ND Administration: Who do they follow?

irish68178
Tue, 12 Jun 2007 10:20:32 +0000

Here is my opinion on Monk, and it is only mine, but you know how it goes. Monk did do a great job at improving ND’s ranking, and if that is your definition of success, then he succeeded. However, while I like being ranked high, I think there are many things that are more important than the rankings. A large part of ND’s mission, in my view, is to be the Catholic alternative to schools like Yale, Duke, Princeton, Harvard, etc. and I believe that it was that for years when Catholics couldn’t get into said schools. However, Monk looked at what our peers were doing, like Georgetown, and focused on improving rankings. We lost a lot of Catholic professors, and while we got some great professors, we lost a lot of the Catholic atmosphere. Monk folded on “academic freedom” issues like the Queer Film Festival and the Vagina Monologues, which do not belong at any university which is truly Catholic. You can get those at Duke, Princeton, Yale, etc, but ND is the ALTERNATIVE, it shouldn’t be one of the bunch. Monk made us less Catholic IMO. Monk also lost track of the fact that we are a big sports school, and did everything he could to try to prove that we weren’t a football school. Football suffered for years and it is because Monk was convinced that you couldn’t have a top university which also was a big football school (this is just my view, I have little to back this up).

So yes, Monk raised our US News rankings, but at what cost? Perhaps I am the only one who remembers this but ND used to ignore these rankings, not even sending them information. ND was focused on its mission and didn’t care to conform to what US News or our peer institutions wanted us to be. A lot has changed since then, and sometimes I think we are more Duke than traditional Notre Dame. There is nothing wrong with being different, we just are becoming less different, and I worry about what cost.

Don’t get me wrong, I still love ND and think it is a great Catholic school, but I think work needs to be done to fix some of what Monk has done. I think Jenkins is doing this, and almost came through on the VMs. Yes, I know that you may like them, but if our school is truly going to be Catholic we can’t have them! We just have to decide what we want to be, an elite university (I am convinced if we lost football and our religious ties tomorrow we would be close to the top 10, again, my view) or do we want to be Notre Dame? Notre Dame can still be great, and should be great, but it has to do it in the right way.

I think Jenkins is doing it in the right way. He is trying to increase the number of Catholic professors we have by actively recruiting them. What I mean is we are not discriminating those who are not Catholic, but if you are Catholic and are good then he is going to go after you strong. He just got a great economics professor from Maryland doing this, and I expect soon we will have many more top Catholic scholars. It proves that you can keep the Catholic identity and get some of the best professors in the world, it doesn’t have to be a trade-off like Monk made it.

Those are just my views from my 3 years at ND, take them for what they are worth, but I did live through some of Monk.