past two years came at time when nearly 50 other American institutions of higher learning closed their DEI-related offices. Some on campus have wondered if the DEI push at Notre Dame might be over, with President Donald Trump in office.

According to one student leader, Notre Dame’s administration has long promoted “woke” ideologies, and McGreevy’s hiring priorities was simply an instance of “saying the quiet part out loud.” 

“By prioritizing race and gender at a level ‘equally important’ to Catholicism, this policy of DEI hiring sacrifices the university’s character for the sake of the meaningless buzzwords ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion,’” said Michael Canady, the editor-in-chief of The Irish Rover, an independent Catholic student newspaper. “It’s even more scandalous that the administration cloaks its woke initiatives with a veneer of Catholic social doctrine when, in reality, DEI directly contradicts Church teaching.”

 

 

Catholic Faculty 

However, other members of the Notre Dame community saw McGreevy’s email and the university’s larger emphasis on diversity as consistent with its Catholic identity and stated goals.

Laura Hollis, a Notre Dame business professor and member of the university’s faculty senate, told the Register that she understood McGreevy’s message to be part of the university’s response to demographic changes in the Church around the world and its desire to be more universally representative. 

Citing the rise of Catholicism outside of Europe and North America, Hollis said that “better reflect[ing] the changing face of global Catholicism … would of necessity” mean recruiting faculty and students from racial groups that are currently minority status in the United States.

“The prospect of increased numbers of Catholic faculty and students from Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Asia is an exciting development and one that will enrich and strengthen the commitment to the Catholic faith here in the United States and abroad, including education and evangelization,” said Hollis, who is a faculty adviser to The Irish Rover.

The Register reached out to several other faculty members, but none replied before deadline.

But not everyone sees the new emphasis as conducive to making the university’s faculty more Catholic.

Bill Dempsey, the founder of the Sycamore Trust, an alumni group dedicated to promoting Notre Dame’s Catholic identity, said the guidance sounds “especially worrisome,” given that it comes at a time when the university has stopped publicly disclosing the proportion of its Catholic faculty.

Citing Pope St. John Paul II’s document on Catholic universities, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, the Sycamore Trust has long argued that having a majority of Catholic faculty is the single most important criteria for a university’s Catholic identity.

Father Jenkins pledged to boost Catholic faculty numbers when he took office in 2005, which had fallen to 53%. But although the university reported a 1% increase over Father Jenkins’ tenure, which ended last year, Dempsey says the administration has since stopped making the Catholic makeup of university faculty publicly available.

“Since the hiding of these data began when the percentage of Catholics was close to 50% and dropping, Catholics may well be in the minority now,” said Dempsey. “It is scarcely a time to stress hiring others.”

Disclaimer: Jonathan Liedl is a member of the board of directors of The Irish Rover and an alumnus of the University of Notre Dame.