Notre Dame Archives - Public Seminar

Politics

Notre Dame and the Controversy over Fundraising for Its Restoration

An excerpt from Amy Schiller’s new book The Price of Humanity

November 29, 2023 • by Amy Schiller

The fundraising for Notre Dame’s reconstruction was simultaneously a triumph and a fiasco for philanthropy. It showed philanthropy’s unique ability to build and sustain things of everlasting importance. At the same time, it also demonstrated how those very triumphs are undermined by preexisting conditions of economic inequality....

Notre Dame and the Controversy over Fundraising for Its Restoration

Higher Ed

COVID-19 Mirror on the Wall—Who’s the Bravest College of Them All?

Moving online and volunteering for vaccine trials this Fall requires a more prudent courage than reopening college campuses for classes and football

September 16, 2020 • by Edwin Michael and Eileen Hunt Botting

––––––– The next time you check the COVID-19 dashboard of your favorite university on your laptop screen, imagine asking: Who’s the bravest of them all? Pretend you’re like the Evil Queen in Snow White, who gazes in a mirror, asking who is the fairest of them all, in order to eliminate ...

COVID-19 Mirror on the Wall—Who’s the Bravest College of Them All?

Higher Ed

The Pandemic Has Revealed the Driving Values of American Higher Education

Universities like UNC are going online for the public good, while other universities persist in reopening for perceived prestige and elite branding

August 24, 2020 • by Eileen Hunt Botting and Edwin Michael

Yet despite the rapidly escalating numbers of COVID-19 cases on campus, this elite private Catholic research university has kept its undergraduates in the dormitories at full capacity, and expressed its intention to reopen its campus again by Labor Day weekend for in-person classes, work, and other activities including Division I ...

Higher Ed

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

College and university presidents should have the courage to halt their reopening

July 30, 2020 • by Eileen Hunt Botting

In late May, the President of Notre Dame and Thomist philosopher Fr. John I. Jenkins defended his decision to reopen its campus in terms of the university’s religious and moral values, including the virtue of having soldierly “courage” in the face of death. This, he insisted, was a virtuous Aristotelian “mean” between ...

Don’t Let Campuses Become Plague Dystopias

Feature

The Rorschach Test of Notre Dame

Notre Dame fire provoked universal shock and grief but its meaning has been refracted through radically different lenses

May 11, 2019 • by Sławomir Sierakowski

Although the Notre Dame fire in Paris provoked universal shock and grief, its meaning has been refracted through radically different lenses. Whereas the French have focused on issues of distributive justice, Poles have locked horns in another battle in the culture war that has defined the country's post-Cold War history. WARSAW ...

Feature

Notre Dame Cathedral, Rep. Ilhan Omar, and the Center for American Progress

Past Present Episode 176

April 23, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

In this episode, Niki, Natalia, and Neil discuss the fire at Paris’ Notre Dame cathedral, President Trump’s attacks against Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MN), and the history of liberal think tanks. Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The world watched as Paris’ iconic Notre Dame Cathedral was engulfed ...