Ending Illegal Discrimination at Notre Dame
18th February 2025
The Fighting Irish may soon be fighting in court rather than on the gridiron. Few universities have practiced affirmative action in hiring longer than Notre Dame, as I document in a new report. Notre Dame’s provost even recently announced that increasing “the number of women and underrepresented minorities” on the faculty is a goal “equally important” to hiring Catholic faculty.
Fifty years of efforts to increase diversity, however, are now clearly in conflict with President Trump’s Executive Order 14173, a bold plan for “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” Section 4 of that order directs relevant government agencies, in a process overseen by the attorney general in coordination with the Office of Management and Budget, to identify the most egregious examples of “illegal DEI discrimination” happening at, among other places, “institutions of higher education with endowments over 1 billion dollars.” The Department of Education could conduct up to nine investigations of around 80 institutions, a target rich environment. Notre Dame, whose endowment exceeds $20 billion, is one such institution that needs to be investigated.
Notre Dame has been practicing affirmative action since the late 1970s, when it established its Academic Affirmative Action Committee (AAAC). The school had long favored hiring faithful Catholics, relying on informal networks in earlier days, when more than 80% of the faculty were Catholic. But according to the AAAC, using informal networks made it more difficult to hire women and underrepresented minorities. Thus Notre Dame revolutionized its hiring process, shifting away from its historic religious affiliation to a new focus on diversity.
I was born in South Bend, and inherited my love of Notre Dame from my parents. My mother’s mother’s father was allegedly a bricklayer brought over from Ireland during the Famine, and family legend has it that his name is inscribed on the Golden Dome along with those of all the other workmen who helped build the campus. Fortunately I left the area before the rot set in.