Elliot Pierce

In his column “What is Notre Dame Really Like?”, Michael Bradley asserts that Notre Dame has two “incommensurable” goals: “to educate the minds and hearts of its students,” and “to actually outdo secular schools at what they do best.”  If Bradley meant drinking and hooking up when he said “what secular schools do best,” then beating those schools at their own game is incompatible with educating students’ minds and hearts.  However, he compares Notre Dame to “the Ivies, Duke, Stanford, and Northwestern” and not to certain other schools.  This leads me to believe that “what secular schools do best” is academic and professional excellence, and that this is incompatible with authentic Catholicism.  If Bradley believes that, he is wrong.

Notre Dame is better equipped to educate its students in the classroom and prepare them for life after college than its secular peers precisely because of its Catholic character.  Companies today value things like teamwork and integrity in addition to “hard” quantitative abilities.  Notre Dame’s undergraduate business school is ranked number one partly because of its commitment to ethics.  The former dean of the business school left to run Catholic Charities, not an investment bank.  The current dean of the College of Engineering is also a passionate and outspoken Catholic.  I was therefore not surprised to find plenty of engineers at every Right to Life and Rodzinka event that I attended on campus.  Catholicism at Notre Dame has permeated the two most “careerist” colleges in the university and made them even better at what they do.

Bradley insults his fellow Domers by saying that “the students simply want lucrative careers and affluent lifestyles.”  As “hard” evidence of the student body’s “careerism,” he points to the ever-increasing achievement levels of the incoming freshmen.  He forgets that the class of 2017 brings more than just good grades and high test scores to campus.  A record-high ninety percent of them engaged in service during high school.  These students will continue to serve others at Notre Dame through the wide variety of programs the university offers.  They will also serve their Lord by participating actively in the plethora of faith-based organizations on campus.  Mass attendance at Mr. Bradley’s dorm may or may not be “abysmal,” but when I went to Mass in my old dorm, Knott Hall, after coming back for the Temple game, it was standing room only as it had been all of last year.

Bradley laments the dearth of intellectuals at Notre Dame, but I find his statement that in “educat[ing] the heart as well as the mind…Notre Dame won’t be able to be ‘tops’ at both” anti-intellectual itself.  The Catholic Church has always been “tops” at educating both hearts and minds.  It preserved the great texts of Ancient Greece and Rome throughout the middle ages.  It founded the world’s first universities nearly a thousand years ago.  It continues to teach America’s best and brightest how to be both good students and good people at Notre Dame.

Elliot Pierce graduated in 2013 with a BA in the Program of Liberal Studies and Mathematics and lived in Knott Hall.  He currently works as an Associate Consultant at Bain & Company in Dallas, Texas.