Female, minority hiring now “equally important” to Catholicism
Notre Dame’s DEI—diversity, equity, and inclusion—programming has attracted national attention in recent weeks, largely due to Provost John McGreevy’s January 17 faculty-wide email promoting female and minority status as now “equally important” to Catholicism in faculty hiring.
McGreevy’s email explained the update: “One important goal is to hire Catholic faculty and other faculty deeply committed to our mission to ensure continuity with our past and our future as the world’s leading global Catholic research university. A second overlapping and equally important goal is to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities on our faculty so that we become the diverse and inclusive intellectual community our mission urges us to be.”
The email continues, “Later this month, the Provost’s Office will publish guidance to support academic units in their pursuit of these goals. … The new guide, which takes effect July 1, will include strategies and best practices to build broad applicant pools, evaluate candidates equitably, and ensure that faculty candidates who visit Notre Dame can imagine themselves as thriving future members of our academic community.”
In the wake of McGreevy’s email and other DEI initiatives in recent years, articles have criticized the development in several national publications, including First Things, National Catholic Register, The Federalist, The Daily Caller, and others.
McGreevy’s email comes as no surprise, according to one report from the Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life. The report, “Mission Compromised? The Advance of DEI at Notre Dame,” by Professor Scott Yenor of Boise State University, provides an in-depth analysis of Notre Dame’s DEI programming and its conflict with the university’s Catholic mission.
In a comment to the Rover, Yenor highlighted the secular approach of the university’s DEI initiatives, despite their Catholic-sounding veneer: “Notre Dame wraps up its DEI administration in the language of Catholic social teaching. In reality it is little different from the hiring preferences and promises of liberation present at other elite institutions. While it is impossible to know how much DEI has corrupted Notre Dame, the fact that Notre Dame held more than 150 distinct DEI events in 2024 shows how much emphasis the leadership places on spreading the DEI message.”
The provost’s recent email reinvigorates a decades-long discussion of faculty hiring at Notre Dame. As stated in the Mission Statement, “The Catholic identity of the University depends upon, and is nurtured by, the continuing presence of a predominant number of Catholic intellectuals.” As Yenor notes, from the 1970s to the mid-2000s, Catholic faculty dropped from 80 percent down to around 50 percent, and now the administration no longer reveals the number.
McGreevy’s email is not the first time he has discussed Catholic hiring. In a 2023 roundtable discussion on the new Strategic Framework, McGreevy noted the importance of hiring Catholic faculty for the university’s “particular Catholic mission,” without worrying about specific percentages or quotas.
Notre Dame spends more than six million dollars each year on DEI personnel across the university, according to Yenor’s report. But aside from that, Yenor draws more attention to the potential danger that DEI poses to the university’s Catholic mission: “[T]he continual expansion of DEI may well corrupt Notre Dame’s ability to transmit genuinely Catholic teaching from one generation to the next.”
When asked what was the most significant finding of his report, Yenor noted, “The post-Floyd embrace of ‘institutional transformation’ is the most unsettling, problematic finding of the report. ND went on a hiring binge after 2020, building new offices, tripling down on racial preferences in hiring, and putting on events. It seems like the ND administration was trying to rub the noses of the Catholic university in diversity ideology.”
Yenor drew special attention to the close relationship between DEI and LGBTQ initiatives: “DEI concerns the division of the world into oppressed and oppressors. Sometimes the oppressors are seen as white supremacists. Other times they are thought of as homophobes. Notre Dame’s Gender Relations Center seems to be based on the typical oppressed-oppressor matrix, not seeing its LGBTQ initiative through the Christian lens of sin, but instead seeing them through the affirming lens of identity politics.”
Campus Ministry’s “racially segregated first-year retreats” program is another initiative that Yenor criticizes. These include “The Plunge: Black First-Year Retreat,” “Latino First-Year Retreat,” and “Asian First Year Retreat.” Campus Ministry also offers LGBTQ retreats for “those seeking to integrate their spirituality with their LGBTQ Identity and their allies,” according to the website.
Yenor writes, “Racially-segregated retreats are done in the name of true inclusion, as DEI officials understand the term. However, this effort to build a so-called inclusive campus that is meant to be in line with Catholic social teaching through Campus Ministry ends up subverting the principles of the universal church.”
However, Yenor expressed hope in Notre Dame’s mission-based ability to combat DEI: “Notre Dame is unique in the fact that it is well situated to reject this pernicious ideology because it has a strong institutional identity, grounded in Catholicism, that runs directly counter to the DEI ideology.”
The recent developments also come in the wake of Trump’s executive order limiting DEI programming in institutions that receive federal funding.
Provost McGreevy did not respond to the Rover’s request for comment.
Michael Canady is a junior from Falls Church, Virginia. He can be reached at mcanady2@nd.edu.
Photo Credit: Notre Dame News
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