BUZZ
University president says initial change to staff document was misinterpreted
The University of Notre Dame will once again ask staff to adhere to its Catholic mission after a now-reversed change to its employee principles statement in October prompted criticism.
University President the Rev. Robert Dowd announced the restored language in a recent memo, saying the removal of “Catholic mission” from its “core Values” list led to confusion, the Irish Rover reports.
“I hope this change makes clear what I believe we all understand: Our Catholic mission guides and informs all that we do and how we work together,” Dowd wrote in a Nov. 21 memo to employees.
Dowd said Notre Dame’s leaders considered the “constructive feedback” and realized that the removal of the “Catholic mission” language could be misinterpreted as “a sign of diminishing commitment.”
“To avoid any further confusion, we have now included the language on Catholic mission as the first of our five core Values,” he wrote.
The document in question is a set of “organizational principles” for its 4,500 non-faculty employees that includes a list of institutional values.
The list now includes the following language: “Catholic Mission: Be a force for good and help to advance Notre Dame’s mission to be the leading global Catholic research university,” according to the Rover, an independent student newspaper on campus.
In October, university leaders had removed the “Catholic mission” part from the values list.
While the initial change included a preface that stated “In all that we do, we seek to advance Notre Dame’s mission as a global Catholic research university to be a force for good in the world,” the list of values did not mention the Catholic mission.
The removal quickly prompted backlash from students, alumni, and Catholic organizations.
Now, some say the criticisms were an overreaction, while others contend the university is not doing enough to ensure institution-wide commitment to its Catholic mission.
As the Rover reports:
Several conservative Notre Dame faculty members criticized the sensationalism that greeted the initial change. Rick Garnett, Paul J. Shierl Professor of Law, told the Rover, “In my view, the nature and significance of the recent changes to the University’s list of staff values was misreported and misunderstood. In some quarters, it was charged that Notre Dame had changed the University’s mission statement, and erased its Catholic commitments.”
“This is not true,” Garnett argued. “The University’s mission statement is unchanged, it is publicly available, and it is robustly Catholic, as it should be.”
“What did change,” Garnett added, “and what was then revised again, was a list of particular values that, for some time, have been used for human-resources and bureaucratic purposes and for evaluating staff performance. In my own experience, it was often difficult—depending on the staff position in question—to numerically evaluate staff in terms of their tangible embrace of the Catholic mission.”
The Rev. Bill Dailey, rector in Graham Family Hall and a former Notre Dame law professor, blamed the situation on “rage-bate culture.”
“It is a good thing that so many people care deeply about Notre Dame’s distinctive and vital Catholic character,” Garnett told the Rover. “That said, it is often the case, especially on social media, that people are quick to criticize the University based on incomplete information.”
However, the Rover’s student editor-in-chief, Lucy Spence, and its faculty advisor, the Rev. Wilson Miscamble, took a different position.
Miscamble said the initial decision to remove the Catholic mission from the set of values was both “stupid” and “unnecessary.”
“To replace well-considered staff values appropriate for a serious Catholic University with some asinine, bland ‘corporate-speak’ values that appear to have been generated by AI was a self-inflicted wound,” he said.
However, Miscamble said he also is “grateful to Father Dowd for responding promptly to the criticism and for restoring at least some mention of the Catholic mission to the staff values.”
Meanwhile, Spence wrote an editorial Monday calling on the university’s leaders to make changes to other areas in which Notre Dame is not adhering to its Catholic mission.
These include adding a pornography filter to the campus Wi-Fi, ending programs that contradict Catholic teachings about sexuality, and suspending “faculty resources to provide contraceptives to students,” she wrote.
“These are the true scandals of the university, and they are much more serious than the latest media uproar,” she wrote.
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