Are Diversity and Catholicism “Equally Important” at Notre Dame?

Notre Dame’s provost, John McGreevy, laid out priorities for faculty hiring to Notre Dame faculty in a January 17 email. Increasing “the number of women and underrepresented minorities” will be a goal “equally important” to hiring Catholic faculty. This stunning announcement is years in the making, as I document in a new study from the Claremont Institute.

Few universities are as trusted or admired by Christian believers as Notre Dame. Unlike many other Catholic institutions, Notre Dame maintains a commitment to hiring Catholics. And Catholic students flock to South Bend, Indiana; the student body is around 80 percent Catholic. Many notable conservatives serve on its faculty. 

But Notre Dame has also built a DEI apparatus that threatens its Catholic mission. In fact, units across campus pledge fealty to the idea that Notre Dame’s Catholic mission “animates our DEI efforts.” The commitment to the “dignity of every human person” demands that the school prioritize the elimination of “inequality and discrimination.” 

Notre Dame’s DEI policies resemble those at Yale or the University of Michigan, though wrapped up in Catholic social justice language. The adoption of programs for minority hiring have coincided with a decrease in the number of Catholics on campus. In the late 1970s, when the faculty was 80 percent Catholic, Notre Dame adopted a comprehensive reporting system with specific goals and timetables for hiring women and ethnic minorities. Unsatisfied with the program’s results by the late 1990s, then-president Rev. Edward A. Malloy promised to “ratchet up our commitment” to affirmative action with aggressive accountability and targeted hiring systems. Notre Dame’s DEI bureaucracies were born. 

The Office of Institutional Equity (OIE) appointed college diversity officers (CDOs) in the early 2000s. Colleges within the university were required to report about diversity efforts annually. Departments were forced to develop plans to increase the number of blacks, Hispanics, and women in their applicant pools, including “publishing vacancy notices in minority professional periodicals” and “using the internet to identify so-called up and coming scholars.” Informally, department members were to use their personal connections to help encourage minority candidates to apply. Still, the number of black faculty remained under 2 percent in the 2010s, even though Notre Dame established an Africana Studies department in 2005 to attract black scholars. The percentage of Catholics on the faculty during this era dropped to just above 50 percent, where it remains today.

Then, after the Floyd riots, Notre Dame hit the gas pedal on DEI. Attracting black faculty and students would require more aggressive hiring and a change in Notre Dame’s campus climate. The goal, according to the Board of Trustees Task Force, is “not only to improve the experiences of underrepresented minorities” but also “to elevate our collective ability . . . to talk honestly with one another about race and racism; to develop greater fluency in our thinking and communication about issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion; and to grow more comfortable acknowledging and addressing gaps in our knowledge or understanding.” Nothing about that goal is distinctively Catholic or Christian. The Task Force hoped for an additional central office to oversee a further extension of DEI. 

Those hoped-for offices soon arrived. Three people staff the ominous-sounding Office of Institutional Transformation (OIT), founded in 2022, and headed by an Anglican priest, Rev. Canon Hugh Page Jr. An assistant provost for academic inclusion and diversity, Keona Lewis, was hired in 2023. The Center for Diversity and Inclusion, which hosts the Gender Relations Center and the Multicultural Student Programs and Services, opened in 2023. Six of Notre Dame’s seven colleges now have a DEI dean or director. Salaries alone cost Notre Dame approximately $6.5 million, according to our estimates. Unit leaders on campus are now evaluated on how well they promote DEI, among other factors.

OIT greatly expanded DEI programming and trainings on campus. During the 2024 calendar year, Notre Dame put on 167 distinct DEI events on campus, and many of these were repeated for multiple days. Both September and October 2024 had thirty-five distinct DEI events—an attempt to set the tone for the rest of the academic year. The 2024 events included a panel on racial reparations and an ongoing film series aimed at deconstructing traditional views on sexuality and gender. Notre Dame’s Campus Ministry, which represents the universal church, held a racially segregated retreat in 2024 (The Plunge: Black First-Year Retreat).

While officials at Notre Dame croon that DEI is central to its Catholic mission, faithful students seem to know better. Barely anyone attends the DEI events on campus, according to the Irish Rover (the conservative student newspaper). “Events promoting critical race theory or LGBT ideology have no place at Notre Dame,” wrote the Rover. Such “obscene and scandalous” events are a “waste of time” for students looking to deepen their faith at Notre Dame. 

Institutions that adopt the DEI framework often confuse the means with the supposed end, valorizing “victims” for their own sake rather than advancing justice and the common good. This has certainly been the case at Notre Dame. 

Moreover, the entire endeavor is unrealistic. Only about 2 percent of American Catholics are black (blacks are around 4 percent of the student body), and blacks earn PhDs at much lower rates than other demographic groups (blacks are about 2 percent of Notre Dame’s faculty, a figure that has hardly budged after more than a decade of preferential hiring practices). Judged by the standard of proportional representation, Notre Dame is doing just fine. But DEI advocates seek limitless “institutional transformation” into a Beloved Community. They will never be satisfied. Platforming them and indulging their concerns poses a serious threat to Notre Dame—and, indeed, any institution seeking to maintain standards distinct from those of the identitarian left.

Image by Matthew Rice. Image cropped.