Ending Illegal Discrimination at Notre Dame

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.

From the late 1970s until 2000, the AAAC set “goals and timetables” for minority hiring. The committee abandoned informal networks and demanded “aggressive and imaginative identification and recruitment of qualified persons.” National searches would be a new centerpiece. The AAAC’s racial bean-counting, documented in my new report, is astounding. Each department annually had to report on the racial composition of its faculty. While the numbers of Asians, Latinos, and women increased among the faculty, blacks stayed below 2%.

The lack of progress in hiring black faculty led Notre Dame President Rev. Edward A. Malloy to “ratchet up [Notre Dame’s] commitment” to affirmative action, in his words. A modern DEI bureaucracy was born, the Office of Institutional Equity, which was established in the early 2000s. College diversity officers were required to report not only on diversity results, but also on the significant diversity efforts to recruit minorities for every job search on campus. “Adherence to a written policy of non-discrimination,” wrote the 2003 affirmative action committee, “will not, by itself, change the racial and gender composition of the teaching-and-research faculty.” Rejecting “non-discrimination,” Notre Dame embraced “discrimination.”

In its “ratchet-up”phase, Notre Dame developed a comprehensive accountability system for diversity hiring. Departments created affirmative action plans that made “every reasonable effort” to get “highly qualified women and racial minorities in the faculty applicant pool.” They were to conduct pool analyses with diversity benchmarks for every job search and 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.” When the percentage of minority and women applicants fell short of nationwide availability numbers, a new search could be ordered. The same process would be repeated when a department conducted interviews and made job offers. Essentially, departments would have to justify hiring white men while minority hiring was favored.

The numbers of Asian, Hispanic, and female faculty increased while this program was in place, but the numbers of black faculty required even more special action. Notre Dame established an Africana Studies department in 2005 to increase black faculty. Still, only about 2% of faculty were black. While the university was focused on affirmative action for blacks, Catholic faculty dipped to just over 50%, where it sits today.

In the fervid environment after the death of George Floyd, the number of black faculty was seen as especially problematic. Notre Dame established a Task Force on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, whose report was released in June 2021. The Task Force called for enhancing “the diversity of our faculty and staff,” but concern for female, Latino, and Asian hiring was mostly gone. Its focus was on hiring blacks: “The data clearly evidence,” writes the Task Force, “that we are not yet who we want to be” due to “unjust stereotypes, insensitivity, or ignorance” and “past policies, practices, and decision-making.” A fundamental change was needed.

During a third phase, Notre Dame established an Office of Institutional Transformation “to implement an integrated diversity, equity, inclusion and justice strategy” and “dismantle…systems of injustice.” The task force wanted Notre Dame to adopt “a cohort of faculty in a targeted area” where there are more likely to be “significantly more underrepresented scholars.” Plans included adding more black faculty, black administrators, and black staff. Toward that end, Notre Dame went on a DEI hiring binge at the administrative level in the post-Floyd years.

One result of transforming the school’s mission was the creation of a new racialized culture at Notre Dame. Campus Ministry now practices racially segregated first-year retreats—“The Plunge: Black First-Year Retreat”—as well as separate retreats for Asians and Latinos. The campus sponsored no less than 167 distinct DEI events in 2024. No fewer than four offices are dedicated to welcoming underrepresented minorities.

The university has an Office of Institutional Equity. It has 50 years of receipts, showing the extraordinary actions it has taken to increase the number of blacks on the faculty. Its accountability systems led to racial preferences in the hiring of blacks. It builds academic and administrative programs so that blacks are more likely to get jobs.

Perhaps Notre Dame can rely on its reputation as a politically balanced elite school; its law school employs conservative scholars. Unlike other nominally Catholic institutions, Notre Dame somewhat values its Catholic identity. It has allies and well-wishers in the halls of power. Yet all these reasons also suggest that Notre Dame would be a strategic place for the Department of Education to investigate, since the school’s DEI programs pose a threat to Notre Dame’s historic Catholic identity.

Notre Dame should reassess its current diversity policies and institutions before the Trump Administration makes an example of it.

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