The University of Notre Dame has been on a decades-long warpath of undermining its Catholic mission at the altar of diversity, equity, and inclusion ( DEI ) ideology. However, that initiative may conflict with the Trump government’s threat to withdraw DEI money.
Prior to the president’s inauguration on January 20, Notre Dame Provost John McGreevy sent a faculty-wide message stating that the school’s hiring interests were to “accrobate the number of people and represented immigrants” and that those La objectives were “equally crucial” to hiring Catholic university. According to a recent statement from The Claremont Institute, that is one of the most recent instances of the school’s commitment to the philosophy that dates back at least to the 1970s.
According to survey artist Scott Yenor, top producer of state partnerships at The Claremont Institute and political science professor at Boise State University,” they change Catholicism to be La, and Notre Dame is moving in the other direction.” Some traditional or conventional aspects of college life have developed as quickly or enthusiastically as DEI efforts have in the last few years.
McGreevy’s contact, according to Yenor, is the “worst point in the statement,” especially given that it came just days before Trump was scheduled to take the oath of office on a mandate to finish things like DEI. He said it signaled a “note of disobedience”.
One of the key objectives of McGreevy’s email is to use Catholic instructors and other faculty who are seriously committed to our vision to maintain consistency with our previous and our future as the world’s leading international Catholic research university, according to McGreevy. To make our university more diverse and inclusive, as our mission calls for it to be, is a second clashing and likewise crucial goal.
According to the report and Yenor, Notre Dame is regarded as a reliable source of support for Christians and is still one of the few Catholic institutions to really have a commitment to employing Catholic faculty. However, according to the report, social engineering is” a threat to the school’s reputation” due to DEI practices that” deal Christian doctrine” and substitute excellent instruction for social engineering.
Conflating DEI and Catholic Social Teaching
For instance, according to The College of Arts and Letters,” Our Catholic mission calls us to respect the dignity of every man, labor toward the common good, and remain in cooperation with the most vulnerable and excluded members of our community.”
Yenor outlined the rationale behind the school’s justification of its fusion of Catholicism and DEI:
Since Notre Dame” as a Catholic university” is” committed to defending the dignity of every human person, to promoting a just society in which every person can flourish, and to attending particularly to the needs of the most vulnerable”, it must “address]the ] racism, inequality, and discrimination” manifest in various forms of disparity. ” True inclusivity” is a” credible witness”, this new version of Catholic theology contends, and therefore a natural extension of the Catholic mission.
This line of logic, but, is not shared by others, including Catholic scientist Ed Feser, who said DEI “is a grave depravity of the good cause it claims to represent, and it is wholly incompatible with Catholic social teaching”, as the review noted.
In terms of ideology and implementation, DEI ultimately rejects Western society and the cultural order that was mostly influenced by Christianity in order to advance the notion that Notre Dame, the United States, and more widely Western civilization are “inexpressibly white supremacist or homophobic”.
Notre Dame’s La laws are all” properly constructed not to disappoint the most intense diversity advocates, while maintaining the façade of orthodoxy”, the report says, noting that the force over time will more” corrupt” the capacity of the university to pursue Catholic teaching.
The university is one of the best examples of how an organization you undertake administrative suicide in fidelity to DEI ideology: the school’s struggle sessions to enhance diversity have been going on for decades. The school’s lack of diversity is almost wholly caused by the fact that the majority of Catholics in America are either light or Spanish, but its response is to kneecap its Catholic mission in order to advance impossible diversity goals.
According to the report, Notre Dame’s student body was 3.4 percent black in 2021, and the university was trying to close the “gap between aspirations and reality” because the DEI proponents on campus found that this low percentage unacceptable.
According to the report,” Notre Dame holds itself responsible for that gap, apparently due to institutional racism or unconscious bias.” The fact that Notre Dame only attributes its failure to any remaining underrepresented minorities to the more radical, dangerous ideology within DEI reveals this.
In many ways, Notre Dame is unable to address the presence of a number of racial minorities on campus. Only about 2 percent of American Catholics are black, and about 4 percent are Asian. Since 2009, the percentage of black faculty members has increased from 1.8 % to 2.4 %.
However, the school has fundamentally undermined its goal to hire Catholic faculty in the decades of trying ( and failing ) to recruit more people of different races on campus with the sole aim of recruiting more people of different races. In the late 1970s, Catholics made up 85 percent of the faculty, but by 2008, they were only 53 percent.
That contrasts starkly with the conservative student body, which is 80 % Catholic.
” If Notre Dame’s going to maintain its Catholic identity, it kind of needs to be okay with the fact that there aren’t going to be as many blacks on campus, because not that many blacks are Catholic, that’s just a fact”, Yenor told The Federalist. ” There’s just an unwillingness to live with that fact”.
According to the report, the school has done the exact same kind of cultural seppuku that other institutions have in order to address this self-diagnosed issue. A brief snapshot of the school’s commitment to the ideology is shown in the report.
Spending$ 6 million on DEI salaries alone, the school employs roughly 30 DEI administrators. It also had 167 DEI events in 2024 alone. Like clockwork, there was a DEI hiring spree after the 2020 George Floyd riots, along with a slew of task forces and related offices established.
Campus Ministry puts on racially segregated retreats for first-year students who are black, Asian, and Latino. The school’s Klau Center runs a” Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary” program” to restructure how people think in terms of systems of oppression”, the report states.
Notre Dame has also” set up an anonymous reporting system” for “microaggressions”, which are often used to weaponize institutional power against free speech, and it has a Gender Relations Center, opened in 2004, which launched LGBT activism on campus.
Yenor claims that the student body does not attend DEI events and other programming.
Providing an Example of Notre Dame
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The attorney general and the Office of Management and Budget were directed to find instances of “illegal DEI discrimination” at “institutions of higher education with endowments over$ 1 billion dollars” by Trump’s executive order, ending “endendendendendends endowments over 1 billion dollars.”
The Department of Education could launch inquiries into its alleged violation of civil rights law because of Notre Dame’s over$ 20 billion endowment, which makes it a prime target.
The Trump administration also issued a” Dear Colleague” letter last week, informing The Federalist that it would fight schools that attempted to ignore the instruction in a letter that explicitly threatened the end of federal funding for DEI programs.
Perhaps it will be necessary to revoke Notre Dame’s federal funding over DEI in order to restore its status as a prestigious Catholic university with a genuinely Catholic mission.
The Federalist contacted Notre Dame for comment, but they did not respond.
Breccan F. Thies is an elections correspondent for The Federalist. He previously covered issues of education and culture for Breitbart News and the Washington Examiner. He is a 2022 Claremont Institute Publius Fellow and holds a degree from the University of Virginia. You can follow him on X: @BreccanFThies.
